Moneyball

by Lewis, Michael

  “Span fucked us,” he says. “His agent just asked for $2.6 million and fucking Colorado can’t get a contract done.” Denard Span is a high school center fielder, who was meant to be drafted by the Colorado Rockies with the ninth pick of the draft. Now, it seems, he won’t be.

  When seventeen-year-old Denard Span announces that he won’t stand for a penny less than $2.6 million, his stock plummets. No one wants to touch him out of fear they won’t be able to persuade him to sign for a sensible sum of money. Span’s name clatters down toward the bottom rungs of the first round, and triggers a mind-numbingly complex chain reaction at the top. The Mets, who hold the pick immediately before the A’s, the fifteenth overall, had been set to take one from a list of four pitchers: Jeff Francis, who was also on Billy’s wish list, and three high schoolers, Clinton Everts, Chris Gruler, and Zack Greinke. Everts, Gruler, and Greinke were probably spoken for by the Expos, Reds, and Royals. That left Francis, free and clear to fall to the Mets with the fifteenth pick. Colorado’s bungling of negotiations with their first choice had just screwed that up. Colorado was now taking Francis. That’s what J.P. has just told Billy. He knows this because the Mets’ next choice after their four pitchers was Russ Adams, whom the Blue jays intended to take with the fourteenth pick. The Mets’ next choice after Adams was Nick Swisher. Swisher—like Lenny!—was going to be a Met.

  Billy calls Steve Phillips, the Mets’ GM, out of some vague notion he might talk him out of taking Swisher. There is no more reason for him to think he can do this than there was for Kenny Williams to think he could trick Billy into tipping his hand. It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw. In his six years on the job Billy has had such a gift for making grotesquely good deals—for finding what other people want, even if they shouldn’t want it, and giving it to them in exchange for something a lot better—that he thinks he can do it here. But he can’t; there’s nothing to trade. It’s against the rules to trade draft slots. The thirty or so people in the draft room hear one side of Billy’s awkward conversation:

  “What about Everts, you hear anything on that?” he asks, teasingly.

  Pause. Phillips tells him that the Montreal Expos are taking Everts.

  “What about Greinke or Gruler?”

  Pause. Phillips tells him that they are being taken by the Royals and Reds.

  “Yeah. I’m just as pissed as you are.”

  He hangs up, and, dropping the pretense that his pain is not unique in the universe, shouts, “Fuck!”

  Anyone who walked in just then and tried to figure out what was happening would have been totally mystified. Thirty men sit in appalled silence watching one man fume. Finally Billy says, “They’re taking Swisher.” Just in case anyone in the draft room is feeling at ease with that fact, he rises and swats his chair across the room. We’d been here more than an hour, thinking about nothing but Swisher, and until that moment no one had mentioned Nick Swisher’s name.

  “We should be all right,” says someone, recklessly.

  “No. We’re not all right,” says Billy. He’s in no mood to feel better. “Greinke, Gruler, and Everts aren’t going to be there. Fucking Colorado’s taking Francis. J.P. is going to take Adams, and once Adams is gone, we’re fucked.”

  Nick Swisher is, at best, the Mets’ sixth choice: the Mets don’t even begin to appreciate what they are getting. The Mets are taking Swisher reluctantly. If Billy had the first pick in the entire draft he’d take Swisher with it. He appreciates Swisher more than any man on the planet and Swisher…should…have…been …his! And yet Swisher will be a Met, almost by default.

  “Fuck!” he shouts again. He reaches for his snuff. He hasn’t slept in two days. It’s a tradition with him: he never sleeps the night before the draft. He’s too excited. Draft day, he says, is the one day of the baseball year that gives him the purest pleasure.

  Except when it goes wrong. He claws out a finger of snuff and jams it into his lip. His face reddens slightly. The draft room, at this moment, has an all-or-nothing feel to it. If the Oakland A’s land Nick Swisher, nothing could mar the loveliness of the day. If they don’t, nothing that happens afterward can make life worth living.

  Any very large angry man can unsettle a room, even a room full of other large men, but Billy has a special talent for it. Five minutes after he’s spoken to Phillips he is still so upset that no one in the room utters a peep, out of fear of setting off the bomb. The mood is exactly what it would be if every person in the room was handed his own personal vial of nitroglycerin. You could see why guys used to come down from the bullpen when Billy Beane hit, just to see what he would do if he struck out. To describe whatever he’s feeling as anger doesn’t do justice to it. It’s an isolating rage: he believes, perhaps even wants to believe, that he is alone with his problem and no one can help him. That no one should help him.

  The space around Billy’s rage is perfectly still. Paul DePodesta stares quietly into his computer screen. Paul’s seen Billy in this state often enough to know that it’s not something you want to get in the middle of. Paul knows that Billy, to be Billy, needs to get worked up. “I think Swisher will get to us,” Paul says quietly, “but I’m not going to say that right now.”

  Finally the miserable silence is punctuated by the ringing of scouting director Erik Kubota’s cellphone—only instead of ringing it plays, absurdly, Pachelbel’s Canon. Erik snatches it quickly off the table. “Oh, is that what it is?” he says into the phone, in a clipped tone, and hangs up. The draft room has become a symbolist play.

  Billy’s phone rings. It’s Kenny Williams again. Williams is of no current interest to Billy. Nothing the White Sox do will alter Billy’s chances of getting Swisher.

  “What’s up Kenny,” Billy says rather than asks.

  What’s up is that Kenny has just heard that Billy isn’t getting Swisher, and fears that Billy will take his first choice. Billy doesn’t have time for other people’s fears just now; if he’s going to be miserable everyone else is going to be, too. “You were going to get Blanton,” he says. “But you ain’t getting him now.”

  He hangs up and calls Steve Phillips again. That’s his style: if he doesn’t get the answer he wants the first time, he calls again and again until he does. To come between him and what he was after at just that moment would have been as unwise as pitching a tent between a mother bear and her cub. Phillips answers on the first ring.

  “Hear anything?” Billy asks.

  Pause. Phillips says he hasn’t.

  “Yeah,” says Billy, glumly. He begins to sympathize with Phillips for getting stuck with Swisher. Then Phillips says something new, that causes Billy’s mood to shift. Frustration is shoved aside by curiosity.

  “Oh really?”

  Pause.

  “Well, that’s a fucking light at the end of the fucking tunnel.”

  He clicks off and turns to Paul. “He says if Kazmir gets to him he’ll take him.” Scott Kazmir is yet another high school pitcher in whom the A’s haven’t the slightest interest. Billy’s so excited he doesn’t even bother to say how foolish it is to take a high school pitcher with a first-round pick. Everyone looks up at the white board and tries to figure out if Kazmir, the Mets’ new sixth choice, will get to the Mets. He might; no other team has said definitely that they will take him. But then no one has any idea what either the Detroit Tigers or the Milwaukee Brewers, who pick seventh and eigth, intend to do. Something not terribly bright, it was a fair bet, if they just continued doing what they had done in the past. And that was a problem: picking a high school pitcher like Kazmir is exactly the sort of not-so-bright decision both franchises had a knack for making.

  “Fielder could help us here,” says Chris Pittaro, finally.

  Fielder is the semi-aptly named Prince Fielder, son of Cecil Fielder, who in 1990 hit fifty-one home runs for the Detroit Tigers, and who by the end
of his career could hardly waddle around the bases after one of his mammoth shots into the upper deck, much less maneuver himself in front of a ground ball. “Cecil Fielder acknowledges a weight of 261,” Bill James once wrote, “leaving unanswered the question of what he might weigh if he put his other foot on the scale.” Cecil Fielder could have swallowed Jeremy Brown whole and had room left for dessert, and the son apparently has an even more troubling weight problem than his father. Here’s an astonishing fact: Prince Fielder is too fat even for the Oakland A’s. Of no other baseball player in the whole of North America can this be said. Pittaro seems to think that the Detroit Tigers might take Fielder anyway, for sentimental reasons. And if the Tigers take him, they trigger a chain reaction that ends with the Mets getting one of their first six choices.

  Before anyone has a chance to figure out whether Kazmir will get to the Mets, the draft begins. As it does, the Oakland A’s owner, Steve Schott, enters the room, followed shortly by the A’s manager, Art Howe. Howe stands in the back of the room with his jaw jutting and a philosophical expression on his face, the way he does in the dugout during games. It is one of the mysteries of baseball that people outside it assume the manager is in charge of important personnel decisions. From the start to the end of this process Howe has been, as he is with all personnel decisions, left entirely in the dark.

  The A’s scouting director, Erik Kubota, takes up his position at the speakerphone and tells everyone else to shut up. Everyone in the draft room is about to learn just how new and different is the Oakland A’s scientific selection of amateur baseball players. The A’s front office has a list, never formally written out, of the twenty players they’d draft in a perfect world. That is, if money were no object and twenty-nine other teams were not also vying to draft the best amateur players in the country. The list is a pure expression of the new view of amateur players. On it are eight pitchers and twelve hitters—all, for the moment, just names.

  Pitchers: Jeremy Guthrie

  Joe Blanton

  Jeff Francis

  Luke Hagerty

  Ben Fritz

  Robert Brownlie

  Stephen Obenchain

  Bill Murphy

  Position Players: Nick Swisher

  Russ Adams

  Khalil Greene

  John McCurdy

  Mark Teahen

  Jeremy Brown

  Steve Stanley

  John Baker

  Mark Kiger

  Brian Stavisky

  Shaun Larkin

  Brant Colamarino

  Two of the position players—Khalil Greene and Russ Adams—Billy already knew would be gone before the A’s picked, and so he hadn’t even bothered to discuss them during the meetings. His best friend J. P. Ricciardi would take Adams, and another close friend, Kevin Towers, the GM of the San Diego Padres, would take Greene. Two of the pitchers—Robert Brownlie and Jeremy Guthrie—were represented by the agent Scott Boras. Boras was famous for extracting more money than other agents for amateur players. If the team didn’t pay whatever Boras asked, Boras would encourage his client to take a year off of baseball and reenter the draft the following year, when he might be selected by a team with real money. The effects of Boras’s tactics on rich teams were astonishing. In 2001 the agent had squeezed a package worth $9.5 million out of Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks for a college third baseman named Mark Teixeira. The guy who was picked ahead of Teixeira signed for $4.2 million, and the guy who was picked after him signed for $2.65 million, and yet somehow between these numbers Boras found $9.5 million. By finding the highest bidders for his players before the draft and scaring everyone else away from them, Boras was transforming the draft into a pure auction.

  Billy couldn’t afford auctions. He had $9.5 million to spend and Boras had let it be known that whichever team drafted Jeremy Guthrie was going to cough up a package worth $20 million—or Guthrie would return to Stanford for his senior year. The Cleveland Indians had agreed to pay the price, and so the Indians would take Guthrie with the twenty-second pick.

  Of the sixteen players on his list he could afford, and stood any chance of getting, Billy thinks he might land as many as six. But the truth is he doesn’t know. It was possible he’d only get one of the players on the wish list. By the time the A’s made their second pick, the twenty-fourth of the draft, all of them might be gone. If they got six of the players on their wish list, Paul said, they’d be ecstatic. No team ever came away with six of their top twenty.

  The room remains silent. The entire draft takes place over speakerphone, far away from the fans. In the draft Major League Baseball has brought to life Bill James’s dystopic vision of closing the stadium to the fans and playing the game in private. Pro football and pro basketball make great public event of their drafts. They gather their famous coaches and players in a television studio and hand them paddles with big numbers on them to wave. Football and basketball fans are able to watch the future of their team unfold before their eyes. The Major League Baseball draft is a conference call—now broadcast on the Web.

  The Pittsburgh Pirates, owners of the worst regular season record in the 2001 season, have the first overall pick. A voice from Pittsburgh crackles over the speakerphone:

  “Redraft number 0090. Bullington, Bryan. Right-handed pitcher. Ball State University. Fishers, Indiana.”

  Just like that the first $4 million is spent, but at least it is spent on a college player. (“Redraft” means he has been drafted before.) The next five teams, among the most pathetic organizations in pro baseball, select high school players. Tampa Bay takes a high school shortstop named Melvin Upton; Cincinnati follows by taking the high school pitcher Chris Gruler; Baltimore follows suit with a high school pitcher named Adam Loewen; Montreal follows suit with yet another high school pitcher, Clinton Everts. The selections made are, from the A’s point of view, delightfully mad. Eight of the first nine teams select high schoolers. The worst teams in baseball, the teams that can least afford for their draft to go wrong, have walked into the casino, ignored the odds, and made straight for the craps table.

  Billy and Paul no longer think of the draft as a crapshoot. They are a pair of card counters at the blackjack tables; they think they’ve found a way to turn the odds inside the casino against the owner. They think they can take over the casino. Each time a team rolls the dice on a high school player, Billy punches his fist in the air: every player taken that he doesn’t want boosts his chances of getting one he does want. When the Milwaukee Brewers take Prince Fielder with the eighth pick, the room explodes. It means that Scott Kazmir probably will be available to the Mets. And he is. And the Mets take him. (And spend $2.15 million to sign him.) Sixteen minutes into the draft Erik Kubota leans into the speakerphone, trying, and nearly succeeding, to sound cool and collected.

  “Oakland selects Swisher, Nicholas. First baseman/center fielder. Ohio State University. Parkersburg, West Virginia. Son of ex-major leaguer Steve Swisher.”

  “Prince Fielder just saved our paint,” says an old scout. Even the fat players who don’t work for the A’s do the A’s work.

  Billy is now on his feet. He’s got Swisher in the bag: who else can he get? There’s a new thrust about him, an unabridged expression on his face. He was a bond trader, who had made a killing in the morning and entered the afternoon free of fear. Feeling greedy. Certain that the fear in the market would present him with even more opportunities to exploit. Whatever happened now wasn’t going to be bad. How good could it get? The anger is gone, lingering only as an afterthought in other people’s minds. He was no longer in the batter’s box. He was out in center field, poised to make a spectacular catch no one expected him to make. “Billy’s a shark,” J. P. Ricciardi had said, by way of explaining what distinguished Billy from every other GM in the game. “It’s not just that he’s smarter than the average bear. He’s relentless—the most relentless person I have ever known.”

  Billy moves back an
d forth between his wish list and Paul and Erik. Paul to check his judgments, Erik to execute his wishes. Like any good bond trader, he loves making decisions. The quicker the better. He looks up at the names of the players on the white board and listens to the speakerphone crackle. Three pitchers from the wish list (Francis, Brownlie, and Guthrie) go quickly. Sixteen players that he badly wants to own remain at large. The A’s second first-round pick is #24 (paid to them by the Yankees for the right to buy Jason Giambi), followed rapidly by #26, #30, #35, #37, #39. Billy has agreed with Erik and Paul to use #24 to get John McCurdy, a shortstop from the University of Maryland, the second hitter on the wish list. McCurdy was an ugly-looking fielder with the highest slugging percentage in the country. They’d turn him into a second baseman, where his fielding would matter less. Billy thought McCurdy might be the next Jeff Kent.

  The White Sox come on the line. “Here goes Blanton,” says Billy.

  When Kenny Williams told Billy an hour before that the White Sox were taking Blanton, Billy couldn’t but agree that it showed disturbingly good judgment. Blanton was the second best pitcher in the draft, in Billy’s view, behind Stanford pitcher Jeremy Guthrie.

  A White Sox voice crackles on the speakerphone: “The White Sox selects redraft number 0103, Ring, Roger. Left-handed pitcher. San Diego State University. La Mesa, California.”

  “You fucking got to be kidding me!” hollers Billy, overjoyed. He doesn’t pause to complain that Kenny Williams had told him he was taking Blanton. (Was he afraid Billy might take Ring?) “Ring over Blanton? A reliever over a starter?” Then it dawns on him: “Blanton’s going to get to us.” The second best right-handed pitcher in the draft. He says it but he can’t quite believe it. He looks at the board and recalculates what the GMs with the next five picks will do. “You know what?” he says in a surer tone. “Blanton’s going to be there at 24.”