Moneyball

by Lewis, Michael

  Just before the Toronto series the team had been in Boston, where Jeremy Giambi had made the mistake of being spotted by a newspaper reporter at a strip club. Jeremy, it should be said, already had a bit of a reputation. Before spring training he’d been caught with marijuana by the Las Vegas Police. Reports from coaches trickled in that Jeremy drank too much on team flights. When the reports from Boston reached Billy Beane, Jeremy ceased to be an on-base machine and efficient offensive weapon. He became a twenty-seven-year-old professional baseball player having too much fun on a losing team. In a silent rage, Billy called around the league to see who would take Jeremy off his hands. He didn’t care what he got in return. Actually, that wasn’t quite true: what he needed in return was something to tell the press. “We traded Jeremy for X because we think X will give us help on defense,” or some such nonsense. The Phillies offered John Mabry. Billy hardly knew who Mabry was.

  On the way to tell Jeremy Giambi that he was fired, Billy tried to sell what he was doing to Paul DePodesta. “This is the worst baseball decision I’ve ever made,” he said, “but it’s the best decision I’ve made as a GM.” Paul knew it was crap, and said so. All the way to the clubhouse he tried to talk Billy down from his pique. He tried to explain to his boss how irrational he’d become. He wasn’t thinking objectively. He was just looking for someone on whom to vent his anger.

  Billy refused to listen. After he’d done the deal, he told reporters that he traded Jeremy Giambi because he was “concerned he was too one-dimensional” and that John Mabry would supply help on defense. He then leaned on Art Howe to keep Mabry out of the lineup. And Art, occasionally, ignored him. And Mabry proceeded to swat home runs and game-winning hits at a rate he had never before swatted them in his entire professional career. And the Oakland A’s began to win. When Billy traded Jeremy Giambi, the A’s were 20-25; they had lost 14 of their previous 17 games. Two months later, they were 60-46. Everyone now said what a genius Billy Beane was to have seen the talent hidden inside John Mabry. Shooting Old Yeller had paid off.

  Neither his trading of Jeremy Giambi nor the other moves he had made had the flavor of a careful lab experiment. It felt more as if the scientist, infuriated that the results of his careful experiment weren’t coming out as they were meant to, waded into his lab and began busting test tubes. Which made what happened now even more astonishing: as Billy Beane sat in his office in July, just a few months after he’d chucked out three eighths of the starting lineup, he insisted that the shake-up hadn’t been the least bit necessary. Between phone calls to other general managers he explained how the purge he’d conducted back in May, in which he’d ditched players left and right, “probably had no effect. We were 21-26 at the time. That’s a small sample size. We’d have been fine if I’d done nothing.” The most he will admit is that perhaps his actions had some “placebo effect.” And the most astonishing thing of all is that he almost believes it.

  Two months later, he still didn’t want to talk about Jeremy Giambi. All that mattered was that the Oakland A’s were winning again. But they were still in third place in the absurdly strong American League West, and Billy worried that this year good might not be good enough. “We can win ninety games and have a nice little season,” he said. “But sometimes you have to say ‘fuck it’ and swing for the fences.”

  And so he flailed about, seemingly at random, calling GMs and proposing this deal or that, trying to make a Fucking A trade. “Trawling” is what he called this activity. His constant chatter was a way of keeping tabs on the body of information critical to his trading success: the value the other GMs were assigning to individual players. Trading players wasn’t any different from trading stocks and bonds. A trader with better information could make a killing, and Billy was fairly certain he had better information. He certainly had different information. In a short two months with the Oakland A’s, for instance, Carlos Pena had transformed himself from a player Billy Beane coveted more than any other minor leaguer into a player everyone valued more highly than Billy did. He knew—or thought he knew—that Carlos was overvalued. The only question was: how much could he get for him?

  Dangling Carlos from a hook, Billy tried to lure the Pittsburgh Pirates into giving him their slugging outfielder Brian Giles. When the Pirates resisted, he offered to send Carlos and his fourth outfielder Adam Piatt to Boston for outfielder Trot Nixon, and then send Trot Nixon and the A’s flame-throwing Triple-A reliever, Franklyn German, to Pittsburgh for Giles. Again, no luck. He then gave up on Giles and tried and failed to talk Cleveland’s GM, Shapiro, into sending him both his ace, Bartolo Colon, and his best hitter, Jim Thome, for Cory Lidle and Carlos Pena.

  In all of this Billy Beane was bound to fail a lot more than he succeeded: but he didn’t mind! The failure wasn’t public; the success it led to was. Trawling in late June, using Carlos Pena as chum, he stumbled upon a new willingness of the Detroit Tigers to trade their young but expensive ace, Jeff Weaver. Billy didn’t have much interest in Jeff Weaver (at $2.4 million a year, pricey) but he knew that the Yankees would, and he had long coveted the Yankees’ only young, cheap, starting pitcher, Ted Lilly (as good as Weaver, in Billy’s view, and a bargain at $237,000). He sent Carlos Pena to Detroit for Weaver, then passed Weaver to New York for Lilly plus a pair of the Yankees’ hottest prospects. Somehow, in the bargain, he also extracted from Detroit $600,000. When Yankees GM Brian Cashman asked him how on earth he’d done that, Billy told him that it was “my brokerage fee.”

  That had happened on July 5. He wasn’t finished; really he was just getting started. He made a run at Tampa Bay’s center fielder Randy Winn and while Tampa Bay’s management was willing to talk to Billy, they were too frightened of him to deal with him. One former Tampa executive says that “after the way Billy took [starting pitcher Cory] Lidle from them, they’ll never deal with him again. He terrifies them.” He came close to getting Kansas City outfielder Raul Ibanez, but then Ibanez went on a hitting tear that led Kansas City to reevaluate his merits and decide that Billy Beane was about to pick their pockets again. (The year before, at the trade deadline, Billy had given Kansas City nothing terribly useful for Jermaine Dye, just as, the year before, he’d given them next to nothing for Johnny Damon.)

  With Carlos Pena gone, Billy re-baited his hook with Cory Lidle. Lidle had pitched poorly during the first half of the season but he was starting to look better. When Lidle went out to pitch, Billy rooted for him as he never had before—not simply for Lidle to win but for Lidle’s stock to rise. Kenny Williams, GM of the Chicago White Sox, expressed an interest in Lidle. Billy suggested a package that would yield, in return, the White Sox’s slugging outfielder Magglio Ordonez. The White Sox declined, but that conversation led to another, in which Billy discovered that the White Sox were willing to part with their All-Star second baseman and leadoff hitter, Ray Durham. To get Durham and the cash to pay the rest of Durham’s 2002 salary, all Billy had to give up was one flame-throwing Triple-A pitcher named Jon Adkins. Over the past eighteen months Billy had traded every pitcher in the A’s farm system whose fastball exceeded 95 miles per hour—except Adkins.

  Ray Durham, acquired on July 15, had been a Fucking A trade. (It quickly inspired an article on baseballprospectus.com, the leading sabermetric Web site, with the title: “Kenny Williams, A’s Fan.”) In getting Durham, Billy got a lot more than just half of a season from a very fine player. Durham would be declared a Type A free agent at the end of the season. Lose a Type A free agent and you received a first-round draft pick plus a compensation pick at the end of the first round. If Kenny Williams valued those draft picks properly, he would have kept Durham on until the end of the season, and then let him walk. Those two draft picks alone were worth paying Ray Durham to play half a season; they were certainly worth more than the minor league pitcher the White Sox acquired for Durham.

  This trading strategy came with a new risk, however. Baseball owners and players were, by the end of July, at work hammering out a new lab
or agreement. The players were threatening to strike; the owners were threatening to let them. The Blue Ribbon Panel Report had put oomph behind a movement, led by Milwaukee Brewer owner and baseball commissioner Bud Selig, to constrain players’ salaries and share revenues among teams. One of Selig’s proposals—tentatively agreed to by the players’ union—was to eliminate compensation for free agents. No more draft picks. Billy Beane was making a bet: it wouldn’t happen. The only way a new labor agreement occurs, he assumed, is if the players agree to some form of constraint on market forces, either through teams sharing revenues or some form of salary cap. And if they agree to that, the owners will be so relieved that they give the players what they want on every smaller issue.* “This is a small issue in the big picture,” he says. “The history of the union negotiations tells you that they’re never going to acquiesce to the slightest detail. If the owners do get revenue sharing, it’s going to be, ‘Grab your ankles.’ It’s going to be, ‘Do what you want with me. Beat me like a farm animal.’”

  You might think the players would want to eliminate the need for the rich teams that signed free agents to compensate the poor ones that had lost them. The practice was a tax on free agency. But the practice also gave the players’ union veto power over any changes that the owners might want to make in the amateur draft, and this they valued even more highly.

  He was right about the draft picks.

  Whereupon he bent over to illustrate what the owner of a baseball team might look like, were he to play the farm animal.

  Cliff Floyd was Ray Durham all over again. Floyd would be a free agent at the end of the season and so, like Durham, a ticket for two more first-round draft picks. The trouble with Floyd, from the point of view of an impoverished team looking to acquire him, was that he was the only big star still left on the market. “His value will only fall so far,” says Billy.

  In the time he spent trying to nail down Rincon, he had lost Floyd. Or so it seemed. Now he notices he has a voice mail message. While he was talking to Gammons, someone else called. He’s thinking it might be Sabean or Phillips calling to take Venafro’s 270 grand paycheck off his hands. Money is what he needs, and he hits his telephone keypad as if there’s money inside. There isn’t. “Billy,” says the soft, pleasant, recorded voice. “It’s Omar Minaya. Call me back, okay?” Omar Minaya is the Montreal Expos’ GM. Omar Minaya controls the fate of Cliff Floyd.

  Billy puts his head in his hands and says, “Let me think.” Which he does for about ten seconds, then calls Omar Minaya. He listens as Minaya tells him what he already knows from Peter Gammons; that his offer for Cliff Floyd is nowhere close to the Red Sox offer. In exchange for one of the best left-handed hitters in the game, Billy Beane had offered a Double-A pitcher who was promising but hardly a prized possession. The Red Sox, amazingly, have agreed to cover the $2 million or so left on Cliff Floyd’s contract, and offered a smorgasbord of major and minor league players for Montreal to choose from—among them Red Sox pitcher Rolando Arrojo and a South Korean pitcher named Seung-jun Song. Plus, according to Cliff Floyd’s agent, it is suddenly Cliff Floyd’s dream to play for the Boston Red Sox (the Red Sox are likely to pay him even more than he is worth at the end of the year, when he becomes a free agent) and his distinct wish not to play for the Oakland A’s (who will bill Cliff Floyd for the sodas he drinks in the clubhouse). Floyd has a clause in his contract that allows him to veto a trade to Oakland.

  Billy listens to the many compelling reasons why Omar is about to trade Cliff Floyd to the Red Sox, and then says, in the polite tones of a man trying to hide his discovery of another’s idiocy, “You really want to do that, Omar?”

  Omar says he does.

  “I mean, Omar, you really like those guys you’re getting from Boston?”

  Omar, a bit less certainly, says that he likes the guys he’s getting from Boston.

  “You like Arrojo that much, huh?” He speaks Arrojo’s name with a question mark after it. Arrojo? The Toronto Blue Jays’ GM, J. P. Ricciardi, said that watching Billy do a deal was “like watching the Wolf talk to Little Red Riding Hood.”

  It takes a full twenty seconds for Omar to apologize for his interest in Rolando Arrojo.

  “So who is this other guy?” says Billy “This Korean pitcher. How do you say his name? Song Song?”

  Omar knows how to say his name.

  “Well, okay,” says Billy. Yet another shift in tone. He’s now an innocent, well-meaning passerby who has stopped to offer a bit of roadside assistance. “If you’re going to send Floyd to Boston,” he says, “why don’t you send him through me?”

  And Billy Beane now attempts to do what he has done so many times in the past: insert himself in the middle of a deal that is none of his business.

  “Omar,” he says. “You’re in the catbird seat here. All you need to do is let the market come to you.”

  He then explains: Omar can have the Red Sox’s money and he can have the Red Sox’s players plus another player from the Oakland A’s minor league system. Just about any player he wants, within reason. All he has to do is agree to give Cliff Floyd to Billy Beane for a few minutes, and let Billy negotiate with the Red Sox. He is explaining, without putting too fine a point on it, that Omar is not getting all he could get out of the Red Sox for Cliff Floyd.

  The Red Sox were in their usual undignified pant to make the play-offs. They had twisted themselves into a position in their own minds where they could not not get Cliff Floyd. They were among the many foolish teams that thought all their questions could be answered by a single player. Cliff Floyd was the answer. Cliff Floyd was a guy the Boston newspapers would praise them for acquiring. Cliff Floyd would bring false hope to Fenway Park. Cliff Floyd, in short, was a guy for whom the Red Sox simply had to overpay. And if Omar Minaya hasn’t the stomach to extract every last hunk of flesh the Boston Red Sox are willing to part with in exchange for Floyd, Billy will do it for him. And once he’s done it, he will give Omar the players he was going to get anyway plus a minor leaguer from the Oakland farm system.

  Billy Beane never had the first hope of landing Cliff Floyd. For Cliff Floyd to become an Oakland A, the Montreal Expos would have had to agree to pay the rest of Floyd’s 2002 salary. The Expos were now officially a failed enterprise, owned and operated by Major League Baseball. By Bud Selig. There is not the slightest chance that Bud Selig would pay a star to play for a team fighting for a spot in the play-offs. Billy had to have known that; what he’d been doing, all along, was making a place for himself in the conversation about Cliff Floyd. Everyone else in that conversation had money. All he had was chutzpah.

  Omar’s now curious. He wants to know exactly how this new deal would work. Billy spells it out: you give me Floyd and I will deliver to you Arrojo and Song Song—or whatever his name is—plus someone else. Some other minor leaguer from the Oakland A’s system.

  Omar still doesn’t quite follow: how will he do that? Billy explains that he will use Floyd to get Arrojo and Song Song and some other things too, from the Boston Red Sox. It goes without saying that he will keep those other things.

  Omar now follows. He says it sounds messy

  “Okay, Omar,” says Billy. “Let’s do this. Here’s what you do. Call them back and tell them that you want one other player, in addition to Arrojo and Song Song. His name is Youkilis.”

  Euclis.

  The Greek god of walks.

  Youkilis, an eighth-round draft choice the previous year. Youkilis, the first college player turned up by Paul DePodesta’s computer, and ignored by the Oakland A’s scouting department. Youkilis, a man who but for the last residue of old baseball wisdom in Billy’s scouting department would have been taken by the Oakland A’s in the third round of the 2001 draft. Youkilis was the Jeremy Brown of the 2001 draft. He was tearing up Double-A ball, and was on the fast track to the big leagues. He played as if he was trying to break the world record for walking, and for wearing out the arms of opposing pitchers.r />
  From the moment he started to talk to Omar Minaya about Cliff Floyd, Billy Beane was after Youkilis.

  Omar has no idea who Youkilis is. “Kevin Youkilis,” says Billy, as if that helps. “Omar, he’s nobody. He’s just a fat Double-A third baseman.” A fat Double-A third baseman who is the Greek god of walks. Who just happened to have walked into some power last year. Yes: the Greek god of walks was now hitting a few more home runs. Which is, of course, the true destiny of the Greek god of walks.

  Omar doesn’t understand how he can get Youkilis from the Red Sox, who have said they’ve made their best offer. “No, Omar,” says Billy. “Here’s how you do it. If I walk you through this, Omar, you can take it to the freaking bank. Trust me on this, Omar. He [Floyd’s agent] wants him in Boston. You know why? Boston can pay him. You don’t ask them for Youkilis. You just tell them Youkilis is in the deal. You just call them and tell them that without Youkilis they don’t have a deal. Then hang up. I guarantee you they’ll call you right back and give you Youkilis. Who is Youkilis?”

  He speaks the name as he has never before, as if he can summon only contempt for anyone with an interest in this Youkilis. “Youkilis for Cliff Floyd?” he says “It’s ridiculous. Of course they’ll do it. Fucking Larry Lucchino [the Red Sox president] doesn’t know who the fuck Youkilis is. How are they going to explain to people that they didn’t get Cliff Floyd because they wouldn’t give up Youkilis?”