Moneyball

by Lewis, Michael

  In Oakland, Billy Beane’s imminent departure quickly rippled through the organization. Paul DePodesta had agreed to become the new general manager of the Oakland A’s. He’d promoted his fellow Harvard graduate, David Forst, to be his assistant. Paul’s main concern was just how much Billy Beane’s Boston Red Sox should pay the Oakland A’s for poaching their general manager. Billy came to work one day to face a new situation. As he put it, “I’ve now got two Harvard guys on my sofa trying to figure out how they’re going to screw me.” It looked like the beginning of a new relationship. He and Paul argued back and forth until they settled on the player Paul would get in exchange for Billy Beane: Kevin Youkilis. The Greek god of walks. The player who, but for the A’s old scouting department, should have been an Oakland A. The player with the highest on-base percentage in all of professional baseball, after Barry Bonds. Paul wanted another minor leaguer too, but Youkilis was the real prize.

  All that remained was for Billy to sign the Red Sox contract. And he couldn’t do it. In the forty-eight hours after he accepted John Henry’s job offer, Billy became as manic and irrational and incapable of sleep as he had been back in May, after the A’s had been swept by the Blue Jays. As decisive as he was about most things, he was paralyzed when the decision involved himself. He loved the idea of working for John Henry, with his understanding of markets and their inefficiencies. But you didn’t up and move three thousand miles and start a new life just to work for a different owner. Five days before, Billy had convinced himself he wasn’t taking the job just for the money. Since it was pretty clear he wasn’t doing it for the love of the Red Sox, it raised a question of why he was doing it at all. He decided he was doing it just to show that he could do it. To prove that his own peculiar talents had concrete value. Dollar value. And that in any sane world he’d be paid a fortune for them.

  Now he had a problem: he’d just proved that. Baseball columns everywhere were abuzz with the news that Billy Beane was about to become the highest paid general manager in the history of the game. Now that everyone knew his true value, Billy didn’t need to prove it anymore. Now the only reason to take the job was for the money.

  The next morning, he called John Henry and told him he couldn’t do it.* A few hours later, he blurted to a reporter something he wished he hadn’t said but was nevertheless the truth: “I made one decision based on money in my life—when I signed with the Mets rather than go to Stanford—and I promised I’d never do it again.” After that, Billy confined himself to the usual blather about personal reasons. None of what he said was terribly rational or “objective” but then, neither was he. Within a week, he was back to scheming how to get the Oakland A’s back to the play-offs, and Paul DePodesta was back to being on his side. And he was left with his single greatest fear: that no one would ever really know. That he and Paul might find ever more clever ways to build great ball clubs with no money, but that, unless they brought home a World Series ring or two, no one would know. And even then—even if they did win a ring—where did that leave him? He’d be just one more general manager among many who were celebrated for a day, then forgotten. People would never know that, for a brief moment, he was right and the world was wrong.

  The job went to Theo Epstein, the twenty-eight-year-old Yale graduate with no experience playing professional baseball.

  About that I think he may have been mistaken. He’d been the perfect vessel for an oddly shaped idea, and that idea was on the move, like an Oakland A’s base runner, station to station. The idea had led Billy Beane to take action, and his actions had consequences. He had changed the lives of ballplayers whose hidden virtues otherwise might never have been seen. And those players who had been on the receiving end of the idea were now busy returning the favor.

  Epilogue

  The Badger

  The Jeremy Brown who steps into the batter’s box in early October is, and is not, the fat catcher from Hueytown, Alabama, that the Oakland A’s had made the least likely first-round draft choice in recent memory. He was still about five foot eight and 215 pounds. He still wasn’t much use to anyone hoping to sell jeans. But in other ways, the important ways, experience had reshaped him.

  Three months earlier, just after the June draft, he’d arrived in Vancouver, Canada, to play for the A’s rookie ball team. Waiting for him there was a seemingly endless number of jokes to be had at his expense. The most widely read magazine in the locker room, Baseball America, kept writing all these rude things about his appearance. They quoted unnamed scouts from other teams saying things like, “He never met a pizza he didn’t like.” They pressed the A’s own scouting director, Erik Kubota, to acknowledge the perversity of selecting a young man who looked like Jeremy Brown with a first-round draft choice. “He’s not the most physically fit,” Kubota had said, sounding distinctly apologetic. “It’s not a pretty body…. This guy’s a great baseball player trapped in a bad body.” The magazine ran Jeremy’s college yearbook picture over the caption: “Bad Body Rap.” His mother back in Hueytown read all of it, and every time someone made fun of the shape of her son, she got upset all over again. His dad just laughed.

  The other guys on the rookie ball team thought it was a riot. They couldn’t wait for the next issue of Baseball America to see what they’d write about Jeremy this time. Jeremy’s new friend, Nick Swisher, was always the first to find whatever they’d written, but Swish approached the thing with defiance. Nick Swisher, son of former major league player Steve Swisher, and consensus first-round draft pick, took shit from no one. Swish didn’t wait for other people to tell him what he was worth; he told them. He was trying to instill the same attitude, without much luck, in Jeremy Brown. One night over dinner with a few of the guys, Swish had said to him, “All that stuff they write in Baseball America—that’s bullshit. You can play. That’s all that matters. You can play. You think Babe Ruth was a stud? Hell no, he was a fat piece of shit.” Jeremy was slow to take offense and it took him a second or two to register the double-edged nature of Swish’s pep talk. “Babe Ruth was a fat piece of shit,” he said. “Just like Brown.” And everyone at the table laughed.

  A few weeks after he’d arrived in Vancouver, Jeremy Brown and Nick Swisher were told by the team’s trainer that the coaches wanted to see them in their office. Jeremy’s first thought was “Oh man, I know I musta done something dumb.” That was Jeremy’s instinctive reaction when the authorities paid special attention to him: he’d done something wrong. What he’d done, in this case, was get on base an astonishing half the time he came to the plate. Jeremy Brown was making rookie ball look too easy. Billy Beane wanted to test him against stiffer competition; Billy wanted to see what he had. The coach handed Jeremy and Nick Swisher plane tickets and told them that they were the first guys from Oakland’s 2002 draft to get promoted to Single-A ball.

  It took them forever to get from Vancouver, Canada, to Visalia, California. They arrived just before a game, having not slept in thirty-one hours. No one said anything to them; no one wanted to have anything to do with them. That’s the way it was as you climbed in the minors: your new teammates were never happy to see you. “Everybody just kind of looks at you and doesn’t say anything,” said Jeremy. “You just try to be nice. You don’t want to get off on the wrong foot.”

  That first night in Visalia, he and Swish dressed and sat on the end of the bench. They might as well have been on the visiting team. No one even came down to say hello; if Swish hadn’t been on hand to confirm the fact Jeremy might have wondered if he still existed. In the third inning the team’s regular catcher, a hulk named Jorge Soto, came to the plate. Jeremy had never heard of Soto but he assumed, rightly, that he was competing with Soto for the catching job. On the first pitch Soto hit a shot the likes of which neither Jeremy nor Swish had ever seen. It was still rising as it flew over the light tower in left center field. It cleared the parking lot and also the skate park on the other side of the parking lot. It was the farthest ball Jeremy had ever seen hit liv
e. Five hundred and fifty feet, maybe more. As Soto trotted around the bases, Jeremy turned to Swish and said, “I don’t think I’m ever going to catch here.”

  If it was up to his new teammates, he wouldn’t have. They locked the door; if Jeremy Brown and Nick Swisher wanted in, they’d have to break it down. One day he was walking through the Visalia clubhouse when someone shouted in a mocking tone, “Hey, Badger.” Jeremy had no clue what the guy was talking about. He soon learned. His teammates, who still weren’t saying much to him, had nicknamed him “The Badger.” “It was ‘cause when I get into the shower I kind of got a lot of hair on my body,” Jeremy explained. Behind his back, they were all still having fun at his expense. Jeremy just did what he always did, smiled and got along.

  Along with most of the other players drafted by the Oakland A’s in 2002, Jeremy Brown had been invited to the Instructional League in Arizona at the end of the season. By then, three months after he’d been promoted to Visalia, no one was laughing at him. In Visalia, he’d quickly seized the starting catching job from Jorge Soto, and led the team in batting average (.310), on-base percentage (.444) and slugging percentage (.545). In fifty-five games, he’d knocked in forty runs. So artfully had he ripped through the pitching in high Single-A ball that Billy Beane had invited him to the 2003 big league spring training camp—the only player from the 2002 draft so honored. Every other player in the Oakland A’s 2002 draft—even Nick Swisher—had experienced what the A’s minor league director Keith Lieppman called “reality.” Reality, Lieppman said, “is when you learn that you are going to have to change the way you play baseball if you are going to survive.” Jeremy alone didn’t need to change a thing about himself; it was the world around him that needed to change. And it did. The running commentary about him in Baseball America hung a U-turn. When the magazine named him one of the top three hitters from the entire 2002 draft, and one of the four top prospects in the Oakland A’s minor league system, his mom called to tell him: someone had finally written something nice about him. His teammates in Visalia no longer called him “The Badger.” Everyone now just called him “Badge.”

  When Jeremy Brown comes to the plate on this mid-October afternoon in Scottsdale, Arizona, it’s the bottom of the second inning. There’s no score, and there’s no one on base. The big left-hander on the other team has made short work of the A’s first three hitters. He throws Jeremy a fastball off the plate. Jeremy just looks at it. Ball one. Pitch number two is a change-up on the outside corner, where Jeremy can’t do much with it anyway, so he just lets it be. Strike one. Jeremy Brown knows something about pitchers: “They almost always make a mistake,” he says. “All you have to do is wait for it.” Give the game a chance to come to you and often enough it will. When he takes the change-up for a called strike, he notices the possibility of a future mistake. The pitcher’s arm motion, when he throws his change-up, is noticeably slower than it is when he throws his fastball.

  The pitcher’s next pitch is a fastball off the plate. Ball two. It’s 2-1: a hitter’s count.

  The fourth pitch is the mistake: the pitcher goes back to his change-up. Jeremy sees his arm coming through slowly again, and this time he knows to wait on it. The change-up arrives waist-high over the middle of the plate. The line drive Jeremy hits screams over the pitcher’s right ear and into the gap in left center field. As he leaves the batter’s box, Jeremy sees the left and center fielders converging fast. The left fielder, thinking he might make the catch, is already running himself out of position to play the ball off the wall. Jeremy knows he hit it hard, and so he knows what’s going to happen next-or imagines he does. The ball is going to hit the wall and ricochet back into the field. The left fielder, having overrun it, will have to turn around and chase after it. Halfway down the first-base line, Jeremy Brown has one thought in his mind: I’m gonna get a triple.

  It’s a new thought for him. He isn’t built for triples. He hasn’t hit a triple in years. He thrills to the new idea: Jeremy Brown, hitter of triples. A funny thing has happened since he became, by some miracle, the most upwardly mobile hitter in the Oakland A’s minor league system. Surrounded by people who keep telling him he’s capable of almost anything, he’s coming to believe it himself.

  He races around first (“I’m haulin’ ass now”) and picks up the left fielder, running with his back to him, but not the ball. He’s running as hard as he’s ever run—and then he’s not. Between first and second base his feet go out from under him and he backflops into the dirt, like Charlie Brown. He notices, first, a shooting pain in his hand: he’s jammed his finger. He picks himself up, to scramble back to the safety of first base, when he sees his teammates in the dugout. The guys are falling all over each other, laughing. Swish. Stanley. Teahen. Kiger. Everybody’s laughing at him again. But their laughter has a different tone; it’s not the sniggering laughter of the people who made fun of his body. It’s something else. He looks out into the gap in left center field. The outfielders are just standing there: they’ve stopped chasing the ball. The ball’s gone. The triple of Jeremy Brown’s imagination, in reality, is a home run.

  Acknowledgments

  I never could have written this book without the help and encouragement of the Oakland A’s. Many people who work for the organization feature prominently in this story but a few who were important to me do not, and I would like to thank them here. The team’s co-owner, Steve Schott, took me to a ball game and encouraged me to pursue my line of inquiry. The front office’s first line of defense, Betty Shinoda, Wilona Perry, and Maggie Baptist, never made me feel anything but welcome. Jim Young and Debbie Callus made my life easier than it should have been in the press box. Mickey Morabito, who had no interest in letting me anywhere near the team’s plane, took me along for the ride. Keith Lieppman and Ted Polakowski, who must have wondered why I so longed to pester their minor league players, instead helped me to do it. Steve Vucinich might have asked what business I had in his clubhouse; instead he did everything to make me feel welcome short of steaming LEWIS on the back of an Oakland A uniform and sending me out to the mound. Jim Bloom introduced me to big league players and helped me to sell them on my project. Two of those players, Tim Hudson and Barry Zito, helped me far more than their brief appearances in this book suggest.

  Several old friends read parts or all of the manuscript and saved me from myself: Tony Horwitz, Gerry Marzorati, Jacob Weisberg, and Chris Wiman. Several new friends combed through the first draft and helped to save me from baseball: Rob Neyer, Dan Okrent, and Doug Pappas. Dick Cramer and Pete Palmer offered invaluable counsel on both the theory and history of sabermetrics. Alan Schwarz provided assistance on the history of baseball statistics, which was remarkably generous, given that he is himself writing a book on the subject.

  Roy Eisenhardt introduced me to Billy Beane, a fact that went a long way with Billy, with reason. Looking through my notes it’s clear that the book arose from what amounts to a year long openended conversation with Billy Beane, Paul DePodesta, and David Forst. And yet not once did any of them seek to control or dilute what I might write. I will always be grateful to them for their generosity of spirit.

  I am blessed to write for the publishing equivalent of the Oakland A’s. Encouraging me to write about baseball was as bold as telling Scott Hatteberg to play first base. For this I am more than usually grateful to my editor, Starling Lawrence, and his assistant, Morgen Van Vorst. The Norton sales director, Bill Rusin, should have put a stop to this project before it began, but he at least pretended to approve of it. I am grateful to have had the chance to present the book to Oliver Gilliland, but it goes only a little way to alleviating the sorrow of knowing that it was the last time I ever will.

  For help in just about every phase of this project I am grateful to my wife, Tabitha Soren. Her official stats, impressive as they are, still don’t do justice to her performance.