Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (15 page)

Billy O is what you’d get if you hammered Shaquille O’Neal on the head with a pile driver until he stood six foot two. He’s big and wide and moves only when he is absolutely certain that movement is required for survival. He’s shrewd, too, and can see what you mean even if you don’t. Over the past few days Billy O has come to see that he has a novel task: giving Jeremy Brown a new opinion of himself. He took it in small steps; he didn’t want to shock the kid. “That boy told me he’d be happy to go in the first nineteen rounds,” says Billy O. “I told him, ‘think top ten.’ I’m telling you, that guy was so happy when I told him that. Next day I called him back and say, ‘shrink that to five.’ I’m not sure he believed me. Yesterday, I called him and said, ‘You got a chance to make six figures and the first number is not going to be a one.’ The boy had to sit down.”

But it was what happened late the night before that really struck Billy O. He’d called Jeremy Brown to tell him that the Oakland A’s were thinking of drafting him with the fifth of their seven first-round picks, the thirty-fifth overall pick. To that, Brown hadn’t said anything much at all. Just “Thank you very much but I need to call you back.” Seconds later he’d called back. It turned out he thought the guy who had just called him wasn’t Billy Owens, Oakland A’s scout, but a college teammate of his masquerading as Billy O. “He thought it was a crank call,” says Billy O. “He said he wanted to make sure it was me, and that I was serious.”

Jeremy Brown, owner of the University of Alabama offensive record books
as a catcher,
has been so perfectly conditioned by the conventional scouting wisdom that he refused to believe that any major league baseball team could think highly of him. As he eased himself into the radically new evaluation of his talents, he heard Billy O lay down the conditions. There were two. One was that he would sign for the $350,000 the A’s were offering, which was nearly a million dollars less than the thirty-fifth pick of the draft might expect to receive. The other was he needed to lose weight. “I said this is the Oakland A’s speaking to you, and the Oakland A’s do things differently,” said Billy O, fresh from the strangest pre-draft chat he’d ever had with an amateur player. “I told him how this was the money and it was as much as he was ever gonna get and it was non-negotiable. I said the Oakland A’s are making a commitment to you. You gotta make a commitment to us, with your body.”

It had to be the most energizing weight loss commercial in history, even if it was delivered by an unlikely pitchman. At the end of it, Brown had sounded willing to agree to anything. At the same time, he still didn’t really believe any of it. And that worries Billy Beane.

“You wanna go home tonight?” he now asks Billy O. What he’s really asking is: Do you think you need to be there in the flesh, to keep Jeremy Brown sane? To remind him that the Oakland A’s have just radically increased his market value, and that he should remain grateful long enough to sign their contract. Once Jeremy Brown becomes a first-round pick, the agents, heretofore oblivious of his existence, would be all over him, trying to persuade him to break the illicit verbal agreement he’d made with the A’s.

“No,” says Billy O, and takes his seat in the ring of scouts. “I told him those agents are going to be calling him and telling him all kinds of shit. The boy’s all right.”

“Hey,” says Sparky, brightly, to Billy O, “your guy could eat my guy for dinner.”

“And would,” says Billy O, then shuts his mouth, to achieve perfect immobility.

Billy Beane’s phone rings.

“Hey Kenny,” he says. Kenny Williams, GM of the Chicago White Sox. Williams has been calling a lot lately. He wants to trade for the A’s starting pitcher, Cory Lidle. But this morning it isn’t Lidle he wants to talk about. He’s calling because the White Sox hold the eighteenth pick in the draft, two behind the A’s first selection, and he wants to find out who the A’s plan to draft. He doesn’t come right out and say it; instead, he probes Billy about players, thinking he might trick Billy into tipping his hand. “We’re in front of you so don’t try to play secret agent man,” Billy finally says. “Don’t worry, Blanton might get to you.” Joe Blanton is a pitcher at the University of Kentucky. Billy likes him too.

Billy hangs up. “He’s going to take Blanton,” he says. A useful tidbit. It fills in the white space between the A’s first pick and their second, the twenty-fourth of the entire draft.

No one is thinking about the twenty-fourth pick of the draft, however. The twenty-fourth pick of the draft feels years away, and irrelevant. With the twenty-fourth pick of the draft, and all the other picks they have after that, the A’s will pursue players in whom no one else has seen the greatness. Jeremy Brown is the extreme example of the phenomenon, but there are many others.

Nick Swisher is a different story; Swisher many teams want. No one utters Swisher’s name, but everyone knows that Billy’s obsessed with the kid. Here in the asylum cell Swisher already feels
owned.
The scouts were already sharing their favorite Swisher stories. The Indians’ GM, Mark Shapiro, goes to see Swisher play, and instead of sticking to his assigned role of intimidated young player under inspection by big league big shot, Swisher marches right up to Shapiro and says, “So what the hell’s up with Finley’s old lady?” (Chuck Finley is an Indians pitcher who had filed assault charges against his wife.) Great story! The kid has an attitude.

Billy has to work to hide how much he likes the sound of that descriptive noun. Attitude is “a subjective thing.” Billy’s stated goal is to remain “objective.” All these terribly subjective statements about Swisher keep popping out of his mouth anyway. Swisher has an attitude. Swisher is fearless. Swisher “isn’t going to let anything get between him and the big leagues.” Swisher has “presence.” The more you listen to Billy talk about Swisher, the more you realize that he isn’t talking about Swisher. He’s talking about Lenny Dykstra. Swisher is the same character as the one that had revealed Billy’s shortcomings to himself—made it clear to him that he was never going to be the success everyone said he was born to be. That he’d need to figure out all by himself how to be something else. No wonder that on the subject of Nick Swisher Billy sounds somewhat less than “objective.” He’s talking about a ghost.

At first, there’s no hint of trouble. The scouts have called around and have a fair idea of who will draft whom with the first fifteen picks. All is clear for the A’s to draft Nick Swisher with the sixteenth pick of the draft. It’s Billy’s best friend in baseball, J. P. Ricciardi, the GM of the Blue Jays, who, twenty minutes before the draft, calls to tell Billy that all is no longer so clear. The sound of J.P.’s voice initially causes Billy to brighten but whatever he says causes Billy to say, “Fuck! I got to go.” He punches his cell phone off and hurls it onto the table.

“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 eighth, 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.