Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (17 page)

“Oakland selects redraft number 1172. Brown, Jeremy. Catcher. University of Alabama. Hueytown, Alabama.”

Minutes after Erik speaks his name, Jeremy Brown’s phone begins to ring. First it’s family and friends, then agents. All these agents he’s never heard of want to be in his life.
Scott Boras
suddenly wants to represent Jeremy Brown. The agents will tell him that they can get him at least half a million dollars more than the A’s have promised. He’ll have to tell them that he’s made a deal with the A’s on his own, and that he intends to keep his end of it. And he does.

The next two hours are, to Billy Beane, a revelation. When the dust settles on the first seven rounds, the A’s have acquired five more of the hitters from Billy and Paul’s wish list—Teahen, Baker, Kiger, Stavisky, and Colamarino. When in the seventh round Erik leans in and takes the last of these, an ambidextrous first baseman from the University of Pittsburgh named Brant Colamarino, Paul wears an expression of pure bliss. “No one else in baseball will agree,” he says, “but Colamarino might be the best hitter in the country.” That told you how contrary the A’s measuring devices were: they were able to draft possibly the best hitter in the country with the 218th pick of the draft. Then Paul says, “You know what gets me excited about a guy? I get excited about a guy when he has something about him that causes everyone else to overlook him and I know that it is something that just doesn’t matter.” When Brant Colamarino removes his shirt for the first time in an A’s minor league locker room he inspires his coaches to inform Billy that “Colarmarino has titties.” Colamarino, like Jeremy Brown, does not look the way a young baseball player is meant to look. Titties are one of those things that just don’t matter in a ballplayer. Billy’s only question for the coaches was whether a male brassiere should be called a “manzier” or a “bro.”

Most every other team looks at the market pretty much the same way, or at any rate acts as if they do. Most teams, if they kept a wish list of twenty players, would feel blessed to have snagged three of them. The combination of having seven first-round draft picks, a deeply quirky view of baseball players, and a general manager newly willing to impose that view on his scouting department has created something like a separate market in Oakland. From their wish list of twenty they had nabbed, incredibly, thirteen players: four pitchers and nine hitters. They had drafted players dismissed by their own scouts as too short or too skinny or too fat or too slow. They had drafted pitchers who didn’t throw hard enough for the scouts and hitters who hadn’t enough power. They’d drafted kids in the first round who didn’t think they’d get drafted before the fifteenth round, and kids in lower rounds who didn’t think they’d get drafted at all. They had drafted
ballplayers.

It was as if a big new market-moving Wall Street money manager had sprung into being, and bought shares only in vegetarian restaurants, or electric car manufacturers. With a difference. A revaluation in the stock market has consequences for companies and for money managers. The pieces of paper don’t particularly care what you think of their intrinsic value. A revaluation in the market for baseball players resonates in the lives of young men. It was as if a signal had radiated out from the Oakland A’s draft room and sought, laserlike, those guys who for their whole career had seen their accomplishments understood with an asterisk. The footnote at the bottom of the page said, “He’ll never go anywhere because he doesn’t
look
like a big league ballplayer.”

Billy Beane was a human arsenal built, inadvertently, by professional baseball to attack its customs and rituals. He thought himself to be fighting a war against subjective judgments, but he was doing something else, too. At one point Chris Pittaro said that the thing that struck him about Billy—what set him apart from most baseball insiders—was his desire to find players unlike himself. Billy Beane had gone looking for, and found, his antitheses. Young men who failed the first test of looking good in a uniform. Young men who couldn’t play anything but baseball. Young men who had gone to college.

The fat scout ambles in. He’s one of the older scouts, and like most of the others, he’ll leave the Oakland A’s at the end of the season, and find a team that cares about what he knows. All these misshapen players coming in will drive all of these old scouts out. But for now the older scouts are, mainly, amused. “Just talked to Kiger,” the fat scout says laconically. Mark Kiger plays shortstop for the University of Florida. A machine for wearing down opposing pitchers, and getting himself on base. Too small to play pro ball—or so they said. Now a fifth-round draft choice of the Oakland A’s.

“What did he say?” asks Billy

“‘Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,’” says the fat scout, and then laughs. “He just wanted to get drafted.”

It counted as one of the happiest days of Billy Beane’s career. He can’t have known whether he had simply found a new way of fixing irrational hopes upon a young man, or if he had, as he hoped, eliminated hope from the equation. But he thought he knew. At the end of the day he actually looked up with a big smile and said, “This is maybe the funnest day I have ever had in baseball.” Then he walked out the back door of the draft room and into the Coliseum. He had another, bigger missile to fire at the conventional wisdom of major league baseball. It was called the Oakland A’s.

Chapter Six

THE SCIENCE OF WINNING AN UNFAIR GAME

T
HERE WAS NO
simple way to approach the problem that Billy Beane was trying to solve. It read like an extra credit question on an algebra quiz: You have $40 million to spend on twenty-five baseball players. Your opponent has already spent $126 million on its own twenty-five players, and holds perhaps another $100 million in reserve. What do you do with your forty million to avoid humiliating defeat? “What you don’t do,” said Billy, “is what the Yankees do. If we do what the Yankees do, we lose every time, because they’re doing it with three times more money than we are.” A poor team couldn’t afford to go out shopping for big league stars in the prime of their careers. It couldn’t even afford to go out and buy averagely priced players. The average big league salary was $2.3 million. The average A’s opening day salary was a bit less than $1.5 million. The poor team was forced to find bargains: young players and whatever older guys the market had undervalued. It would seem highly unlikely, given the wage inflation in pro baseball over the past twenty-five years, that any established big league player was underpriced. If the market was even close to rational, all the real talent would have been bought up by the rich teams, and the Oakland A’s wouldn’t have stood a chance. Yet they stood a chance. Why?

Oddly enough, Major League Baseball had asked that very question, in its own half-assed, incurious way. After the 1999 season, Major League Baseball had created something it called the Commissioner’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Baseball Economics, whose job it was to produce a document called
The Blue Ribbon Panel Report
. Its stated purpose was to examine “the question of whether baseball’s current economic system has created a problem of competitive imbalance in the game.” The baseball commissioner, Bud Selig, had invited four men of sound reputation—former U.S. senator George Mitchell, Yale president Richard Levin, the columnist George Will, and former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Paul Volcker—to write a report on the economic inequalities in baseball. Selig owned maybe the most pathetic poor team in all of baseball, the Milwaukee Brewers. He no doubt wanted to believe that the Brewers’ trouble was poverty, not stupidity. He had an obvious financial interest in the commission reaching the conclusion that players’ salaries needed to be constrained and that rich teams should subsidize poor ones. He expressed this interest by trying to pad the Blue Ribbon Panel Commission with other owners of poor, pathetic baseball teams. But the four eminences objected to this transparent attempt to undermine their authority, and Selig agreed that the owners would merely sit in the room, observing the eminences deliberate.

It didn’t matter. In July 2000, the panel did pretty much exactly what Bud Selig hoped it would do: conclude that poor teams didn’t stand a chance, that their hopelessness was Bad for Baseball, and that a way must be found to minimize the distinction between rich and poor teams. George Will, the conservative columnist, was, oddly enough, the most outspoken proponent of baseball socialism. One dramatic fact Will often used to incite alarm was that the ratio of the payrolls of the seven richest and seven poorest teams in baseball was 4:1, while in pro basketball it was 1.75:1 and in pro football 1.5:1. Baseball was the major American sport in which money bought success, he said, and that was a crime against the game. When fans of the Brewers and the Royals and the Devil Rays figured out that their teams existed only so that the New York Yankees might routinely pummel them, they would abandon the sport altogether. At stake was nothing less than the future of professional baseball.

There was something to be said for these arguments but there was also something to be said against them, and, according to two people who watched the proceedings, only one commissioner was willing to say it: Paul Volcker. Volcker was also the only commissioner with a financial background. To the growing annoyance of the others, he kept asking two provocative questions:

1. If poor teams were in such dire financial condition, why did rich guys keep paying higher prices to buy them?

2. If poor teams had no hope, how did the Oakland A’s, with the second lowest payroll in all of baseball, win so many games?

The owners didn’t have a good answer to the first question, but to answer the second they dragged in Billy Beane to explain himself. The odd thing was that the previous season, 1999, the A’s had finished 87–75 and missed the play-offs. Still, they had improved dramatically from 1998, Billy’s first year on the job, when they’d gone 74–88. And they were looking even stronger in 2000. Volcker smelled a rat. If results in pro baseball were so clearly determined by financial resources, how could there be even a single exception? How could a poor team improve so dramatically? Paul DePodesta wrote Billy Beane’s presentation and Billy flew off to New York to explain to Volcker why he was a fluke. He was happy to do it. He hadn’t the slightest interest in stopping the Blue Ribbon Panel from concluding that his life was unfair. He’d be delighted to see the cost of players constrained, or, even better, the Yankees made to give him some of their money. When he got up before the panel, Billy flashed a slide up on the overhead projector. It read:

When it suited his purposes Billy could throw the best pity party this side of the Last Supper. He told the Blue Ribbon Panel that the Oakland A’s inability to afford famous stars meant that no matter how well the team performed, the fans stayed away—which was the opposite of the truth. All the A’s marketing studies showed that the main thing fans cared about was winning. Win with nobodies and the fans showed up, and the nobodies
became
stars; lose with stars and the fans stayed home, and the stars became nobodies. Assembling nobodies into a ruthlessly efficient machine for winning baseball games, and watching them become stars, was one of the pleasures of running a poor baseball team.

Billy also told the Blue Ribbon Panel that his inability to pay the going rate for baseball players meant that his success was likely to be ephemeral. It might have been what they wanted to hear but it wasn’t what he believed. What he believed was what Paul Volcker seemed to suspect, that the market for baseball players was so inefficient, and the general grasp of sound baseball strategy so weak, that superior management could still run circles around taller piles of cash. He then went out and created more evidence in support of his belief. Having won 87 games in 1999, the Oakland A’s went on to win 91 games in 2000, and an astonishing 102 games in 2001, and made the play-offs both years.

They weren’t getting worse, they were getting better. The rapidly expanding difference between the size of everyone else’s money pile and Oakland’s had no apparent effect. Each year the Oakland A’s seemed more the financial underdog and each year they won more games. Maybe they were just lucky. Or maybe they knew something other people didn’t. Maybe they were, as they privately thought, becoming more
efficient.
When, in 2001, for the second year in a row, they lost to the Yankees in the fifth and deciding game of the play-offs, the Oakland front office was certain that theirs had been the better team and that it was the Yankees who had gotten lucky—and that the Yankees front office knew it. And that some fraction of the $120 million the Yankees had paid Jason Giambi after the 2001 play-offs to lure him away from the Oakland A’s was to prevent him from ever again playing for the Oakland A’s.

At any rate, by the beginning of the 2002 season, the Oakland A’s, by winning so much with so little, had become something of an embarrassment to Bud Selig and, by extension, Major League Baseball. “An aberration” is what the baseball commissioner, and the people who worked for him, called the team, and when you asked them what they meant by that nebulous word, they said, though not for attribution, “They’ve been lucky.” This was the year the luck of the A’s was meant to run out. The relative size of the team’s payroll had shrunk yet again. The
difference
between the Yankees’ and A’s opening day payrolls had ballooned from $62 million in 1999 to $90 million in 2002. The Blue Ribbon Panel’s nightmare scenario for poor teams had become a reality for the 2002 Oakland A’s. They had lost to free agency—and thus, to richer teams—three of their proven stars: Jason Isringhausen, Johnny Damon, and Giambi.