Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (38 page)

His timing was about perfect. The market for Billy Beane’s services was changing rapidly. What appeared to be a new trend had started a year ago, in Toronto. Rogers Communications, the Blue Jays’ new owner, had made it clear that the team, which had been losing more money than any in baseball, had to be self-sustaining. After the 2001 season the Blue Jays’ new CEO Paul Godfrey, formerly the metro chairman of Toronto (i.e., mayor) and a man with no baseball experience, set out to run the business along rational lines. He started by firing his general manager. He then piled up on his desk the media guides for the other twenty-nine teams in baseball, and went looking for a replacement. He called just about everyone in baseball, and interviewed most of them. Buck Showalter, who had run the Diamondbacks and was now a TV announcer. Dave Dombrowski, who ran the Detroit Tigers. Pat Gillick, who had been the Blue Jays’ GM during the glory years and was now the GM of the Seattle Mariners. Doug Melvin, who just had been fired by the Rangers. John Hart, the GM of the Cleveland Indians, who would wind up replacing Melvin at the Rangers. “They all said the same thing to me,” says Godfrey. “It always came back to: give me the bucks to compete with the Yankees and I’ll do it. They didn’t understand what I was even talking about when I said I wanted someone who had a strategy going forward. I didn’t want a guy who said, ‘Give me a hundred fifty million bucks and I’ll give you a winner.’”

In all of baseball Godfrey found one exception to the general money madness: Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s. He concluded that the A’s were playing a different game than everyone else. He decided that, whatever game they were playing, he wanted to play it too. He assumed that Billy Beane, who had a long-term contract in Oakland, was off-limits. So he’d offered the Blue Jays’ top job to Paul DePodesta—but Paul didn’t want it. And so Godfrey went back into the Oakland A’s media guide and found the picture of the guy under DePodesta. His name was J. P. Ricciardi, the A’s director of player development. J.P. flew to Toronto for the interview—and had the job in about five minutes. “He had a reason for everything,” said Godfrey. “Of all the people I’d talked to, J.P. was the only one with a business plan and the only one who told me, ‘You are spending too much money.’ He basically went through the lineup and said, ‘These people are all replaceable by people you’ve never heard of.’ And I said, ‘You sure?’ And he said, ‘Look, if you can stand the heat in the media, I can make you cheaper and better. It’ll take a couple of months to make you cheaper and a couple of years to make you better. But you’ll be a lot better.’”

The first thing J. P. Ricciardi did after he took the job was hire Keith Law, a twenty-eight-year-old Harvard graduate who had never played baseball, but who wrote lots of interesting articles about it for baseballprospectus.com. That was partly Billy’s idea. Billy had told J.P. that, in order to find the fool at the poker table, “you need your Paul.” The second thing J.P. did was fire twenty-five Blue Jays scouts. Then, over the next few months, he proceeded to get rid of just about every highly paid, established big league player and replace them with minor leaguers no one had ever heard of. By the end of the 2002 season J.P. had taken to watching every Blue Jays game with Keith Law. By then he could turn to his pet sabermetrician in the middle of a game and gleefully shout, “Rain Man, we got a $1.8 million team out there on the field right now!”

That superior management armed with science could be had so cheaply was easily the greatest inefficiency in all of baseball, and the owner with the keenest sense of markets, and their follies, saw this. John Henry had just purchased the Boston Red Sox, and he was looking to overhaul his franchise in the image of the Oakland A’s. In late October he hired Bill James as “Senior Consultant, Baseball Operations.” (“I don’t understand how it took so long for somebody to hire this guy,” Henry said.) Just to be sure, he also hired Voros McCracken as a special adviser on pitching. Then he went looking for someone to run the show.

Only one guy had ever actually proved he could impose reason on a big league clubhouse, and that guy, two weeks after his team had been bounced from the play-offs, was now dissatisfied with his job. One thing led to another, and before long Billy Beane had agreed to run the Boston Red Sox. He would be guaranteed $12.5 million over five years, the most anyone had ever been paid to run a baseball team. Billy hadn’t yet signed the contract, but that was just a formality. He had already persuaded his owner to let him out of his contract, and started to overhaul the Red Sox. In his mind’s eye he had traded Red Sox third baseman Shea Hillenbrand to some team that didn’t understand that a .293 batting average was a blow to the offense when it came attached to a .330 on-base percentage. He’d signed Edgardo Alfonzo to play second base, and Bill Mueller to play third. Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek was gone and White Sox backup Mark Johnson was in his place. Manny Ramirez’s glove was requisitioned by general management, and the slugger would spend the rest of his Red Sox career as a designated hitter. All in his mind’s eye.

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.

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

T
HE 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 year-book 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 live. 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.”