Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (6 page)

More silence. Decades of scouting experience are being rendered meaningless. “I hate to piss on the campfire,” one of the scouts finally says, “but I haven’t heard Teahen’s name
once
all year. I haven’t heard other teams talking about him. I haven’t heard his name
around here
all year. It wasn’t like this guy was a fifty-five we all liked.” The scouts put numbers on players. The numbers are one of the little tricks that lend scouting an air of precision. A player who receives a “55” is a player they think will one day be a regular big league player.

“Who do you like better?” asks Billy.

The old scout leans back in his chair and folds his arms. “What about Perry?” he says. “When you see him do something right on a swing, it’s impressive. There’s some work that needs to be done. He needs to be reworked a bit.”

“You don’t change guys,” says Billy. “They are who they are.”

“That’s just my opinion,” says the old scout, and folds his arms.

Once Teahen has found his slot high up on the Big Board, Billy Beane takes out a Magic Marker and writes another name:

BROWN

The four scouts across from him either wince or laugh. Brown?
Brown?
Billy can’t be serious.

“Let’s talk about Jeremy Brown,” Billy says.

In moving from Mark Teahen, whoever he is, to Jeremy Brown, whoever
he
is, Billy Beane, in the scouting mind, had gone from the remotely plausible to the ridiculous. Jeremy Brown made the scouting lists, just. His name appears on the last page; he is a lesser member of the rabble regarded by the scouts as, at best, low-level minor league players. He’s a senior catcher at the University of Alabama. Only three of the old scouts saw him and none of them rated him even close to a big leaguer. Each of them has about a thousand players ranked above him.

“Jeremy Brown is a bad body catcher,” says the most vocal of the old scouts.

“A bad body who owns the Alabama record books,” says Pitter.

“He’s the only player in the history of the SEC with three hundred hits and two hundred walks,” says Paul, looking up from his computer.

It’s what he doesn’t say that is interesting. No one in big league baseball cares how often a college players walks; Paul cares about it more than just about anything else. He doesn’t explain why walks are important. He doesn’t explain that he has gone back and studied which amateur hitters made it to the big leagues, and which did not, and why. He doesn’t explain that the important traits in a baseball player were not all equally important. That foot speed, fielding ability, even raw power tended to be dramatically overpriced. That the ability to control the strike zone was the greatest indicator of future success. That the number of walks a hitter drew was the best indicator of whether he understood how to control the strike zone. Paul doesn’t say that if a guy has a keen eye at the plate in college, he’ll likely keep that keen eye in the pros. He doesn’t explain that plate discipline might be an innate trait, rather than something a free-swinging amateur can be taught in the pros. He doesn’t talk about all the other statistically based insights—the overwhelming importance of on-base percentage, the significance of pitches seen per plate appearance—that he uses to value precisely a hitter’s contribution to a baseball offense. He doesn’t stress the importance of generalizing from a large body of evidence as opposed to a small one. He doesn’t explain anything because Billy doesn’t want him to. Billy was forever telling Paul that when you try to explain probability theory to baseball guys, you just end up confusing them.

“This kid wears a large pair of underwear,” says another old scout. It’s the first time in two days that this old scout has spoken. He enjoys, briefly, the unusual attention accorded the silent man in a big meeting. The others in the room can only assume that if the scout was moved to speak it must be because he had something earth-shatteringly important to say. He doesn’t.

“Okay,” says Billy.

“It’s soft body,” says the most vocal old scout. “A fleshy kind of a body.”

“Oh, you mean like Babe Ruth?” says Billy. Everyone laughs, the guys on Billy’s side of the room more happily than the older scouts across from him.

“I don’t know,” says the scout. “A body like that can be low energy.”

“Sometimes low energy is just being cool,” says Billy.

“Yeah,” says the scout. “Well, in this case low energy is because when he walks, his thighs stick together.”

“I repeat: we’re not selling jeans here,” says Billy.

“That’s good,” says the scout. “Because if you put him in corduroys, he’d start a fire.”

Clutching Jeremy Brown’s yellow nameplate, Billy inches toward the Big Board with the “Top 60” names on it. The scouts shift and spit. The leading scouting publication,
Baseball America
, has just published its special issue devoted to the 2002 draft, and in it a list of the top twenty-five amateur catchers in the country. Jeremy Brown’s name is not on the list.
Baseball America
has more or less said that Jeremy Brown will be lucky to get drafted. Billy Beane is walking Jeremy Brown into the first five rounds of the draft.

“Billy, does he really belong in that group?” asks the old scout plaintively. “He went in the nineteenth round last year and he’ll be lucky to go there this year.” The Red Sox had drafted Brown the year before, and Brown had turned down the peanuts they’d offered and returned to the University of Alabama for his senior year. It was beginning to look like a wise move.

The older scouts all share their brother’s incredulity. One of them, the fat scout, when he returned from the trip Billy made him take to the University of Alabama, called Billy and told him that he couldn’t recommend drafting Jeremy Brown. Period. There were fifteen hundred draft-eligible players in North America alone that he would rather own than this misshapen catcher. Like all the scouts, the fat scout had the overriding impression that Brown was fat and growing fatter. He had the further impression that Brown didn’t look all that good when he did anything but hit. “Behind the plate he’s not mobile,” the fat scout now says. “His throws are all slingshot throws.” Throws from catchers with a slinging motion tend not to follow a straight line but to tail off toward the first-base side of second base.

Billy takes a step toward the Big Board, sticks Brown’s name onto the top of the Big Board’s second column, the seventeenth slot, and says, “All right, push him down, guys.” Jeremy Brown is now a high second-round, or even low first-round, draft pick. If baseball scouts were capable of gasping, these men would have gasped. Instead, they spit tobacco juice into their cups. That was the moment when the scouts realized just how far Billy Beane was willing to go to push his supposedly rational and objective view of things.

“Come on, Billy,” the vocal scout says.

“Finding a catcher who can hit—there’s not one of them out there who can hit,” says Billy. “This guy can hit.”

Erik looks across the table and says, “This guy’s a senior with, like, a huge history.”

The scouts don’t see the point of history. In their view history isn’t terribly relevant when you’re talking about kids who haven’t become who they will be.

“Come on,” says Erik, “you guys have all played with guys who were bad bodies and good baseball players.”

“Yeah,” says Billy. “I played with Pitter.” Everyone laughs, even Pitter. “Another thing about Brown,” says Billy; “he walks his ass off.”

“He’s leading the country in walks,” says Paul. Walks!

“He better walk because he can’t run,” says one of the scouts.

“That body, Billy,” says the most vocal old scout. “It’s not natural.” He’s pleading now.

“He’s got big thighs,” says the fat scout, thoughtfully munching another jumbo-sized chocolate chip cookie. “A big butt. He’s
huge
in the ass.”

“Every year that body has just gotten worse and worse and worse,” says a third.

“Can he hit, though?” asks Billy Beane.

“Wanna hear something,” says Paul, gazing into his computer screen at the University of Alabama Web site. “In the past two years: 390 at bats; 98 walks; 38 Ks. Those numbers are better than
anyone’s
in minor league baseball. Oh yeah, 21 jacks.” Jacks are home runs. So are dongs, bombs, and big flies. Baseball people express their fondness for a thing by thinking up lots of different ways to say it.

The fat scout looks up from his giant chocolate chip cookie and seeks to find a way to get across just how unimpressed he is. “Well,” he says, exaggerating his natural drawl, “I musta severely unnerestimated Jeremy Brown’s hittin’ ability.”

“I just don’t see it,” says the vocal scout.

“That’s all right,” says Billy. “We’re blending what we see but we aren’t allowing ourselves to be victimized by what we see.”

This argument had nothing to do with Jeremy Brown. It was about how to find a big league ballplayer. In the scouts’ view, you found a big league ballplayer by driving sixty thousand miles, staying in a hundred crappy motels, and eating god knows how many meals at Denny’s all so you could watch 200 high school and college baseball games inside of four months, 199 of which were completely meaningless to you. Most of your worth derived from your membership in the fraternity of old scouts who did this for a living. The other little part came from the one time out of two hundred when you would walk into the ballpark, find a seat on the aluminum plank in the fourth row directly behind the catcher, and see something no one else had seen—at least no one who knew the meaning of it. You only had to see him once. “If you see it once, it’s there,” says Erik. “There’s always been that belief in scouting.” And if you saw it once, you, and only you, would know the meaning of what you saw. You had found the boy who was going to make you famous.

Billy had his own idea about where to find future major league baseball players: inside Paul’s computer. He’d flirted with the idea of firing all the scouts and just drafting the kids straight from Paul’s laptop. The Internet now served up just about every statistic you could want about every college player in the country, and Paul knew them all. Paul’s laptop didn’t have a tiny red bell on top that whirled and whistled whenever a college player’s on-base percentage climbed above .450, but it might as well have. From Paul’s point of view, that was the great thing about college players: they had meaningful stats. They played a lot more games, against stiffer competition, than high school players. The sample size of their relevant statistics was larger, and therefore a more accurate reflection of some underlying reality. You could project college players with greater certainty than you could project high school players. The statistics enabled you to find your way past all sorts of sight-based scouting prejudices: the scouting dislike of short right-handed pitchers, for instance, or the scouting distrust of skinny little guys who get on base. Or the scouting distaste for fat catchers.

That was the source of this conflict. For Billy and Paul and, to a slightly lesser extent, Erik and Chris, a young player is not what he looks like, or what he might become, but
what he has done.
As elementary as that might sound to someone who knew nothing about professional baseball, it counts as heresy here. The scouts even have a catch phrase for what Billy and Paul are up to: “performance scouting.” “Performance scouting,” in scouting circles, is an insult. It directly contradicts the baseball man’s view that a young player is what you can see him doing in your mind’s eye. It argues that most of what’s important about a baseball player, maybe even including his character, can be found in his statistics.

After Billy said what he had to say about being “victimized by what we see,” no one knew what to say. Everyone stared at Jeremy Brown’s name. Maybe then they all understood that they weren’t here to make decisions. They were here to learn about the new way that decisions were going to be made.

“This is a cutting-edge approach we’re taking this year,” says Erik, whose job, it is increasingly clear, is to stand between Billy and the old scouts, and reconcile the one to the other. “Five years from now everyone might be doing it this way.”

“I hope not,” says Paul. He doesn’t mean this in the way that the old scouts would like him to mean it.

“Bogie,” says Erik, calling across the table on the vast moral authority of the oldest scout of all, Dick Bogard. “Does this make sense to you?” Erik adores Bogie, though of course he’d never put it that way. When Erik announced he wanted to leave the A’s advertising department and get into the baseball end of things, even though he himself had never played, Bogie not only did not laugh at him; he encouraged him. “My baseball father,” Erik called Bogie.

Bogie is not merely the oldest of the scouts; he is the scout who has worked for the most other teams. He is a walking map of his own little world. In spite of his age, or maybe because of it, he knows when an old thing has died.

“Oh definitely,” says Bogie, motioning to Paul’s computer. “It’s a new game. Years ago we didn’t have these stats to look up. We had to go with what we saw.”

“Years ago it only cost a hundred grand to sign them,” says Erik.

The other older scouts are unmoved. “Look,” says Erik, “Pitter and I are the ones that people are going to say, ‘What the hell were you doing? How the hell could you take Brown in the first round?’”

No one says anything.

“The hardest thing,” says Billy, “is there is a certain pride, or lack of pride, required to do this right. You take a guy high no one else likes and it makes you uncomfortable. But I mean, really, who gives a fuck where guys are taken? Remember Zito? Everyone said we were nuts to take Zito with the ninth pick of the draft. And we
knew
everyone was going to say that. One fucking month later it’s clear we kicked everyone’s ass. Nobody remembers that now. But understand, when we stop trying to figure out the perception of guys, we’ve done better.”

“Jeremy Brown isn’t Zito,” says one of the scouts. But he is. A lot of people in the room have forgotten that the scouting department hadn’t wanted to take Barry Zito because Barry Zito threw an 88-mph fastball. They preferred a flamethrower named Ben Sheets. “Billy made us take Zito,” Bogie later confesses.