Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (7 page)

“Let me ask you this,” says Billy. “If Jeremy Brown looked as good in a uniform as Majewski [a Greek Kouros who played outfield for the University of Texas], where on this board would you put him?”

The scouts pretend to consider this. Nobody says anything so Pitter says it for them: “He’d be in that first column.” A first-round pick.

“You guys really are trying to sell jeans, aren’t you?” says Billy. And on that note of affectionate disgust, he ends the debate. He simply takes Jeremy Brown’s nameplate and moves him from the top of the second column on the Big Board to the bottom of the first, from #17 to #15. Jeremy Brown, whose name had somehow failed to turn up on
Baseball America
’s list of the top twenty-five amateur catchers, who serious scouts believed should never be a pro baseball player, is now a first-round draft choice of the Oakland A’s.

“Since we’re talking about Brown anyway,” says Paul, which wasn’t exactly true, since the scouts were now distinctly
not
talking about Brown, “there’s a list of hitters I want to talk about. All of these guys share certain qualities. They are the eight guys we definitely want. And we want
all
eight of these guys” He reads a list:

Jeremy Brown

Stephen Stanley

John Baker

Mark Kiger

Shaun Larkin

John McCurdy

Brant Colamarino

Brian Stavisky

All eight are college players. Most of them are guys the scouts either did not particularly like, or, in a few cases, don’t really know. A young man rises to put their names on the board. Paul quickly organizes them, like a dinner guest who has spilled his wine and hopes to clean it up before the host notices. When he’s finished, the board is a market but from a particular point of view, that of a trader who possesses, or believes he possesses, superior knowledge.

With that, the coup was complete. Paul’s list of hitters were distinctly not guys the scouts found driving around. They were guys Paul found surfing the Internet. Some of the names the older scouts do not even recognize. The evaluation of young baseball players had been taken out of the hands of old baseball men and placed in the hands of people who had what Billy valued most (and what Billy didn’t have), a degree in something other than baseball.

“There’s some serious on-base percentage up there,” says Billy. No one else says anything. The room is filled with silence.

“We got three guys at the top of the board that no one has ever heard of,” Pitter finally says, with just a trace of pride.

“There isn’t a board in the game that looks like this one,” agrees Bogie.

Bogie brought into the draft room something unique: vast experience to which he had no visceral attachment. He’d been in the game for nearly fifty years. He’d seen a lot, perhaps everything, and he was willing to forget it, if asked. As it happened, one of the things he had seen, back in 1980, was a high school game in San Diego. That was the year that the Mets took Darryl Strawberry with the first overall pick in the draft. But that year there was another high school player, who, in his ability to conjure fantasies in the baseball scouting mind, rivaled Strawberry. Bogie had gone to see him at the behest of the Houston Astros. Great body, plus wheels, plus arm, good instincts, and the ability to hit the ball over light towers. To top it off, he’d scored higher than any other prospect on the psychological tests. Bogie had phoned Houston and told the front office that he had found a better prospect than Darryl Strawberry: Billy Beane.

When asked which player, on the Oakland A’s draft board, most resembled the young Billy Beane, Bogie said, “Shit, man. There
is
no Billy Beane. Not up there.” When asked why, he’d said, “Billy was a guy you could dream on,” and left it to you to understand that Billy Beane, the general manager, had just systematically eliminated guys “you could dream on.” But when asked what became of those still unforgotten dreams, Bogie hesitated. He looked over and met the eye of the grown-up Billy Beane.

“That’s enough!” said Billy. He’d only been pretending not to listen. Bogie just smiled, shrugged, and said no more.

Chapter Three

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

T
HE METS
had had only the greatest expectations of him. They’d wanted to hold a big press conference in Dodger Stadium to announce his signing. Billy asked them not to. He had a claustrophobic unease with ceremony of any kind, and a press conference was nothing but a ceremonial event. It’d make him feel trapped. Plus he didn’t want to make a big deal about becoming a pro baseball player. It was less a decision to celebrate than a vaguely uncomfortable fact to get his mind around. The Mets failed to consider the cause or implications of his reticence. In the belief that Billy was more ready for pro ball than Darryl Strawberry, they sent Strawberry to the low-level rookie team with the other high school kids and Billy to the high-level rookie team, in Little Falls, New York, with the college players. Little Falls, New York, could not have felt farther from San Diego, California. His teammates might as well have been a different species than the high school kids he was used to playing with. They had hair on their backs and fat on their stomachs. They smoked before games and drank after them. A few had wives. And all of the pitchers had sliders.

The Mets were betting that Billy was better equipped than Strawberry to deal with the pressures, and inevitable frustrations, that went with playing against much older players. Roger Jongewaard, the Mets’ head scout, fully expected Billy to rocket through the minors and into the big leagues well ahead of Strawberry. The Mets scouting department had badly misjudged Billy’s nature. They had set him up to fail. If there was one thing Billy was not equipped for, it was failure. He didn’t even begin to know what to make of a stat sheet at the end of his first short season in high-level rookie ball that showed him hitting .210. He didn’t know how to think of himself if he couldn’t think of himself as a success. When the season ended he returned home, enrolled in classes at the University of California at San Diego, and forgot that he played baseball for a living. He didn’t so much as pick up a bat or a glove until spring training the following March. That in itself should have been an ominous sign, but no one was looking for ominous signs.

The next year went well enough for him—he was, after all, Billy Beane—and by the summer of 1982 he had been promoted to the Mets’ Double-A team in Jackson, Mississippi. He played left, Strawberry played right, and the whole team played the field. For a lot of the players it was their first exposure to the Southern female—the most flagrant cheater in the mutual disarmament pact known as feminism. Lipstick! Hairdos! Submissiveness! Baseball was a game but chasing women was a business, in which Billy Beane was designed to succeed without even trying. Billy had the rap. Billy, said his old teammate J. P. Ricciardi, “could talk a dog off a meat wagon.” Billy was forever having to explain to another teammate of his, Steve Springer, that when you’d just met some girl, what you didn’t do was tell her you played pro ball. It wasn’t fair to her; you had to give the girl a chance to turn you down. Billy’s way of giving her a chance was to tell her that what he did for a living was collect roadkill off local highways. Springer didn’t have Billy’s awesome God-given ability with women; he thought he needed the Mets to stand a chance; and this need of his led to one of those great little moments that make even the most dismal minor league baseball careers worth remembering. They were leaving one of the local burger joints when two pretty girls called after them, in their fetching drawls: “You boys Yankees?” Springer turned around and said, “No, we’re the Mets.”

Off the field Billy was Billy; on the field Billy was crumbling. The only thing worse than an ambivalent minor league baseball player was an ambivalent minor league baseball player with a terror of failure, forced to compare himself every afternoon to Darryl Strawberry. “People would look at Billy and Darryl and think about the untapped potential that might be brought out of them,” recalls Jeff Bittiger, who was the ace of the staff on the same team. “They weren’t just supposed to be big leaguers. They were supposed to be big league all-stars.” That year Strawberry would be named the most valuable player in the Texas League. Billy would hit only .220. Often they’d hit third and fourth in the lineup, and so Billy spent a lot of hours in the outfield dwelling on Strawberry’s heroics and his own failure. “That was the first year I really questioned if I’d made the right decision to sign,” Billy said.

Darryl Strawberry presented one kind of problem for Billy; Lenny Dykstra presented another, perhaps even more serious one. Billy and Lenny lived together and played side by side in minor league outfields for nearly two years, beginning in 1984. In the spring of that year both were invited to the Mets’ big league spring training camp. With Strawberry now a fixture in the Mets’ right field, the talk in the minors was that Billy was being groomed to replace George Foster in left, and Lenny was supposed to replace Mookie Wilson in center. Lenny thought of himself and Billy as two buddies racing together down the same track, but Billy sensed fundamental differences between himself and Lenny. Physically, Lenny didn’t belong in the same league with him. He was half Billy’s size, and had a fraction of Billy’s promise—which is why the Mets hadn’t drafted him until the thirteenth round. Mentally, Lenny was superior, which was odd considering Lenny wasn’t what you’d call a student of the game. Billy remembers sitting with Lenny in a Mets dugout watching the opposing pitcher warm up. “Lenny says, ‘So who’s that big dumb ass out there on the hill?’ And I say, ‘Lenny, you’re kidding me, right? That’s Steve Carlton. He’s maybe the greatest left-hander in the history of the game.’ Lenny says, ‘Oh yeah! I knew that!’ He sits there for a minute and says, “So, what’s he got?’ And I say, ‘Lenny, come on.
Steve Carlton.
He’s got heat and also maybe the nastiest slider ever.’ And Lenny sits there for a while longer as if he’s taking that in. Finally he just says, ‘Shit, I’ll stick him.’ I’m sitting there thinking, that’s a
magazine cover
out there on the hill and all Lenny can think is that he’ll stick him.”

The point about Lenny, at least to Billy, was clear: Lenny didn’t let his mind screw him up. The physical gifts required to play pro ball were, in some ways, less extraordinary than the mental ones. Only a psychological freak could approach a 100-mph fastball aimed not all that far from his head with total confidence. “Lenny was so perfectly designed, emotionally, to play the game of baseball,” said Billy. “He was able to instantly forget any failure and draw strength from every success. He had no concept of failure. And he had no idea of where he was. And I was the opposite.”

Living with Lenny, Billy became even less sure that he was destined to be the star everyone told him he would be. He began, in the private casino of his mind, to hedge his bets. He told teammates he might quit baseball and go back to college and play football. He might enter politics; everyone said he’d be good at it. He took to reading some nights—a radical idea for a minor league baseball player—to compensate for the formal education he now realized he wasn’t getting. Lenny would come home and find Billy curled up in a chair with a book. “He’d look at me,” recalls Billy, “and say, ‘Dude, you shouldn’t be doing that. That shit’ll ruin your eyes.’ Lenny’s attitude was: I’m going to do nothing that will interfere with getting to the big leagues, including learning.” Maybe more to the point, Lenny—a thirteenth-round draft pick!—hadn’t the slightest doubt that he was going to make it to the big leagues and make it big. “I started to get a sense of what a baseball player was,” Billy said, “and I could see it wasn’t me. It was Lenny.”

That thought led to another:
I’m not sure I like it here
. Before Billy was sent back to the minor leagues in the first cuts of 1984 spring training, he was confronted by the Mets’ big league manager, Davey Johnson. Johnson told Billy that he didn’t think he, Billy, really wanted to play baseball. “I didn’t take it as a criticism,” said Billy. “I took it as ‘I think he’s right.’ I was so geared to going to college. I was sort of half in and half out.”

The half that was in stayed in. He didn’t quit baseball. He kept grinding his way up through the minor leagues, propelled by his private fears and other people’s dreams. The difference between who he was, and who other people thought he should be, grew by the day. A lot of people who watched Billy Beane play still thought what J. P. Ricciardi thought when he played with Billy that first year in Little Falls. “He was so physically gifted that I thought he would overcome everything,” said Ricciardi. “I remember coming home from that first season and telling my friends, ‘I just played with this guy who you gotta see to believe. He isn’t like other animals.’” Teammates would look at Billy and see the future of the New York Mets. Scouts would look at him and see what they had always seen. The hose. The wheels. The body. The Good Face.

Billy was smart enough to fake his way through his assigned role: young man of promise. “Billy
never
looked bad, even when he struggled,” recalls the scout who had signed him, Roger Jongewaard. “He was the most talented player I ever played with,” says Chris Pittaro, who made it to the big leagues with the Tigers and won a World Series with the Twins. “He had the ability to do things in a game that ninety-five percent of the people in the big leagues could not do in practice because they didn’t have the physical ability. There aren’t many plays I remember from fifteen years ago but I remember some of Billy’s. We were in Albuquerque in ’87 [in Triple-A ball] and Billy made this play in right field. He had to run up and down over the bullpen mound to make a catch, and then throw a tagging runner out at the plate. I remember being astonished—first of all, that he even got to the ball. Second, that he ran up and down a pitcher’s mound at full speed without breaking stride. Third, that he even thought to make that throw. Speed. Balance. Presence of mind. I think that the runner when he found the ball waiting for him was more surprised than anybody.”