Moneyball: Chapters 1–2

Anyway, the first thing they always did was run you. Five young men stretch and canter on the outfield crabgrass: Darnell Coles. Cecil Espy. Erik Erickson. Garry Harris. Billy Beane.

They've been culled from the nation's richest trove of baseball talent, Southern California, and invited to the baseball field at San Diego's Herbert Hoover High to answer a question: who is the best of the best?

They are indifferent to their surroundings. Numb. During the past few months they have been so thoroughly examined by so many older men that they don't even think about where they are performing, or for whom.

And as straightforward as it seems—what ambiguity could there possibly be in a sixty-yard dash?—Gillick is troubled.

He found talents in himself almost before his body was ready to exploit them: he could dunk a basketball before his hands were big enough to palm it.

"I've got this first-round draft pick," he says, "and fifteen and twenty scouts showing up every time we scrimmage. And I didn't know what to do. I'd never played pro ball."

It got so that Billy would run from practice straight to some friend's house to avoid their incessant phone calls to his home.

Twenty-two years later, after more than sixty of his players, and two of his nephews, had been drafted to play pro baseball, Blalock would say that he had yet to see another athlete of Billy's caliber.

Word was that the Mets had winnowed their short list to two players, Billy and a Los Angeles high school player named Darryl Strawberry.

To the chagrin of Billy's mother, who was intent on her son going to Stanford, Jongewaard planted himself in the Beane household.

He appeased his mother (and his conscience) by telling her (and himself) he would attend classes at Stanford during the off-season.

The brown mop of hair had thinned, and been trained, poorly, to part. Otherwise the saggings and crinklings of middle age were barely discernable on him.

Other teams, when they sought to explain to themselves why the Oakland A's had won so many games with so little money, and excuse themselves for winning so few with so much, usually invoked the A's scouting.

Certainly, Grady could never have imagined that his scouting department was on the brink of total overhaul, and that his job was on the line.

Grady had no way of knowing how much Billy disapproved of Grady's most deeply ingrained attitudes—that Billy had come to believe that baseball scouting was at roughly the same stage of development in the twenty-first century as professional medicine had been in the eighteenth.

For Billy Beane, it was a little different, a little less cerebral and a little more visceral. Billy intended to rip away from the scouts the power to decide who would be a pro baseball player and who would not, and Paul was his weapon for doing it.

In conciliatory tones, he allowed as how he still needed to sign a pitcher to fill out the A's rookie league roster in Arizona.

Paul had noticed that on the same pitching staff as this consensus first-round pick was this complete unknown, a six foot four left-hander, who had even better numbers than the first rounder.

The treatment of amateur players is the most glaring of the many violations of free market principles in Major League Baseball. A team that drafts and signs a player holds the rights to his first seven years in the minor leagues and his first six in the majors. It also enjoys the right to pay the player far less than he is worth.

For his first three years of big league ball, Zito was stuck; for his next three years he could apply for salary arbitration, which would bump him up to maybe a few million a year but would still keep him millions below the $10–$15 million a year he could get for himself on the open market.

The scout who knew the kid then offered up a brief, dispassionate description of him.

"Competitive drive: one out of ten. Leadership: one out of ten. Conscientiousness: one out of ten."

"Soft" is also fairly damning—it connotes both "out of shape" and "wimp"—but it, too, is inconclusive.

"Hell,” says Matty, now genuinely indignant. "That was three years ago!”

The second group, maybe four hundred players, they parse further by position.

"Operation Shutdown," the scouts called their project to keep Billy as far away from Swisher as they could. Operation Shutdown has had some perverse effects. One of them is to lead Billy to speak of Swisher in the needy tone of a man who has been restrained for too long from seeing his beloved.

The conversation turns from Nick Swisher, and the moment it does it becomes contentious. Not violently so—these are people with an interest in getting along.

The old scouts are like a Greek chorus; it is their job to underscore the eternal themes of baseball.

Paul reads the player's college batting statistics. They contain a conspicuous lack of extra base hits and walks.

Over and over the old scouts will say, "The guy has a great body," or, "This guy may be the best body in the draft." And every time they do, Billy will say, "We're not selling jeans here," and deposit yet another highly touted player...

Decades of scouting experience are being rendered meaningless.

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.

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.

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.

"Billy, does he really belong in that group?" asks the old scout plaintively.

The older scouts all share their brother's incredulity.

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.

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.

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.

Bogie had gone to see him at the behest of the Houston Astros.