Moneyball: Chapters 5–7

You think of John Maynard Keynes's condescending line about men of action—how they believe themselves guided by their own ideas even when they are unwittingly in the thrall of some dead economist.

Once Jeremy Brown becomes a first-round pick, the agents, heretofore oblivious of his existence, would be all over him, trying to persuade him to break the illicit verbal agreement he'd made with the A's.

Howe stands in the back of the room with his jaw jutting and a philosophical expression on his face, the way he does in the dugout during games.

The A's front office has a list, never formally written out, of the twenty players they'd draft in a perfect world. That is, if money were no object and twenty-nine other teams were not also vying to draft the best amateur players in the country.

He was out in center field, poised to make a spectacular catch no one expected him to make.

"Billy's a shark," J. P. Ricciardi had said, by way of explaining what distinguished Billy from every other GM in the game.

"It's not just that he's smarter than the average bear. He's relentless—the most relentless person I have ever known."

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.

"Just talked to Kiger," the fat scout says laconically.

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.

George Will, the conservative columnist, was, oddly enough, the most outspoken proponent of baseball socialism.

"MAJOR LEAGUE"
Movie about the hapless Cleveland Indians
In order to assemble a losing team, the owner distributes a list of players to be invited to spring training. The baseball executives say that most of these players are way past their prime.

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."

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."

You could take a slightly above average pitcher and drop him into the closer's role, let him accumulate some gaudy number of saves, and then sell him off. You could, in essence, buy a stock, pump it up with false publicity, and sell it off for much more than you'd paid for it.

The question wasn't whether a baseball team could keep its stars even after they had finished with their six years of indentured servitude and became free agents.

The question was: how did a baseball team find stars in the first place, and could it find new ones to replace the old ones it lost? How fungible were baseball players? The short answer was: a lot more fungible than the people who ran baseball teams believed.

The ability to get on base—to avoid making outs—was underpriced compared to the ability to hit with power. The one attribute most critical to the success of a baseball team was an attribute they could afford to buy.

Options and futures were really just fragments of stocks and bonds, but the fragments soon became so arcane and inexplicable that Wall Street created a single word to describe them all: "derivatives." In one big way these new securities differed from traditional stocks and bonds: they had a certain, precisely quantifiable, value.

As Bill James had shown, baseball data conflated luck and skill, and simply ignored a lot of what happened during a baseball game.

Mauriello and Armbruster began by turning every major league diamond into a mathematical matrix of location points.

The system replaced the game seen by the ordinary fan with an abstraction. In AVM's computers the game became a collection of derivatives, a parallel world in which baseball players could be evaluated more accurately than they were evaluated in the real world.

There are doubles that should have been caught—just as there are balls that are hit that should have been doubles but were plucked from the air by preternaturally gifted fielders.

Their solution wasn't perfect, it was just better than the hoary alternative, rendering decisions by gut feeling.

Thus the practical answer to the question about Johnny Damon's defense: it would probably cost more to replace than it was worth. Anyone who could play center field so well as Damon was either a lot worse offensively than Damon, or overpriced. The most efficient way to offset the loss of Johnny Damon's defense was to add more offense.

One wall was stacked with old tapes of A's games, the other with decrepit video equipment. Stained Formica desks, a pair of old video screens on each one, squatted on either end of the room.

Feiny argued that while rich teams had far more expansive and tasteful facilities, they paid a price for their luxury: their players never had to share close quarters. They weren't forced to get to know one another by smell.

He'd already turned down one lucrative offer, from the Toronto Blue Jays, to become, at twenty-eight, the youngest general manager in the history of baseball, and he was prepared to turn down more until exactly the right one came along.

"The important thing is not to recreate the individual," Billy Beane would later say. "The important thing is to recreate the aggregate.” He couldn't and wouldn't find another Jason Giambi; but he could find the pieces of Giambi he could least afford to be without, and buy them for a tiny fraction of the cost of Giambi himself.

He is playing left field not because he has any particular gift for plucking balls from the air but because he is even more gloriously inept when faced with the task of picking them up off the ground.

The trick is to know precisely what trade-offs you were making. A farce in left field is merely the price of doing business with Jeremy Giambi's bat.

Giambi has all the crude offensive attributes—home runs, high batting average, a perennially high number of RBIs.

"Baseball is a war of attrition," Billy Beane was fond of saying, "and what's being attrited is pitchers' arms."

The war of attrition is turning into a rout. Eric Hiljus has thrown fifty-four pitches in the first two innings. David Wells throws twelve pitches in the first and just six more—two each to Tejada, Chavez, and Long—in the second before he strolls back to the dugout.

Much of his power was now gone. His new Oakland teammates witnessed his dissipation up close.

They flashed up on the television screen that stoic image of Art ten times a game and at some point the announcers felt moved to mention Art's calming effect on young players.

Billy had told Art how and where to stand during a game so that the players would be forced to look up to him, and take strength from his countenance, because when Art sat on the bench, as he preferred to do, he looked like a prisoner of war.

The notion that he would huddle in his luxury suite with friends and family and visiting dignitaries—well, that just wasn't going to happen. Some visiting dignitary would hint he might like to see a game from Billy's box and Billy would say, "Fine, just don't think I'll be seeing it with you."

Only every now and then Billy Beane did see. He'd permit himself a furtive glimpse of the action on live television, behind the closed door of Art Howe's office.

"I'm the only manager in baseball," A's manager Art Howe complained, "who has to pinch-run for his leadoff man." Sticking the ice wagon in the leadoff slot had been another quixotic front office ploy.