Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (5 page)

“Can he bring it?” someone finally asks. The air clears.

“I can see this guy in somebody’s pen throwing aspirin tablets someday,” says the older scout. “The guy has a cannon.” This old scout is pushing fifty-five but still has a lean quickness about him, as if he hadn’t completely abandoned the hope that he might one day play the game. The old scout likes high school kids and refuses to apologize for that fact.

“I’m worried about the makeup,” says someone.

“What does his profile say?” asks someone else.

A young man sits quietly off to one side at the room’s lone desktop computer. He punches a few keys. He’s looking for Lark’s results on the psychological test given by Major League Baseball to all prospects.

“Not good,” he says, at length. “Competitive drive: one out of ten. Leadership: one out of ten. Conscientiousness: one out of ten.” He keeps on reading down the list, but no matter what the category the kid’s score is always the same.

“Shit,” Bogie finally says, “does he even have a
two
in anything?” Bogie is the oldest scout. In 1972, scouting for the Houston Astros, Bogie administered what he believes to have been the first ever baseball psychological test, to a pitcher named Dick Ruthven. (He passed.)

“Bad makeup,” says someone else and no one disagrees.

The scouts used several catch phrases to describe what they need to avoid. “Rockhead” clearly isn’t a good thing to be, but the quality can be overcome. “Soft” is also fairly damning—it connotes both “out of shape” and “wimp”—but it, too, is inconclusive. “Bad makeup” is a death sentence. “Bad makeup” means “this kid’s got problems we can’t afford to solve.” The phrase signaled anything from jail time to drinking problems to severe personality disorders. Whenever a player is convicted of “bad make-up” another young man reaches into a cardboard box for a tiny magnetized photograph of a former A’s employee named Phil Milo. Milo had worked as one of Billy Beane’s assistants for a brief spell and in that time offended pretty much everyone in the organization. When I ask Paul how it was possible for one man to personify so many different personality disorders, Paul says, “Put it this way. On the day I was hired, Milo came over to meet me. The first thing out of his mouth was, ‘I got to be honest with you. I’m really not pleased we hired you.’” Milo was just that kind of guy.

During the first few days of the draft meetings the tiny photos of Phil Milo fly like confetti. And the conversations that ended with Milo’s picture plastered beside a prospect’s name told you something: not just what baseball men distrusted in a player’s character, but how little they really knew the people they were about to rain money on.

A high school pitcher:

“Where’s he going to college?” asks Billy, idly.

“He’s not,” says the scout who knows him best. “He’s a Christian kid and he was given a free ride to UC Irvine. Coach set him up with a couple of his players. Took him to a party and all it was was drinking. Kid was offended and he left and said, ‘I’m not going to school.’”

“Oh, then he’ll fit right into pro ball, won’t he?” says Billy.

“Put a Milo on him,” says Erik.

A collegiate right-handed pitcher:

“He’s a cocky guy,” says Matt Keough, who is arguing on the pitcher’s behalf. “He’d shove it up your ass. And taunt you. So you hate the guy. He’s had a couple of ejections.”

“But no drugs?” asks Erik.

“No drugs,” says Matty, then thinks about it. “There are rumors of some hash.”

An old scout laughs. “Corned beef hash?”

“It’s unsubstantiated,” Matty protests.

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” says another old scout.

Erik looks up: “Is he the guy who was selling wacky tobacky in high school?”

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

Everyone groans. “Put a Milo on him,” says Erik, and spits tobacco juice.

A power-hitting outfielder:

“I’m not sure he wants to sign. He said he’d like to go to law school.”

“Law school?”

“He’s getting pressure from his girlfriend, I think.”

“He’s looking for love, it sounds like.”

“Put a Milo on him.”

Another collegiate left-handed pitcher:

“The guy’s got no grades,” says a scout.

“You mean bad grades?” asks another.

“No, I mean no grades,” says the first.

“How can a guy have no grades at Chico State?” asks the other.

“He really has no desire at all to be in college,” says the first scout, almost admiringly. “This guy was designed to play ball.”

“I’m not really jazzed about a guy who has no desire whatsoever to go to college,” says Billy. “That’s not a badge of honor.”

“Put a Milo on him.”

Billy doesn’t interfere much in the search for bad makeup, and Paul says nothing at all. The meetings, from their point of view, are all about minimizing risk. They can’t afford to have guys not work out. There’s no point in taking risks on players temperamentally, or legally, unsuited to pro ball. At one point Billy looks up and asks, “Who’s that fucking guy we took last year we had to release because he robbed a bank?” The others are too absorbed in weeding out the bad makeup to reply, or to even consider how remarkable the question is.

Most of the first few days were devoted to culling the original pile of 680 players. Other than an excessive affection for one’s girlfriend, or a criminal record, or other signs of bad makeup, there were just two reasons why the Oakland A’s did not waste further time on a player. One was age: with rare exceptions the new scouting directors toss all high school players immediately onto the dumping ground, leaving the younger scouts who spent their days following them wondering why they bothered. The other is what is delicately known in the draft room as “expectations.”

“What are his expectations?” Erik Kubota asks, of a promising college pitcher.

The scout who knows him best says, “His dad said, and I quote, ‘$4.2 million is a good place to start.’”

“Put him over there,” Erik will say. When his name is tossed onto the dump heap nobody in the front office cares.

B
Y THE END
of the third day the scouts have organized the players into two groups: the prospects not worth considering further, and everyone else. The second group, maybe four hundred players, they parse further by position. They’ll rank 120 right-handed pitchers; they’ll list 37 catchers, 1 through 37, and 94 outfielders, 1 through 94. But before they do, they turn their attention from eliminating players to selecting them. Billy’s already made it clear that this year he has only a secondary interest in pitchers. The past few years he has stocked up on arms. It’s the bats he needs. On the white board closest to Billy, the “Big Board,” there was space for sixty players. Only one slot had been filled, the first:

SWISHER

Nick Swisher, a center fielder from Ohio State. For the past six months, Billy’s been sure about Swisher, and he knows he won’t get the slightest disagreement from his scouts. Swisher is a rare point of agreement between Paul’s computer and the internal compass of an old baseball guy. He has the raw athletic ability the scouts adore; but he also has the stats Billy and Paul have decided matter more than anything: he’s proven he can hit, and hit with power; he drew more than his share of walks.

Oddly enough, Billy has never actually seen Swisher play. He had wanted to fly across the country to watch a few of Swisher’s games, but his scouting department told him that if he did, word would quickly spread to the rest of Major League Baseball that Billy Beane was onto Nick Swisher, Swisher’s stock would rise, and the odds that he’d still be around when the A’s made this first pick—the sixteenth of the draft—would plummet. “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. Swisher is his picture bride.

“Swisher is noticeable, isn’t he?” says Billy, hoping to hear more about what Swisher
looks
like. How Swisher
really is.

“Oh, he’s noticeable,” says an old scout. “From the moment he gets off the bus he doesn’t shut up.”

“His background is interesting,” says Billy. “His dad was a major league player. That’s huge. A great chip in his favor. Those guys succeed.” (Swisher’s dad is Steve Swisher, who caught for the Cubs, Cardinals, and Padres.)

“He does have a presence,” agrees an old scout.

“Did Operation Shutdown work?” asks Billy.

“Too well,” says an old scout. “Guy from the White Sox called me yesterday and said he knows you must be in love with Swisher because you haven’t been to see him.”

Billy laughs. “Out of this room, Swisher is hush-hush,” he says.

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 tone of the conversation is that of a meeting in a big company that has just decided to drop a product line, or shift resources from marketing to R&D. Still, it’s a dispute with two sides riven by some fundamental difference. The two sides are, on the one hand, the old scouts and, on the other, Billy Beane. The old scouts are like a Greek chorus; it is their job to underscore the eternal themes of baseball. The eternal themes are precisely what Billy Beane wants to exploit for profit—by ignoring them.

One by one Billy takes the names of the players the old scouts have fallen in love with, and picks apart their flaws. The first time he does this an old scout protests.

“The guy’s an athlete, Billy,” the old scout says. “There’s a lot of upside there.”

“He can’t hit,” says Billy.

“He’s not that bad a hitter,” says the old scout.

“Yeah, what happens when he doesn’t know a fastball is coming?” says Billy.

“He’s a tools guy,” says the old scout, defensively. The old scouts aren’t built to argue; they are built to
agree
. They are part of a tightly woven class of former baseball players. The scout looks left and right for support. It doesn’t arrive.

“But can he
hit?”
asks Billy.

“He can hit,” says the old scout, unconvincingly.

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

“My only question is,” says Billy, “if he’s that good a hitter why doesn’t he hit better?”

“The swing needs some work. You have to reinvent him. But he can hit.”

“Pro baseball’s not real good at reinventing guys,” says Billy.

Whatever happened when an older man who failed to become a big league star looks at a younger man with a view to imagining whether he might become a big league star, Billy wanted nothing more to do with it. He’d been on the receiving end of the dreams of older men and he knew what they were worth. 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, beloved by the scouts, onto his shit list. One after another of the players the scouts rated highly vanish from the white board, until it’s empty. If the Oakland A’s aren’t going to use their seven first-round draft picks to take the players their scouts loved, who on earth are they going to take? That question begins to be answered when Billy Beane, after tossing another name on the slag heap, inserts a new one:

TEAHEN

The older scouts lean back in their chairs, spittoons in hand. Paul leans forward into a laptop and quietly pulls up statistics from college Web sites. Erik Kubota, scouting director, holds a ranked list of all the amateur baseball players in the country. He turns many pages, and passes hundreds and hundreds of names, before he finds Teahen. “Tell us about Teahen,” says Billy.

Mark Teahen, says Erik, is a third baseman from St. Mary’s College just down the road in Moraga, California. “Teahen,” says Erik. “Six three. Two ten. Left right. Good approach to hitting. Not a lot of power right now. Our kind of guy. He takes pitches.”

“Why haven’t we talked about this guy before?” asks the old scout.

“It’s because Teahen doesn’t project,” says Erik. “He’s a corner guy who doesn’t hit a lot of home runs.”

“Power is something that can be acquired,” says Billy quickly. “Good hitters develop power. Power hitters don’t become good hitters.”

“Do you see him at third base or shortstop?” asks another old scout, like a prosecuting attorney leading a witness.

“Let’s forget about positions and just ask: who is the best hitter?” says Billy.

Paul looks up from his computer. “Teahen: .493 on base; .624 slug. Thirty walks and only seventeen strikeouts in one hundred ninety-four at bats.” It’s hard to tell what the scouts make of these numbers. Scouts from other teams would almost surely say: who gives a shit about a guy’s numbers? It’s college ball. You need to
look
at the guy.
Imagine
what he might become.

Everyone stares silently at Teahen’s name for about thirty seconds. Erik says, “I hate to say it but if you want to talk about another Jason Giambi, this guy could be it.” Giambi was a natural hitter who developed power only after the Oakland A’s drafted him. In the second round. Over the objections of scouts who said he couldn’t run, throw, field, or hit with power. Jason Giambi: MVP of the American League in 2000.