Moneyball - Michael Lewis [11]
He was left wondering. Months passed without any word of Beck from the scouting department. Paul finally asked Grady about him. And Grady said, “Oh yeah, I forgot, I’ll have one of the scouts go have a look.” But he didn’t do it, at least not seriously. When Paul asked again, Billy Owens, the A’s scout responsible for covering Tennessee grudgingly came back to him with the word that Beck was “a soft tosser.” Soft tosser was scouting code for not worth my time. Paul still had the impression that no one had bothered to scout David Beck.
When he came to see Paul after the draft, Grady was in a different mood about David Beck. Should we sign your guy? he asked.
What guy? asked Paul. He’d forgotten about Beck.
Beck, said Grady.
Grady, he’s not my guy, said Paul. I just asked you to check him out.
Grady was eager to make peace with the front office, and he thought he could do it by throwing Paul a bone. He ran off and signed David Beck, sight unseen. A few days later, Beck reported for duty at the A’s training facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. Most of the scouts, and Paul, happened to be there when Beck warmed up in the A’s bullpen. It was one of the most bizarre sights any of them ever had seen on a pitcher’s mound. When the kid drew back his left arm to throw, his left hand flopped and twirled maniacally. His wrist might as well not exist: at any moment, it seemed, his hand might disengage itself and fly away. The kid was double-jointed, maybe even crippled. At that moment David Beck ceased to be known to the scouts as David Beck and became, simply, “The Creature.” A scout from another organization came right up to Billy Owens, chuckling, and asked how he came to sign The Creature. Billy O pointed over to Paul and said, “I didn’t sign him. Paul made me do it.”
Whereupon The Creature went out and dominated the Arizona rookie league. He and his Halloween hand and his 84-mph fastball shut down the opposition so completely that the opposition never knew what happened. In the short season The Creature pitched eighteen innings in relief, struck out thirty-two batters, and finished with an earned run average of an even 1.00. He was named the closer on the rookie league All-Star team.
The Creature was the first thing to come out of Paul’s computer that the A’s scouting department signed. There were about to be a lot more. The 2002 draft was to be the first science experiment Billy Beane performed upon amateur players.
IT WASN’T QUITE TEN in the morning and everyone in the draft room except the Harvard graduates had a lipful of chewing tobacco. The snuff rearranged their features into masks of grim determination. Anyone whose name wasn’t two syllables, or didn’t end in a vowel or a spitable consonant, has had it changed for the benefit of baseball conversation. Ron Hopkins is “Hoppy,” Chris Pittaro is “Pitter,” Dick Bogard is “Bogie.” Most were former infielders who had topped out someplace in the minor leagues. A handful actually made it to the big leagues, but so briefly that it almost hadn’t happened at all. John Poloni had pitched seven innings in 1977 with the Texas Rangers. Kelly Heath had played second base in the Royals organization, and had exactly one major league at bat, in