Moneyball - Michael Lewis [12]
All of them had lived different versions of the same story. They were uncoiled springs, firecrackers that had failed to explode. The only bona fide big league regular in the room was Matt Keough, who’d won sixteen games for the A’s in 1980. In his rookie year, 1978, he’d pitched in the All-Star Game. Matty, as he is known, easily was the most detached of the group. He had the air of a man taking a break from some perpetual Hawaiian vacation of the soul to stop by and chat with his old buddies. The rest of them weren’t like that.
There was no avoiding just how important the 2002 amateur draft was for the future of the Oakland A’s. The Oakland A’s survived by finding cheap labor. 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 instance, the Oakland A’s were able to pay their All-Star pitcher Barry Zito $200,000 in 2000, $240,000 in 2001, and $500,000 in 2002 (when he would win the Cy Young Award as the best pitcher in the American League) because they had drafted him in 1999. 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. Not until 2007, after he had been in the big leagues for six years, would Barry Zito, like any other citizen of the republic, be allowed to auction his services to the highest bidder. At which point, of course, the Oakland A’s would no longer be able to afford Barry Zito. That’s why it was important to find Barry Zito here, in the draft room, and obtain him for the period of his career when he could be paid the baseball equivalent of slave’s wages.
This year was the best chance they might ever have to find several Barry Zito’s. In 2001, the A’s had lost all three of their top free agents to richer teams. First baseman Jason Giambi had left for the Yankees for $120 million over seven years. Outfielder Johnny Damon had gone to the Red Sox for $32 million over four years. Closer Jason Isringhausen had signed with the Cardinals for $28 million over four years. The $33 million the three players would make each year was just $5 million less than the entire Oakland team. The rules of the game granted the A’s the first-round draft picks of the three teams that had poached their top talent, plus three more “compensation” picks at the end of the first round. Together with their own first round pick the A’s had, in effect, seven first-round draft picks. In the history of the draft going back to 1965 no team had ever held seven first-round picks. The question for Billy Beane was what to do with them. What he wasn’t going to do with them was what Grady had done last year, or what old baseball men had done with them for the past thirty-seven years. “You know what?” Billy said to Paul, before the draft-room meetings. “However we do it we’re never going to be more wrong than the way we did it before.”
Already the scouts had whittled, or thought they had whittled, the vast universe of North American amateur baseball down to 680 players. They’d pasted all the names onto little magnetic strips. They now had one week to reduce that pile of magnetic nameplates to some kind