Moneyball - Michael Lewis [19]
“I just don’t see it,” says the vocal scout.
“That’s all right,” says Billy. “We’re blending what we see but we aren’t allowing ourselves to be victimized by what we see.”
This argument had nothing to do with Jeremy Brown. It was about how to find a big league ballplayer. In the scouts’ view, you found a big league ballplayer by driving sixty thousand miles, staying in a hundred crappy motels, and eating god knows how many meals at Denny’s all so you could watch 200 high school and college baseball games inside of four months, 199 of which were completely meaningless to you. Most of your worth derived from your membership in the fraternity of old scouts who did this for a living. The other little part came from the one time out of two hundred when you would walk into the ballpark, find a seat on the aluminum plank in the fourth row directly behind the catcher, and see something no one else had seen—at least no one who knew the meaning of it. You only had to see him once. “If you see it once, it’s there,” says Erik. “There’s always been that belief in scouting.” And if you saw it once, you, and only you, would know the meaning of what you saw. You had found the boy who was going to make you famous.
Billy had his own idea about where to find future major league baseball players: inside Paul’s computer. He’d flirted with the idea of firing all the scouts and just drafting the kids straight from Paul’s laptop. The Internet now served up just about every statistic you could want about every college player in the country, and Paul knew them all. Paul’s laptop didn’t have a tiny red bell on top that whirled and whistled whenever a college player’s on-base percentage climbed above .450, but it might as well have. 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. You could project college players with greater certainty than you could project high school players. The statistics enabled you to find your way past all sorts of sight-based scouting prejudices: the scouting dislike of short right-handed pitchers, for instance, or the scouting distrust of skinny little guys who get on base. Or the scouting distaste for fat catchers.
That was the source of this conflict. 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. The scouts even have a catch phrase for what Billy and Paul are up to: “performance scouting.” “Performance scouting,” in scouting circles, is an insult. It directly contradicts the baseball man’s view that a young player is what you can see him doing in your mind’s eye. It argues that most of what’s important about a baseball player, maybe even including his character, can be found in his statistics.
After Billy said what he had to say about being “victimized by what we see,” no one knew what to say. Everyone stared at Jeremy Brown’s name. Maybe then they all understood that they weren’t here to make decisions. They were here to learn about the new way that decisions were going to be made.
“This is a cutting-edge approach we’re taking this year,” says Erik, whose job, it is increasingly clear, is to stand between Billy and the old scouts, and reconcile the one to the other. “Five years from now everyone might be doing it this way.”
“I hope not,” says Paul. He doesn’t mean this in the way that the old scouts would like him to mean it.
“Bogie,” says Erik, calling across the table on the vast moral authority of the oldest scout of all, Dick Bogard. “Does this make sense to you?” Erik adores Bogie, though of course he’d never put it that way. When Erik announced he wanted to leave the A’s advertising department and get