Moneyball - Michael Lewis [20]
Bogie is not merely the oldest of the scouts; he is the scout who has worked for the most other teams. He is a walking map of his own little world. In spite of his age, or maybe because of it, he knows when an old thing has died.
“Oh definitely,” says Bogie, motioning to Paul’s computer. “It’s a new game. Years ago we didn’t have these stats to look up. We had to go with what we saw.”
“Years ago it only cost a hundred grand to sign them,” says Erik.
The other older scouts are unmoved. “Look,” says Erik, “Pitter and I are the ones that people are going to say, ‘What the hell were you doing? How the hell could you take Brown in the first round?’”
No one says anything.
“The hardest thing,” says Billy, “is there is a certain pride, or lack of pride, required to do this right. You take a guy high no one else likes and it makes you uncomfortable. But I mean, really, who gives a fuck where guys are taken? Remember Zito? Everyone said we were nuts to take Zito with the ninth pick of the draft. And we knew everyone was going to say that. One fucking month later it’s clear we kicked everyone’s ass. Nobody remembers that now. But understand, when we stop trying to figure out the perception of guys, we’ve done better.”
“Jeremy Brown isn’t Zito,” says one of the scouts. But he is. A lot of people in the room have forgotten that the scouting department hadn’t wanted to take Barry Zito because Barry Zito threw an 88-mph fastball. They preferred a flamethrower named Ben Sheets. “Billy made us take Zito,” Bogie later confesses.
“Let me ask you this,” says Billy. “If Jeremy Brown looked as good in a uniform as Majewski [a Greek Kouros who played outfield for the University of Texas], where on this board would you put him?”
The scouts pretend to consider this. Nobody says anything so Pitter says it for them: “He’d be in that first column.” A first-round pick.
“You guys really are trying to sell jeans, aren’t you?” says Billy. And on that note of affectionate disgust, he ends the debate. He simply takes Jeremy Brown’s nameplate and moves him from the top of the second column on the Big Board to the bottom of the first, from #17 to #15. Jeremy Brown, whose name had somehow failed to turn up on Baseball America’s list of the top twenty-five amateur catchers, who serious scouts believed should never be a pro baseball player, is now a first-round draft choice of the Oakland A’s.
“Since we’re talking about Brown anyway,” says Paul, which wasn’t exactly true, since the scouts were now distinctly not talking about Brown, “there’s a list of hitters I want to talk about. All of these guys share certain qualities. They are the eight guys we definitely want. And we want all eight of these guys” He reads a list:
Jeremy Brown
Stephen Stanley
John Baker
Mark Kiger
Shaun Larkin
John McCurdy
Brant Colamarino
Brian Stavisky
All eight are college players. Most of them are guys the scouts either did not particularly like, or, in a few cases, don’t really know. A young man rises to put their names on the board. Paul quickly organizes them, like a dinner guest who has spilled his wine and hopes to clean it up before the host notices. When he’s finished, the board is a market but from a particular point of view, that of a trader who possesses, or believes he possesses, superior knowledge.
With that, the coup was complete. Paul’s list of hitters were distinctly not guys the scouts found driving around. They were guys Paul found surfing the Internet. Some of the names the older scouts do not even recognize. The evaluation of young baseball players had been taken out of the hands of old baseball men and placed in the hands of people who had what Billy valued most (and what Billy didn’t have), a degree in something other than baseball.
“There’s some serious on-base percentage up there,” says Billy. No one else says anything. The room is filled with silence.
“We got three