Moneyball - Michael Lewis [49]
It was still early, a full hour before the draft, and the younger scouts trickled in to report their savings. It’s actually against Major League Baseball rules for teams to negotiate with players before the draft, but every team does it anyway, though not, perhaps, with the A’s enthusiasm. One of the first scouts to arrive is Rich Sparks (“Sparky”), who covers the Great Lakes region for the A’s. Sparky has just finished a conversation with Steve Stanley, a center fielder from Notre Dame, and he’s pleased. Steve Stanley was yet another example of the strange results you obtained when you ceased to prejudge a player by his appearance, and his less meaningful statistics, and simply looked at what he had accomplished according to his meaningful stats. The Major League Scouting Bureau lists Stanley at five foot seven and 155 pounds, but that’s wildly generous. Despite his size—or perhaps because of it—Stanley has a gift for getting on base. To judge crudely, with the naked eye, he already plays a better center field than Terrence Long, the A’s big league center fielder. And yet the scouts long ago decided Stanley wasn’t big enough to play.
Stanley has told Sparky that he expected to go after the fifteenth round of the draft. In other words, he expects to be taken by a team simply to fill out its minor league roster, not because the team thinks he has a chance of making it to the big leagues. Sparky has just informed Stanley that the A’s are willing to make him a second-round draft pick—and a genuine big league prospect—on the condition that he agree to sign for $200,000, or about half a million dollars less than every other second-round pick will sign for. Other teams will assume that Billy Beane is interested in all these oddballs because he can’t afford normal players, and Billy encourages the view. And it’s true he can’t afford anyone else. On the long cafeteria table in front of Billy sat an invisible cash register, and inside it the $9.4 million his owner had given him to sign perhaps as many as thirty-five players. The A’s seven first-round picks alone, paid what their equivalents had received the year before, would cost him more than $11 million. Billy uses his poverty to camouflage another fact, that he wants these oddballs more than the studs he cannot afford. He views Stanley as a legitimate second-round pick. Since no one else does, he might as well save money on him.
“Sparky, we all right?” asks Billy.
“Yeah, sure,” says Sparky. “I thought he was going to jump through the phone when I told him.”
Billy laughs. “Pumped, are we?”
“I think he’d play for free,” says Sparky.
After Sparky comes Billy Owens (“Billy O”), the young scout who covers the Deep South and is thus responsible for all communication with the University of Alabama catcher, Jeremy Brown. “Billy O looks like a Jamaican drug lord, doesn’t he?” shouts Billy Beane, as Billy O ambles into the draft room. Billy O doesn’t bother to smile. Too much trouble. He somehow conveys the idea of a smile without moving a muscle.
“We’re all right, huh?” says Billy.
“Yeah, we all right,” says Billy O.
“Does he understand?”
“Oh he understands.”
Billy O is what you’d get if you hammered Shaquille O’Neal on the head with a pile driver until he stood six foot two. He’s big and wide and moves only when he is absolutely certain that movement is required for survival. He’s shrewd, too, and can see what you mean even if you don’t. Over the past few days Billy O has come to see that he has a novel task: giving Jeremy Brown a new opinion of himself. He took it in small steps; he didn’t want to shock the kid. “That boy told me he’d be happy to go in the first nineteen rounds,” says Billy O. “I told him, ‘think top ten.’ I’m telling you, that guy was so happy when I told him that. Next day I called him back and say, ‘shrink that to five.’ I’m not sure he believed me. Yesterday, I called him and said, ‘You got a chance to make six figures and the first number is not going to be a one.’ The boy had to sit down.”
But