Moneyball - Michael Lewis [50]
Jeremy Brown, owner of the University of Alabama offensive record books as a catcher, has been so perfectly conditioned by the conventional scouting wisdom that he refused to believe that any major league baseball team could think highly of him. As he eased himself into the radically new evaluation of his talents, he heard Billy O lay down the conditions. There were two. One was that he would sign for the $350,000 the A’s were offering, which was nearly a million dollars less than the thirty-fifth pick of the draft might expect to receive. The other was he needed to lose weight. “I said this is the Oakland A’s speaking to you, and the Oakland A’s do things differently,” said Billy O, fresh from the strangest pre-draft chat he’d ever had with an amateur player. “I told him how this was the money and it was as much as he was ever gonna get and it was non-negotiable. I said the Oakland A’s are making a commitment to you. You gotta make a commitment to us, with your body.”
It had to be the most energizing weight loss commercial in history, even if it was delivered by an unlikely pitchman. At the end of it, Brown had sounded willing to agree to anything. At the same time, he still didn’t really believe any of it. And that worries Billy Beane.
“You wanna go home tonight?” he now asks Billy O. What he’s really asking is: Do you think you need to be there in the flesh, to keep Jeremy Brown sane? To remind him that the Oakland A’s have just radically increased his market value, and that he should remain grateful long enough to sign their contract. Once Jeremy Brown becomes a first-round pick, the agents, heretofore oblivious of his existence, would be all over him, trying to persuade him to break the illicit verbal agreement he’d made with the A’s.
“No,” says Billy O, and takes his seat in the ring of scouts. “I told him those agents are going to be calling him and telling him all kinds of shit. The boy’s all right.”
“Hey,” says Sparky, brightly, to Billy O, “your guy could eat my guy for dinner.”
“And would,” says Billy O, then shuts his mouth, to achieve perfect immobility.
Billy Beane’s phone rings.
“Hey Kenny,” he says. Kenny Williams, GM of the Chicago White Sox. Williams has been calling a lot lately. He wants to trade for the A’s starting pitcher, Cory Lidle. But this morning it isn’t Lidle he wants to talk about. He’s calling because the White Sox hold the eighteenth pick in the draft, two behind the A’s first selection, and he wants to find out who the A’s plan to draft. He doesn’t come right out and say it; instead, he probes Billy about players, thinking he might trick Billy into tipping his hand. “We’re in front of you so don’t try to play secret agent man,” Billy finally says. “Don’t worry, Blanton might get to you.” Joe Blanton is a pitcher at the University of Kentucky. Billy likes him too.
Billy hangs up. “He’s going to take Blanton,” he says. A useful tidbit. It fills in the white space between the A’s first pick and their second, the twenty-fourth of the entire draft.
No one is thinking about the twenty-fourth pick of the draft, however. The twenty-fourth pick of the draft feels years away, and irrelevant. With the twenty-fourth pick of the draft, and all the other picks they have after that, the A’s will pursue players in whom no one else has seen the greatness. Jeremy Brown is the extreme example of the phenomenon, but there are many others.
Nick Swisher is a different