Moneyball - Michael Lewis [52]
“What about Everts, you hear anything on that?” he asks, teasingly.
Pause. Phillips tells him that the Montreal Expos are taking Everts.
“What about Greinke or Gruler?”
Pause. Phillips tells him that they are being taken by the Royals and Reds.
“Yeah. I’m just as pissed as you are.”
He hangs up, and, dropping the pretense that his pain is not unique in the universe, shouts, “Fuck!”
Anyone who walked in just then and tried to figure out what was happening would have been totally mystified. Thirty men sit in appalled silence watching one man fume. Finally Billy says, “They’re taking Swisher.” Just in case anyone in the draft room is feeling at ease with that fact, he rises and swats his chair across the room. We’d been here more than an hour, thinking about nothing but Swisher, and until that moment no one had mentioned Nick Swisher’s name.
“We should be all right,” says someone, recklessly.
“No. We’re not all right,” says Billy. He’s in no mood to feel better. “Greinke, Gruler, and Everts aren’t going to be there. Fucking Colorado’s taking Francis. J.P. is going to take Adams, and once Adams is gone, we’re fucked.”
Nick Swisher is, at best, the Mets’ sixth choice: the Mets don’t even begin to appreciate what they are getting. The Mets are taking Swisher reluctantly. If Billy had the first pick in the entire draft he’d take Swisher with it. He appreciates Swisher more than any man on the planet and Swisher…should…have…been…his! And yet Swisher will be a Met, almost by default.
“Fuck!” he shouts again. He reaches for his snuff. He hasn’t slept in two days. It’s a tradition with him: he never sleeps the night before the draft. He’s too excited. Draft day, he says, is the one day of the baseball year that gives him the purest pleasure.
Except when it goes wrong. He claws out a finger of snuff and jams it into his lip. His face reddens slightly. The draft room, at this moment, has an all-or-nothing feel to it. If the Oakland A’s land Nick Swisher, nothing could mar the loveliness of the day. If they don’t, nothing that happens afterward can make life worth living.
Any very large angry man can unsettle a room, even a room full of other large men, but Billy has a special talent for it. Five minutes after he’s spoken to Phillips he is still so upset that no one in the room utters a peep, out of fear of setting off the bomb. The mood is exactly what it would be if every person in the room was handed his own personal vial of nitroglycerin. You could see why guys used to come down from the bullpen when Billy Beane hit, just to see what he would do if he struck out. To describe whatever he’s feeling as anger doesn’t do justice to it. It’s an isolating rage: he believes, perhaps even wants to believe, that he is alone with his problem and no one can help him. That no one should help him.
The space around Billy’s rage is perfectly still. Paul DePodesta stares quietly into his computer screen. Paul’s seen Billy in this state often enough to know that it’s not something you want to get in the middle of. Paul knows that Billy, to be Billy, needs to get worked up. “I think Swisher will get to us,” Paul says quietly, “but I’m not going to say that right now.”
Finally the miserable silence is punctuated by the ringing of scouting director Erik Kubota’s cellphone—only instead of ringing it plays, absurdly, Pachelbel’s Canon. Erik snatches it quickly off the table. “Oh, is that what it is?” he says into the phone, in a clipped tone, and hangs up. The draft room has become a symbolist play.
Billy’s phone rings. It’s Kenny Williams again. Williams is of no current interest to Billy. Nothing the White Sox do will alter Billy’s chances of getting Swisher.
“What’s up Kenny,” Billy says rather than asks.
What’s up is