Moneyball - Michael Lewis [56]
Everyone in the room, even the people in the back who have no real idea what is going on, a group that includes both the manager and the owner of the Oakland A’s, claps and cheers. The entire room assumes that if Billy gets what he wants it can only be good for the future of the franchise. This is now the Billy Beane Show, and it’s not over yet.
Billy stares at the board. “Fritz,” he says. “It’d be unbelievable if we could get Fritz too.” Benjamin Fritz, right-handed pitcher from Fresno State. Third best right-handed pitcher in the draft, in the opinion of Paul DePodesta’s computer.
“There’s no chance Teahen’s gone before 39, right?” says Paul quickly. He can see what Billy is doing. Having realized that he can get most of the best hitters, Billy is now seeing if he can get the best pitchers, too. Paul’s view—the “objective” one—is that the hitters are a much better bet than the pitchers. He thinks the best thing to do with pitchers is draft them in bulk, lower down. He doesn’t want to risk losing his hitters.
“Teahen will be there at 39,” says Billy.
No one else in the room is willing to confirm it.
“Take Fritz with 30, Brown with 35, and Teahen with 37,” Billy says. Erik leans into the speakerphone, and listens. The Arizona Diamondbacks take yet another high school player with the twenty-seventh pick and the Seattle Mariners take another with the twenty-eighth. The Astros take a college player, not Fritz, with the twenty-ninth. Erik takes Fritz with the thirtieth.
“We just got two of the three best right-handed pitchers in the country, and two of the four best position players,” says Paul.
“This doesn’t happen,” says Billy. “Don’t think this is normal.”
As the thirty-fifth pick approaches, Erik once again leans into the speaker phone. If he leaned in just a bit more closely he might hear phones around the league clicking off, so that people could laugh without being heard. For they do laugh. They will make fun of what the A’s are about to do; and there will be a lesson in that. The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you’ve never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It’s a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.
When asked which current or former major league player Jeremy Brown reminded him of, Paul stewed for two days, and finally said, “He has no equivalent.” The kid himself is down in Tuscaloosa, listening to the Webcast of the conference call, biting his nails because he still doesn’t quite believe that the A’s will take him in the first round. He’s told no one except his parents and his girlfriend and them he’s made swear they won’t tell anyone else, in case it doesn’t happen. Some part of him still thinks he’s being set up to be a laughingstock. That part of him dies the moment he hears his name called.
“Oakland selects redraft number 1172. Brown, Jeremy. Catcher. University of Alabama. Hueytown, Alabama.”
Minutes after Erik speaks his name, Jeremy Brown’s phone begins to ring. First it’s family and friends, then agents. All these agents he’s never heard of want to be in his life. Scott Boras suddenly wants to represent Jeremy Brown. The agents will tell him that they can get him at least half a million dollars more than the A’s have promised. He’ll have to tell them that he’s made a deal with the A’s on his own, and that he intends to keep his end of it. And he does.
The next two hours are, to Billy Beane, a revelation. When the dust settles on the first seven rounds, the A’s have acquired five more of the hitters from Billy and Paul’s wish list—Teahen, Baker, Kiger, Stavisky, and Colamarino.