Moneyball - Michael Lewis [96]
Billy’s assistant tells him that Peter Gammons, the ESPN reporter, is on the line. In the hours leading up to the trade deadline Billy refuses to take calls from several newspaper reporters. One will get through to him by accident and he’ll make her regret that she did. Most reporters, in Billy’s experience, are simply trying to be the first to find out something they’ll all learn anyway before their deadlines. “They all want scoops,” he complains. “There are no scoops. Whatever we do will be in every paper tomorrow. There’s no such thing as a paper that comes out in an hour.”
It’s different when Peter Gammons calls. The difference between Gammons and the other reporters is that Gammons might actually tell him something he doesn’t know. “Let’s get some info,” he says, and picks up the phone. Gammons asks about Rincon and Billy says, casually, “Yeah, I’m just finishing up Rincon,” as if it’s a done deal, which clearly it is not. He knows Gammons will tell others what he tells him. Then the quid pro quo: Gammons tells Billy that the Montreal Expos have decided to trade their slugging outfielder, Cliff Floyd, to the Boston Red Sox. Billy quickly promises Gammons that he’ll be the first to know whatever he does, then hangs up the phone and says, “Shit.”
Cliff Floyd was the other player Billy was trying to get. “There’s more than one season,” Billy often said. What he really meant was that, in the course of a single season, there was more than one team called the Oakland Athletics. There was, for a start, the team that had opened the season and that, on May 23, he’d booted out of town. Three eighths of his starting lineup, and a passel of pitchers. Players who just a couple of months earlier he’d sworn by he dumped, without so much as a wave good-bye. Jeremy Giambi, for instance. Back in April, Jeremy had been Exhibit A in Billy Beane’s lecture on The New and Better Way to Think About Building a Baseball Team. Jeremy proved Billy’s point that a chubby, slow unknown could be the league’s best leadoff hitter. All Billy would now say about Jeremy is that walking over to the Coliseum to tell him he was fired was “like shooting Old Yeller.”
There was a less sentimental story about Old Yeller, but it never got told. In mid-May, as the Oakland A’s were being swept in Toronto by the Blue Jays, Billy’s behavior became erratic. Driving home at night he’d miss his exit and wind up ten miles down the road before he’d realize what had happened. He’d phone Paul DePodesta all hours of the night and say, “Don’t think I’m going to put up with this shit. Don’t think I won’t do something.” When the team arrived back in Oakland, he detected what he felt was an overly upbeat tone in the clubhouse. He told the team’s coaches, “Losing shouldn’t be fun. It’s not fun for me. If I’m going to be miserable, you’re going to be miserable.”
Just before the Toronto series the team had been in Boston, where Jeremy Giambi had made the mistake of being spotted by a newspaper reporter at a strip club. Jeremy, it should be said, already had a bit of a reputation. Before spring training he’d been caught with marijuana by the Las Vegas Police. Reports from coaches trickled in that Jeremy drank too much on team flights. When the reports from Boston reached Billy Beane, Jeremy ceased to be an on-base machine and efficient offensive weapon. He became a twenty-seven-year-old professional baseball player having too much fun on a losing team. In a silent rage, Billy called around the league to see who would take Jeremy off his hands. He didn’t care what he got in return. Actually, that wasn’t quite true: what he needed in return was something to tell the press. “We traded Jeremy for X because we think X will give us help on defense,” or some such nonsense.