Moneyball - Michael Lewis [97]
On the way to tell Jeremy Giambi that he was fired, Billy tried to sell what he was doing to Paul DePodesta. “This is the worst baseball decision I’ve ever made,” he said, “but it’s the best decision I’ve made as a GM.” Paul knew it was crap, and said so. All the way to the clubhouse he tried to talk Billy down from his pique. He tried to explain to his boss how irrational he’d become. He wasn’t thinking objectively. He was just looking for someone on whom to vent his anger.
Billy refused to listen. After he’d done the deal, he told reporters that he traded Jeremy Giambi because he was “concerned he was too one-dimensional” and that John Mabry would supply help on defense. He then leaned on Art Howe to keep Mabry out of the lineup. And Art, occasionally, ignored him. And Mabry proceeded to swat home runs and game-winning hits at a rate he had never before swatted them in his entire professional career. And the Oakland A’s began to win. When Billy traded Jeremy Giambi, the A’s were 20–25; they had lost 14 of their previous 17 games. Two months later, they were 60–46. Everyone now said what a genius Billy Beane was to have seen the talent hidden inside John Mabry. Shooting Old Yeller had paid off.
Neither his trading of Jeremy Giambi nor the other moves he had made had the flavor of a careful lab experiment. It felt more as if the scientist, infuriated that the results of his careful experiment weren’t coming out as they were meant to, waded into his lab and began busting test tubes. Which made what happened now even more astonishing: as Billy Beane sat in his office in July, just a few months after he’d chucked out three eighths of the starting lineup, he insisted that the shake-up hadn’t been the least bit necessary. Between phone calls to other general managers he explained how the purge he’d conducted back in May, in which he’d ditched players left and right, “probably had no effect. We were 21–26 at the time. That’s a small sample size. We’d have been fine if I’d done nothing.” The most he will admit is that perhaps his actions had some “placebo effect.” And the most astonishing thing of all is that he almost believes it.
Two months later, he still didn’t want to talk about Jeremy Giambi. All that mattered was that the Oakland A’s were winning again. But they were still in third place in the absurdly strong American League West, and Billy worried that this year good might not be good enough. “We can win ninety games and have a nice little season,” he said. “But sometimes you have to say ‘fuck it’ and swing for the fences.”
And so he flailed about, seemingly at random, calling GMs and proposing this deal or that, trying to make a Fucking A trade. “Trawling” is what he called this activity. His constant chatter was a way of keeping tabs on the body of information critical to his trading success: the value the other GMs were assigning to individual players. Trading players wasn’t any different from trading stocks and bonds. A trader with better information could make a killing, and Billy was fairly certain he had better information. He certainly had different information. In a short two months with the Oakland A’s, for instance, Carlos Pena had transformed himself from a player Billy Beane coveted more than any other minor leaguer into a player everyone valued more highly than Billy did. He knew—or thought he knew—that Carlos was overvalued. The only question was: how much could he get for him?
Dangling Carlos from a hook, Billy tried to lure the Pittsburgh Pirates into giving him their slugging outfielder Brian Giles. When the Pirates resisted, he offered to send Carlos and his fourth outfielder Adam Piatt to Boston for outfielder Trot Nixon, and then send Trot Nixon and the A’s flame-throwing Triple-A reliever, Franklyn German, to Pittsburgh for Giles. Again, no luck. He then gave up on Giles and tried and failed to talk Cleveland’s GM, Shapiro, into sending him both his ace, Bartolo Colon, and his best hitter, Jim Thome, for Cory Lidle and Carlos