“He’s a confident kid. But—”
“But,” says Erik.
“There might be some, uh, family issues here,” says the old scout. “I heard the dad had spent some time in prison. Porno or something.”
No one on either side of the room seems to know what to make of that. You can see thirty men thinking: is porno a crime?
“Can he bring it?” someone finally asks. The air clears.
“I can see this guy in somebody’s pen throwing aspirin tablets someday,” says the older scout. “The guy has a cannon.” This old scout is pushing fifty-five but still has a lean quickness about him, as if he hadn’t completely abandoned the hope that he might one day play the game. The old scout likes high school kids and refuses to apologize for that fact.
“I’m worried about the makeup,” says someone.
“What does his profile say?” asks someone else.
A young man sits quietly off to one side at the room’s lone desktop computer. He punches a few keys. He’s looking for Lark’s results on the psychological test given by Major League Baseball to all prospects.
“Not good,” he says, at length. “Competitive drive: one out of ten. Leadership: one out of ten. Conscientiousness: one out of ten.” He keeps on reading down the list, but no matter what the category the kid’s score is always the same.
“Shit,” Bogie finally says, “does he even have a two in anything?” Bogie is the oldest scout. In 1972, scouting for the Houston Astros, Bogie administered what he believes to have been the first ever baseball psychological test, to a pitcher named Dick Ruthven. (He passed.)
“Bad makeup,” says someone else and no one disagrees.
The scouts used several catch phrases to describe what they need to avoid. “Rockhead” clearly isn’t a good thing to be, but the quality can be overcome. “Soft” is also fairly damning—it connotes both “out of shape” and “wimp”—but it, too, is inconclusive. “Bad makeup” is a death sentence. “Bad makeup” means “this kid’s got problems we can’t afford to solve.” The phrase signaled anything from jail time to drinking problems to severe personality disorders. Whenever a player is convicted of “bad make-up” another young man, reaches into a cardboard box for a tiny magnetized photograph of a former A’s employee named Phil Milo. Milo had worked as one of Billy Beane’s assistants for a brief spell and in that time offended pretty much everyone in the organization. When I ask Paul how it was possible for one man to personify so many different personality disorders, Paul says, “Put it this way. On the day I was hired, Milo came over to meet me. The first thing out of his mouth was, ‘I got to be honest with you. I’m really not pleased we hired you.’” Milo was just that kind of guy.
During the first few days of the draft meetings the tiny photos of Phil Milo fly like confetti. And the conversations that ended with Milo’s picture plastered beside a prospect’s name told you something: not just what baseball men distrusted in a player’s character, but how little they really knew the people they were about to rain money on.
A high school pitcher:
“Where’s he going to college?” asks Billy, idly.
“He’s not,” says the scout who knows him best. “He’s a Christian kid and he was given a free ride to UC Irvine. Coach set him up with a couple of his players. Took him to a party and all it was was drinking. Kid was offended and he left and said, ‘I’m not going to school.’”
“Oh, then he’ll fit right into pro ball, won’t he?” says Billy.
“Put a Milo on him,” says Erik.
A collegiate right-handed pitcher:
“He’s a cocky guy,” says Matt Keough, who is arguing on the pitcher’s behalf. “He’d shove it up your ass. And taunt you. So you hate the guy. He’s had a couple of ejections.”
“But no drugs?” asks Erik.
“No drugs,” says Matty, then thinks about it. “There are rumors of some hash.”
An old scout laughs. “Corned beef hash?”
“It’s unsubstantiated,” Matty protests.
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, ” says another old scout.
Erik looks up: “Is he the guy who was selling wacky tobacky in high school?”
“Hell,” says Matty, now genuinely indignant. “That was three years ago!”
Everyone groans. “Put a Milo on him, ” says Erik, and spits tobacco juice.
A power-hitting outfielder:
“I’m not sure he wants to sign. He said he’d like to go to law school. ”
“Law school?”
“He’s getting pressure from his girlfriend, I think.”
“He’s looking for love, it sounds like.”
“Put a Milo on him. ”
Another collegiate left-handed pitcher:
“The guy’s got no grades, ” says a scout.
“You mean bad grades?” asks another.
“No, I mean no grades, ” says the first.
“How can a guy have no grades at Chico State?” asks the other.
“He really has no desire at all to be in college,” says the first scout, almost admiringly. “This guy was designed to play ball. ”
“I’m not really jazzed about a guy who has no desire whatsoever to go to college, ” says Billy. “That’s not a badge of honor.”
“Put a Milo on him.”
Billy doesn’t interfere much in the search for bad makeup, and Paul says nothing at all. The meetings, from their point of view, are all about minimizing risk. They can’t afford to have guys not work out. There’s no point in taking risks on players temperamentally, or legally, unsuited to pro ball. At one point Billy looks up and asks, “Who’s that fucking guy we took last year we had to release because he robbed a bank?” The others are too absorbed in weeding out the bad makeup to reply, or to even consider how remarkable the question is.
Most of the first few days were devoted to culling the original pile of 680 players. Other than an excessive affection for one’s girlfriend, or a criminal record, or other signs of bad makeup, there were just two reasons why
