TEAHEN
The older scouts lean back in their chairs, spittoons in hand. Paul leans forward into a laptop and quietly pulls up statistics from college Web sites. Erik Kubota, scouting director, holds a ranked list of all the amateur baseball players in the country. He turns many pages, and passes hundreds and hundreds of names, before he finds Teahen. “Tell us about Teahen,” says Billy.
Mark Teahen, says Erik, is a third baseman from St. Mary’s College just down the road in Moraga, California. “Teahen,” says Erik. “Six three. Two ten. Left right. Good approach to hitting. Not a lot of power right now. Our kind of guy. He takes pitches.”
“Why haven’t we talked about this guy before?” asks the old scout.
“It’s because Teahen doesn’t project,” says Erik. “He’s a corner guy who doesn’t hit a lot of home runs.”
“Power is something that can be acquired,” says Billy quickly. “Good hitters develop power. Power hitters don’t become good hitters.”
“Do you see him at third base or shortstop?” asks another old scout, like a prosecuting attorney leading a witness.
“Let’s forget about positions and just ask: who is the best hitter?” says Billy.
Paul looks up from his computer. “Teahen: .493 on base; .624 slug. Thirty walks and only seventeen strikeouts in one hundred ninety-four at bats.” It’s hard to tell what the scouts make of these numbers. Scouts from other teams would almost surely say: who gives a shit about a guy’s numbers? It’s college ball. You need to look at the guy. Imagine what he might become.
Everyone stares silently at Teahen’s name for about thirty seconds. Erik says, “I hate to say it but if you want to talk about another Jason Giambi, this guy could be it.” Giambi was a natural hitter who developed power only after the Oakland A’s drafted him. In the second round. Over the objections of scouts who said he couldn’t run, throw, field, or hit with power. Jason Giambi: MVP of the American League in 2000.
More silence. Decades of scouting experience are being rendered meaningless. “I hate to piss on the campfire,” one of the scouts finally says, “but I haven’t heard Teahen’s name once all year. I haven’t heard other teams talking about him. I haven’t heard his name around here all year. It wasn’t like this guy was a fifty-five we all liked.” The scouts put numbers on players. The numbers are one of the little tricks that lend scouting an air of precision. A player who receives a “55″ is a player they think will one day be a regular big league player.
“Who do you like better?” asks Billy.
The old scout leans back in his chair and folds his arms. “What about Perry?” he says. “When you see him do something right on a swing, it’s impressive. There’s some work that needs to be done. He needs to be reworked a bit.”
“You don’t change guys,” says Billy. “They are who they are.”
“That’s just my opinion,” says the old scout, and folds his arms.
Once Teahen has found his slot high up on the Big Board, Billy Beane takes out a Magic Marker and writes another name:
BROWN
The four scouts across from him either wince or laugh. Brown? Brown? Billy can’t be serious.
“Let’s talk about Jeremy Brown,” Billy says.
In moving from Mark Teahen, whoever he is, to Jeremy Brown, whoever he is, Billy Beane, in the scouting mind, had gone from the remotely plausible to the ridiculous. Jeremy Brown made the scouting lists, just. His name appears on the last page; he is a lesser member of the rabble regarded by the scouts as, at best, low-level minor league players. He’s a senior catcher at the University of Alabama. Only three of the old scouts saw him and none of them rated him even close to a big leaguer. Each of them has about a thousand players ranked above him.
“Jeremy Brown is a bad body catcher,” says the most vocal of the old scouts.
“A bad body who owns the Alabama record books,” says Pitter.
“He’s the only player in the history of the SEC with three hundred hits and two hundred walks,” says Paul, looking up from his computer.
It’s what he doesn’t say that is interesting. No one in big league baseball cares how often a college players walks; Paul cares about it more than just about anything else. He doesn’t explain why walks are important. He doesn’t explain that he has gone back and studied which amateur hitters made it to the big leagues, and which did not, and why. He doesn’t explain that the important traits in a baseball player were not all equally important. That foot speed, fielding ability, even raw power tended to be dramatically overpriced. That the ability to control the strike zone was the greatest indicator of future success. That the number of walks a hitter drew was the best indicator of whether he understood how to control the strike zone. Paul doesn’t say that if a guy has a keen eye at the plate in college, he’ll likely keep that keen eye in the pros. He doesn’t explain that plate discipline might be an innate trait, rather than something a free-swinging amateur can be taught in the pros. He doesn’t talk about all the other statistically based insights—the overwhelming importance of on-base percentage, the significance of pitches seen per plate appearance—that he uses to value precisely a hitter’s contribution to a baseball offense. He doesn’t stress the importance of generalizing from a large body of evidence as opposed to a small one. He doesn’t explain anything because Billy doesn’t want him to. Billy was forever telling Paul that when you try to
