“This kid wears a large pair of underwear,” says another old scout. It’s the first time in two days that this old scout has spoken. He enjoys, briefly, the unusual attention accorded the silent man in a big meeting. The others in the room can only assume that if the scout was moved to speak it must be because he had something earth-shatteringly important to say. He doesn’t.
“Okay,” says Billy.
“It’s soft body,” says the most vocal old scout. “A fleshy kind of a body.”
“Oh, you mean like Babe Ruth?” says Billy. Everyone laughs, the guys on Billy’s side of the room more happily than the older scouts across from him.
“I don’t know,” says the scout. “A body like that can be low energy.”
“Sometimes low energy is just being cool,” says Billy.
“Yeah,” says the scout. “Well, in this case low energy is because when he walks, his thighs stick together.”
“I repeat: we’re not selling jeans here,” says Billy.
“That’s good,” says the scout. “Because if you put him in corduroys, he’d start a fire.”
Clutching Jeremy Brown’s yellow nameplate, Billy inches toward the Big Board with the “Top 60″ names on it. The scouts shift and spit. The leading scouting publication, Baseball America, has just published its special issue devoted to the 2002 draft, and in it a list of the top twenty-five amateur catchers in the country. Jeremy Brown’s name is not on the list. Baseball America has more or less said that Jeremy Brown will be lucky to get drafted. Billy Beane is walking Jeremy Brown into the first five rounds of the draft.
“Billy, does he really belong in that group?” asks the old scout plaintively. “He went in the nineteenth round last year and he’ll be lucky to go there this year.” The Red Sox had drafted Brown the year before, and Brown had turned down the peanuts they’d offered and returned to the University of Alabama for his senior year. It was beginning to look like a wise move.
The older scouts all share their brother’s incredulity. One of them, the fat scout, when he returned from the trip Billy made him take to the University of Alabama, called Billy and told him that he couldn’t recommend drafting Jeremy Brown. Period. There were fifteen hundred draft-eligible players in North America alone that he would rather own than this misshapen catcher. Like all the scouts, the fat scout had the overriding impression that Brown was fat and growing fatter. He had the further impression that Brown didn’t look all that good when he did anything but hit. “Behind the plate he’s not mobile,” the fat scout now says. “His throws are all slingshot throws.” Throws from catchers with a slinging motion tend not to follow a straight line but to tail off toward the first-base side of second base.
Billy takes a step toward the Big Board, sticks Brown’s name onto the top of the Big Board’s second column, the seventeenth slot, and says, “All right, push him down, guys.” Jeremy Brown is now a high second-round, or even low first-round, draft pick. If baseball scouts were capable of gasping, these men would have gasped. Instead, they spit tobacco juice into their cups. That was the moment when the scouts realized just how far Billy Beane was willing to go to push his supposedly rational and objective view of things.
“Come on, Billy,” the vocal scout says.
“Finding a catcher who can hit—there’s not one of them out there who can hit,” says Billy. “This guy can hit.”
Erik looks across the table and says, “This guy’s a senior with, like, a huge history.”
The scouts don’t see the point of history. In their view history isn’t terribly relevant when you’re talking about kids who haven’t become who they will be.
“Come on,” says Erik, “you guys have all played with guys who were bad bodies and good baseball players.”
“Yeah,” says Billy. “I played with Pitter.” Everyone laughs, even Pitter. “Another thing about Brown,” says Billy; “he walks his ass off.”
“He’s leading the country in walks,” says Paul. Walks!
“He better walk because he can’t run,” says one of the scouts.
“That body, Billy,” says the most vocal old scout. “It’s not natural.” He’s pleading now.
“He’s got big thighs,” says the fat scout, thoughtfully munching another jumbo-sized chocolate chip cookie. “A big butt. He’s huge in the ass.”
“Every year that body has just gotten worse and worse and worse,” says a third.
“Can he hit, though?” asks Billy Beane.
“Wanna hear something,” says Paul, gazing into his computer screen at the University of Alabama Web site. “In the past two years: 390 at bats; 98 walks; 38 Ks. Those numbers are better than anyone’s in minor league baseball. Oh yeah, 21 jacks.” Jacks are home runs. So are dongs, bombs, and big flies. Baseball people express their fondness for a thing by thinking up lots of different ways to say it.
The fat scout looks up from his giant chocolate chip cookie and seeks to find a way to get across just how unimpressed he is. “Well,” he says, exaggerating his natural drawl, “I musta severely unnerestimated Jeremy Brown’s hittin’ ability.”
“I just don’t see it,” says the vocal scout.
“That’s all right,” says Billy. “We’re blending what we see but we aren’t allowing ourselves to be victimized by what we see.”
This argument had nothing to do with Jeremy Brown. It was about how to find a big league ballplayer. In the scouts’ view, you found a big league ballplayer by driving sixty thousand miles, staying in a hundred crappy motels, and eating god knows how many meals at Denny’s all so you could watch 200 high school and college baseball games inside of four months, 199 of which were completely meaningless to you. Most of your worth derived from your membership in the fraternity of old scouts who did this for a living. The other little part came from the one time out of two hundred when you would walk into the
