Billy had his own idea about where to find future major league baseball players: inside Paul’s computer. He’d flirted with the idea of firing all the scouts and just drafting the kids straight from Paul’s laptop. The Internet now served up just about every statistic you could want about every college player in the country, and Paul knew them all. Paul’s laptop didn’t have a tiny red bell on top that whirled and whistled whenever a college player’s on-base percentage climbed above .450, but it might as well have. From Paul’s point of view, that was the great thing about college players: they had meaningful stats. They played a lot more games, against stiffer competition, than high school players. The sample size of their relevant statistics was larger, and therefore a more accurate reflection of some underlying reality. You could project college players with greater certainty than you could project high school players. The statistics enabled you to find your way past all sorts of sight-based scouting prejudices: the scouting dislike of short right-handed pitchers, for instance, or the scouting distrust of skinny little guys who get on base. Or the scouting distaste for fat catchers.
That was the source of this conflict. For Billy and Paul and, to a slightly lesser extent, Erik and Chris, a young player is not what he looks like, or what he might become, but what he has done. As elementary as that might sound to someone who knew nothing about professional baseball, it counts as heresy here. The scouts even have a catch phrase for what Billy and Paul are up to: “performance scouting.” “Performance scouting,” in scouting circles, is an insult. It directly contradicts the baseball man’s view that a young player is what you can see him doing in your mind’s eye. It argues that most of what’s important about a baseball player, maybe even including his character, can be found in his statistics.
After Billy said what he had to say about being “victimized by what we see,” no one knew what to say. Everyone stared at Jeremy Brown’s name. Maybe then they all understood that they weren’t here to make decisions. They were here to learn about the new way that decisions were going to be made.
“This is a cutting-edge approach we’re taking this year,” says Erik, whose job, it is increasingly clear, is to stand between Billy and the old scouts, and reconcile the one to the other. “Five years from now everyone might be doing it this way.”
“I hope not,” says Paul. He doesn’t mean this in the way that the old scouts would like him to mean it.
“Bogie,” says Erik, calling across the table on the vast moral authority of the oldest scout of all, Dick Bogard. “Does this make sense to you?” Erik adores Bogie, though of course he’d never put it that way. When Erik announced he wanted to leave the A’s advertising department and get into the baseball end of things, even though he himself had never played, Bogie not only did not laugh at him; he encouraged him. “My baseball father,” Erik called Bogie.
Bogie is not merely the oldest of the scouts; he is the scout who has worked for the most other teams. He is a walking map of his own little world. In spite of his age, or maybe because of it, he knows when an old thing has died.
“Oh definitely,” says Bogie, motioning to Paul’s computer. “It’s a new game. Years ago we didn’t have these stats to look up. We had to go with what we saw.”
“Years ago it only cost a hundred grand to sign them,” says Erik.
The other older scouts are unmoved. “Look,” says Erik, “Pitter and I are the ones that people are going to say, ‘What the hell were you doing? How the hell could you take Brown in the first round?”’
No one says anything.
“The hardest thing,” says Billy, “is there is a certain pride, or lack of pride, required to do this right. You take a guy high no one else likes and it makes you uncomfortable. But I mean, really, who gives a fuck where guys are taken? Remember Zito? Everyone said we were nuts to take Zito with the ninth pick of the draft. And we knew everyone was going to say that. One fucking month later it’s clear we kicked everyone’s ass. Nobody remembers that now. But understand, when we stop trying to figure out the perception of guys, we’ve done better.”
“Jeremy Brown isn’t Zito,” says one of the scouts. But he is. A lot of people in the room have forgotten that the scouting department hadn’t wanted to take Barry Zito because Barry Zito threw an 88-mph fastball. They preferred a flamethrower named Ben Sheets. “Billy made us take Zito,” Bogie later confesses.
“Let me ask you this,” says Billy. “If Jeremy Brown looked as good in a uniform as Majewski [a Greek Kouros who played outfield for the University of Texas], where on this board would you put him?”
The scouts pretend to consider this. Nobody says anything so Pitter says it for them: “He’d be in that first column.” A first-round pick.
“You guys really are trying to sell jeans, aren’t you?” says Billy. And on that note of affectionate disgust, he ends the debate. He simply takes Jeremy Brown’s nameplate and moves him from the top of the second column on the Big Board to the bottom of the first, from #17 to #15. Jeremy Brown,
