Before it had a chance to become a proper argument, the conflict between the old and the new baseball men was resolved by the budget crisis. Tony La Russa left when the new owners renounced the old habit of bankrolling millions of dollars in losses. Alderson set out to find a manager who would understand that he wasn’t the boss, and landed upon the recently fired manager of the Houston Astros, Art Howe. “Art Howe was hired to implement the ideas of the front office, not his own,” said Alderson. “And that was new.”
Billy would say later that his wife left him because she was unnerved by his intensity—that she could even see it in his hands when he drove an automobile. At any rate, he soon found himself out of not only a baseball uniform but a wife as well. Baseball marriages were like that: their most vulnerable moment was immediately after a player retired, and it dawned on husband and wife that they’d actually be spending time together. “They end when the career ends,” said Billy. “Until then you can put up with anything because you’re always leaving the next day.” His wife moved back to San Diego and took their infant daughter, christened Casey, with her. Billy spent his weeks scouting and his weekends speeding down, and then back up, the highway between Oakland and San Diego. He couldn’t afford the plane tickets.
His motor was still fueled less by desire than anxieties—and he now had two of them. One was that he wouldn’t know his own daughter. The other was that he wouldn’t cut it in the front office. “If baseball’s all you can do and you know that’s all you can do,” he said, “it breeds in you a certain creative desperation.” When he wasn’t speeding down some California highway he was jetting around the country watching games and listening to the other scouts talk about players. Whatever shred of doubt he’d had that most of them had no idea what they were talking about, he lost.
What he hadn’t lost was his ferocious need to win. He had just transferred it to a different place, from playing to making decisions about players. But this time he had guidance—from a graduate of not one but two Ivy League colleges—and he was willing to follow it. “What Billy figured out at some point,” said Sandy Alderson, “is that he wanted to be me more than he wanted to be Jose Canseco.” In 1993 Alderson, impressed by the creative enthusiasm with which Billy seemed to attack every task he was given, brought him into the front office, made him his assistant, and told him his job was to go out and find undervalued minor league players. And then he handed Billy the pamphlet he’d commissioned from Eric Walker.
When Billy read Walker’s pamphlet, he experienced—well, he couldn’t quite describe the excitement of it. “It was the first thing I had ever read that tried to take an objective view of baseball,” he said. “Something that was different than just a lot of people’s subjective opinions. I was still very subjective in my own thinking but it made sense to me.” It more than made sense to him: it explained him. The new, outsider’s view of baseball was all about exposing the illusions created by the insiders on the field. Billy Beane had himself been one of those illusions.
Billy wasn’t one to waste a lot of time worrying about whether he was motivated by a desire to succeed or the pursuit of truth. To his way of thinking the question was academic, since the pursuit of truth was, suddenly, the key to success. He was bright. He had a natural coruscating skepticism about baseball’s traditional wisdom. He could see that Eric Walker’s pamphlet was just the beginning of a radical, and rational, approach to the game—one that would concentrate unprecedented powers in the hands of the general manager. Where had Eric Walker come from, he wondered, and was there any more behind what he’d written? “Billy shed every one of his player-type prejudices and adapted,” Alderson said. “Whereas most of the people like him would have said, ‘That’s not the way we did it when I played.’” In answer to Billy’s question, Alderson pointed to a row of well-thumbed paperbacks by a writer named Bill James, who had opened Alderson’s eyes to a new way of thinking about baseball. Alderson had collected pretty much everything Bill James had written, including four books self-published by James between 1977 and 1980 that still existed only as cheap mimeographs. Sandy Alderson had never met, or even spoken to, Bill James. He wasn’t a typical baseball insider but he still recognized a distinction between people like himself, who actually made baseball decisions, and people like James, who just wrote about them. But he had
