At first, there’s no hint of trouble. The scouts have called around and have a fair idea of who will draft whom with the first fifteen picks. All is clear for the A’s to draft Nick Swisher with the sixteenth pick of the draft. It’s Billy’s best friend in baseball, J. P. Ricciardi, the GM of the Blue jays, who, twenty minutes before the draft, calls to tell Billy that all is no longer so clear. The sound of J.P.’s voice initially causes Billy to brighten but whatever he says causes Billy to say, “Fuck! I got to go.” He punches his cell phone off and hurls it onto the table.
“Span fucked us,” he says. “His agent just asked for $2.6 million and fucking Colorado can’t get a contract done.” Denard Span is a high school center fielder, who was meant to be drafted by the Colorado Rockies with the ninth pick of the draft. Now, it seems, he won’t be.
When seventeen-year-old Denard Span announces that he won’t stand for a penny less than $2.6 million, his stock plummets. No one wants to touch him out of fear they won’t be able to persuade him to sign for a sensible sum of money. Span’s name clatters down toward the bottom rungs of the first round, and triggers a mind-numbingly complex chain reaction at the top. The Mets, who hold the pick immediately before the A’s, the fifteenth overall, had been set to take one from a list of four pitchers: Jeff Francis, who was also on Billy’s wish list, and three high schoolers, Clinton Everts, Chris Gruler, and Zack Greinke. Everts, Gruler, and Greinke were probably spoken for by the Expos, Reds, and Royals. That left Francis, free and clear to fall to the Mets with the fifteenth pick. Colorado’s bungling of negotiations with their first choice had just screwed that up. Colorado was now taking Francis. That’s what J.P. has just told Billy. He knows this because the Mets’ next choice after their four pitchers was Russ Adams, whom the Blue jays intended to take with the fourteenth pick. The Mets’ next choice after Adams was Nick Swisher. Swisher—like Lenny!—was going to be a Met.
Billy calls Steve Phillips, the Mets’ GM, out of some vague notion he might talk him out of taking Swisher. There is no more reason for him to think he can do this than there was for Kenny Williams to think he could trick Billy into tipping his hand. It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw. In his six years on the job Billy has had such a gift for making grotesquely good deals—for finding what other people want, even if they shouldn’t want it, and giving it to them in exchange for something a lot better—that he thinks he can do it here. But he can’t; there’s nothing to trade. It’s against the rules to trade draft slots. The thirty or so people in the draft room hear one side of Billy’s awkward conversation:
“What about Everts, you hear anything on that?” he asks, teasingly.
Pause. Phillips tells him that the Montreal Expos are taking Everts.
“What about Greinke or Gruler?”
Pause. Phillips tells him that they are being taken by the Royals and Reds.
“Yeah. I’m just as pissed as you are.”
He hangs up, and, dropping the pretense that his pain is not unique in the universe, shouts, “Fuck!”
Anyone who walked in just then and tried to figure out what was happening would have been totally mystified. Thirty men sit in appalled silence watching one man fume. Finally Billy says, “They’re taking Swisher.” Just in case anyone in the draft room is feeling at ease with that fact, he rises and swats his chair across the room. We’d been here more than an hour, thinking about nothing but Swisher, and until that moment no one had mentioned Nick Swisher’s name.
“We should be all right,” says someone, recklessly.
“No. We’re not all right,” says Billy. He’s in no mood to feel better. “Greinke, Gruler, and Everts aren’t going to be there. Fucking Colorado’s taking Francis. J.P. is going to take Adams, and once Adams is gone, we’re fucked.”
Nick Swisher is, at best, the Mets’ sixth choice: the Mets don’t even begin to appreciate what they are getting. The Mets are taking Swisher reluctantly. If Billy had the first pick in the entire draft he’d take Swisher with it. He appreciates Swisher more than any man on the planet and Swisher…should…have…been …his! And yet Swisher will be a Met, almost by default.
“Fuck!” he shouts again. He reaches for his snuff. He hasn’t slept in two days. It’s a tradition with him: he never sleeps the night before the draft. He’s too excited. Draft day, he says, is the one day of the baseball year that gives him the purest pleasure.
Except when it goes wrong. He claws out a finger of snuff and jams it into his lip. His face reddens slightly. The draft room, at this moment, has an all-or-nothing feel to it. If the Oakland A’s land Nick Swisher, nothing could mar the loveliness of the day. If they don’t, nothing that happens afterward can make life worth living.
Any very large angry man can unsettle a room, even a room full of other large men, but Billy has a special talent for it. Five minutes after he’s spoken to Phillips he is still so upset that no one in the room utters a peep, out
