It was hard to know what Grady Fuson imagined would happen after he took a high school pitcher with the first pick. On draft day the Oakland draft room was a ceremonial place. Wives, owners, friends of the owners—all these people who made you think twice before saying “fuck”—gathered politely along the back wall of the room to watch the Oakland team determine its future. Grady, a soft five foot eight next to Billy’s still dangerous-looking six foot four, might have thought that their presence would buffer Billy’s fury. It didn’t. Professional baseball had violently detached Billy Beane from his youthful self, but Billy was still the guy whose anger after striking out caused the rest of the team to gather on the other end of the bench. When Grady leaned into the phone to take Bonderman, Billy, in a single motion, erupted from his chair, grabbed it, and hurled it right through the wall. When the chair hit the wall it didn’t bang and clang; it exploded. Until they saw the hole Billy had made in it, the scouts had assumed that the wall was, like their futures, solid.
Up till then, Grady had every reason to feel secure in his job. Other teams, when they sought to explain to themselves why the Oakland A’s had won so many games with so little money, and excuse themselves for winning so few with so much, usually invoked the A’s scouting. Certainly, Grady could never have imagined that his scouting department was on the brink of total overhaul, and that his job was on the line. But that was the direction Billy’s mind was heading. He couldn’t help but notice that his scouting department was the one part of his organization that most resembled the rest of baseball. From that it followed that it was most in need of change. “The draft has never been anything but a fucking crapshoot,” Billy had taken to saying, “We take fifty guys and we celebrate if two of them make it. In what other business is two for fifty a success? If you did that in the stock market, you’d go broke.” Grady had no way of knowing how much Billy disapproved of Grady’s most deeply ingrained attitudes—that Billy had come to believe that baseball scouting was at roughly the same stage of development in the twenty-first century as professional medicine had been in the eighteenth. Or that all of Billy’s beliefs, at the moment of Jeremy Bonderman’s selection, acquired a new intensity.
On the other hand, Grady wasn’t entirely oblivious to Billy’s hostility. He had known enough to be uncomfortable the week before the draft, when Billy’s assistant, Paul DePodesta, had turned up in the draft room with his laptop. Paul hadn’t played pro ball. Paul was a Harvard graduate. Paul looked and sounded more like a Harvard graduate than a baseball man. Maybe more to the point, Paul shouldn’t have even been in the draft room. The draft room was for scouts, not assistant general managers.
It was Paul’s computer that Grady dwelled upon. “What do you need that for?” Grady asked Paul after the meeting, as if he sensed the machine somehow challenged his authority. “You’re sitting over there with your computer and I don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I’m just looking at stats,” said Paul. “It’s easier than printing them all out.”
Paul wanted to look at stats because the stats offered him new ways of understanding amateur players. He had graduated from college with distinction in economics, but his interest, discouraged by the Harvard economics department, had been on the uneasy border between psychology and economics. He was fascinated by irrationality, and the opportunities it created in human affairs for anyone who resisted it. He was just the sort of person who might have made an easy fortune in finance, but the market for baseball players, in Paul’s view, was far more interesting than anything Wall Street offered. There was, for starters, the tendency of everyone who actually played the game to generalize wildly from his own experience. People always thought their own experience was typical when it wasn’t. There was also a tendency to be overly influenced by a guy’s most recent performance: what he did last was not necessarily what he would do next. Thirdly—but not lastly—there was the bias toward what people saw with their own eyes, or thought they had seen. The human mind played tricks on itself when it relied exclusively on what it saw, and every trick it played was a financial opportunity for someone who saw through the illusion to the reality. There was a lot you couldn’t see when you watched a baseball game.
For Billy Beane, it was a little different, a little less cerebral and a little more visceral. Billy intended to rip away from the scouts the power to decide who would be a pro baseball player and. who would not, and Paul was his weapon for doing it.
Grady did not know about that. Grady had ignored Paul’s prodding to scout the players his computer flushed out. Paul had said the scouts ought to go have a look at a college kid named Kevin Youkilis. Youkilis was a fat third baseman who couldn’t run, throw, or field. What was the point of going to see that? (Because, Paul would be able to say three months later, Kevin Youkilis has the second highest on-base percentage in all of professional baseball, after Barry Bonds. To Paul, he’d become Euclis: the Greek god of walks.) Grady and his scouts had ignored Paul when he
