Raw violence had gotten Grady’s attention. It was only baseball tradition that allowed scouting directors and scouts to go off and find the ballplayers on their own without worrying too much about the GM looking over their shoulders. And if there was one thing Grady knew about Billy, it was that he could give a fuck about baseball tradition. All Billy cared about was winning. A few days after the 2001 draft—with Billy away and still not speaking to him—Grady crept into Paul’s‘ office. In conciliatory tones, he allowed as how he still needed to sign a pitcher to fill out the A’s rookie league roster in Arizona. There was this kid Paul had mentioned who, along with Youkilis and Saarloos, Grady had ignored. David Beck was his name. Beck had gone completely undrafted. Thirty big league teams, each with fifty draft picks, had passed on him. Oddly enough, Paul’s computer had spit out Beck’s name only because one of Beck’s teammates at Cumberland University in Tennessee, a big kid with a 98-mile-per-hour fastball, had made everyone’s list as a potential first-round draft pick. Paul had noticed that on the same pitching staff as this consensus first-round pick was this complete unknown, a six foot four lefthander, who had even better numbers than the first rounder. A lower earned run average, fewer home runs allowed, more strikeouts, and fewer walks per nine innings. And Paul just wondered: maybe the kid had something going for him that the scouts were missing.
He was left wondering. Months passed without any word of Beck from the scouting department. Paul finally asked Grady about him. And Grady said, “Oh yeah, I forgot, I’ll have one of the scouts go have a look.” But he didn’t do it, at least not seriously. When Paul asked again, Billy Owens, the A’s scout responsible for covering Tennessee grudgingly came back to him with the word that Beck was “a soft tosser.” Soft tosser was scouting code for not worth my time. Paul still had the impression that no one had bothered to scout David Beck.
When he came to see Paul after the draft, Grady was in a different mood about David Beck. Should we sign your guy? he asked.
What guy? asked Paul. He’d forgotten about Beck.
Beck, said Grady.
Grady, he’s not my guy, said Paul. I just asked you to check him out.
Grady was eager to make peace with the front office, and he thought he could do it by throwing Paul a bone. He ran off and signed David Beck, sight unseen. A few days later, Beck reported for duty at the A’s training facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. Most of the scouts, and Paul, happened to be there when Beck warmed up in the A’s bullpen. It was one of the most bizarre sights any of them ever had seen on a pitcher’s mound. When the kid drew back his left arm to throw, his left hand flopped and twirled maniacally. His wrist might as well not exist: at any moment, it seemed, his hand might disengage itself and fly away. The kid was double-jointed, maybe even crippled. At that moment David Beck ceased to be known to the scouts as David Beck and became, simply, “The Creature.” A scout from another organization came right up to Billy Owens, chuckling, and asked how he came to sign The Creature. Billy O pointed over to Paul and said, “I didn’t sign him. Paul made me do it.”
Whereupon The Creature went out and dominated the Arizona rookie league. He and his Halloween hand and his 84-mph fastball shut down the opposition so completely that the opposition never knew what happened. In the short season The Creature pitched eighteen innings in relief, struck out thirty-two batters, and finished with an earned run average of an even 1.00. He was named the closer on the rookie league All-Star team.
The Creature was the first thing to come out of Paul’s computer that the A’s scouting department signed. There were about to be a lot more. The 2002 draft was to be the first science experiment Billy Beane performed upon amateur players.
It wasn’t quite ten in the morning and everyone in the draft room except the Harvard graduates had a lipful of chewing tobacco. The snuff rearranged their features into masks of grim determination. Anyone whose name wasn’t two syllables, or didn’t end in a vowel or a spitable consonant, has had it changed for the benefit of baseball conversation. Ron Hopkins is “Hoppy,” Chris Pittaro is “Pitter,” Dick Bogard is “Bogie.” Most were former infielders who had topped out someplace in the minor leagues. A handful actually made it to the big leagues, but so briefly that it almost hadn’t happened at all. John Poloni had pitched seven innings in 1977 with the Texas Rangers. Kelly Heath had played second base in the Royals organization, and had exactly one major league at bat, in 1982, after the Royals regular second baseman, Frank White, decided in the middle of a game that his hemorrhoids were bothering him. As one of the other scouts put it, Kelly was the only player in history whose entire big league career was made possible by a single asshole. Chris Pittaro had played second base for the Tigers and Twins. Back in 1985, during Pitter’s rookie year, Detroit’s manager Sparky Andersen was quoted saying Pitter “has a chance to become the greatest second baseman who ever lived.” It hadn’t turned out that way.
All of them had lived different versions of the same story. They were uncoiled springs, firecrackers that had failed to explode. The only bona fide big league regular in the
