Now he had a problem: he’d just proved that. Baseball columns everywhere were abuzz with the news that Billy Beane was about to become the highest paid general manager in the history of the game. Now that everyone knew his true value, Billy didn’t need to prove it anymore. Now the only reason to take the job was for the money.
The next morning, he called John Henry and told him he couldn’t do it.* A few hours later, he blurted to a reporter something he wished he hadn’t said but was nevertheless the truth: “I made one decision based on money in my life—when I signed with the Mets rather than go to Stanford—and I promised I’d never do it again.” After that, Billy confined himself to the usual blather about personal reasons. None of what he said was terribly rational or “objective” but then, neither was he. Within a week, he was back to scheming how to get the Oakland A’s back to the play-offs, and Paul DePodesta was back to being on his side. And he was left with his single greatest fear: that no one would ever really know. That he and Paul might find ever more clever ways to build great ball clubs with no money, but that, unless they brought home a World Series ring or two, no one would know. And even then—even if they did win a ring—where did that leave him? He’d be just one more general manager among many who were celebrated for a day, then forgotten. People would never know that, for a brief moment, he was right and the world was wrong.
The job went to Theo Epstein, the twenty-eight-year-old Yale graduate with no experience playing professional baseball.
About that I think he may have been mistaken. He’d been the perfect vessel for an oddly shaped idea, and that idea was on the move, like an Oakland A’s base runner, station to station. The idea had led Billy Beane to take action, and his actions had consequences. He had changed the lives of ballplayers whose hidden virtues otherwise might never have been seen. And those players who had been on the receiving end of the idea were now busy returning the favor.
Epilogue
The Badger
The Jeremy Brown who steps into the batter’s box in early October is, and is not, the fat catcher from Hueytown, Alabama, that the Oakland A’s had made the least likely first-round draft choice in recent memory. He was still about five foot eight and 215 pounds. He still wasn’t much use to anyone hoping to sell jeans. But in other ways, the important ways, experience had reshaped him.
Three months earlier, just after the June draft, he’d arrived in Vancouver, Canada, to play for the A’s rookie ball team. Waiting for him there was a seemingly endless number of jokes to be had at his expense. The most widely read magazine in the locker room, Baseball America, kept writing all these rude things about his appearance. They quoted unnamed scouts from other teams saying things like, “He never met a pizza he didn’t like.” They pressed the A’s own scouting director, Erik Kubota, to acknowledge the perversity of selecting a young man who looked like Jeremy Brown with a first-round draft choice. “He’s not the most physically fit,” Kubota had said, sounding distinctly apologetic. “It’s not a pretty body…. This guy’s a great baseball player trapped in a bad body.” The magazine ran Jeremy’s college yearbook picture over the caption: “Bad Body Rap.” His mother back in Hueytown read all of it, and every time someone made fun of the shape of her son, she got upset all over again. His dad just laughed.
The other guys on the rookie ball team thought it was a riot. They couldn’t wait for the next issue of Baseball America to see what they’d write about Jeremy this time. Jeremy’s new friend, Nick Swisher, was always the first to find whatever they’d written, but Swish approached the thing with defiance. Nick Swisher, son of former major league player Steve Swisher, and consensus first-round draft pick, took shit from no one. Swish didn’t wait for other people to tell him what he was worth; he told them. He was trying to instill the same attitude, without much luck, in Jeremy Brown. One night over dinner with a few of the guys, Swish had said to him, “All that stuff they write in Baseball America—that’s bullshit. You can play. That’s all that matters. You can play. You think Babe Ruth was a stud? Hell no, he was a fat piece of shit.” Jeremy was slow to take offense and it took him a second or two to register the double-edged nature of Swish’s pep talk. “Babe Ruth was a fat piece of shit,” he said. “Just like Brown.” And everyone at the table laughed.
A few weeks after he’d arrived in Vancouver, Jeremy Brown and Nick Swisher were told by the team’s trainer that the coaches wanted to see them in their office. Jeremy’s first thought was “Oh man, I know I musta done something dumb.” That was Jeremy’s instinctive reaction when the authorities paid special attention to him: he’d done something wrong. What he’d done, in this case, was get on base an astonishing half the time he came to the plate. Jeremy Brown was making rookie ball look too easy. Billy Beane wanted to test him against stiffer competition; Billy wanted to see what he had. The coach handed Jeremy and Nick Swisher plane tickets and told them that they were the first guys from Oakland’s 2002 draft to get promoted to Single-A ball.
It took them forever to get from Vancouver, Canada, to Visalia, California. They arrived
