Beane Counter

"Wanna hear something," says Paul, gazing into his computer screen at the University of Alabama website. "In the past two years: 390 at bats; 98 walks; 38 K's. Those numbers are better than anyone's in minor league baseball. Oh yeah, 21 jacks." Jacks are home runs. So are dongs, bombs and big flies. Baseball people express their fondness for a thing by thinking up lots of different ways to say it.

The fat scout looks up from his giant chocolate chip cookie and tries to find a way to get across just how unimpressed he is. "Well," he says, exaggerating his natural drawl, "I must a severely underestimated Jeremy Brown's hittin' ability."

"I just don't see it," says the vocal scout.

"That's all right," says Billy. "We're blending what we see but we aren't allowing ourselves to be victimized by what we see."

This argument had nothing to do with Jeremy Brown. It was about how to find a big league ballplayer. In the scouts' view you found a big league ballplayer by driving 60,000 miles, staying in a hundred crappy motels and eating God knows how many meals at Denny's, all so you could watch 200 high school and college baseball games inside of four months, 199 of which were completely meaningless to you. Most of your worth derived from your membership in the fraternity of old scouts who did this for a living. The other little part came from the one time out of 200 when you would walk into the ballpark, find a seat on the aluminum plank in the fourth row directly behind the catcher, and see something no one else had seen—at least no one who knew the meaning of it. You only had to see it once. "If you see it once, it's there," says Eric. "There's always been that belief in scouting." And if you saw it once, you, and only you, would know the meaning of what you saw. You had found the boy who was going to make you famous.

Billy had his own idea about where to find future major league baseball players: inside Paul's computer. He'd flirted with the idea of firing all the scouts and just drafting the kids straight from Paul's laptop. The Internet now served up just about every statistic you could want about every college player in the country, and Paul knew them all. Paul's laptop didn't have a tiny red alarm on top that whirled and whistled whenever a college player's on-base percentage climbed above .450, but it might as well have. From Paul's point of view, that was the great thing about college players: They had meaningful stats. They played a lot more games, against stiffer competition, than high school players. The sample size of their relevant statistics was larger, and therefore a more accurate reflection of some underlying reality. You could project college players with greater certainty than you could project high school players. The statistics enabled you to find your way past all sorts of sight-based scouting prejudices: the scouting dislike of short righthanded pitchers, for instance, or the scouts' distrust of skinny little guys who get on base. Or their distaste for fat catchers.

That was the source of this conflict. For Billy and Paul and, to a slightly lesser extent, Eric and Chris, a young player is not what he looks like or what he might become, but what he has done. As elementary as that might sound to someone who knows nothing about professional baseball, it counts as heresy here. The scouts even have a catchphrase for what Billy and Paul are up to: performance scouting. Performance scouting, in scouting circles, is an insult. It directly contradicts the baseball man's view that a young player is what you can see him doing in your mind's eye. It argues that most of what's important about a baseball player, maybe even including his character, can be found in his statistics. After Billy says what he has to say about being "victimized by what we see," no one knows what to say. Everyone stares at Jeremy Brown's name. Maybe then they all understand now that they aren't here to make decisions. They are here to learn about the new way that decisions are going to be made.

"This is a cutting-edge approach we're taking this year," says Eric, whose job, it is increasingly clear, is to stand between Billy and the old scouts, and reconcile the one to the other. "Five years from now everyone might be doing it this way."

"I hope not," says Paul. He doesn't mean this in the way that the old scouts would like him to mean it.

"Bogie," says Eric, calling across the table on the vast moral authority of the oldest scout of all, Dick Bogard. "Does this make sense to you?" Eric adores Bogie, though of course he'd never put it that way. When Eric announced he wanted to leave the A's advertising department and get into the baseball end of things, even though he himself had never played, Bogie not only did not laugh at him; he encouraged him. "My baseball father," Eric calls Bogie.