Beane Counter

All eight are college players. Most of them are guys the scouts either did not particularly like, or, in a few cases, don't really know.

With that, the coup was complete.

When you think of intellectuals influencing the course of human affairs, you think of physics or political theory or economics. You don't think of baseball, because you don't think of baseball as having an intellectual underpinning. But it does; it had just never been seriously observed and closely questioned, in a writing style sufficiently compelling to catch the attention of the people who actually played baseball. Once it had been, it was only a matter of time—a long time—before some man of action seized on newly revealed truths to gain a competitive advantage.

By the time he became the general manager of the Oakland A's, in 1997, Billy Beane had read all 12 of Bill James's Baseball Abstracts. James had something to say specifically to Billy: You were on the receiving end of a false idea of what makes a successful baseball player. James also had something general to say to Billy, or any other general manager of a baseball team who had the guts, or the need, to listen: If you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.

The night before the amateur draft Oakland scout Billy Owens had called Jeremy Brown to tell him that the Oakland A's were thinking of drafting him with the fifth of their seven first-round picks, the 35th overall pick. To that, Brown hadn't said anything much at all. Just "Thank you very much but I need to call you back." Seconds later he'd called back. It turned out he thought the guy who had just called him wasn't Billy Owens, Oakland A's scout, but a college teammate of his masquerading as Billy O. "He thought it was a crank call," says Owens. "He said he wanted to make sure it was me, and that I was serious." Jeremy Brown, owner of the University of Alabama offensive record books as a catcher, has been so perfectly conditioned by the conventional scouting wisdom that he refused to believe that any major league baseball team could think highly of him.

On the morning of the draft Billy Beane arrived at the Coliseum earlier than usual and took the place he had occupied for the previous seven days. At dawn the room seemed more glaringly impersonal than usual; its cinder-block walls were the bright white of an asylum cell. The next two hours will be, to Billy Beane, a revelation. Almost all the other teams look at the market pretty much the same way, or at any rate act as if they do. Most teams, if they kept a wish list of 20 players, would feel blessed to snag three of them in the draft. The combination of having seven first-round picks, a deeply quirky view of baseball players and a general manager newly willing to impose that view on his scouting department has created something like a separate market in Oakland. The A's were drafting players dismissed by their own scouts as too short or too skinny or too fat or too slow. They were drafting pitchers who didn't throw hard enough for the scouts and hitters who hadn't enough power. They were drafting kids in the first round who didn't think they'd get drafted before the 15th round, and kids in lower rounds who didn't think they'd get drafted at all. They were drafting ballplayers.

It was as if Billy Beane was a human arsenal built, inadvertently, by professional baseball to attack its customs and rituals. He thought himself to be fighting a war against subjective judgments, but he was doing something else, too. At one point Chris Pittaro said that the thing that struck him about Billy—what set him apart from most baseball insiders—was his desire to find players unlike himself. Billy Beane had gone looking for, and found, his antitheses: Young men who failed the first test of looking good in a uniform. Young men who couldn't play anything but baseball.

As the 35th pick approaches, Eric once again leans into the speakerphone. If he leaned in just a bit more closely he might hear phones around the league clicking off, so that people could laugh without being heard. For they do laugh. They will make fun of what the A's are about to do; and there will be a lesson in that. The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: When you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply on the basis of their appearance, you're less likely to find the best person for the job. When asked which current or former major league player Jeremy Brown reminded him of, Paul stewed for two days and finally said, "He has no equivalent."

The kid himself is down in Tuscaloosa, listening to the webcast of the conference call, biting his nails because he still doesn't quite believe that the A's will take him in the first round. He's told no one except his parents and his girlfriend, and he's made them swear they won't tell anyone else, in case it doesn't happen. Some part of him still thinks he's being set up to be a laughingstock. That part of him dies the moment he hears his name called.

" Oakland selects redraft number 1172. Brown, Jeremy. Catcher. University of Alabama. Hueytown, Alabama."