Beane Counter

He began that day in the summer of 2002 facing a roomful of his scouts. Now in his 40th year on earth and his fifth as the Oakland A's general manager, Billy Beane had changed. He'd lost the ramrod posture of his youth. The brown mop of hair had thinned, and been trained, poorly, to part. But the saggings and crinklings of middle age were otherwise barely discernible on him.

The men in this room were the spiritual descendants of the older men who had identified Billy, then a boy of 16, as a future baseball superstar. Invisible to the ordinary fan, they were nevertheless the heart of the game. They decided who got to play and, therefore, how the game was played. For the first time in his career Billy was about to start an argument about how they did what they did. Calling them in from the field and stuffing them into a dank room in the bowels of the Oakland Coliseum for the seven days before the draft had become something of an A's custom. It was the point of the exercise that was about to change.

A year ago, before the 2001 draft, the goal had been for the A's general manager and his scouts to come to some mutually satisfying decision about whom to select with the top picks. Billy had allowed the scouts to lead the discussion and influence his decisions. He had even let the scouts choose a lot of their own guys in higher rounds. That changed about five seconds after the 2001 draft, which had been an expensive disaster. The elite players that Billy and the scouts had discussed in advance had been snapped up by other teams before the A's turn came to make their final first-round draft pick. All that remained were guys the scouts loved and Billy knew next to nothing about. In the confusion Grady Fuson, the A's soon-to-be-former head of scouting, had taken a high school pitcher named Jeremy Bonderman. The kid had a 94 mph fastball, a clean delivery and a body that looked as if it had been created to wear a baseball uniform. He was, in short, precisely the kind of pitcher Billy thought he had trained his scouting department to avoid.

It was impossible to say whether Jeremy Bonderman would make it to the big leagues, but that wasn't the point. The odds were against him, just as they were against any high school player. The scouts adored high school players, and they especially adored high school pitchers. High school pitchers were so far away from being who they would be when they grew up that you could imagine them becoming almost anything. High school pitchers also had brand-new arms, and brand-new arms were able to generate the one asset scouts could measure: velocity on a fastball. Billy knew, though, that the most important quality in a pitcher was not his brute strength but his ability to deceive, and deception took many forms. In any case you had only to study the history of the draft to see that high school pitchers were half as likely as college pitchers, and a quarter as likely as college position players, to make it to the big leagues. Taking a high school pitcher in the first round—and spending 1.2 million bucks to sign him—was exactly the sort of thing that happened when you let scouts have their way. It defied the odds; it defied reason. Reason, even science, was what Billy Beane was intent on bringing to baseball. He used many unreasonable means to do it: anger, passion, even physical intimidation. "My deep-down belief about how to build a baseball team is at odds with my day-to-day personality," he said. "It's a constant struggle for me."

It was hard to know what Grady Fuson imagined would happen after he took a high school pitcher with that first-round pick. On the big 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 "f—"—gathered politely along the back wall of the room to watch the Oakland team determine its future. Grady, a soft 5'8" next to Billy's still dangerous-looking 6'4", 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 used to cause the rest of the team to gather on the other end of the bench. When Grady leaned into the phone to announce his selection of 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 why the Oakland A's had won so many games with so little money, and to 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 a 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 f——crapshoot," Billy had taken to saying. "We take 50 guys and we celebrate if two of them make it. In what other business is two for 50 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 21st century as professional medicine had been in the 18th. 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 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, atypical though it might have been. 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. And then 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.