Beane Counter

For Billy Beane it was a little different, a little less cerebral and a little more visceral. Billy intended to rip away from the scouts the power to decide who would be a pro baseball player and who would not, and Paul was his weapon for doing it.

It wasn't quite 10 in the morning on that summer day last year, 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 spittable 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. All of them had lived different versions of the same story. They were uncoiled springs, firecrackers that had failed to explode. Sparky Anderson had once predicted, for instance, that Chris Pittaro had "a chance to become the greatest second baseman who ever lived," and Pitter had ended up playing all of 53 games over three major league seasons. The only bona fide big league regular in the room was Matt Keough, who'd won 16 games for the As in 1980.

There was no avoiding just how important the 2002 amateur draft was for the future of the Oakland A's. The A's survived by finding cheap labor. The treatment of amateur players is the most glaring of the many violations of free-market principles in Major League Baseball. A team that drafts and signs a player holds the rights to his first seven years in the minor leagues and his first six in the majors. It also enjoys the right to pay the player far less than he is worth. For instance, the As were able to afford their All-Star pitcher Barry Zito because they had drafted him in 1999. For his first three years of big league ball Zito was stuck; for his next three years he could apply for salary arbitration, which would bump him up to maybe a few million a year but would still keep him far below the $10 million to $15 million a year he could get for himself on the open market. Not until 2007, after he had been in the big leagues for six years, would Barry Zito, like any other citizen of the republic, be allowed to auction his services to the highest bidder. At which point, of course, the A's would no longer be able to afford Barry Zito. That's why it was important to find Zito here, in the draft room, and obtain him for the period of his career when he could be paid the baseball equivalent of slave's wages.

This year was the best chance Oakland might ever have to find several Barry Zitos. In 2001 the A's had lost all three of their top free agents to richer teams. First baseman Jason Giambi had left for the Yankees, outfielder Johnny Damon had gone to the Boston Red Sox and closer Jason Isringhausen had signed with the St. Louis Cardinals. The total of $33 million the three players would make each year was just $5 million less than the entire Oakland payroll. The rules of the game granted the A's the first-round draft picks of the three teams that had poached their top talent, plus three more compensation picks at the end of the first round. Together with their own selection, the A's had, in effect, seven first-round draft picks. In the history of the draft going back to 1965, no team had ever held seven first-round picks. The question for Billy Beane was what to do with them. What he wasn't going to do with them was what Grady had done last year, or what old baseball men had done with them for the past 37 years. "You know what?" Billy said to Paul, before the draft-room meetings. "However we do it, we're never going to be more wrong than the way we did it before."

Already the scouts had whittled, or thought they had whittled, the vast universe of North American amateur baseball down to 680 players. They'd pasted all the names onto little magnetic strips. They now had one week to reduce that pile of magnetic nameplates to some kind of order. They would do this, more or less, by a process of elimination. The scouting director would read a kid's name off a sheet. The scout who knew the kid then offered up a brief, dispassionate description of him. Anyone else who had seen the kid play might then chime in. Then the floor was open for general discussion, until everyone was satisfied that enough had been said.

They begin that first morning by weeding out the pile. Some large number of amateur ballplayers were, for one reason or another, unworthy of serious consideration.

Eric, for instance, throws out the name of a high school player we'll call Lark. Eric is Eric Kubota, the young scouting director who replaced Grady Fuson after the 2001 season. Eric used a giant wad of Copenhagen to disguise the fact that he was a brainy Cal graduate whose first job with the A's had been as a public relations intern. That Eric had never played even high school ball was, in Billy Beane's mind, a point in his favor. At least he hadn't learned the wrong lessons. Billy had played pro ball, and regarded it as an experience he needed to overcome if he wanted to do his job well. "A reformed alcoholic" is how he described himself.

Lark is a high school pitcher with a blazing fastball. He's a favorite of one of the older scouts, who introduces him in a language only faintly resembling English. "Good body, big arm. Good fastball, playable slider, so-so change," he says. "A little funk on the backside but nothing you can't clean up. I saw him good one day and not so good another."

"Any risk he'll go to college?" asks Eric.

"He's not a student type," says the older scout.