“The kid wears a large pair of underwear,” says an old scout.
“I repeat: We’re not selling jeans here,” says Billy Beane.
That is the Oakland A’s draft room in 2002, as Michael Lewis tells it in Moneyball. The kid was Jeremy Brown, a heavyset catcher from the University of Alabama. Brown had told the A’s he hoped to go somewhere in the first 19 rounds. They took him 35th overall.
Beane, the A’s general manager, needed bargains. By the end of August, according to the commissioner’s office, Oakland’s payroll was about $42 million. The New York Yankees were paying about $133 million.
Scouts had once loved Beane himself. In 1980, Lewis writes, a group of them stood on a high school field in San Diego with stopwatches and watched him run 60 yards in 6.4 seconds, three full strides ahead of the next boy. They carried checklists of five “tools”: the abilities to run, throw, field, hit, and hit with power. They also looked at his face. “Some of the scouts still believed they could tell by the structure of a young man’s face not only his character but his future in pro ball,” Lewis writes. “Billy had the Good Face.” As a major leaguer, he never became what they had pictured.
As a general manager, Beane went looking for players on a laptop belonging to his assistant, Paul DePodesta. One number they prized was on-base percentage, how often a hitter reaches base. Lewis lists the sight-based scouting prejudices the statistics got them past: the scouting dislike of short right-handed pitchers, the distrust of skinny little guys who get on base, “the scouting distaste for fat catchers.”
Their favorite case was Scott Hatteberg, a former Boston Red Sox catcher who had torn a nerve in his elbow and could no longer throw well. The A’s signed him cheap and made him a first baseman, a position he had never played. He led the American League in not swinging at first pitches. DePodesta worked out that a lineup of nine Hattebergs would have scored 940 to 950 runs. The Yankees scored 897.
From August 13 to September 4, the A’s won 20 games in a row. In the 20th, before 55,528 fans, they led Kansas City 11 to 0 after three innings and let the Royals tie it. Hatteberg, given the night off, came in to pinch-hit with one out in the ninth and homered. The 12 to 11 win set an American League record. Oakland finished 103 and 59, tied with the Yankees for the most wins in baseball.
The book left some things in the background. The A’s also had three excellent pitchers, Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito. Lewis said later that everyone already knew how good they were, and that Beane had drafted them out of college. In the playoffs, Oakland lost its first round series to Minnesota, whose payroll was a little smaller still.
Jeremy Brown got 10 at-bats in the majors and retired in February 2008. Fifteen years after his draft, ESPN compared the players taken in the first five rounds in 2002 with those taken in 2016. The average height and weight had barely moved. “I never meant to say that experience is completely irrelevant,” Lewis said in 2022.
In February 2011, as the A’s gathered for spring training in Phoenix, a Mercury News columnist observed that plenty of players in camp were fit enough to model.
“Oh yeah, our guys look good in jeans,” Beane said.