The Only Rule Is It Has to Work Read online

  The boys scatter to their positions, and we migrate to scouting spots thirty feet behind them, where we can see their movements, gauge their arm strength, and hear everything they give away in their small talk. (“Fucking thing took a shit hop on me,” one says, and we scratch out his name. There are going to be a lot of bad hops this year, and it’s way too early for complaining.) We ignore everybody in left field. There will be no good baseball players who self-identify as left fielders—anybody good will have the range for center, the arm for right, or the self-confidence to pretend one or the other. Ben and I move to center field, marking down our assessments as a crude filter to help us focus our attention. Like typical scouts, we pull the power move of leaving our station and moving onto the next one before each position is finished. Perform for nobody, chum. We’ve seen enough of you. We’ve measured you up; nothing you can do now will impress a couple of pros like us. One hour with stopwatches and we’re already a couple of assholes.

  As during the sprints, we find ourselves the most attentive “scouts” on the field. This is understandable—there’s very little chance that a player is going to win a job by the way he flags down a can of corn and hits a cutoff man in a nongame situation—but it once more gives us an edge, as we obsess over the tiniest details. As the shortstops and center fielders flag down fungoes to prove their premium-defender capabilities, we note our surprisingly fast David Ortiz clone fielding throws at first base. His footwork is graceful, his scoops effortless, his arm stroke short, and his throws strong and accurate. And so we have a kid who is 6-foot-5, 250 pounds, looks like David Ortiz, and can field and run. Is there any chance this kid can’t hit? Is there any player in history who checks off all the “looks like David Ortiz but can field and run” boxes and can’t hit? Of course he can hit. He’s clearly, unambiguously, the best player on this field.

  And we’re not going to get him. Earlier in the day, we learned the depressing news that we’re probably not going to get any of the players we really want. Pittsburg’s owner has accused Theo of tampering. One of the Pittsburg outfielders, furious at how he had been treated during the 2014 season, and ignored all off-season by his club, continually reached out to Theo, asking for a job. Theo ignored him for months but, by January, with Pittsburg apparently uninterested in re-signing the player, and with said player working out regularly with guys from our 2014 team, Theo agreed to sign him to a league-minimum contract. Pittsburg then complained that we had stolen its player—even though it’s only a gentleman’s agreement that prevents teams from signing one another’s players, who are legally independent contractors and have the right to play anywhere they want—and, with the ever-looming threat that the Diamonds (the new name of the Pittsburg team) will simply quit the league if they don’t get their way, and with the existential crisis that a three-team league would face, Theo concedes. As restitution, he agrees to pay Pittsburg $500 and give them our first-round pick at the conclusion of this tryout. We did get back one extra pick by trading six doughnuts (three maple, two chocolate, one glazed) for San Rafael’s third-round pick. But without a first-rounder, every team will pick twice before we pick once. If that big dude at first base can hit like we think he can hit, he’ll certainly be snatched away before our turn comes. As he stands near the batting cage with a bat and a helmet in hand, I do something desperate.

  I pull him aside. I ask him two questions.

  1. Why are you here? If you’re good, you’d be somewhere else, right? Answer: Seven months earlier, he weighed 325 pounds. He was, by baseball standards, about six standard deviations overweight, at an age when heaviness typically goes from barely tolerable to problematic. (It’s hard enough for ballplayers to maintain their mobility as they age out of their late teens or early twenties; harder still when 325 turns into 350.) For that reason, he’d gone unrecruited out of high school and attended a junior college, where he hit nineteen home runs in a two-month season. For that reason, nobody had taken him seriously as a prospect, and for that reason Vallejo, his hometown team, had rejected him at two previous tryouts. For that reason, when he’d approached Theo in the Vallejo parking lot a year earlier, Theo had excused himself from the solicitation. For that reason, he’d had to play in the Pecos League in New Mexico. And for that reason, he’d blown out his ACL just eight games into his Pecos League career, ending his lone shot in professional baseball. He was hitting .370 at the time.

  And so we have a reason he’s here, which was important; without knowing the “why,” we’d only be waiting to discover his weakness, which would undoubtedly show up at some point. Which leads to question no. 2.

  2. Can you hit? The kid looks at me and cocks his head, curious at this unusual audition. “I’d like to think I can,” he says, and I notice he’s missing a front tooth. I stick out my hand.

  “Sam Miller, Sonoma Stompers. Go home.”

  He grips. “Daniel Baptista. What?”

  “Go home. We’re signing you. Now let’s get you out of here.”

  I’m not sure how this is going to work. I didn’t learn the rules of this draft all that well before we arrived, but I know that I’m breaking at least one of them. We have an information advantage, and in about ten minutes Daniel is going to hit and we’re going to lose that advantage when everybody else sees him. And cheating—was this cheating?—has never been all that far removed from sabermetrics. Read any profile of Branch Rickey, perhaps the first sabermetrician (though the word didn’t yet exist) in professional baseball, the Dodgers GM who signed Jackie Robinson and hired a stathead assistant and built up the first farm systems and more or less dominated Major League Baseball for decades, and there’s an undercurrent through it all: This dude cheats! Rickey devised the “desk contract,” whereby he would sign a young player to a contract but file that contract not with the league but to a desk drawer. The kid would be sent off to play for a farm team, essentially (and unknowingly) still auditioning for a job, and if he didn’t pan out Rickey would simply release him—and disappear the contract. Rickey’s sins, baseball’s commissioner once said, were “as big as the universe.”

  It’s not that cheating is socially acceptable in baseball; the shock and indignation over the steroids era are proof that it is very much not. It’s that certain kinds of cheating are socially acceptable in baseball, and being competitive means engaging in the ambiguous negotiation of the acceptable vs. the unacceptable. In a twenty-second window, I have to decide which this is. I have to decide whether I am hurting Daniel’s negotiating power, and thus exploiting a kid with little leverage. (As only one team would have his rights regardless, and he would have no negotiating power anyway, I decide I am not.) I have to decide whether I am engaging in something like insider trading, where I am taking advantage of information that another team does not have access to. (No. They could have watched the 60-yard dashes as easily as we did. It’s not like I am taking Daniel off-site to watch him hit before I sign him—though I briefly consider it.) I have to decide whether there is any other, noncheating way of accomplishing the same goal. (No. Because the Diamonds have screwed us over with their absurd demands. Heck, as I weigh the morality, I conclude that they are the ones trying to exploit labor, and we are the ones standing up for player mobility and agency. We’re the good guys!) In those twenty seconds, I decide that we are definitely going to be in trouble if we get caught and that I definitely am not going to feel guilty if we don’t. And we shake. Now if I can just get him off this field without being seen doing it.

  Baptista shakes my hand. “Thank you! Thank you!” he says.

  “Can you get home?”

  “Right now? Actually … no. My ride is still trying out.”

  “I’ll give you a ride. You go that way,” I say, motioning toward the left-field line, “and I’ll meet you in the parking lot in fifteen minutes.” He shakes my hand again. He packs his bag, slings it around his shoulder, walks past the chain-link dugout, and begins to walk the 330 feet until he’ll be beyond the left-field wall and out
of our rivals’ sight. He does not make it. We see a man in his early thirties call out to him, and Baptista stops.

  “Bleh,” I say. “Who is that?”

  “That’s Matt Kavanaugh,” Theo says. The Pacifics’ manager, who caught for San Rafael the previous two years. We try not to stare; we know that in a few seconds he’s going to look over at us, and we can’t be seen paying too much attention. And there it is: He looks over at us, me and Theo and Ben, looking at each other intently and pretending to be talking about something we just saw on the other side of the field.

  “Is he looking at us?”

  “I think so.”

  “Is he still looking at us?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is he still looking at us?”

  They talk for a minute, then five. There’s no physical contact between them; Kavanaugh looks as if he’s trying to talk Baptista into getting his air filter replaced. I move slowly down the right-field line, exaggeratedly jotting down notes about what I’m seeing in the right fielders standing nearby. I reach the outfield wall and survey the area, having transitioned into my needing-to-pee, where’s-the-bathroom character. Baptista and Kavanaugh are ninety degrees to my left, and I strain to see separation between them. I dip down a grassy area toward the bathroom, then tuck behind it and find the parking lot. I can no longer see Baptista, and so I stare at my phone, waiting for an update from Ben. And then, suddenly, around a pickup truck, comes Daniel Baptista, his bag still slung, his eyes still wide and hopeful. “Ready to go?” he asks. I am ready to go.

  It’s a nervous exchange as we drive away, a first-date conversation where your date’s ex is sitting at the bar across the restaurant. We’re waiting for the reckoning to chime on my phone, and we talk to avoid the tension.

  “How’d you lose all the weight?” I ask.

  “It was a poor man’s college diet. I literally drove to Walmart every morning, bought discounted rotisserie chicken for $4.86, and a bag of iceberg lettuce, and one loaf of French bread. I had to make the bread last the whole week, and after three it would be no carbs. And then work out every day. It was a whole chicken, so it wasn’t like I was starving—I was eating well, but it was just good protein, good lean. And seven bucks.”

  “I don’t even want to know how they can sell a chicken that cheap,” I say. “You buy a whole chicken raw, it’s going to cost you eight, nine bucks. How do they take that, cook it, make it that delicious, put all those spices on it, it’s tender, it’s slow-cooked, and now it costs half as much?”

  “Man, something else gotta be going on behind closed doors to those chickens,” he says.

  My phone rings. “Okay,” I tell him. “Here we go.”

  “Theo. We’re in the car. You’re on speakerphone.”

  “Oh? You and…?”

  “Me and Daniel. I’m driving him home.”

  “Oh. When … why did you guys leave?”

  “Why’d we leave?” I look at Daniel, confused.

  “Yeah,” Theo says.

  “Uhhhhhh. His … grandma was sick?”

  “Oh, shit,” Theo says, relieved that I’m playing along. “I’m sorry to hear that. Did Kavanaugh ask him why he left?”

  “He did ask,” Daniel says, “and I told him I was told to go home.”

  “By who?”

  “I said … by Sonoma.”

  “By Sonoma? That’s weird. By who with Sonoma?”

  I’m now also feigning confusion, unsure whether I’m on speakerphone, too. “Could it have been … could Jayce have done it?” “Jayce” is Jayce Ray, the Stompers’ star player last year, who has moved up to a higher league but is hanging around the tryout for fun.

  “I’m not sure,” Theo says. “We’ll try to figure it out. I’ll see you when you get back here. Tell Daniel we’re sorry he had to leave.”

  The call ends. “Okay,” Daniel says. “That scared me a little. What went on right there?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Hope the contract’s still good.”

  “It’ll be good. Either everybody will be cool, or they’ll fine us and it’ll be worth it.”

  “I like that,” Daniel says. “I’ll make it worth it.”

  * * *

  I drop him off and speed back. Ben’s calling. Ben’s terrified. Everybody is really serious over here, he tells me. He thinks we’re in trouble. He and Theo have decided that the best thing to do is blame me, and blame my ignorance: I didn’t know that there was a draft, we’ll say; I thought we could just sign guys. He told me he wanted to go home, and, like an idiot, I told him he should, because we would definitely like to sign him. Derp.

  I go back, act stupid, say what a dummy I am, say I thought I was just doing a kid a favor, and apologize for my mistake. The compromise is that Daniel will still be available to every team in the draft at the end of this. We still don’t pick until every team has picked twice, but at least we’ve kept anybody else from seeing what we saw. The fear is that, by showing how eager we were to sign him, we’ve now created an even more attractive player than he otherwise would have been. “They’re going to draft him out of spite, aren’t they?” I ask Theo as we gather around before our picks. Theo thinks. “Kavanaugh? Yeah, he’d do that.”

  The rest of the tryout and draft is almost an afterthought now. Fehlandt wants to sign pitchers, particularly a guy named Caleb Natov, who throws in the mid-80s with an easy but unathletic pitching motion. I don’t want to fight too hard; it’ll be tough enough getting Baptista from the other teams, and I don’t want to lose Fehlandt’s support by turning our draft into a conflict among ourselves.

  “We cans draft Natov,” I agree, “but we have to draft 173 first if we have him. I promised him. We can’t break our promise.”

  “Pretty sure he’s not going to be there anyway,” Fehlandt says. “So there’s no real point, but okay.”

  The draft takes place in front of the group of players. They sit there, waiting for us to call their name, and then nine out of ten of them will walk away, shamed.

  “This is cruel,” I whisper to Ben.

  “Like gym class,” he says.

  Pittsburg is up first; their owner/GM/manager, the former major league reliever Wayne Franklin, has already left, in keeping with the organization’s reputation as the league’s bad haircut. He has left instructions for his first two picks—his and the one he took from us—and we’re confident that, in the half hour he spent at the field today, he didn’t see (or hear) enough to take Baptista. He does not. He drafts a good-looking catcher and a slight left-handed pitcher from Hawaii.

  Vallejo is next, and this concerns us. They’re known for putting a premium on local kids, for the headlines and because host families are harder to find in Vallejo. Baptista is from Vallejo, and he tried out for Vallejo when he was still fat. Their representative, a veteran coach named Mike Samuels, chooses number 146, a pitcher who was on Fehlandt’s wish list. I’m impressed; I didn’t see anything in the guy, but Fehlandt picked him out, and another team saw it, too. I’m even more impressed when I notice that the Pacifics are mad; they were also going to take him.

  San Rafael has the next two picks, and here we’re sure we’ll lose our guy. The Pacifics are good enough and rich enough that they might not see any two guys on the field they think can crack their lineup; they might take Baptista just to keep him from us. Kavanaugh keeps us in suspense by giving the waiting players a speech: “I just want to say thank you to everyone. As baseball players, we’ve all been in your shoes. It’s a tough place to be.” He encourages them all to stay in touch. “With that said, we’ll take 144. We got another pick: 60.” Two pitchers.

  I’m still quietly stressing to Ben and Fehlandt that we need to get Baptista, making it less about how good he is—which might spark debate—but because we promised him, and it’s harder to argue against a promise. “Yeah, yeah, we have to,” Fehlandt agrees. Vallejo makes its second pick—147—and, as quietly as we can, so nobody sees how desperate we were, w
e whisper to one another, “We got him.”

  “Okay,” I say calmly, “we’ll take 173.” I try to act somewhat surprised when nobody stands up—173 apparently isn’t here, huh, how about that—and Fehlandt breaks the confusion: “He left.” The draft moves on to Pittsburg, who takes …

  “Hold on, time-out,” somebody says. A young man has come over to take his spot on our roster. “I’m 173,” he says. And suddenly I panic. Did I call the wrong number? Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.… We look at our sheets, and …

  “No, you’re 174.”

  “No, I was 173.”

  “You’re Reginald? You’re 174.”

  “Oh.”

  We got him. We got him. I can’t believe we got him. We also got Caleb Natov, the big right-handed pitcher that Fehlandt wanted, and Mark Hurley, a right fielder from nearby Monterey who impressed all of us with his concentration and clean fundamentals. We don’t expect much from these two, but at the very least we figure Natov can get outs and Hurley will make plays in the outfield. As Fehlandt puts it, “That’s the fun thing about this league: You don’t have the money to say there’s going to be somebody better coming along.”

  As we drive home in the dark, back out of Sonoma Valley, back over the fog-thick bridge, back through an empty city, I’m thinking only about Baptista. I scream as loud as I can: “We got him!”

  And Ben, quietly, says, “Now let’s see if he’s any good.”

  5

  SPREADSHEET GUYS

  As proud as we are of our Baptista heist, Sam and I still want to prove that we can find players who wouldn’t have been blips on the Stompers’ screen without us. What we want is a source of talent that the other teams in the Pacific Association aren’t already mining: a good, old-fashioned market inefficiency, like the one the Oakland A’s exploited in the Moneyball era when they targeted players with high on-base percentages, or the one the Tampa Bay Rays leveraged years later, when they realized that their opponents’ emphasis on power bats made it easier to sign players with good gloves at a discount. The problem is that inefficiencies like these are increasingly difficult to find.