Front Offices
This is a work of fiction. Fakeity fake fake, didn't go down like this. However, many of the events surrounding the story are true (the entire timeline of events is real-life accurate) and the people and places do exist. So it's modern-day historical fiction, kinda. HOWEVER PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS A FICTIONAL STORY SERIOUSLY. NOT REAL. NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT. No money made, no harm intended, I'm aware I'm going to Hell already, thanks.
This story is rated NC-17, Billy Beane/Theo Epstein. Please don't read it if you're not OK with that kinda thing.
I tried to catch all spelling and typing errors. Sincere apologies if any remain.
Notes and images for the story may be found here, and are strongly recommended reading/viewing if you are at all unfamiliar with Billy Beane and Theo Epstein.
Disclaimer, again: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
Front Offices
1989: Billy Beane resigns from his professional baseball career after playing in parts of 6 seasons.
1995: Theo Epstein graduates from Yale University with a degree in American Studies.
June 1996: Eric Chavez is selected in the first round of the amateur draft by the Oakland Athletics.
1997: Billy Beane is hired as the general manager of the Oakland A’s. Tim Hudson is selected in the 6th round of the amateur draft by the Oakland A’s.
June 1998: Mark Mulder is selected in the first round of the amateur draft by the Oakland A’s.
1999: After studying at the San Diego School of Law, Theo Epstein passes the California bar exam. During this time he also works in the PR department of the San Diego Padres under Larry Lucchino, eventually becoming the Director of Baseball Operations. Barry Zito is selected in the first round of the amateur draft by the Oakland A’s.
December 19, 2000: The Boston Red Sox sign free agent Manny Ramirez.
Early 2002: John Henry, Larry Lucchino, and Tom Werner purchase the Boston Red Sox-- Henry as the principal owner, Werner as the chairman, Lucchino as the President and CEO.
November 2002: Theo Epstein is hired, mostly by Larry Lucchino, as the general manager of the Boston Red Sox.
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The best thing about Billy Beane, so far as Theo is concerned, is his brain. It’s a source of constant marvel. Not that there aren’t intelligent people around for Theo to talk to; there are, lots of them. Hell, he goes out of his way to hire them. But when it comes to other general managers, other people at his level of responsibility, Billy is the only one he’s run across who’s this smart.
Of course that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other smart GMs. Most GMs are smart, much more so than owners or regular managers, worlds smarter than the ballplayers themselves, but none of them are smart in the same way Billy is. Billy’s version of smart is a kind of roving all-consuming intelligence that aims its sharp swordpoint at one topic after another, attacking with single-minded intensity until the appropriate information has been completely eviscerated.
Theo always knew that he would be able to talk to Billy about baseball. He’s read the book, after all. But the first time Billy spent three hours talking with him about classic film history--something Theo knows far too much about, his grandfather and great-uncle having written Casablanca, his father having run the English department at BU-Theo realized that Billy was going to be a lot more fun than most other GMs.
And Theo has never been the kind of GM who objects to fun.
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Theo considers tapeball to be one of his crowning achievements. It is, so far as he knows, unique to the Fenway front offices, although maybe Josh and Peter have taught it to the Arizona guys now that they’ve gone over there. Tapeball is the result of a very young front office with lots of extra energy, run by a very young general manager with a mischievous streak.
It’s pretty simple. You wad up masking tape until you have something about the size and shape of a baseball, you get a bunch of people together in the hallway or in a conference room, and you throw the ball around and whack it with a fungo or something. Tapeball is played whenever Theo gets so bored that he can’t work (usually around 10 or 11 at night), sticks his head out of his office, and yells, “Tapeball!”
So far tapeball has resulted in the destruction of three framed pictures, four coffee mugs, a dozen carefully organized piles of paper, and one broken finger. The office manager, a solid woman in her late 50s hired for her capability and sense of organization, screams at them whenever she hears them playing it. Theo hired her himself, but this has never yet stopped her from chewing him out for tapeball, and it has never stopped Theo from feeling thoroughly chastened when she does. So they wait until she leaves the office, sneaking around like little kids with wiffle ball bats and wads of tape hidden behind their backs.
Theo tiptoes past her desk, quiet as he can so she has no reason to look up. He’s holding a tapeball in his hand, keeping it at his hip, on the side facing away from her.
A young woman looks up from her desk as he passes. She’s a new hire, only been here a week or two, but she’s good with numbers and is writing a new program that will crunch VORP-Value Over Replacement Player-statistics much faster and hopefully more accurately than anything they’ve been using before. It’ll improve the risk management of the team significantly if it works. Smart, young computer geeks: these are kinds of people that Theo likes to hire.
Lots of GMs think he’s crazy for this. For hiring more young people than old baseball men. For hiring more women than old baseball men. But Theo doesn’t care, has never cared. He’s going to run his team the best way he can, so that it wins the most it can, and makes the most money it can at the same time while maximizing the money put in, and to do that he doesn’t want old baseball men. He wants, often, just the opposite. He knows this well. It’s a lesson he learned from someone who knows it better than anyone else.
The young woman sees the tapeball in his hand and giggles, bringing a hand quickly up to her mouth to stifle it so that the office manager doesn’t hear. Theo favors her with a quick grin, the kind he’s best at. She grins back and looks back down at her computer screen. Her fingers fly over the keyboard so that it clicks and clacks like mechanical birdsong.
Young, technologically adept, with a mindset that allows for things like tapeball. This is how Theo runs his office, and no matter how many old baseball men tell him he’s crazy, he just needs that one vote of confidence, that one opinion he trusts, to know that he’s doing it exactly right.
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He wasn’t originally supposed to be in charge, not in Boston. He was Larry Lucchino’s geeky law student Director of Baseball Operations, formerly an even geekier college intern for the Orioles who stayed up all night getting the late west coast scores, writing baseball stories for the Yale Daily News.
When new ownership took over, they wanted a fresh approach working below them; the team and the franchise had both suffered too much stagnation for too long. Theo was a crazy choice, though. He was barely a kid, not just someone who had Never Played Baseball, but also someone who was Younger Than Most of the Team. One of these factors alone should have been enough to keep him far away from the job. Both together should have made it impossible for him to ever acquire it.
The first name on the list of the new Boston front office wasn’t Theo Epstein, although he secretly suspects that Lucchino was pushing for him right from the very beginning. The new front office was comprised of three men who had read all the right articles and seen quite a few baseball things themselves and who had a pretty clear idea of what they wanted. What they wanted was Billy Beane.
Of course Theo’s heard all the stories by now. The official one, the one in the book, says that Billy debated and debated and said yes but at the very last possible second said no, said it because he didn’t want to give up on something he’d started, and also so that he could be close to his family.
The unofficial story, the one not in the book, says that Billy debated and debated and said yes but at the very last possible second said no, setting off a very hushed-up legal battle over whether or not Billy had violated a contract by backing out so last-minute. The unofficial story also says that Billy was less concerned with not seeing his family and more concerned with seeing too much of certain people who were not his family, but who maybe had more claim to him in that way, and whose claim would grow the more Billy was away from his wife and his little girl. There were also whispers of something approaching alcohol abuse, but that attracted less attention, in baseball.
The unofficial unofficial story whispers something about those people Billy had to avoid being not whores, or groupies, or kids looking a little too much like him about the eyes. The unofficial unofficial story whispers about attachments rather more male in nature.
Official or unofficial story, it’s Theo who gets the call eventually, and now it doesn’t seem like Billy could ever be anywhere but Oakland.
Theo thinks that Billy must have, on some level, regretted not taking the Boston job. He might think this on his own, just from the stories, but he thinks it more especially because as soon as he took the job Billy started calling him at his office. Billy wanted to talk trades, and prospects, and the state of umpiring in baseball today, and statistics, and economics, and, after a while, real life.
At first Theo isn’t sure why Billy would call him so often; a month after Theo took the Boston job, Billy is calling once every two or three days and Theo has his office phone number, his home phone number, and both his cell phone numbers. It’s not that he objects, because Billy Beane is a legend to a certain class of baseball people, and Theo is one of those people. It’s just that he’d heard that Billy was not the most friendly or forthcoming guy in the world.
The only thing he can think of is that Billy wants something from him, and is, for strange Billy-ish reasons of his own, trying to work Theo from a different angle. This seems so wildly improbable that he has to ultimately reject it, though. Billy will do a lot of things to get a trade done, but going out of his way to befriend someone is a little much, even for him.
Anyways, they do talk trades-Billy keeps obliquely asking about Kevin Youkilis and acting like it’s no big deal, which tells Theo that he had better hold onto Youkilis as hard as he can if he knows what’s good for his team-but Billy doesn’t press the issue in a dead-serious-need-this-trade way.
It’s sometimes almost as though the whole Kevin Youkilis thing, the whole Greek God of Walks story and all that, is just an excuse for Billy to call Theo up whenever the fancy strikes him. This seems improbable too, but Theo, phone cradled bemusedly to his head in his office after hours, can’t come up with anything better.
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2003: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is published and released.
January 22, 2003: The Boston Red Sox sign free agent David Ortiz following his unconditional release from the Minnesota Twins.
2004: The Oakland A’s sign Eric Chavez to a 6 year, $66 million contract extension.
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General manager of the Boston Red Sox. It still hasn’t quite sunk in. He goes up to his executive suite (his executive suite!) when the ballpark is empty and stares past sheet glass windows to the Green Monster. He remembers, as a little kid, coming to Fenway and gazing in awe at that very same wall, and although it didn’t have seats on top of it when he was growing up, its very greenness and monstrosity were two adjectival constants in his young life, just the same today.
He can see the Citgo sign peeking over the Monster, and it makes him smile. That’s been around for a while too.
It’s the same for children all over New England, and for a lot of adults. This is a big responsibility, and, staring at the white scoreboard scribed on the classically drab green, Theo is not likely to forget it.
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July 31, 2004: The Boston Red Sox trade Nomar Garciaparra to the Cubs in a 4-team deal that nets them Orlando Cabrera and Doug Mientkiewicz.
October 27, 2004: The Boston Red Sox win the World Series for the first time since 1918.
December 10- 13, 2004: The 2004 Winter Meetings meet in Anaheim, CA.
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“So,” Billy says, voice a little staticky, “freeing up roster space any time soon?” The phone crackles on his end and there’s some faint garbled radio-voice-noise. Theo glances at the clock. Eleven pm in his office means 8 pm in Billy’s office, but Billy doesn’t sound like he’s in his office. This probably means that Billy is in his car, driving around and around the city so that he doesn’t go crazy pacing around the stadium or his house or wherever it is that he’s actually supposed to be.
“You’re a fucking shark, Billy.”
“Mmmm. A shark.” There’s a pause, during which Theo can imagine Billy concentrating on getting his car around a sharp turn, phone clamped tight between his ear and his shoulder. “Why would you say that? You bleeding?” It’s late 2004 and Billy obviously has something on his mind.
“Not yet.” Theo is thinking about the potential deal he’s trying to work out with Edgar Renteria. Tony LaRussa had been saying some unflattering things about Edgar’s fortitude, and Theo has spent most of the day reassuring everyone in Boston that Edgar will be fine. He’s not entirely sure of this himself, but if he says it enough times he’s hoping that he’ll get there.
“Yeah? Managing a post-Series team treating you good?”
Theo laughs. “It’s not that different from managing any other kinda team in the offseason. Just with more publicity stunts.”
“Publicity stunts.” The disgust in Billy’s voice is evident. “Poor fucker.”
“I’ll live.”
“You seem to have the knack for it.” Billy is working up to whatever it is he really wants to say. Theo can feel it coming.
“Last I checked you were alive too, Billy. I’d say that means you have just as much a knack for living.”
“You know what I mean. Living through the crazy shit you do.”
Theo pauses. This is a weird kind of statement, even from Billy, who is in the habit of routinely making what other people might call weird statements. It’s not like Theo’s a daredevil mountain climber or a sky diver or something; he’s not in the habit of doing crazy things that it would be hard to survive. Unless, of course, Billy is talking careers, in which case…
“You mean Nomar?”
“I always mean Nomar.”
It seems like ever since Theo has known Billy, Billy has been obsessed with two Red Sox: Kevin Youkilis and Nomar Garciaparra. He’s obsessed with Youkilis because Youkilis represents precisely the kind of undervalued yet incredibly effective player that Billy craves, the kind of player who’s so cheap but gets on base so often. Theo would in a second believe that Billy has actual honest-to-god dreams about acquiring Youkilis.
Nomar is something else entirely. Billy is not so obsessed with Nomar as a player (too expensive, not enough production for the dollar), but he is very obsessed with Nomar as icon-that-Theo-traded-in-the-middle-of-a-season. In this sense he’s not really obsessed with Nomar, just with the kind of balls it must have taken for Theo to pull off that move. He does talk about Nomar a lot, though.
“I survived Nomar, yes.” Theo says this with a wry smile, which he hopes comes through across phone and state and time zone lines, although he never can tell. He thinks he can hear when Billy makes faces over the phone, though, so he doesn’t feel too weird about it.
“Yeah. Hang on, I’m gonna park.” There’s a squeal of tires and Theo winces sympathetically, imagining Billy jerking the car across a lane of traffic to reach whatever godforsaken parking lot he’s sighted. Probably the Coliseum parking lot, which should be skeleton-empty in these winter months. “OK. So, Nomar. That wasn’t an easy trade.”
“No.” Theo puts his feet up on his desk and tosses a tapeball up into the air, catching it easily. “But we can’t think like fans.”
“We can’t think like fans. Precisely what I’ve been saying.” Billy pauses and there’s a very faint noise that makes Theo think he’s chewing on his lower lip. Theo scratches at the tapeball, peeling up a stray sliver of masking tape. “We can’t think like players either. When you let old baseball players run teams, they act like old baseball players. They make all the wrong moves ‘cause they still want to be one of the boys. Pathetic.” Another pause, more faint lip-chewing noises, and a slight tapping, like Billy’s drumming the fingers of his free hand on the wheel. “That’s why I like you so much, kid. It’s not like talkin’ to some fat fucking idiot who wishes he was still strapping on a jock and sweating through his shorts out there.”
“Thanks,” Theo says. “Now we’re gonna get to the Winter Meetings and I’m gonna be picturing everyone in a sweaty jock.”
Billy laughs, a sharp abbreviated bark. “You think I’m joking, but I’m serious. That’s half of what’s wrong with baseball. Fat old men still dreaming about playing ball themselves.”
“I used to, you know,” Theo says.
“Used to what?”
“Want to play ball. I mean, I did play, when I was a kid-Little League and my school team and whatever. I always wanted to go pro. “
“Everyone wants to at some point. It’s the fucking American dream.” Billy is really getting worked up now. This is one of his favorite subjects. “That’s fine. That’s grade-fucking-A normal. But do you still dream about it? Do you still spend your days and nights and when-the-fuck-evers trying to be one of the ‘boys’ so they’ll let you onto the fucking field?”
“No,” Theo answers, truthfully. “I’m pretty happy looking at the field. These days I think I’d just look stupid on it.”
“There you go. That’s what I’m talking about. You’re not one of those flabby head-in-the-lightbanks jerkoffs.”
“Thanks. I think.”
Billy laughs, sounding more relaxed than he has in a while. “Yeah. You don’t have all that fucking stupid ‘wanting what you don’t got’ baggage hanging off you. Lucky guy.”
“I do what I have to do, that’s all.” Theo pauses. Thinks. “Same as you.”
“Same as me? Not quite.” Billy seems suddenly sad, almost wistful, even though wistfulness is not the kind of emotion that Theo can imagine him indulging in. “You got it down a lot better than I do.”
“Oh.” Theo pushes the tapeball along the edge of his desk with the back of a pencil. He’s not quite sure what to say. Billy, after all, is the veteran GM. Billy is the expert. Billy is the one they wrote a fucking book about.
He can hear the muted rumble of a car starting up again. “Hey,” Billy says, “I’d better get going. I’ll talk to you later. Lemme know if you need to clear some shit off your roster anytime before the Meetings.”
“Sure,” Theo says. He hangs up and stares at the tapeball. He can’t shake the feeling that he’s just missed something fairly important.
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The Winter Meetings are a unique baseball event because, for once, there aren’t any players or fans around: just owners and GMs and team presidents and managers. It’s a meet-up for the people who get things done behind the scenes, not on the field. Theo likes the Winter Meetings, because it cuts down on the bullshit. There’s not much good-for-TV action, so the only reporters who show up are of the print variety, and only the baseball-centric ones bother coming around. These are the reporters that Theo likes best; these are the guys he might have been.
On the other hand, the entire hotel is filled with management and management-types trying to outwit each other, so while the external bullshit level is low, the internal bullshit level is high. Everyone is kind of talking around each other, cereal-box-decoder-ring sort of silly and cautious, trying to feel each other out without giving anything away. It’s a little bit exhilarating and a lot dumb.
It’s also practically Billy’s natural habitat.
Theo spends most of the first day just figuring out who has sent whom, because some teams just send the GM and some attendants while some teams send everyone from the manager in the dugout to the team president. He orders some of his hand-picked assistants out into the fray and they report back all day long to John Henry’s hotel room, where they have a bank of big whiteboards set up. On one of the whiteboards they work up an erasable marker map of team representatives, covered in squiggly lines showing old affiliations and lines of communication. The other whiteboards will soon be filled with player names and statistics and rumored trades. The hotel room smells so strongly of marker that Henry has to go and open the window in spite of the humid California heat, just so they don’t all get lightheaded and pass out.
He listens to the reports as they roll in and makes some phone calls, reconnecting with the people who have the power to make something happen for him. He saves Billy for last and ends up calling him just after 9 at night, a little strung out from a phone call to Omar Minaya that had started out a simple exchange of pleasantries and had quickly turned into an incredibly long and complex conversation about everything in the world that had anything to do with Pedro Martinez. Theo is drained, feeling like Omar’s just peeled back his scalp and had an exciting rummage in his brain.
“You sound like shit,” is the first thing Billy Beane says to him when he picks up the phone and hears Theo’s (tired, but surely not that shitty) greeting. “Hotel bar. Table all the way to the back and in the left corner. Twenty minutes. See ya.” Then he hangs up and Theo’s left staring at his phone in a bemused way. This seems to happen a lot with Billy.
Twenty minutes later he’s in the bar, hair still spiky-wet from his shower, hoping his black collared shirt doesn’t have any creases from his admittedly haphazard packing practices. Billy’s wearing a short-sleeved bright green collared shirt, unapologetically rumpled, with very worn-looking khaki shorts. Theo reaches the table at the exact same moment that a waitress carrying two beers does. The bar is one of those incredibly dark, incredibly pretentious and modern ones, all done up in shades of black and purple and red. Everyone there is unbearably cool. The waitress smiles warmly at Theo, whose all-black outfit must pass some kind of ironic hipster code, grimaces a little at Billy, sets down the beer and stalks away.
They just stare at one another for a couple of minutes, sipping their beer. They’ve been talking for years, but haven’t actually seen each other since the last Winter Meeting, which is kind of ridiculous when Theo stops to think about it. Surely Billy could have contrived to show up when Theo was in Oakland, or he could have made the trip to Boston once in a while, but Billy usually seemed oddly determined to avoid Theo in person. Even at the last Winter Meeting they had only seen each other in a professional capacity, never over drinks, never even for an informal chat. Theo lifts his glass and glances at Billy through the yellow light of the beer. He wonders what changed. Maybe it had to do with trading Nomar, and whatever that made Billy think of him.
“Rough day?” Billy asks, leaning back in his seat.
Theo notices that Billy’s already finished half his beer and wonders if he should try to catch up. “Not that rough. Just at the end. Talked to Omar.”
Billy nods. “Me too. He wants pitching.” Theo raises an eyebrow, and Billy shakes his head. “He doesn’t want any of my guys, I think he was just covering his bases. He wants a star. A Latino star.” Billy smirks, the kind of expression that Theo has, until now, mostly had to imagine over the phone. The reality of it is not that different from his mental picture. “All my big guys are white. Omar doesn’t want shit from me.”
This puts Omar’s interest in Pedro in a new light and distracts Theo for a minute while he sifts through the implications. Eventually he looks up and realizes that Billy has been watching him with amusement. Theo smiles-guilty as charged.
“What about Chavez?”
The way that Billy’s expression slides from amused to shocked is gratifying in a way that Theo doesn’t bother to examine too closely. “Chavez? What about him?”
“He’s not white.” Theo’s grin widens as he watches Billy visibly relax into his seat. He wonders what Billy was afraid of. Maybe he thought Theo was going to make him a trade offer.
“Chavvy’s practically white. I don’t think he even speaks Spanish.” Theo raises his eyebrows, both of them this time. Billy grins and leans forward over his beer again. Obviously some Chavez-ian crisis has just been avoided, but it’s probably something that only Billy will ever know, or understand. “He’s definitely not Hispanic enough for crazy Omar Minaya and his plot to revive the Mets through cultural fucking awareness.”
It’s impossible to not laugh at this, so Theo does. He takes a long draught of beer to settle himself down before talking again. “Oh, c’mon. He’s targeting a market, right? Get more Latino fans into the team, attract better Latino players to the team. He probably thinks Latin America’s where the all new talent’s gonna come from these days.”
“Isn’t it?” Billy looks tense again.
Theo waggles his head noncommittally and smiles down at his beer.
Billy signals the waitress for more drinks and twirls his hand at Theo, telling him to finish up the beer he’s got now. Theo’s busy downing his beer when the waitress comes to take their order and doesn’t hear what Billy says, but when she comes back she’s bearing an entire tray of tiny glasses, the shots inside gleaming a rainbow of translucent jewel colors.
“Oh hell no,” Theo says, boggling at the tray. “No way in hell.”
Billy smiles in a way that quirks up one corner of his mouth and makes him look, in the muted bar light, sort of appealingly insane. “Let’s see what you’re made of, kid,” he says, and that’s when Theo realizes that Billy is probably going to get him drunk so that he can pump him for information about the next big player market. Theo also realizes that he brought this entirely on himself. He should know better than to bring up stuff like that around Billy.
As he grabs a shot and brings it to his lips, his movements mirrored by Billy, he realizes that if Billy is also getting himself drunk, this can’t be the case. But by then the shot is burning its way down his throat like vaporous liquid fire, and he doesn’t think about much else for the rest of the night.
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On the second day they wake up early, grab enormous cups of coffee, and reconvene in Henry’s room to look at the whiteboards, mostly still pristine. Normally the owners wouldn’t come down, but the offseason after winning the World Series is a delicate time for a team, something this ownership group knows well, and they want to be on-scene. Henry and Lucchino both made the trip, for which Theo is equal parts grateful and annoyed. At least he doesn’t have to deal with the entire front office looking over his shoulder; Werner, third member of the triumvirate Boston ownership, stayed at home to provide off-scene updates via cell phone and email.
Lucchino, already looking more strung-out and tired than a moderately hung-over Theo, hands Theo a list and tells him to get out there and start pumping.
‘Pumping’ is Boston front office vernacular for the whole business of going around trying to extract valuable information from people without giving valuable information away. Finding out who was here isn’t difficult, nobody’s trying to hide it and there isn’t anything at stake, so the assistants were able to do most of yesterday’s grunt-work. Today they have to get down to the real business of the Winter Meetings, though. Theo has to go out and earn his keep.
He’s down in the lobby busy pumping Dave Dombrowski, who is unbearably smug because the topic of everyone’s conversation is the rumor that he’s getting Kenny Rogers, and he knows it. Theo is just about to give Dombrowski up as a bad job when he sees Billy sidle into the lobby with a carefully blank look on his face. Theo asks Dombrowki another question and watches Billy over Dombrowski’s shoulder, just to see him in action.
Billy walks up to John Schuerholz and says something that immediately sets Schuerholz to smiling. Billy puts a hand between Schuerholz’s shoulder blades, all casual ease, and this, Theo knows, is Billy playing into Schuerholz’s desire to be “one of the boys.” It might look a little strange to an outsider; the dignified older man being charmed by the rumpled younger man, respect going in the wrong directions. It might look a little strange even to an insider, because anyone who knows the furor over Moneyball will know that Billy isn’t generally so well-regarded by the old school camp of baseball guys. But Theo knows what’s going on here, and he’s enjoying a chance to watch it played out to perfection right in front of him.
Billy is something that Schuerholz never was-namely, a former ballplayer, for real-and it doesn’t matter how successful Schuerholz is, how much respect he commands, he still wants what Billy has, and Billy knows this probably better than Schuerholz does. This is true of many people in baseball management, and is exactly what Billy rants about to Theo all the time. Still, to say that Billy is not above exploiting this would be like saying that the ground is not above the sky.
The thing that Theo knows, that Schuerholz does not know, is that Billy doesn’t want what he has. Billy hates the fact that he used to be a baseball player. Billy likes baseball players, but would probably be a much happier man if he had never been one. Schuerholz would know this if he had read the book, but a surprising majority of baseball people haven’t even cracked it. Some of them even think Billy himself wrote it, which is so crazy that Theo can’t even begin to argue with them if they mention it, and can only laugh. He can’t imagine Billy ever sitting in one place long enough to write a book.
He watches Billy’s mouth form a word that looks like ‘pitcher’. Two entirely separate things start happening in Theo’s brain.
In one train of thought he’s noticing that Billy is talking about pitchers with John Schuerholz, and Theo starts to think about what players could be involved in talk like that. Everyone has been saying that Billy is under a money crunch again and needs to break up the Big 3-Zito, Mulder, Hudson. If Billy’s talking about this with the Braves, that’s news, and that will have bearing on what the Red Sox do. Theo had been toying with the idea of trying to get one of the Big 3 himself.
The rest of his mind is completely given over to the task of keeping Dombrowski from realizing any of this is going on, because half of getting an advantage at these meetings is making sure no one else gets one. These two things occupy his mind so fully that he actually jumps a little bit, his shoulders and heels coming up, when Billy appears behind him and taps him on the shoulder.
“Mind if I steal him away for a bit?” Billy asks, all toothy smiles with the corners of his eyes reassuringly creased, steal him away for a bit, like they’re at a ballroom dance and Billy’s trying to politely cut in for the next song. Dombrowski nods and waves him off, obviously bored with Theo’s strategic obtuseness. Billy puts a hand in the center of Theo’s back and gently steers him towards the elevators.
“That’s not gonna work on me, y’know,” Theo mutters, allowing himself to be steered anyways.
“What’s not?”
“Your… buddy-buddy ballplayer thing.” Theo twitches the muscles of his back a little, right where Billy has his hand.
Billy laughs and gently pushes Theo into the elevator, slides his hand up Theo’s spine until it’s high enough that he can curl it around Theo’s shoulder, making Theo shiver a little. The gesture was totally unnecessary and he doesn’t know what to make of it.
“No worries, kid,” Billy says. “I’m not tryin’ to hit you up for trades… right now, anyways.”
“What’s up, then?”
The elevator door opens and Billy gives his shoulder a little tug to indicate that he should follow, then lets go and sets off down the hotel corridor. As if Theo wouldn’t follow anyways. The floor is exactly like every other residential floor in the hotel, but Billy’s moving with definite purpose, so Theo guesses that they’re heading for Billy’s room. Billy still hasn’t answered his question.
Theo has to trot a little to catch up to Billy so that he can get in stride with him. He doesn’t know who else is staying on this floor; if it was Brian Cashman he was following, he might imagine that the Yankees had rented the entire floor, but this is highly unlikely for the A’s, who, last he heard, still make players pay for their own candy bars in the clubhouse. In any event, he doesn’t want someone popping out of their room and seeing him tagging after Billy like a puppy on a leash.
Billy stops abruptly and digs a keycard out of his pocket so that he can open the door. This takes him a minute, as he’s got a ridiculous amount of things in his pockets: money, credit cards, ID cards, business cards, lots and lots of folded-up pieces of paper with undoubtedly vital baseball information on them. Theo, in a moment of tapeball-esque rebellious jocularity, puts a hand in the middle of Billy’s back. Billy stiffens imperceptibly-Theo wouldn’t be able to tell at all if he couldn’t feel Billy’s muscles tense up under his hand-but otherwise acts like he doesn’t notice.
Eventually he gets the door open, of course. The room is a lot smaller than John Henry’s room, which is probably the largest suite this hotel offers, and is smaller even than Theo’s room, which is a more modest but still two-roomed suite. Billy’s staying in the cheapest type of room here: one room with a tiny bathroom, hardly any space between the bed and the wall on the far side of the room, the foot of it entirely taken up with a little dresser with a TV on top. There’s a tiny desk, piled high with papers, and a little chair that has its seat serving as additional paper pile storage.
Billy flops himself onto the bed and turns on the TV. Theo closes the door behind him and realizes that his options are limited. He can move the papers off the desk chair, but he would probably get them out of order somehow, and he of course knows all about Billy’s enormous, volcanic rage. He could sit on the toilet in the bathroom and shout in towards Billy. Or he could sit on the bed.
After a minute Billy makes his decision for him by shifting a little away from the center of the bed and rolling his eyes towards Theo without moving any other part of his head. “C’mon,” he mutters, just barely loud enough to be heard over the TV, “I don’t have rabies.”
Theo chuckles a little and sits down, hesitating a bit before toeing off his shoes and swinging his legs up onto the bed. He looks at the TV. Billy has put on the Home and Garden Channel, something Theo cannot imagine him actually watching. He looks over at Billy and, sure enough, Billy is ignoring the TV entirely and watching Theo instead.
This is making him a little uncomfortable, but Theo thinks that’s a pretty reasonable reaction, under the circumstances. He would feel a lot better if Billy would just explain what they’re doing here. There’s no point in pretending that he hasn’t seen Billy looking at him, so he stares right back.
Eventually Billy huffs out a small laugh and turns his eyes back to the TV. Theo keeps looking at him. It’s only fair. Billy’s eyes are brown and his hair is spiked up at the front. There are a few gray hairs powdering his sideburns, but he doesn’t really look like a man in his 40s.
Theo just turned 31, and looks about 22. He looks way too young to be running a baseball team. He knows this because everyone keeps telling him so. “You’re too young,” people say, “you’re too….” They never finish the statement, waving their hands to indicate some other thing he’s too much of. Theo always wonders-too what?
Billy doesn’t really look like a guy running a baseball team either, if it comes to that. For some reason this makes Theo feel a little better. He relaxes against the headboard and watches TV with Billy for a while.
The show is called FreeStyle. Theo has never seen it before but he gets the idea quickly enough; some kind of interior decorator comes in, looks at a room in someone’s home, takes everything out of it and then puts everything back in, plus some stuff from other parts of the house, in a new way. It’s the same room, and it doesn’t cost anything, but after the designer’s done with it the room looks completely different. Billy appears to be watching very intently.
The next show after FreeStyle is called reDesign and seems to involve really, really rich people. Billy loses interest and goes back to staring at Theo.
“Trying to FreeStyle the A’s?” Theo asks. It’s cheesy and lame, but if he doesn’t get Billy talking soon, doesn’t find out why Billy dragged him up here, he’s going to have to just get up and leave. Not that he doesn’t enjoy spending time with Billy, in person, but at the Winter Meetings time is money and all that.
“Maybe.” Billy leans closer and the room suddenly seems stifling, way too small. Billy sits up so that he’s mostly between Theo and the TV, his gaze worryingly intense. “Look. Don’t you ever get sick of the bullshit?”
“The bullshit?” Theo swallows and tries to remember everything he’s done since he got here, if he’s done anything Billy would categorize as ‘bullshit’.
“The fucking bullshit that’s all over these fucking management circle jerks.” Billy leans in and grabs Theo’s arm, hard. It’s clearly very important that Theo understands this. “Don’t you just want to go up to some of these guys and fucking punch them in the head?”
Theo blinks. He can’t honestly say that he’s wanted to punch anyone in the head since he got here. That may be the fundamental difference between Billy and himself, though. Billy was fucked over by the system, so when he sees guys doing the same thing to baseball that baseball did to him, he gets angry. He wants to hit things. Theo never went into the system, so while he can recognize stupid things being done, it doesn’t ever make him particularly, personally outraged.
“Sometimes,” Billy says, tightening his fingers just below Theo’s elbow, “sometimes I get these impulses. And I’m always afraid I’m just gonna do shit. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I just have to get the fuck out of there before I do. That’s what… I was talking to those guys, that drooling idiot Schuerholz, and I just. I had to get out of there. Fuck knows what I woulda done.”
“OK.” Theo eyes Billy warily. “I understand needing to get away. Come back to your room or… whatever. But, uh. Why am I here?”
“Were you fucking listening? Sometimes I just act on those terrible fucking impulses.”
Theo wrinkles his nose a little, thinking that over. “I’m an impulse?”
“You are the most impossible fucking kid in the whole fucking universe,” Billy says, and that’s when he leans in and kisses him.
-------
The third day starts out as a big blur. Somehow Theo finds his way to Henry’s room at a not-too-late hour, and somehow a big cup of coffee ends up in front of him. He closes his eyes and just inhales the steam for a while. There’s a lot more on the whiteboards than there was the day before, but he can’t focus on them just now.
Billy Beane kissed him. Billy Beane put his hand down Theo’s pants. Theo’s not sure if he should feel assaulted or not; it’s not like he encouraged Billy, or did anything, really. He’s pretty sure he was in shock the whole time. He’s still in shock.
Billy Beane humped Theo’s leg until he generated an enormous wet spot on the front of his rumpled khaki shorts, and a little bit on Theo’s pants. Will semen come out of black denim? He doesn’t know. He contemplates asking Lucchino for advice and has to put his head down on the desk lest he burst into incredibly inappropriate laughter.
When he picks his head up, Henry is looking at him oddly. Theo taps the rim of his coffee cup and Henry nods sympathetically. He thinks Theo’s been up all night working. It would be just like Theo to do that.
He wonders what Henry would say if Theo told him what he really did last night. “Oh, yeah, so, I think the Braves are going after one of the Big 3, and Dombrowski’s definitely getting Rogers, pitching is gonna be expensive. The Mets want Pedro. I had a nice long talk with Billy Beane, then I let him go to third base with me and afterwards he freaked out and locked himself in the bathroom.” Third base. Is it possible that Billy broke his mind? He’s not sure. Maybe. He’s never touched another guy before. He’s never even thought about it.
Lucchino’s talking about Kevin Millar. Theo knows he should be paying attention; this meeting may basically decide Millar’s fate, and he likes Millar a lot, wants to do right by the guy, but he just can’t concentrate.
Billy had come and slumped on top of Theo, panting. He had lifted himself up, looked down at his shorts, then looked at Theo. Theo has an idea of what he looked like because he had a good long look at himself in the mirror after he managed to stagger back to his own room: shirt all wrinkled up and hanging funny (somehow Billy managed to rip the bottom button clean off), pants gapping open, hair sticking up crazily, his eyes huge and staring. He probably looked slightly worse than that, right after the fact, and the crazy intensity had dropped out of Billy’s eyes like the bottom dropping out of a carnival ride.
“Shit,” Billy had said. Then he had gotten up and locked himself in the bathroom.
Theo had attempted to put himself back together-a failing attempt because of the missing shirt button, and his hair would not lie flat at all, and he had still been dazed. He had also been half hard himself, and part of him wanted to stay, grab some of Billy’s baseball stat sheets and jerk off into them, leaving them spread on the bed like some kind of ruined symbol for Billy to decipher later, but even in his stunned state he had recognized that as a direction in which madness lay.
After stumbling to the elevator and getting off at the wrong floor twice, thankfully not meeting any other GMs, he had made it back to his own room. There were papers spread over his desk, things he should attend to, but he hadn’t been able to touch them. All he could do was turn his shower on, strip naked and sit under the spray for two hours, eyes closed and silently thanking the enormous hotel hot water tanks.
With a huge effort Theo turns his mind back to what Lucchino’s saying. “A couple years ago we might have been able to send him back to Japan for something, but they’re not stupid, it’s not going to happen now. I mean, the guy’s a whole lot fatter than he used to be, at the very least.”
“Look,” Theo says, then stops, surprised by the hoarseness of his own voice. He sounds like he spent the whole night screaming. Everyone swivels around to stare at him, and he carefully clears his throat before continuing. “OK. Look. His numbers weren’t bad. He’s up for arbitration at the end of next season. Why don’t we just hang onto him for a year, and if his numbers drop again we just won’t go to arb next winter. It’s not like he’s too expensive, and at worst he’s a bench player who keeps the clubhouse happy.”
Peter Woodfork, one of Theo’s assistants, is tapping at the keyboard of his laptop and looking mutinous. Peter’s a big numbers guy, and Theo knows that phrases like “player who keeps the clubhouse happy” make Peter grind his molars, but Millar’s numbers weren’t bad this year, and sometimes being the GM means looking at the bigger picture.
Theo knows what Billy would say. Billy would say that Theo should trade Millar now, while his value is high, because he and Theo both know that it’s probably going to come down soon, but Theo will probably be able to find someone who doesn’t know that, or is idiotically willing to ignore it. Billy would say that hanging onto Millar now is sentimental and weak-willed. But the Athletics are not the Red Sox.
“We need to keep Manny happy,” Henry says. “That’s going to be hard in his first season away from Pedro in 4 years.”
Theo nods. “Right. Pedro and Millar… that would be asking Manny to be mature.”
Everyone looks at each other, grimly smiling. Asking Manny to be mature would be like asking the ocean to turn bright pink. You could ask all day long and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference.
“Millar for another year.” Lucchino crisply taps the small stack of papers in front of him against the table, evening out the edges before setting it aside. An aide starts making squeaky notes on the whiteboards, filling in Millar’s spot on their roster and erasing potential replacements and trades they had been considering.
Peter sets his jaw and goes back to furiously typing at his laptop. Theo looks over at him with a sympathetic half-smile. Retaining Millar the very height of his value seems stupid to Peter, who gets paid to analyze numbers and statistical trends, and it would look stupid to Billy, who has the payroll of a Little League team to work with. Theo sees the bigger picture, and Theo, thanks to the owners, has money. He can take all of this information-- statistical, financial, logical, emotional-and turn it into a real winning team. That and a healthy dose of luck got them a World Series ring.
The Red Sox had always had the talent. What they had needed was someone willing to make the unbiased move, the unpopular move, so long as it was the right one. Henry and Lucchino and Werner had thought that Billy was that person: he was certainly crazy enough and smart enough. Billy, though, hadn’t been the one to pick up the reins. Theo was.
Boston thought they needed someone crazy. Billy knew. At the last minute he had realized that craziness wasn’t what the Red Sox really needed. Theo’s not sure what it is that he has that Billy doesn’t, what it is that makes him what the Red Sox actually required, but he’s starting to understand.
Whatever that thing is, it’s more or less the same thing that drives Billy to call him after hours, at all hours. Maybe it’s the same thing that made Billy impulsively pull him up to a hotel room in the middle of the Winter Meetings.
None of this will make sense, Theo guesses, rubbing the back of his neck and letting the coffee soothe him back into sanity, until he figures out what that thing is.
-------
December 16, 2004: The Oakland A’s trade Tim Hudson to the Atlanta Braves for Juan Cruz, Dan Meyer, and Charles Thomas.
December 17, 2004: The Boston Red Sox sign free agent David Wells.
December 18, 2004: The Oakland A’s trade Mark Mulder to the St. Louis Cardinals for Dan Haren, Kiko Calero, and Daric Barton.
December 19, 2004: The Boston Red Sox sign free agent Edgar Renteria.
-------
It’s a week after the Winter Meetings before Theo hears from Billy again, and that’s just a terse, business-like phone call to tell Theo that Billy’s traded Tim Hudson to the Braves for Charles Thomas and Juan Cruz and Dan Meyer, totally underwhelming names to Theo, except maybe for Meyer. Apparently he thinks Theo deserves to know, maybe he feels a little guilty that he never really gave Theo a chance to bid on Hudson if he’d wanted to, or maybe it’s for some other reason. The guilt is definitely there, though.
“It’s OK, he’s a Georgia kid, they love that hometown shit in Atlanta,” Billy says. He sounds flat, like he’s rehearsed his lines.
“What about Mulder?” Theo thumps a tapeball against the wall next to his desk. “What about Zito? How’re they taking it?”
Billy makes a soft sound, sucking on his lip, maybe. “Who the fuck cares? It’s not their fucking place to give a fuck about who gets traded and who doesn’t.”
“That’s stupid,” Theo says. He lets the tapeball drop with a dull thud to the center of his blotter and starts picking at the sleeve of his sweater. “Shit like that affects the team. ‘Specially shit like I heard was up with the three of them.”
Silence, broken a little by the slight whistling sound of Billy breathing down the line. Eventually he sucks in a breath and says, “Like. What kinda shit.” He’s tense and controlled, his voice coiled with warning.
“That they were a little too close to each other.” Theo drops his sleeve and thumps the tapeball against the wall again. He hasn’t heard that, not exactly, but he’s heard plenty of jokes, and that’s almost the same thing. He’s a little mad at Billy anyways; if Billy was going to freak out and avoid him, maybe Billy shouldn’t have done all that shit in the first place. Theo has been pretty much a bystander for this whole thing.
“That’s.” Billy sounds somewhere between laughing and screaming. “Where the fuck did you hear bullshit like that.”
“Around. People talk. Baseball people talk, Billy, especially about shit like that.”
“Shit like that. God.” Billy sighs. “I told you about the fact that I have poor fucking impulse control, right?”
“You did,” Theo says, even as even can be. He’s not going to give an inch here.
“So I understand if you don’t want to talk, you know. Anymore. But I thought, Hudson, I should let you know. I know you were kinda interested.”
“Oh, fuck you, honestly. Why would I not want to talk anymore?” Billy makes a surprised sound, like a startled cat, and Theo has to laugh. “Oh come on. Like anyone else is as fun to talk baseball with. Don’t be an asshole.”
“I’m all asshole,” Billy mutters, but it’s a reflexive statement, there’s no poison in it.
“All asshole? Really? Will you let me see for myself?”
The background breathing cuts off as Billy moves his head away from the phone for a minute. When he comes back, he sounds strangled. “OK. I’m gonna just. I’m gonna hang up, and I’ll call you back when I’ve had a chance to figure out how to talk to you without you killing me dead over the phone. I don’t… do you even… OK, no, don’t even answer that. I’ll call you back when I finish trading Mulder.”
“Wait, you’re trading Mulder? Where’s he going? Who’s getting Mulder?”
Theo is still yelling, hunched over and intent, tapeball and drama forgotten, who’s getting Mulder, as Billy hangs up the phone.
-------
Billy calls two days later to tell Theo that the Cardinals are getting Mulder, and the A’s are getting, among others, pitcher Danny Haren in return.
“Jerk.” Theo’s in his office again, throwing pencils at the ceiling, probably the only person in the entire stadium right now. He and Billy had talked a lot about Haren for a month or so, back in July. Theo had wanted Haren pretty badly. “So Zito’s the one you’re keeping, huh?”
“We’re keeping Zito until he becomes a free agent,” Billy says, carefully precise. “Then we won’t be able to afford him. Fucker’s probably going to hire Boras.”
“We could afford him. If you want, you know, we could buy him up. Let you visit him sometimes.” Zito kenneling. The idea makes Theo smile.
“I hope he’ll go National League.” Billy seems earnest, sincere, and Theo realizes with a start that both Hudson and Mulder were traded to National League teams, like Billy can’t stand to see his former players any more than he absolutely has to, like he doesn’t want them running into him or Zito on two or more roadtrips a year.
“How’s Zito holding up as the last of the Big 3?” Theo can’t help but think of Zito as a kind of taller, skinnier, whiter Manny Ramirez. He’s heard some weird shit about Zito, on and off the field, and his own personal reference for weird, zoney, moody, idiot savant ballplayers is of course Manny. Manny, he knows, would not take the trading of his two favorite friends away very gracefully, and he imagines that Zito, in his own Zito way, is much the same.
There’s a pause, during which Theo finally gets a pencil to stick in the ceiling. “Zito will get over it,” Billy says, and he sounds like he’s trying to convince himself as much as he’s trying to convince Theo. “Eventually. Especially if he doesn’t have to see me around.” There’s another pause, giving Theo time to puzzle over that one. “Look. If you’re not. Uh, you didn’t seem mad, so. I mean, if you’re not mad, can I. Uh. I’ve never really done the tourist shit in Boston, you think I could maybe.”
There’s yet another pause, during which Theo realizes that Billy is asking if he can come visit without actually asking. “Sure. Tell me when you can fly out, I’ll pick you up.” Theo’s already leaning for his planner, scrabbling for a fresh pencil, ready to mark this down. Billy isn’t being very sneaky about this; he obviously wants to get out of Oakland for some reason, did something to someone and needs time to let it all cool down, but Theo isn’t going to pry. Not just yet, anyways.
“Uhhh. How about.” There’s a clicking sound, Billy’s probably booking a flight on his computer right this very second. “The 22nd? Eight pm?”
That’s only in two days, but Theo erases a couple of lines and pencils it in. “Sure. No problem. Call me when you touch down, that’ll give me enough time to get out there.”
“OK.” More clicking. “Do you know, uh, a hotel that’s not where the teams stay…”
“I know my apartment, where you can stay.” Billy starts to make a noise of protest and Theo just talks right over him. “It’s big enough. It’s very cost effective.”
“Fuck you,” Billy says, but Theo doesn’t need to see him to know that he’s smiling.
On to Part 2.
This story is rated NC-17, Billy Beane/Theo Epstein. Please don't read it if you're not OK with that kinda thing.
I tried to catch all spelling and typing errors. Sincere apologies if any remain.
Notes and images for the story may be found here, and are strongly recommended reading/viewing if you are at all unfamiliar with Billy Beane and Theo Epstein.
Disclaimer, again: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
Front Offices
1989: Billy Beane resigns from his professional baseball career after playing in parts of 6 seasons.
1995: Theo Epstein graduates from Yale University with a degree in American Studies.
June 1996: Eric Chavez is selected in the first round of the amateur draft by the Oakland Athletics.
1997: Billy Beane is hired as the general manager of the Oakland A’s. Tim Hudson is selected in the 6th round of the amateur draft by the Oakland A’s.
June 1998: Mark Mulder is selected in the first round of the amateur draft by the Oakland A’s.
1999: After studying at the San Diego School of Law, Theo Epstein passes the California bar exam. During this time he also works in the PR department of the San Diego Padres under Larry Lucchino, eventually becoming the Director of Baseball Operations. Barry Zito is selected in the first round of the amateur draft by the Oakland A’s.
December 19, 2000: The Boston Red Sox sign free agent Manny Ramirez.
Early 2002: John Henry, Larry Lucchino, and Tom Werner purchase the Boston Red Sox-- Henry as the principal owner, Werner as the chairman, Lucchino as the President and CEO.
November 2002: Theo Epstein is hired, mostly by Larry Lucchino, as the general manager of the Boston Red Sox.
-------
The best thing about Billy Beane, so far as Theo is concerned, is his brain. It’s a source of constant marvel. Not that there aren’t intelligent people around for Theo to talk to; there are, lots of them. Hell, he goes out of his way to hire them. But when it comes to other general managers, other people at his level of responsibility, Billy is the only one he’s run across who’s this smart.
Of course that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other smart GMs. Most GMs are smart, much more so than owners or regular managers, worlds smarter than the ballplayers themselves, but none of them are smart in the same way Billy is. Billy’s version of smart is a kind of roving all-consuming intelligence that aims its sharp swordpoint at one topic after another, attacking with single-minded intensity until the appropriate information has been completely eviscerated.
Theo always knew that he would be able to talk to Billy about baseball. He’s read the book, after all. But the first time Billy spent three hours talking with him about classic film history--something Theo knows far too much about, his grandfather and great-uncle having written Casablanca, his father having run the English department at BU-Theo realized that Billy was going to be a lot more fun than most other GMs.
And Theo has never been the kind of GM who objects to fun.
-------
Theo considers tapeball to be one of his crowning achievements. It is, so far as he knows, unique to the Fenway front offices, although maybe Josh and Peter have taught it to the Arizona guys now that they’ve gone over there. Tapeball is the result of a very young front office with lots of extra energy, run by a very young general manager with a mischievous streak.
It’s pretty simple. You wad up masking tape until you have something about the size and shape of a baseball, you get a bunch of people together in the hallway or in a conference room, and you throw the ball around and whack it with a fungo or something. Tapeball is played whenever Theo gets so bored that he can’t work (usually around 10 or 11 at night), sticks his head out of his office, and yells, “Tapeball!”
So far tapeball has resulted in the destruction of three framed pictures, four coffee mugs, a dozen carefully organized piles of paper, and one broken finger. The office manager, a solid woman in her late 50s hired for her capability and sense of organization, screams at them whenever she hears them playing it. Theo hired her himself, but this has never yet stopped her from chewing him out for tapeball, and it has never stopped Theo from feeling thoroughly chastened when she does. So they wait until she leaves the office, sneaking around like little kids with wiffle ball bats and wads of tape hidden behind their backs.
Theo tiptoes past her desk, quiet as he can so she has no reason to look up. He’s holding a tapeball in his hand, keeping it at his hip, on the side facing away from her.
A young woman looks up from her desk as he passes. She’s a new hire, only been here a week or two, but she’s good with numbers and is writing a new program that will crunch VORP-Value Over Replacement Player-statistics much faster and hopefully more accurately than anything they’ve been using before. It’ll improve the risk management of the team significantly if it works. Smart, young computer geeks: these are kinds of people that Theo likes to hire.
Lots of GMs think he’s crazy for this. For hiring more young people than old baseball men. For hiring more women than old baseball men. But Theo doesn’t care, has never cared. He’s going to run his team the best way he can, so that it wins the most it can, and makes the most money it can at the same time while maximizing the money put in, and to do that he doesn’t want old baseball men. He wants, often, just the opposite. He knows this well. It’s a lesson he learned from someone who knows it better than anyone else.
The young woman sees the tapeball in his hand and giggles, bringing a hand quickly up to her mouth to stifle it so that the office manager doesn’t hear. Theo favors her with a quick grin, the kind he’s best at. She grins back and looks back down at her computer screen. Her fingers fly over the keyboard so that it clicks and clacks like mechanical birdsong.
Young, technologically adept, with a mindset that allows for things like tapeball. This is how Theo runs his office, and no matter how many old baseball men tell him he’s crazy, he just needs that one vote of confidence, that one opinion he trusts, to know that he’s doing it exactly right.
-------
He wasn’t originally supposed to be in charge, not in Boston. He was Larry Lucchino’s geeky law student Director of Baseball Operations, formerly an even geekier college intern for the Orioles who stayed up all night getting the late west coast scores, writing baseball stories for the Yale Daily News.
When new ownership took over, they wanted a fresh approach working below them; the team and the franchise had both suffered too much stagnation for too long. Theo was a crazy choice, though. He was barely a kid, not just someone who had Never Played Baseball, but also someone who was Younger Than Most of the Team. One of these factors alone should have been enough to keep him far away from the job. Both together should have made it impossible for him to ever acquire it.
The first name on the list of the new Boston front office wasn’t Theo Epstein, although he secretly suspects that Lucchino was pushing for him right from the very beginning. The new front office was comprised of three men who had read all the right articles and seen quite a few baseball things themselves and who had a pretty clear idea of what they wanted. What they wanted was Billy Beane.
Of course Theo’s heard all the stories by now. The official one, the one in the book, says that Billy debated and debated and said yes but at the very last possible second said no, said it because he didn’t want to give up on something he’d started, and also so that he could be close to his family.
The unofficial story, the one not in the book, says that Billy debated and debated and said yes but at the very last possible second said no, setting off a very hushed-up legal battle over whether or not Billy had violated a contract by backing out so last-minute. The unofficial story also says that Billy was less concerned with not seeing his family and more concerned with seeing too much of certain people who were not his family, but who maybe had more claim to him in that way, and whose claim would grow the more Billy was away from his wife and his little girl. There were also whispers of something approaching alcohol abuse, but that attracted less attention, in baseball.
The unofficial unofficial story whispers something about those people Billy had to avoid being not whores, or groupies, or kids looking a little too much like him about the eyes. The unofficial unofficial story whispers about attachments rather more male in nature.
Official or unofficial story, it’s Theo who gets the call eventually, and now it doesn’t seem like Billy could ever be anywhere but Oakland.
Theo thinks that Billy must have, on some level, regretted not taking the Boston job. He might think this on his own, just from the stories, but he thinks it more especially because as soon as he took the job Billy started calling him at his office. Billy wanted to talk trades, and prospects, and the state of umpiring in baseball today, and statistics, and economics, and, after a while, real life.
At first Theo isn’t sure why Billy would call him so often; a month after Theo took the Boston job, Billy is calling once every two or three days and Theo has his office phone number, his home phone number, and both his cell phone numbers. It’s not that he objects, because Billy Beane is a legend to a certain class of baseball people, and Theo is one of those people. It’s just that he’d heard that Billy was not the most friendly or forthcoming guy in the world.
The only thing he can think of is that Billy wants something from him, and is, for strange Billy-ish reasons of his own, trying to work Theo from a different angle. This seems so wildly improbable that he has to ultimately reject it, though. Billy will do a lot of things to get a trade done, but going out of his way to befriend someone is a little much, even for him.
Anyways, they do talk trades-Billy keeps obliquely asking about Kevin Youkilis and acting like it’s no big deal, which tells Theo that he had better hold onto Youkilis as hard as he can if he knows what’s good for his team-but Billy doesn’t press the issue in a dead-serious-need-this-trade way.
It’s sometimes almost as though the whole Kevin Youkilis thing, the whole Greek God of Walks story and all that, is just an excuse for Billy to call Theo up whenever the fancy strikes him. This seems improbable too, but Theo, phone cradled bemusedly to his head in his office after hours, can’t come up with anything better.
-------
2003: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is published and released.
January 22, 2003: The Boston Red Sox sign free agent David Ortiz following his unconditional release from the Minnesota Twins.
2004: The Oakland A’s sign Eric Chavez to a 6 year, $66 million contract extension.
-------
General manager of the Boston Red Sox. It still hasn’t quite sunk in. He goes up to his executive suite (his executive suite!) when the ballpark is empty and stares past sheet glass windows to the Green Monster. He remembers, as a little kid, coming to Fenway and gazing in awe at that very same wall, and although it didn’t have seats on top of it when he was growing up, its very greenness and monstrosity were two adjectival constants in his young life, just the same today.
He can see the Citgo sign peeking over the Monster, and it makes him smile. That’s been around for a while too.
It’s the same for children all over New England, and for a lot of adults. This is a big responsibility, and, staring at the white scoreboard scribed on the classically drab green, Theo is not likely to forget it.
-------
July 31, 2004: The Boston Red Sox trade Nomar Garciaparra to the Cubs in a 4-team deal that nets them Orlando Cabrera and Doug Mientkiewicz.
October 27, 2004: The Boston Red Sox win the World Series for the first time since 1918.
December 10- 13, 2004: The 2004 Winter Meetings meet in Anaheim, CA.
-------
“So,” Billy says, voice a little staticky, “freeing up roster space any time soon?” The phone crackles on his end and there’s some faint garbled radio-voice-noise. Theo glances at the clock. Eleven pm in his office means 8 pm in Billy’s office, but Billy doesn’t sound like he’s in his office. This probably means that Billy is in his car, driving around and around the city so that he doesn’t go crazy pacing around the stadium or his house or wherever it is that he’s actually supposed to be.
“You’re a fucking shark, Billy.”
“Mmmm. A shark.” There’s a pause, during which Theo can imagine Billy concentrating on getting his car around a sharp turn, phone clamped tight between his ear and his shoulder. “Why would you say that? You bleeding?” It’s late 2004 and Billy obviously has something on his mind.
“Not yet.” Theo is thinking about the potential deal he’s trying to work out with Edgar Renteria. Tony LaRussa had been saying some unflattering things about Edgar’s fortitude, and Theo has spent most of the day reassuring everyone in Boston that Edgar will be fine. He’s not entirely sure of this himself, but if he says it enough times he’s hoping that he’ll get there.
“Yeah? Managing a post-Series team treating you good?”
Theo laughs. “It’s not that different from managing any other kinda team in the offseason. Just with more publicity stunts.”
“Publicity stunts.” The disgust in Billy’s voice is evident. “Poor fucker.”
“I’ll live.”
“You seem to have the knack for it.” Billy is working up to whatever it is he really wants to say. Theo can feel it coming.
“Last I checked you were alive too, Billy. I’d say that means you have just as much a knack for living.”
“You know what I mean. Living through the crazy shit you do.”
Theo pauses. This is a weird kind of statement, even from Billy, who is in the habit of routinely making what other people might call weird statements. It’s not like Theo’s a daredevil mountain climber or a sky diver or something; he’s not in the habit of doing crazy things that it would be hard to survive. Unless, of course, Billy is talking careers, in which case…
“You mean Nomar?”
“I always mean Nomar.”
It seems like ever since Theo has known Billy, Billy has been obsessed with two Red Sox: Kevin Youkilis and Nomar Garciaparra. He’s obsessed with Youkilis because Youkilis represents precisely the kind of undervalued yet incredibly effective player that Billy craves, the kind of player who’s so cheap but gets on base so often. Theo would in a second believe that Billy has actual honest-to-god dreams about acquiring Youkilis.
Nomar is something else entirely. Billy is not so obsessed with Nomar as a player (too expensive, not enough production for the dollar), but he is very obsessed with Nomar as icon-that-Theo-traded-in-the-middle-of-a-season. In this sense he’s not really obsessed with Nomar, just with the kind of balls it must have taken for Theo to pull off that move. He does talk about Nomar a lot, though.
“I survived Nomar, yes.” Theo says this with a wry smile, which he hopes comes through across phone and state and time zone lines, although he never can tell. He thinks he can hear when Billy makes faces over the phone, though, so he doesn’t feel too weird about it.
“Yeah. Hang on, I’m gonna park.” There’s a squeal of tires and Theo winces sympathetically, imagining Billy jerking the car across a lane of traffic to reach whatever godforsaken parking lot he’s sighted. Probably the Coliseum parking lot, which should be skeleton-empty in these winter months. “OK. So, Nomar. That wasn’t an easy trade.”
“No.” Theo puts his feet up on his desk and tosses a tapeball up into the air, catching it easily. “But we can’t think like fans.”
“We can’t think like fans. Precisely what I’ve been saying.” Billy pauses and there’s a very faint noise that makes Theo think he’s chewing on his lower lip. Theo scratches at the tapeball, peeling up a stray sliver of masking tape. “We can’t think like players either. When you let old baseball players run teams, they act like old baseball players. They make all the wrong moves ‘cause they still want to be one of the boys. Pathetic.” Another pause, more faint lip-chewing noises, and a slight tapping, like Billy’s drumming the fingers of his free hand on the wheel. “That’s why I like you so much, kid. It’s not like talkin’ to some fat fucking idiot who wishes he was still strapping on a jock and sweating through his shorts out there.”
“Thanks,” Theo says. “Now we’re gonna get to the Winter Meetings and I’m gonna be picturing everyone in a sweaty jock.”
Billy laughs, a sharp abbreviated bark. “You think I’m joking, but I’m serious. That’s half of what’s wrong with baseball. Fat old men still dreaming about playing ball themselves.”
“I used to, you know,” Theo says.
“Used to what?”
“Want to play ball. I mean, I did play, when I was a kid-Little League and my school team and whatever. I always wanted to go pro. “
“Everyone wants to at some point. It’s the fucking American dream.” Billy is really getting worked up now. This is one of his favorite subjects. “That’s fine. That’s grade-fucking-A normal. But do you still dream about it? Do you still spend your days and nights and when-the-fuck-evers trying to be one of the ‘boys’ so they’ll let you onto the fucking field?”
“No,” Theo answers, truthfully. “I’m pretty happy looking at the field. These days I think I’d just look stupid on it.”
“There you go. That’s what I’m talking about. You’re not one of those flabby head-in-the-lightbanks jerkoffs.”
“Thanks. I think.”
Billy laughs, sounding more relaxed than he has in a while. “Yeah. You don’t have all that fucking stupid ‘wanting what you don’t got’ baggage hanging off you. Lucky guy.”
“I do what I have to do, that’s all.” Theo pauses. Thinks. “Same as you.”
“Same as me? Not quite.” Billy seems suddenly sad, almost wistful, even though wistfulness is not the kind of emotion that Theo can imagine him indulging in. “You got it down a lot better than I do.”
“Oh.” Theo pushes the tapeball along the edge of his desk with the back of a pencil. He’s not quite sure what to say. Billy, after all, is the veteran GM. Billy is the expert. Billy is the one they wrote a fucking book about.
He can hear the muted rumble of a car starting up again. “Hey,” Billy says, “I’d better get going. I’ll talk to you later. Lemme know if you need to clear some shit off your roster anytime before the Meetings.”
“Sure,” Theo says. He hangs up and stares at the tapeball. He can’t shake the feeling that he’s just missed something fairly important.
-------
The Winter Meetings are a unique baseball event because, for once, there aren’t any players or fans around: just owners and GMs and team presidents and managers. It’s a meet-up for the people who get things done behind the scenes, not on the field. Theo likes the Winter Meetings, because it cuts down on the bullshit. There’s not much good-for-TV action, so the only reporters who show up are of the print variety, and only the baseball-centric ones bother coming around. These are the reporters that Theo likes best; these are the guys he might have been.
On the other hand, the entire hotel is filled with management and management-types trying to outwit each other, so while the external bullshit level is low, the internal bullshit level is high. Everyone is kind of talking around each other, cereal-box-decoder-ring sort of silly and cautious, trying to feel each other out without giving anything away. It’s a little bit exhilarating and a lot dumb.
It’s also practically Billy’s natural habitat.
Theo spends most of the first day just figuring out who has sent whom, because some teams just send the GM and some attendants while some teams send everyone from the manager in the dugout to the team president. He orders some of his hand-picked assistants out into the fray and they report back all day long to John Henry’s hotel room, where they have a bank of big whiteboards set up. On one of the whiteboards they work up an erasable marker map of team representatives, covered in squiggly lines showing old affiliations and lines of communication. The other whiteboards will soon be filled with player names and statistics and rumored trades. The hotel room smells so strongly of marker that Henry has to go and open the window in spite of the humid California heat, just so they don’t all get lightheaded and pass out.
He listens to the reports as they roll in and makes some phone calls, reconnecting with the people who have the power to make something happen for him. He saves Billy for last and ends up calling him just after 9 at night, a little strung out from a phone call to Omar Minaya that had started out a simple exchange of pleasantries and had quickly turned into an incredibly long and complex conversation about everything in the world that had anything to do with Pedro Martinez. Theo is drained, feeling like Omar’s just peeled back his scalp and had an exciting rummage in his brain.
“You sound like shit,” is the first thing Billy Beane says to him when he picks up the phone and hears Theo’s (tired, but surely not that shitty) greeting. “Hotel bar. Table all the way to the back and in the left corner. Twenty minutes. See ya.” Then he hangs up and Theo’s left staring at his phone in a bemused way. This seems to happen a lot with Billy.
Twenty minutes later he’s in the bar, hair still spiky-wet from his shower, hoping his black collared shirt doesn’t have any creases from his admittedly haphazard packing practices. Billy’s wearing a short-sleeved bright green collared shirt, unapologetically rumpled, with very worn-looking khaki shorts. Theo reaches the table at the exact same moment that a waitress carrying two beers does. The bar is one of those incredibly dark, incredibly pretentious and modern ones, all done up in shades of black and purple and red. Everyone there is unbearably cool. The waitress smiles warmly at Theo, whose all-black outfit must pass some kind of ironic hipster code, grimaces a little at Billy, sets down the beer and stalks away.
They just stare at one another for a couple of minutes, sipping their beer. They’ve been talking for years, but haven’t actually seen each other since the last Winter Meeting, which is kind of ridiculous when Theo stops to think about it. Surely Billy could have contrived to show up when Theo was in Oakland, or he could have made the trip to Boston once in a while, but Billy usually seemed oddly determined to avoid Theo in person. Even at the last Winter Meeting they had only seen each other in a professional capacity, never over drinks, never even for an informal chat. Theo lifts his glass and glances at Billy through the yellow light of the beer. He wonders what changed. Maybe it had to do with trading Nomar, and whatever that made Billy think of him.
“Rough day?” Billy asks, leaning back in his seat.
Theo notices that Billy’s already finished half his beer and wonders if he should try to catch up. “Not that rough. Just at the end. Talked to Omar.”
Billy nods. “Me too. He wants pitching.” Theo raises an eyebrow, and Billy shakes his head. “He doesn’t want any of my guys, I think he was just covering his bases. He wants a star. A Latino star.” Billy smirks, the kind of expression that Theo has, until now, mostly had to imagine over the phone. The reality of it is not that different from his mental picture. “All my big guys are white. Omar doesn’t want shit from me.”
This puts Omar’s interest in Pedro in a new light and distracts Theo for a minute while he sifts through the implications. Eventually he looks up and realizes that Billy has been watching him with amusement. Theo smiles-guilty as charged.
“What about Chavez?”
The way that Billy’s expression slides from amused to shocked is gratifying in a way that Theo doesn’t bother to examine too closely. “Chavez? What about him?”
“He’s not white.” Theo’s grin widens as he watches Billy visibly relax into his seat. He wonders what Billy was afraid of. Maybe he thought Theo was going to make him a trade offer.
“Chavvy’s practically white. I don’t think he even speaks Spanish.” Theo raises his eyebrows, both of them this time. Billy grins and leans forward over his beer again. Obviously some Chavez-ian crisis has just been avoided, but it’s probably something that only Billy will ever know, or understand. “He’s definitely not Hispanic enough for crazy Omar Minaya and his plot to revive the Mets through cultural fucking awareness.”
It’s impossible to not laugh at this, so Theo does. He takes a long draught of beer to settle himself down before talking again. “Oh, c’mon. He’s targeting a market, right? Get more Latino fans into the team, attract better Latino players to the team. He probably thinks Latin America’s where the all new talent’s gonna come from these days.”
“Isn’t it?” Billy looks tense again.
Theo waggles his head noncommittally and smiles down at his beer.
Billy signals the waitress for more drinks and twirls his hand at Theo, telling him to finish up the beer he’s got now. Theo’s busy downing his beer when the waitress comes to take their order and doesn’t hear what Billy says, but when she comes back she’s bearing an entire tray of tiny glasses, the shots inside gleaming a rainbow of translucent jewel colors.
“Oh hell no,” Theo says, boggling at the tray. “No way in hell.”
Billy smiles in a way that quirks up one corner of his mouth and makes him look, in the muted bar light, sort of appealingly insane. “Let’s see what you’re made of, kid,” he says, and that’s when Theo realizes that Billy is probably going to get him drunk so that he can pump him for information about the next big player market. Theo also realizes that he brought this entirely on himself. He should know better than to bring up stuff like that around Billy.
As he grabs a shot and brings it to his lips, his movements mirrored by Billy, he realizes that if Billy is also getting himself drunk, this can’t be the case. But by then the shot is burning its way down his throat like vaporous liquid fire, and he doesn’t think about much else for the rest of the night.
-------
On the second day they wake up early, grab enormous cups of coffee, and reconvene in Henry’s room to look at the whiteboards, mostly still pristine. Normally the owners wouldn’t come down, but the offseason after winning the World Series is a delicate time for a team, something this ownership group knows well, and they want to be on-scene. Henry and Lucchino both made the trip, for which Theo is equal parts grateful and annoyed. At least he doesn’t have to deal with the entire front office looking over his shoulder; Werner, third member of the triumvirate Boston ownership, stayed at home to provide off-scene updates via cell phone and email.
Lucchino, already looking more strung-out and tired than a moderately hung-over Theo, hands Theo a list and tells him to get out there and start pumping.
‘Pumping’ is Boston front office vernacular for the whole business of going around trying to extract valuable information from people without giving valuable information away. Finding out who was here isn’t difficult, nobody’s trying to hide it and there isn’t anything at stake, so the assistants were able to do most of yesterday’s grunt-work. Today they have to get down to the real business of the Winter Meetings, though. Theo has to go out and earn his keep.
He’s down in the lobby busy pumping Dave Dombrowski, who is unbearably smug because the topic of everyone’s conversation is the rumor that he’s getting Kenny Rogers, and he knows it. Theo is just about to give Dombrowski up as a bad job when he sees Billy sidle into the lobby with a carefully blank look on his face. Theo asks Dombrowki another question and watches Billy over Dombrowski’s shoulder, just to see him in action.
Billy walks up to John Schuerholz and says something that immediately sets Schuerholz to smiling. Billy puts a hand between Schuerholz’s shoulder blades, all casual ease, and this, Theo knows, is Billy playing into Schuerholz’s desire to be “one of the boys.” It might look a little strange to an outsider; the dignified older man being charmed by the rumpled younger man, respect going in the wrong directions. It might look a little strange even to an insider, because anyone who knows the furor over Moneyball will know that Billy isn’t generally so well-regarded by the old school camp of baseball guys. But Theo knows what’s going on here, and he’s enjoying a chance to watch it played out to perfection right in front of him.
Billy is something that Schuerholz never was-namely, a former ballplayer, for real-and it doesn’t matter how successful Schuerholz is, how much respect he commands, he still wants what Billy has, and Billy knows this probably better than Schuerholz does. This is true of many people in baseball management, and is exactly what Billy rants about to Theo all the time. Still, to say that Billy is not above exploiting this would be like saying that the ground is not above the sky.
The thing that Theo knows, that Schuerholz does not know, is that Billy doesn’t want what he has. Billy hates the fact that he used to be a baseball player. Billy likes baseball players, but would probably be a much happier man if he had never been one. Schuerholz would know this if he had read the book, but a surprising majority of baseball people haven’t even cracked it. Some of them even think Billy himself wrote it, which is so crazy that Theo can’t even begin to argue with them if they mention it, and can only laugh. He can’t imagine Billy ever sitting in one place long enough to write a book.
He watches Billy’s mouth form a word that looks like ‘pitcher’. Two entirely separate things start happening in Theo’s brain.
In one train of thought he’s noticing that Billy is talking about pitchers with John Schuerholz, and Theo starts to think about what players could be involved in talk like that. Everyone has been saying that Billy is under a money crunch again and needs to break up the Big 3-Zito, Mulder, Hudson. If Billy’s talking about this with the Braves, that’s news, and that will have bearing on what the Red Sox do. Theo had been toying with the idea of trying to get one of the Big 3 himself.
The rest of his mind is completely given over to the task of keeping Dombrowski from realizing any of this is going on, because half of getting an advantage at these meetings is making sure no one else gets one. These two things occupy his mind so fully that he actually jumps a little bit, his shoulders and heels coming up, when Billy appears behind him and taps him on the shoulder.
“Mind if I steal him away for a bit?” Billy asks, all toothy smiles with the corners of his eyes reassuringly creased, steal him away for a bit, like they’re at a ballroom dance and Billy’s trying to politely cut in for the next song. Dombrowski nods and waves him off, obviously bored with Theo’s strategic obtuseness. Billy puts a hand in the center of Theo’s back and gently steers him towards the elevators.
“That’s not gonna work on me, y’know,” Theo mutters, allowing himself to be steered anyways.
“What’s not?”
“Your… buddy-buddy ballplayer thing.” Theo twitches the muscles of his back a little, right where Billy has his hand.
Billy laughs and gently pushes Theo into the elevator, slides his hand up Theo’s spine until it’s high enough that he can curl it around Theo’s shoulder, making Theo shiver a little. The gesture was totally unnecessary and he doesn’t know what to make of it.
“No worries, kid,” Billy says. “I’m not tryin’ to hit you up for trades… right now, anyways.”
“What’s up, then?”
The elevator door opens and Billy gives his shoulder a little tug to indicate that he should follow, then lets go and sets off down the hotel corridor. As if Theo wouldn’t follow anyways. The floor is exactly like every other residential floor in the hotel, but Billy’s moving with definite purpose, so Theo guesses that they’re heading for Billy’s room. Billy still hasn’t answered his question.
Theo has to trot a little to catch up to Billy so that he can get in stride with him. He doesn’t know who else is staying on this floor; if it was Brian Cashman he was following, he might imagine that the Yankees had rented the entire floor, but this is highly unlikely for the A’s, who, last he heard, still make players pay for their own candy bars in the clubhouse. In any event, he doesn’t want someone popping out of their room and seeing him tagging after Billy like a puppy on a leash.
Billy stops abruptly and digs a keycard out of his pocket so that he can open the door. This takes him a minute, as he’s got a ridiculous amount of things in his pockets: money, credit cards, ID cards, business cards, lots and lots of folded-up pieces of paper with undoubtedly vital baseball information on them. Theo, in a moment of tapeball-esque rebellious jocularity, puts a hand in the middle of Billy’s back. Billy stiffens imperceptibly-Theo wouldn’t be able to tell at all if he couldn’t feel Billy’s muscles tense up under his hand-but otherwise acts like he doesn’t notice.
Eventually he gets the door open, of course. The room is a lot smaller than John Henry’s room, which is probably the largest suite this hotel offers, and is smaller even than Theo’s room, which is a more modest but still two-roomed suite. Billy’s staying in the cheapest type of room here: one room with a tiny bathroom, hardly any space between the bed and the wall on the far side of the room, the foot of it entirely taken up with a little dresser with a TV on top. There’s a tiny desk, piled high with papers, and a little chair that has its seat serving as additional paper pile storage.
Billy flops himself onto the bed and turns on the TV. Theo closes the door behind him and realizes that his options are limited. He can move the papers off the desk chair, but he would probably get them out of order somehow, and he of course knows all about Billy’s enormous, volcanic rage. He could sit on the toilet in the bathroom and shout in towards Billy. Or he could sit on the bed.
After a minute Billy makes his decision for him by shifting a little away from the center of the bed and rolling his eyes towards Theo without moving any other part of his head. “C’mon,” he mutters, just barely loud enough to be heard over the TV, “I don’t have rabies.”
Theo chuckles a little and sits down, hesitating a bit before toeing off his shoes and swinging his legs up onto the bed. He looks at the TV. Billy has put on the Home and Garden Channel, something Theo cannot imagine him actually watching. He looks over at Billy and, sure enough, Billy is ignoring the TV entirely and watching Theo instead.
This is making him a little uncomfortable, but Theo thinks that’s a pretty reasonable reaction, under the circumstances. He would feel a lot better if Billy would just explain what they’re doing here. There’s no point in pretending that he hasn’t seen Billy looking at him, so he stares right back.
Eventually Billy huffs out a small laugh and turns his eyes back to the TV. Theo keeps looking at him. It’s only fair. Billy’s eyes are brown and his hair is spiked up at the front. There are a few gray hairs powdering his sideburns, but he doesn’t really look like a man in his 40s.
Theo just turned 31, and looks about 22. He looks way too young to be running a baseball team. He knows this because everyone keeps telling him so. “You’re too young,” people say, “you’re too….” They never finish the statement, waving their hands to indicate some other thing he’s too much of. Theo always wonders-too what?
Billy doesn’t really look like a guy running a baseball team either, if it comes to that. For some reason this makes Theo feel a little better. He relaxes against the headboard and watches TV with Billy for a while.
The show is called FreeStyle. Theo has never seen it before but he gets the idea quickly enough; some kind of interior decorator comes in, looks at a room in someone’s home, takes everything out of it and then puts everything back in, plus some stuff from other parts of the house, in a new way. It’s the same room, and it doesn’t cost anything, but after the designer’s done with it the room looks completely different. Billy appears to be watching very intently.
The next show after FreeStyle is called reDesign and seems to involve really, really rich people. Billy loses interest and goes back to staring at Theo.
“Trying to FreeStyle the A’s?” Theo asks. It’s cheesy and lame, but if he doesn’t get Billy talking soon, doesn’t find out why Billy dragged him up here, he’s going to have to just get up and leave. Not that he doesn’t enjoy spending time with Billy, in person, but at the Winter Meetings time is money and all that.
“Maybe.” Billy leans closer and the room suddenly seems stifling, way too small. Billy sits up so that he’s mostly between Theo and the TV, his gaze worryingly intense. “Look. Don’t you ever get sick of the bullshit?”
“The bullshit?” Theo swallows and tries to remember everything he’s done since he got here, if he’s done anything Billy would categorize as ‘bullshit’.
“The fucking bullshit that’s all over these fucking management circle jerks.” Billy leans in and grabs Theo’s arm, hard. It’s clearly very important that Theo understands this. “Don’t you just want to go up to some of these guys and fucking punch them in the head?”
Theo blinks. He can’t honestly say that he’s wanted to punch anyone in the head since he got here. That may be the fundamental difference between Billy and himself, though. Billy was fucked over by the system, so when he sees guys doing the same thing to baseball that baseball did to him, he gets angry. He wants to hit things. Theo never went into the system, so while he can recognize stupid things being done, it doesn’t ever make him particularly, personally outraged.
“Sometimes,” Billy says, tightening his fingers just below Theo’s elbow, “sometimes I get these impulses. And I’m always afraid I’m just gonna do shit. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I just have to get the fuck out of there before I do. That’s what… I was talking to those guys, that drooling idiot Schuerholz, and I just. I had to get out of there. Fuck knows what I woulda done.”
“OK.” Theo eyes Billy warily. “I understand needing to get away. Come back to your room or… whatever. But, uh. Why am I here?”
“Were you fucking listening? Sometimes I just act on those terrible fucking impulses.”
Theo wrinkles his nose a little, thinking that over. “I’m an impulse?”
“You are the most impossible fucking kid in the whole fucking universe,” Billy says, and that’s when he leans in and kisses him.
-------
The third day starts out as a big blur. Somehow Theo finds his way to Henry’s room at a not-too-late hour, and somehow a big cup of coffee ends up in front of him. He closes his eyes and just inhales the steam for a while. There’s a lot more on the whiteboards than there was the day before, but he can’t focus on them just now.
Billy Beane kissed him. Billy Beane put his hand down Theo’s pants. Theo’s not sure if he should feel assaulted or not; it’s not like he encouraged Billy, or did anything, really. He’s pretty sure he was in shock the whole time. He’s still in shock.
Billy Beane humped Theo’s leg until he generated an enormous wet spot on the front of his rumpled khaki shorts, and a little bit on Theo’s pants. Will semen come out of black denim? He doesn’t know. He contemplates asking Lucchino for advice and has to put his head down on the desk lest he burst into incredibly inappropriate laughter.
When he picks his head up, Henry is looking at him oddly. Theo taps the rim of his coffee cup and Henry nods sympathetically. He thinks Theo’s been up all night working. It would be just like Theo to do that.
He wonders what Henry would say if Theo told him what he really did last night. “Oh, yeah, so, I think the Braves are going after one of the Big 3, and Dombrowski’s definitely getting Rogers, pitching is gonna be expensive. The Mets want Pedro. I had a nice long talk with Billy Beane, then I let him go to third base with me and afterwards he freaked out and locked himself in the bathroom.” Third base. Is it possible that Billy broke his mind? He’s not sure. Maybe. He’s never touched another guy before. He’s never even thought about it.
Lucchino’s talking about Kevin Millar. Theo knows he should be paying attention; this meeting may basically decide Millar’s fate, and he likes Millar a lot, wants to do right by the guy, but he just can’t concentrate.
Billy had come and slumped on top of Theo, panting. He had lifted himself up, looked down at his shorts, then looked at Theo. Theo has an idea of what he looked like because he had a good long look at himself in the mirror after he managed to stagger back to his own room: shirt all wrinkled up and hanging funny (somehow Billy managed to rip the bottom button clean off), pants gapping open, hair sticking up crazily, his eyes huge and staring. He probably looked slightly worse than that, right after the fact, and the crazy intensity had dropped out of Billy’s eyes like the bottom dropping out of a carnival ride.
“Shit,” Billy had said. Then he had gotten up and locked himself in the bathroom.
Theo had attempted to put himself back together-a failing attempt because of the missing shirt button, and his hair would not lie flat at all, and he had still been dazed. He had also been half hard himself, and part of him wanted to stay, grab some of Billy’s baseball stat sheets and jerk off into them, leaving them spread on the bed like some kind of ruined symbol for Billy to decipher later, but even in his stunned state he had recognized that as a direction in which madness lay.
After stumbling to the elevator and getting off at the wrong floor twice, thankfully not meeting any other GMs, he had made it back to his own room. There were papers spread over his desk, things he should attend to, but he hadn’t been able to touch them. All he could do was turn his shower on, strip naked and sit under the spray for two hours, eyes closed and silently thanking the enormous hotel hot water tanks.
With a huge effort Theo turns his mind back to what Lucchino’s saying. “A couple years ago we might have been able to send him back to Japan for something, but they’re not stupid, it’s not going to happen now. I mean, the guy’s a whole lot fatter than he used to be, at the very least.”
“Look,” Theo says, then stops, surprised by the hoarseness of his own voice. He sounds like he spent the whole night screaming. Everyone swivels around to stare at him, and he carefully clears his throat before continuing. “OK. Look. His numbers weren’t bad. He’s up for arbitration at the end of next season. Why don’t we just hang onto him for a year, and if his numbers drop again we just won’t go to arb next winter. It’s not like he’s too expensive, and at worst he’s a bench player who keeps the clubhouse happy.”
Peter Woodfork, one of Theo’s assistants, is tapping at the keyboard of his laptop and looking mutinous. Peter’s a big numbers guy, and Theo knows that phrases like “player who keeps the clubhouse happy” make Peter grind his molars, but Millar’s numbers weren’t bad this year, and sometimes being the GM means looking at the bigger picture.
Theo knows what Billy would say. Billy would say that Theo should trade Millar now, while his value is high, because he and Theo both know that it’s probably going to come down soon, but Theo will probably be able to find someone who doesn’t know that, or is idiotically willing to ignore it. Billy would say that hanging onto Millar now is sentimental and weak-willed. But the Athletics are not the Red Sox.
“We need to keep Manny happy,” Henry says. “That’s going to be hard in his first season away from Pedro in 4 years.”
Theo nods. “Right. Pedro and Millar… that would be asking Manny to be mature.”
Everyone looks at each other, grimly smiling. Asking Manny to be mature would be like asking the ocean to turn bright pink. You could ask all day long and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference.
“Millar for another year.” Lucchino crisply taps the small stack of papers in front of him against the table, evening out the edges before setting it aside. An aide starts making squeaky notes on the whiteboards, filling in Millar’s spot on their roster and erasing potential replacements and trades they had been considering.
Peter sets his jaw and goes back to furiously typing at his laptop. Theo looks over at him with a sympathetic half-smile. Retaining Millar the very height of his value seems stupid to Peter, who gets paid to analyze numbers and statistical trends, and it would look stupid to Billy, who has the payroll of a Little League team to work with. Theo sees the bigger picture, and Theo, thanks to the owners, has money. He can take all of this information-- statistical, financial, logical, emotional-and turn it into a real winning team. That and a healthy dose of luck got them a World Series ring.
The Red Sox had always had the talent. What they had needed was someone willing to make the unbiased move, the unpopular move, so long as it was the right one. Henry and Lucchino and Werner had thought that Billy was that person: he was certainly crazy enough and smart enough. Billy, though, hadn’t been the one to pick up the reins. Theo was.
Boston thought they needed someone crazy. Billy knew. At the last minute he had realized that craziness wasn’t what the Red Sox really needed. Theo’s not sure what it is that he has that Billy doesn’t, what it is that makes him what the Red Sox actually required, but he’s starting to understand.
Whatever that thing is, it’s more or less the same thing that drives Billy to call him after hours, at all hours. Maybe it’s the same thing that made Billy impulsively pull him up to a hotel room in the middle of the Winter Meetings.
None of this will make sense, Theo guesses, rubbing the back of his neck and letting the coffee soothe him back into sanity, until he figures out what that thing is.
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December 16, 2004: The Oakland A’s trade Tim Hudson to the Atlanta Braves for Juan Cruz, Dan Meyer, and Charles Thomas.
December 17, 2004: The Boston Red Sox sign free agent David Wells.
December 18, 2004: The Oakland A’s trade Mark Mulder to the St. Louis Cardinals for Dan Haren, Kiko Calero, and Daric Barton.
December 19, 2004: The Boston Red Sox sign free agent Edgar Renteria.
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It’s a week after the Winter Meetings before Theo hears from Billy again, and that’s just a terse, business-like phone call to tell Theo that Billy’s traded Tim Hudson to the Braves for Charles Thomas and Juan Cruz and Dan Meyer, totally underwhelming names to Theo, except maybe for Meyer. Apparently he thinks Theo deserves to know, maybe he feels a little guilty that he never really gave Theo a chance to bid on Hudson if he’d wanted to, or maybe it’s for some other reason. The guilt is definitely there, though.
“It’s OK, he’s a Georgia kid, they love that hometown shit in Atlanta,” Billy says. He sounds flat, like he’s rehearsed his lines.
“What about Mulder?” Theo thumps a tapeball against the wall next to his desk. “What about Zito? How’re they taking it?”
Billy makes a soft sound, sucking on his lip, maybe. “Who the fuck cares? It’s not their fucking place to give a fuck about who gets traded and who doesn’t.”
“That’s stupid,” Theo says. He lets the tapeball drop with a dull thud to the center of his blotter and starts picking at the sleeve of his sweater. “Shit like that affects the team. ‘Specially shit like I heard was up with the three of them.”
Silence, broken a little by the slight whistling sound of Billy breathing down the line. Eventually he sucks in a breath and says, “Like. What kinda shit.” He’s tense and controlled, his voice coiled with warning.
“That they were a little too close to each other.” Theo drops his sleeve and thumps the tapeball against the wall again. He hasn’t heard that, not exactly, but he’s heard plenty of jokes, and that’s almost the same thing. He’s a little mad at Billy anyways; if Billy was going to freak out and avoid him, maybe Billy shouldn’t have done all that shit in the first place. Theo has been pretty much a bystander for this whole thing.
“That’s.” Billy sounds somewhere between laughing and screaming. “Where the fuck did you hear bullshit like that.”
“Around. People talk. Baseball people talk, Billy, especially about shit like that.”
“Shit like that. God.” Billy sighs. “I told you about the fact that I have poor fucking impulse control, right?”
“You did,” Theo says, even as even can be. He’s not going to give an inch here.
“So I understand if you don’t want to talk, you know. Anymore. But I thought, Hudson, I should let you know. I know you were kinda interested.”
“Oh, fuck you, honestly. Why would I not want to talk anymore?” Billy makes a surprised sound, like a startled cat, and Theo has to laugh. “Oh come on. Like anyone else is as fun to talk baseball with. Don’t be an asshole.”
“I’m all asshole,” Billy mutters, but it’s a reflexive statement, there’s no poison in it.
“All asshole? Really? Will you let me see for myself?”
The background breathing cuts off as Billy moves his head away from the phone for a minute. When he comes back, he sounds strangled. “OK. I’m gonna just. I’m gonna hang up, and I’ll call you back when I’ve had a chance to figure out how to talk to you without you killing me dead over the phone. I don’t… do you even… OK, no, don’t even answer that. I’ll call you back when I finish trading Mulder.”
“Wait, you’re trading Mulder? Where’s he going? Who’s getting Mulder?”
Theo is still yelling, hunched over and intent, tapeball and drama forgotten, who’s getting Mulder, as Billy hangs up the phone.
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Billy calls two days later to tell Theo that the Cardinals are getting Mulder, and the A’s are getting, among others, pitcher Danny Haren in return.
“Jerk.” Theo’s in his office again, throwing pencils at the ceiling, probably the only person in the entire stadium right now. He and Billy had talked a lot about Haren for a month or so, back in July. Theo had wanted Haren pretty badly. “So Zito’s the one you’re keeping, huh?”
“We’re keeping Zito until he becomes a free agent,” Billy says, carefully precise. “Then we won’t be able to afford him. Fucker’s probably going to hire Boras.”
“We could afford him. If you want, you know, we could buy him up. Let you visit him sometimes.” Zito kenneling. The idea makes Theo smile.
“I hope he’ll go National League.” Billy seems earnest, sincere, and Theo realizes with a start that both Hudson and Mulder were traded to National League teams, like Billy can’t stand to see his former players any more than he absolutely has to, like he doesn’t want them running into him or Zito on two or more roadtrips a year.
“How’s Zito holding up as the last of the Big 3?” Theo can’t help but think of Zito as a kind of taller, skinnier, whiter Manny Ramirez. He’s heard some weird shit about Zito, on and off the field, and his own personal reference for weird, zoney, moody, idiot savant ballplayers is of course Manny. Manny, he knows, would not take the trading of his two favorite friends away very gracefully, and he imagines that Zito, in his own Zito way, is much the same.
There’s a pause, during which Theo finally gets a pencil to stick in the ceiling. “Zito will get over it,” Billy says, and he sounds like he’s trying to convince himself as much as he’s trying to convince Theo. “Eventually. Especially if he doesn’t have to see me around.” There’s another pause, giving Theo time to puzzle over that one. “Look. If you’re not. Uh, you didn’t seem mad, so. I mean, if you’re not mad, can I. Uh. I’ve never really done the tourist shit in Boston, you think I could maybe.”
There’s yet another pause, during which Theo realizes that Billy is asking if he can come visit without actually asking. “Sure. Tell me when you can fly out, I’ll pick you up.” Theo’s already leaning for his planner, scrabbling for a fresh pencil, ready to mark this down. Billy isn’t being very sneaky about this; he obviously wants to get out of Oakland for some reason, did something to someone and needs time to let it all cool down, but Theo isn’t going to pry. Not just yet, anyways.
“Uhhh. How about.” There’s a clicking sound, Billy’s probably booking a flight on his computer right this very second. “The 22nd? Eight pm?”
That’s only in two days, but Theo erases a couple of lines and pencils it in. “Sure. No problem. Call me when you touch down, that’ll give me enough time to get out there.”
“OK.” More clicking. “Do you know, uh, a hotel that’s not where the teams stay…”
“I know my apartment, where you can stay.” Billy starts to make a noise of protest and Theo just talks right over him. “It’s big enough. It’s very cost effective.”
“Fuck you,” Billy says, but Theo doesn’t need to see him to know that he’s smiling.
On to Part 2.