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The Trading Desk

It was late July of last year, July of last year, which is to say that Mike Magnante had picked a bad time to pitch poorly. Mags, as everyone called him, had come in against Cleveland in the top of the seventh with two runners on and a three-run lead. The first thing he did was to walk Jim Thome -- no one could blame him for that. He then gave up a bloop single to Milton Bradley, and the inherited runners scored -- just plain bad luck, that. But then he threw three straight balls to Lee Stevens. Stevens dutifully took a strike, then waited for Mags to throw his fifth pitch.

After the game the first question the Oakland A's' general manager, Billy Beane, asked his manager, Art Howe, was why he brought in Magnante. Howe's first answer was that he thought that Mags, the lefty, would be effective against a left-handed slugger like Thome. Which was just more conventional baseball nonsense, in Beane's view, since Mags hadn't got anyone out in weeks. Howe's second answer was that Beane put Mags on the team, and if a guy is on the team, you need to use him. Howe won't say this directly to Beane, but he'll probably think it. The coaching staff had grown tired of hearing Beane holler at them for using Magnante. ''The guy has got braces on both legs,'' said Rick Peterson, the pitching coach. ''We're not going to use him as a pinch runner. If you don't want us to use him, trade him.''

Magnante went into his stretch and looked for the signal. He had recently turned 37 and was four days shy of the 10 full years of big-league service he needed to collect a full pension. Paul DePodesta, Oakland's assistant general manager, often said that ''for guys to be available to us, there usually has to be something wrong with them,'' and it wasn't hard to see what was wrong with Mags, to discern the defect that made him available to a strapped team like Oakland. He was pear-shaped and slack-jawed and looked less like a professional baseball player than most of the beat reporters who covered the team.

Magnante made an almost perfect pitch to Lee Stevens, a fastball low and away. The catcher was set up low and outside. When you see the replay, you understand that he had hit his spot. If he missed, it was only by half an inch. It was the pitch Mike Magnante wanted to make. Good pitch, bad count. The ball caught the fat part of the bat. It rose and rose, and the two runners on base began to circle ahead of the hitter. It was Lee Stevens's first home run as a Cleveland Indian. By the time the ball landed, the first and third basemen were closing in on the mound like bailiffs, and Art Howe was on the top of the dugout steps. Magnante let in five runs and got nobody out. It wasn't the first time that he had been knocked out of a game, but it wasn't often he had been knocked out on his pitch. That's what happens when you're 37 years old: you do the things you always did, but the results are somehow different.

The game was effectively over. The Indians' own left-handed relief pitcher, Ricardo Rincon, struck out David Justice on three pitches and got Eric Chavez to pop out on four. The contrast cast Mags in unflattering light. The A's had the weakest left-handed relief pitching in the league, and the Indians had some of the strongest. To see the difference, Billy Beane didn't even need to watch the game.

The next day, when Billy Beane sits upright in his office, a few yards from Oakland's Coliseum, he faces a wall covered entirely by a white board and, on it, the names of the several hundred players controlled by the Oakland A's. Mike Magnante's name is still on that board. Swiveling around to his rear, he faces another white board with the names of the nearly 1,200 players on other major league rosters. Ricardo Rincon's name is on that board. At this point in the year Beane doesn't really need to look at these boards to make connections; he knows every player on other teams that he wants, and every player in his own system that he doesn't want. The trick is to persuade other teams to buy his guys for more than they are worth and to sell their guys for less than they are worth. Jermaine Dye, Johnny Damon, Ray Durham, Mark Ellis, Cory Lidle, Chad Bradford: in just the past few years Billy Beane acquired an obscene amount of talent at so little cost to himself that he is finding other teams reluctant to do business with him. The Cleveland Indians are not yet one of those teams.

Waiting for the Cleveland general manager, Mark Shapiro, to call him back, Beane distracts himself by paying attention to several things at once. On his television is ''Lou Dobbs Moneyline.'' On his desk is the most recent issue of Harvard Magazine, containing an article about a Harvard professor of statistics named Carl Morris. The article explains how Morris had used statistical theory to determine the number of runs a team could expect to score in the different states of a baseball game. No outs with no one on base: .537. No outs with a runner on first base: .902. And so on for each of the 24 possible states of a baseball game. ''We knew this three years ago,'' Beane says, ''and Harvard thinks it's original.''

He shoves a wad of tobacco into his upper lip, then turns back to his computer screen. He was made the Oakland G.M. just before the 1998 season. Not long before that, the Oakland A's figured out that they were long-term poor. Their financial disadvantage was not only permanent but growing. Each year they would have less money to spend on players than the Yankees and the Red Sox. They responded by creating, in effect, a research-and-development department inside the organization. Oakland R.&D. at first consisted of applying hidden truths about baseball unearthed by hobbyists -- Harvard statistics professors, research scientists, Wall Street analysts turned amateur baseball analysts -- and ignored by organized baseball. This practice had evolved into something more elaborate and original. The reason Billy Beane, high-school graduate, could condescend to abstruse statistical arguments in Harvard Magazine was that he himself had, for several years, employed graduates of Harvard to make abstruse statistical arguments.

Paul DePodesta was the main one. In the past few years DePodesta helped Beane to put a dollar value on everything from foot speed (almost always overpriced), defense (often overpriced and more often misunderstood) and offense (better understood but still not so well that there wasn't money to be made from a more nuanced understanding of its origins). Batting average wasn't usually worth what it cost, but on-base percentage was usually worth a great deal more. So much more, in fact, that if you set about buying as much of it as you could, you could build a winning team with very little money at all. There were all sorts of ancillary traits in a hitter -- the number of pitches he saw per plate appearance, for instance -- that had concrete value to a baseball offense but that were treated by most baseball people as worthless.

Pitching was another subject. You could make a fair living as a G.M. selling flamethrowers and buying guys who found other, subtler ways to get outs.

At the bottom of the Oakland experiment was a willingness to rethink baseball: how it is managed, how it is played, who is best suited to play it and why. The Oakland front office was on a perpetual search for new baseball knowledge. It had studied everything from the market price of foot speed to the inherent difference between the average major league player and the superior Triple A one. This experiment in bringing science to baseball had some odd consequences.

One was to turn the manager in the dugout into a mere functionary and concentrate rare powers in the office of the general manager: everything of importance, from whether to steal bases to which relief pitchers to use and when, was decided in advance by the G.M. Which was useful. The benefits of bunting and stealing -- and a lot of other tactical decisions that made field managers legends -- usually did not justify their cost.

Maybe the simplest inefficiency of all were the significant shifts that occurred in the prices of players over the course of a season. On July 30, the eve of last season's trading deadline, Billy Beane is still pursuing players, and one of them is the Cleveland Indians' left-hander Ricardo Rincon. At that very moment, Rincon is still just a few yards away, inside the visitors' locker room, dressing to play the second game of a three-game series against the A's. The night before he threw only seven pitches. His arm, no doubt, feels good. The Cleveland Indians have given up any hope of winning this year, and are now busy selling off their parts. ''The premier left-handed set- up man is just a luxury we can't afford,'' Shapiro says, as a way of explaining why he has been shopping Rincon around the league. Beane has found out -- he won't say how -- that the other bidder is the San Francisco Giants and that the Giants' offer may be better than his. All Beane has offered the Indians is a minor-league second baseman named Marshall MacDougal.

For three of the past four years, the Oakland A's have played like a different team after the All-Star break than before it. The previous year, 2001, they had been almost bizarrely better: 44-43 before the break, 58-17 after it. Since the All-Star game was created, in 1933, no other team had ever won so many of its final 75 games. The reason the Oakland A's, as run by Billy Beane, played as if they were a different team in the second half of the season is that they were a different team. As spring turned to summer, the market allowed Beane to do things that he could do at no other time of the year. The bad teams lost hope. With the loss of hope came a desire to cut costs. With the desire to cut costs came the dumping of players. As the supply of players rose, their prices fell.

Halfway through the 2002 season, Billy Beane was able to acquire players he could never have afforded at the start of the season. And by late July, his antennae for bargains quivered. Shopping for players just before the deadline was like shopping for used designer dresses on the day after the Oscars, or for secondhand engagement rings in Reno. His goal at the start of the season was to build a team good enough to remain in contention until the end of June. On the first of July, the A.L. West standings looked like this:

Seattle 52-30

Anaheim 47-33-4GB

Oakland 46-36-6GB

Texas 35-45-16GB

Having kept the team close enough to hope, he could now go out and shop for whatever else he needed to get to the playoffs. When he set off on this shopping spree, he kept in mind five simple rules:

1) No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo. When you have no money, you can't afford long-term solutions, only short-term ones. You have to always be upgrading.

2) The day you say, ''I have to do something,'' you're in trouble. Because you are going to make a bad deal. You can always recover from the player you didn't sign. You may never recover from the player you signed at the wrong price.

3) Know exactly what every player in baseball is worth to you. You can put a dollar figure on it.

4) Know exactly who you want and go after him. (Never mind whom they say they want to trade.)

5) Every deal you do will be publicly scrutinized by subjective opinion. If I'm the C.E.O. of I.B.M., I'm not worried that every personnel decision I make is going to wind up on the front page of the business section. Not everyone believes that he knows everything about the personal computer. But everyone who ever picked up a bat thinks he knows baseball. To do this well, you have to ignore the newspapers.

Billy Beane compensated for his complete inability to heed Rule No. 5 by fanatically heeding the other four. Otherwise, his approach to the market for baseball players was by its nature unsystematic. Unsystematic -- and yet incredibly effective.

For more than a decade, the people who run professional baseball have argued that the game was ceasing to be an athletic competition and becoming a financial one. The gap between rich and poor teams in baseball is far greater than in football and basketball, and widening rapidly. In the middle of the 2002 season, the richest team, the New York Yankees, had a payroll of $133.4 million, while two of the poorest teams, the Oakland A's and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, had payrolls of less than a third of that. A decade before, the highest-payroll team, the New York Mets, spent about $44 million on players, and the lowest-payroll team, the Cleveland Indians, a bit more than $8 million. The growing raw disparities meant that only the rich teams could afford the best players. A poor team could afford only the maimed and the inept, and was almost certain to fail. Or so argued the people who ran baseball.

But when you actually look at what happened over the past few years, you have to wonder. The bottom of each division has been littered with teams -- the Rangers, the Orioles, the Dodgers, the Mets -- that have spent huge sums and failed spectacularly. On the other end of the spectrum is Oakland. For the past four years, working with one of the lowest payrolls in the game, the Oakland A's have won as many regular-season games as any other team except the Atlanta Braves. They've been to the playoffs three years in a row and twice taken the richest team in baseball, the Yankees, to within a few outs of elimination. How on earth did they do it? As early as 2000, Commissioner Bud Selig took to calling the Oakland A's' success ''an aberration,'' but that was less an explanation than an excuse not to grapple with the questions: how did they do it? What was their secret?

And there did, indeed, appear to be a secret. A leading independent authority on baseball finance, a Manhattan lawyer named Doug Pappas, pointed out a quantifiable distinction between Oakland and the rest of baseball. The least you could spend on a 25-man team, if everyone was paid the minimum salary, was $5 million, plus $2 million more for players on the disabled list and the remainder of the 40-man roster. The huge role of luck in any baseball game, and the relatively small difference in ability between most major leaguers and the rookies who might work for the minimum wage, meant that the fewest games a minimum-wage baseball team would win during a 162-game season was something like 49. The Pappas measure of financial efficiency was this: How many dollars over the minimum $7 million does each team pay for each win over its 49th? How many marginal dollars does a team spend for each marginal win? Over the past three years Oakland has paid about half a million dollars per win. The only other team in six figures has been the Minnesota Twins, at $675,000 per win. The most profligate rich franchises -- the Baltimore Orioles, for instance, or the Texas Rangers -- have paid nearly $3 million for each win, or more than six times what Oakland paid. Oakland seemed to be playing a different game from everyone else.

Anyone who really wanted to understand how this team with no money kept winning more and more games would do well to examine the impact of Billy Beane's shopping sprees.

On July 25, he acquired the All-Star second baseman Ray Durham, plus a portion of the money to pay his salary, from the White Sox, who had abandoned all hope for their season. Now he has sights on Ricardo Rincon, and the absence of ready cash is becoming a problem. Rincon is owed about $508,000 for the rest of the season, and that is $508,000 the Oakland A's' owners will not agree to spend. To get Rincon, Beane not only has to persuade Shapiro that his is the highest bid; he also has to find the money to pay Rincon's salary. Where? If he gets Rincon, he won't need Mike Magnante. No one else does, either, so he is unlikely to save money there. No matter what he does, the A's will wind up eating Magnante's salary. But he might well be able to move Mike Venafro, the low-budget left-handed reliever he just sent down to Triple A. Venafro is a lot younger than Magnante. Other teams might be interested in him.

This gives Beane an idea: auction Mike Venafro to teams that might be competing with him for Ricardo Rincon.

He knows that the San Francisco Giants are after Rincon. He knows also that the Giants don't have much to spend and that, if offered a cheaper option, might be less inclined to stretch for Rincon. ''Let's make them skinnier,'' he says, and picks up the phone and calls Brian Sabean, the G.M. of the Giants. He'll offer Venafro to the Giants for almost nothing. In a stroke he'll raise cash he needs to buy Rincon (because he won't have to pay Venafro's salary) and possibly also reduce the Giants' interest in Rincon, as they'll now see they have, in Venafro, an alternative.

Brian Sabean listens to Beane's magnanimous offer of Mike Venafro; all Beane wants in return is a minor-league player. Sabean says he's interested. ''Sabes,'' Beane says, after laying out his proposal. ''I'm not asking for much here. Think it over and call me back.''

The moment he hangs up, he calls Mark Shapiro, current owner of Ricardo Rincon, and tells him that he has the impression that the market for Rincon is softening. Whoever the other bidder is, he says, Shapiro ought to make sure his offer is firm.

As he puts down the phone, DePodesta pokes his head into the office. ''Billy, what about the Mets on Venafro? Just to have options.''

''The Mets could be after Rincon,'' Beane says.

The phone rings. It's Mark Shapiro, calling right back. He tells Beane that, by some amazing coincidence, the other buyer for Rincon has just called to lower his offer. Beane leans forward in his chair, chaw clenched in his upper lip, as if waiting to see if a fly ball hit by an Oakland A will clear the wall. He raises his fist as it does. ''I just need to talk to my owner,'' he says. ''Thanks, Mark.''

He puts down the phone. ''We have a two-hour window on Rincon,'' he says. He now has a purpose: two hours to find $508,000 from another team, or to somehow sell his owner on the deal. Never mind that his owner, Steve Schott, has already said that he won't spend the money to buy Rincon. He shouts across the hall. ''Paul! What's left on Venafro's contract?''

''Two hundred and seventy-five thousand, two hundred and seventy-three dollars.''

He does the math. If he unloads Venafro, he'll still need to find another $233,000 to cover Rincon's salary, but he isn't thinking about that just yet. His owners have told him only that they won't eat 508 grand; they've said nothing about eating 233 grand. He has two hours to find someone who will take Venafro off his hands. The Mets are a good idea. Beane picks up the phone and dials the number for Steve Phillips, the general manager of the Mets. A secretary answers.

''Denise,'' Beane says, ''Billy Beane, vice president and general manager of the Oakland Athletics. Denise, who is the best-looking G.M. in the game?'' Pause. ''Exactly right, Denise. Is Steve there?''

Steve isn't there, but someone named Jimmy is. ''Jimmy,'' Beane says. ''Hey, how you doin'? Got a question for you. You guys looking for a left-handed reliever?''

He raises his fist again. Yes! He tells Jimmy about Venafro. ''I can make it real quick for you,'' he says.

How quick?

''Fifteen minutes?''

Fine.

''I can give you names in 15 minutes,'' Beane says. ''Yeah, look, I'd do this if I were you. And I'm not [expletive] you here Jimmy. I'm being honest with you.''

Paul sees what is happening and walks out the door before Beane is finished. ''I gotta find some more prospects,'' he says. He needs to find who they want from the Mets in exchange for Venafro.

Beane hangs up. ''Paul! We got 15 minutes to get names.'' Paul's already in his office flipping through various handbooks that list all the players owned by the Mets. Beane takes the seat across from him and grabs one of the books; together they rifle through the entire Mets farm system, stat by stat. It's a new game: maximize what you get from the Mets farm system inside of 15 minutes. They're like a pair of shoppers who have been allowed into Costco before the official opening time and told that anything they can cart out the door in the next 15 minutes they can have free. The A's' president, Michael Crowley, walks by and laughs. ''What's the rush?'' he says. ''We don't need Rincon until the sixth or seventh inning.''

''What about Bennett?'' DePodesta asks.

''How old is he?'' Beane asks.

''Twenty-six.''

''He's 26 and in Double A? Forget it.''

Beane stops at a name and laughs. ''Virgil Chevalier? Who is that?''

''How about Eckert,'' Paul says. ''But he's 25.''

''How about this guy?'' Beane says and laughs. ''Just for his name alone. Furbush!''

Anyone older than about 23 who is desirable will be too obviously desirable for the Mets to give up. They're looking for a player whose promise they have a better view of than the Mets have. Someone very young. It will be someone they do not know and have never seen, and have researched for 30 seconds.

''How about Garcia?'' Paul DePodesta asks.

''What's Garcia? Twenty-two?''

''Twenty-two,'' DePodesta says.

He shows Beane the stats for Garcia, and Beane says: ''Garcia's good. I'll ask for Garcia.'' He gets up and walks back to his office cursing. ''I know what I'll do. Why don't we go back to them and say, 'Give us cash too!'? What's the difference between Rincon and Venafro?''

Paul punches numbers into his calculator: ''232,923.''

''I'll ask him for 233 grand plus the prospect,'' Beane says. ''The money doesn't mean anything to the Mets.''

Being poor means treating rich teams as petty cash dispensers. If he can get the Mets to give him the 233, he doesn't even need to call his owner. He can just make the deal himself.

He pauses before he picks up the phone. ''Should I call Sabean first?'' he's asking himself; the answer, also provided by himself, is no. As Beane calls Steve Phillips, Paul reappears. ''Billy,'' he says, ''you might also ask for Duncan. What can they say? He's hitting .217.''

''Who would we rather have, Garcia or Duncan?'' Beane asks.

The Mets' secretary answers before DePodesta. Beane leans back and smiles. ''Denise,'' he says, ''Billy Beane, vice president and general manager of the Oakland Athletics. Denise, who is the coolest G.M. in the game?'' Pause. ''Right again, Denise.''

When he was a young man, Billy Beane could beat anyone at anything, and often did. As a freshman in high school, Beane was the quarterback on the football team and later the high scorer on the basketball team; but it was on the baseball field that he truly excelled. By his junior year he was 6-foot-4, 180 pounds, and his high-school diamond was infested with major league scouts. In the first big game after Beane came to the attention of baseball scouts, he pitched a two-hitter, stole four bases and hit three triples. He encouraged strong feelings in the older men who were paid to imagine what kind of pro ballplayer a young man might become.

The boy had a body you could dream on: ramrod straight and lean but not so lean you couldn't imagine him filling out. And that face! Beneath an unruly mop of dark brown hair, the boy had the sharp features that the scouts loved. In the late 1970's, when Beane was coming of age, some scouts still believed they could tell by the structure of a young man's face not only his character but also his future in pro ball. They had a phrase they used: ''the Good Face.'' Beane had the Good Face.

What the scouts failed to notice is what happened when things did not go well for Beane on the field: a wall came down between him and his talent, and he didn't know any other way to get through the wall than to try to smash a hole in it. The moment Billy failed, he went looking for something to break. It wasn't merely that he didn't like to fail; it was as if he didn't know how to fail. The scouts never considered this. By the end of Beane's senior year the only question they had about Beane was, Can I get him? And the answer was a firm no. Beane insisted that he didn't want to play pro ball; he wanted to go to Stanford on a joint football and baseball scholarship. But the New York Mets took him in the first round anyway, one thing led to another and Beane took the $125,000 offered by the Mets. He appeased his mother (and his conscience) by telling her (and himself) he would attend classes at Stanford during the off-season.

Stanford disagreed. When the admissions office learned that Beane would not be playing sports for Stanford, they told him that he was no longer welcome in Stanford's classrooms. ''Dear Mrs. Beane,'' read the letter from the Stanford dean of admissions, Fred A. Hargadon, ''we are withdrawing Billy's admission. . . . I do wish him every success, both with his professional career in baseball and with his alternate plans for continuing his education.''

Only there were no plans. One day Beane could have been anything; the next he was just another minor-league baseball player, and not even a rich one. On the advice of a family friend, Billy's parents invested on their son's behalf his entire $125,000 bonus in a real-estate partnership that promptly went bust.

It got worse. In his first year of pro ball, Billy Beane hit .210. He didn't know how to think of himself if he couldn't think of himself as a success. His second full season, in the Double A Texas League, he played alongside Darryl Strawberry and hit .220; Strawberry was named the league's most valuable player. Beane spent a lot of hours in the outfield dwelling on Strawberry's heroics and on his own failure. ''That was the first year I really questioned if I'd made the right decision to sign,'' Beane says.

Strawberry presented one kind of problem for Billy; Lenny Dykstra presented another. Beane and Dykstra lived together and played side by side in minor-league outfields for nearly two years, beginning in 1984. That year both were invited to the Mets' big-league spring training camp. Dykstra thought of himself and Beane as two buddies racing together down the same track, but Beane sensed fundamental differences between them. Physically, Dykstra didn't belong in the same league with him. He was half Beane's size and had a fraction of Beane's promise. But mentally, Dykstra was superior. Beane remembers sitting with Dykstra in a Mets dugout watching the opposing pitcher warm up. ''Lenny says, 'So who's that big dummy out there on the hill?' And I say: 'Lenny, you're kidding me, right? That's Steve Carlton. He's maybe the greatest left-hander in the history of the game.' Lenny says: 'Oh, yeah! I knew that!' He sits there for a minute and says, 'So, what's he got?' And I say: 'Lenny, come on. Steve Carlton. He's got heat and also maybe the nastiest slider ever.' And Lenny sits there for a while longer as if he's taking that in. Finally he just says, 'I'll stick him.' ''

The point about Dykstra, at least to Billy, was clear: Dykstra didn't let his mind mess him up. Only a psychological freak could approach a 100-m.p.h. fastball aimed not all that far from his head with total confidence. ''Lenny was so perfectly designed, emotionally, to play the game of baseball,'' Beane said. ''He was able to instantly forget any failure and draw strength from every success. He had no concept of failure. I was the opposite.''

Dykstra went on to be a star with the Mets; Beane was traded to Minnesota, which eventually passed him on to Detroit. After leaving the Tigers, he signed with Oakland. No matter how often he moved, his problem never changed: he couldn't hit. By the end of 1989, after six seasons in the major leagues, his career stat line (301 at bats, .219 batting average, .246 on-base percentage, .296 slugging percentage, 11 walks against 80 strikeouts) told an eloquent tale of suffering. You didn't need to know Billy Beane at all -- you only needed to read his stats -- to sense that he left every on-deck circle in trouble. That he had developed neither discipline nor composure. That he had never learned to lay off a bad pitch. That he was easily fooled. That, fooled so often, he came to expect that he would be fooled. That he hit with fear. That his fear masqueraded as aggression. That the aggression enabled him to exit the batter's box as quickly as possible.

During spring training of 1990, Beane walked out of the Oakland dugout and into the front office and said be wanted a job as an advance scout. An advance scout traveled ahead of the big- league team and analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of future opponents. Beane was 27, entering what was meant to be his prime as a baseball player, and he had decided he would rather watch than play. Baseball had rendered him unfit for anything but itself.

Denise, who is the coolest G.M. in the game?'' The New York Mets' secretary is charmed. Her laughter reaches the far end of Billy Beane's office. ''Billy has the gift of making people like him,'' said the man who made Beane a general manager, Oakland's former G.M. Sandy Alderson. ''It's a dangerous gift to have.''

This time Steve Phillips is present and ready to talk. ''Look, I'm not going to ask you for a lot for Venafro,'' Beane says, generously, as if acquiring Venafro had been Phillips's idea. ''I need a player and 233 grand. I'm not going to ask you for anyone really good. I have a couple of names I want to run by you. Garcia, the second baseman, and Duncan, the outfielder, who hit .217 last year.''

Phillips, like every other G.M. who has just received a call from Billy Beane, assumes there must be some angle he isn't seeing. He asks why Beane sent Venafro down to Triple A. He's worried about Venafro's health. He wonders why Beane is now asking for money too.

''Venafro's fine, Steve,'' Beane says. He's back to selling used cars. ''This is just a situation for us. . . . I need the money for something else I want to do later.''

Phillips says he still wonders what's up with Venafro. The last few times he pitched he was hammered. Beane sighs: it's harder turning Mike Venafro into a New York Met than he supposed. ''Steve, me and you both know that you don't judge a pitcher by the last nine innings he threw. Art misused him. You should use him for a whole inning. He's good against righties too!''

For whatever reason, the fish refuses the bait. At that moment Beane realizes: the Mets are hemming and hawing about Venafro because they think they are going to get Rincon. ''Look,'' Beane says. ''Here's the deal, Steve.'' He's no longer selling used cars. He's organizing a high-school fire drill and tolerating no cutups. ''I'm going to get Rincon. It's a done deal. Yeah. It's done. The Giants want Venafro. I've told them they can have him for a player: Luke Robertson.''

''Anderson,'' DePodesta whispers.

''Luke Anderson,'' Beane says, easing off. ''We like Anderson. We think he's going to be in the big leagues. But I'd like to deal with you because Sabes doesn't have any money. You can win this because you can give me 233 grand in cash, and he can't. I don't have to have the 233 grand in cash. But it makes enough of a difference to me that I'll work with you.'' He has ceased to be the fire drill instructor and become the personal trainer. You can do it, Steve! You can win!

Beane likes whatever place he has reached in the conversation. ''Yeah,'' he says. ''It doesn't have to be Garcia or Duncan. I'll find a player with you. If it makes you feel better.'' (I want you, and only you, to have Venafro). ''O.K., Steve. Whoever calls me back first gets Venafro.'' (But if you drag your heels, you'll regret it for the rest of your life.) ''Watching Billy do a deal,'' said his best friend, the Toronto Blue Jays' G.M., J.P. Ricciardi, ''is like watching the wolf talk to Little Red Riding Hood.''

When Beane hangs up, his assistant tells him that Peter Gammons, the ESPN reporter, is on the line. In the hours leading up to the trade deadline, Beane refuses to take calls from several newspaper reporters. One will get through to him by accident, and he'll make her regret that she did. Most reporters, in Billy's experience, are simply trying to be the first to find out something they'll all learn anyway before their deadlines. ''They all want scoops,'' he complains. ''There are no scoops. Whatever we do will be in every paper tomorrow. There's no such thing as a paper that comes out in an hour.''

It's different when Gammons calls. Gammons might actually tell him something he doesn't know. ''Let's get some info,'' he says and picks up the phone. Gammons asks about Rincon, and Beane says, casually, ''Yeah, I'm just finishing up Rincon,'' as if it's a done deal, which clearly it is not. He knows Gammons will tell others what he tells him. Then the quid pro quo: Gammons tells Beane that the Montreal Expos have decided to trade their slugging outfielder, Cliff Floyd, to the Boston Red Sox. Beane quickly promises Gammons that he'll be the first to know whatever he does.

''Billy, Steve's still waiting to talk!'' Mike Crowley again. His owner, Steve Schott, keeps calling. Beane looks around as if he has forgotten something. Money! He goes back to his phone and calls Steve Phillips, the Mets G.M., one last time. ''Steve, here's the deal. I don't want Rincon pitching against me tonight.'' He listens for a bit and hears nothing that makes him happy. When he hangs up, he says, ''He has no money.''

The Mets have no money to waste. This is new. The market for baseball players, like the market for stocks and bonds, is always changing. To trade it well, you need to be adaptable.

Every minute that passes is a minute Brian Sabean -- or even Steve Phillips! -- has to talk Mark Shapiro into closing the two-hour window on Rincon he has opened for Beane. Beane hollers to Mike Crowley: ''Tell Schott that if we don't move Venafro, I'll sell Rincon for twice the price next year. No. Tell him that I'll make him a deal. If I don't do it, I'll cover it. But I keep anything over twice the savings.''

The A's' president doesn't know what to do with this. His G.M., who earns 400 grand a year, is telling his owner that he'll take an equity stake in a single player. Billy Beane could make himself a very rich man, simply by dealing players as well as he has done. No reply comes back from the owner, and Beane assumes he is free to do what he wants with Rincon (and hold on to Venafro). He gives the Mets and Giants 15 minutes more. Finally, he decides. He'll take the risk. He picks up the phone to call Mark Shapiro to acquire Rincon.

When he trades players, Billy Beane always operates with total certainty. He doesn't know it yet, but that is the real edge he has in his quest for Ricardo Rincon: he is more decisive than the other G.M.'s. From the others Mark Shapiro hears only vagueness and uncertainty; from Billy Beane he hears the most alarmingly concrete and rapid proposals. This is odd. In any ruthlessly competitive market for complex assets -- stocks and bonds or baseball players -- it isn't normal for any one trader to act with perfect confidence. Those who do are either deluded or have some brief informational edge.

Beane has an edge, but it isn't brief. He has been dealing in players in this manner for five years, and never made a trade he regretted. The market for baseball players is inefficient, and he knows it. He knows in his bones how completely a seemingly efficient market can misvalue a human being -- because it so completely misvalued him. With Paul DePodesta's help, he is able to put fairly exact numbers on the value of any given baseball player. And those numbers are often shocking.

That is another strange consequence of the Oakland experiment: to undermine a lot of old prejudices about who, and who was not, meant to play pro ball. Constantly looking beneath the surface of a player's performance to discern its underlying value, the Oakland A's became a magnet for guys who didn't look all that good on the surface. Guys who were too fat, too skinny, too short, too slow or too old. The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury; and the Oakland A's couldn't afford luxuries. They needed to find ballplayers, as cheaply as possible. On the team's current roster there is hardly a player who wasn't dismissed at one point in his career as ill designed to play big league baseball. Tim Hudson, Barry Zito, Miguel Tejada, Scott Hatteberg, Chad Bradford: most of the players knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of professional baseball's irrational scorn. Oakland R.&D. liberated many players from unthinking prejudice and allowed them to demonstrate their true worth. A baseball team, of all things, was at the center of a story about the possibilities -- and the limits -- of science in human affairs.

The A's' left-handed reliever Mike Magnante had once been the beneficiary of baseball science; now he was its victim. Beane acquired Mags on the down slope of his career, when most other teams thought he was washed up, and milked a hundred or so useful innings of relief pitching out of him. But now Mags was done, and someone needed to tell him. And so, phone in hand, almost casually, Beane says to DePodesta, now seated on Billy's sofa, ''Do you want to go down and release Magnante?''

''Do I want to?'' DePodesta says. He looks right, then left, as if Beane must be talking to some other person who enjoys telling a 37-year-old relief pitcher that he's washed up. When he looks left he can see the Coliseum a few yards away, through Billy's office window. It wasn't that Mags was just four days short of his 10-year goal. He'd get his pension. It was that, in all likelihood, Mags was finished in the big leagues.

''Someone's got to talk to him,'' Beane says. Now, suddenly, there is a difference between trading stocks and bonds and trading human beings. Beane never lets it affect what he does. He is able to think of players as pieces in a board game. That's why he traded them so well.

''Call Art,'' DePodesta says. ''That's his job.''

Beane picks up his phone to call Art Howe and then remembers that he hasn't actually made the trade, and so reverses himself and calls Mark Shapiro in Cleveland. It's 6:30. The game against the Indians starts in 35 minutes.

''Mike Magnante has just thrown his last pitch in the big leagues,'' DePodesta says.

''Sorry I took so long, Mark,'' Beane says.

No problem. But since you did, do you want to wait until after the game to take Rincon?

''No, we want him now. We want to get him in our dugout tonight.''

Why the rush?

''By and large Magnante cost us the game last night, and Rincon won the game.''

O.K. No big deal. We'll do it now.

''You feel comfortable with Ricardo's health, right?''

Right.

Beane hangs up and dials Art Howe's number. The A's' manager has just returned to his office beside the clubhouse.

''Art. It's Billy. I have some good news and some bad news.''

Art gives a little nervous chuckle. ''O.K.''

''The good news is you've got Rincon.''

''Do I?!''

''The bad news is you gotta release Magnante.''

Silence on the other end of the line. ''O.K.,'' Art finally says.

''And you've got to do it before the game.''

''O.K.''

Beane makes several quick calls. He calls the A's' equipment manager, Steve Vucinich. ''Voos. We gotta get rid of Mags by game time. Yeah. You have 25 minutes to get him out of there.'' He calls the Mets' Steve Phillips. ''Steve, I got the guy I wanted. Rincon.'' (For you, it's Venafro or nothing.) He calls the Giants' Brian Sabean. ''Brian. Hey Brian. Hey, it's Billy. I've made a deal for Rincon right now.'' (So don't think you can wait me out.) He calls Peter Gammons and tells him what he has done, and that he's not doing anything else.

After the final call, his phone rings. He looks at his caller ID and sees it's from the visitors' clubhouse. He picks it up.

''Oh, hi, Ricardo.'' It's Ricardo Rincon, whose English skills are rudimentary.

''Ricardo, I know it's a little bit shocking for you,'' Beane says. His syntax changes slightly; he's groping for a Mexican mode of expression and winds up saying whatever he can think of that Ricardo might understand. ''But we have been trying to get you for a long time. You're going to love the guys on the team. They're fun.''

Ricardo is trying to get it clear in his head that he's supposed to do what he has just been asked to do, take off his Cleveland Indians uniform, gather his personal belongings, walk down the hall into the Oakland clubhouse and put on an Oakland uniform. He can't quite get his mind around it.

''Yes! Yes!'' Beane says. ''I don't know if you'll pitch tonight. But you're on our team tonight.''

Whatever Ricardo says, he means: Oh, my God, I might actually have to pitch tonight?

''Yes. Yes. Possibly you'll punch out Jim Thome!'' Possibly you will punch out Jim Thome. Beane is becoming, quickly, a Mexican immigrant.

''We'll have a uniform and everything ready for you.'' And everything. He's had just about enough touchy-feely for one evening. He tries to lead the conversation to a not horribly unnatural conclusion. ''Where are you from, Ricardo?''

Ricardo says he's from Veracruz, Mexico.

''Well, Veracruz is closer to here than to Cleveland. You're closer to home!''

He finishes that one, hangs up and says, ''It's gotten to be a longer road trip for Ricardo than he expected.'' He looks absolutely spent. The wad of tobacco is gone from his upper lip, and his mouth is dry. He gargles with the glass of water on his desk and spits. ''I've got to work out,'' he says.

At that moment, Mike Magnante was removing his Oakland uniform, and Ricardo Rincon was removing his Cleveland one. Mags left the Oakland clubhouse quickly; he would come back for his things later when no one was around. His wife had brought the kids to the game, so he couldn't just leave. Magnante watched the game with his family until the sixth inning and then left so that he wouldn't have to answer questions from the media. He had no desire to call further attention to his situation. In his youth he might have mouthed off. He would certainly have borne a grudge. But he was no longer young; the numbness had long since set in. He thought of himself the way the market thought of him, as an asset to be bought and sold. He'd long ago forgotten whatever it was he was meant to feel.

The main thing was that Mags was gone from the clubhouse before Beane walked across to change into his sweats. As Beane headed in, however, he bumped into Ricardo Rincon heading out, in street clothes. Ricardo remained confused. He had heard he was going to the San Francisco Giants, or maybe the Los Angeles Dodgers. He never imagined he might be an Oakland A. And he still didn't understand the full implications of what happened. The Oakland A's' primary left-handed relief pitcher was going out to find a seat in the stands to watch the game. Beane led him back into the clubhouse where the staff had just finished steaming RINCON onto the back of an Oakland A's jersey. ''You're on our team now,'' Beane says.

Ricardo Rincon walked back into his new clubhouse, put on his new uniform and sat down and watched the entire game on television. ''I was not ready,'' he said. ''I couldn't concentrate.'' His left arm, however, felt great.

No matter how you look at it, the season was a miracle. Ricardo Rincon and Ray Durham helped to turn the 2002 Oakland A's into one of the top 10 second-half teams in the past 50 years. All but written off when they could not afford to prevent Jason Giambi from signing with the Yankees, the A's won 103 games, one more than they had the year before, tied for the most in all of baseball. Maybe more astonishingly, at least for economic determinists, the teams in baseball's best division, the American League West, finished in inverse order to their payrolls.

Oakland 103-59 -$41,942,665

Anaheim 99-63-4 -$62,757,041

Seattle 93-69-10 -$86,084,710

Texas 72-90-31 -$106,915,180

Then they did a favor for everyone who wanted to ignore or dismiss their importance: they lost in the first round of the playoffs to the Minnesota Twins. That was all right, Beane said, because the playoffs were a crap shoot, impervious to baseball science. He could control what happened over a 162-game season; in a 5-game series, his magic didn't work. There were no secret recipes for the post-season, except maybe having three great starting pitchers, and he had that.

His objective spirit survived his team's playoff exit for a week. The fact that his team had lost to the clearly inferior Minnesota Twins festered. He never said it, but it was nonetheless evident that he could not quite believe how little appreciation there was for what they had achieved. Even his owner, who was getting multiples more for his money than any owner in baseball, complained. The public reaction to the thing ate at Beane. In these situations, when his mind was disturbed, he often went looking to make a trade. But there was no player on whom his mind naturally fixed; the only person in the organization whose riddance would make him happier was his manager, Art Howe. It wasn't long before he had a novel idea: trade Art.

It took him about a week to do it. He called Steve Phillips and told him that Howe was a superb manager, but his latest one-year contract called for a big raise, and Oakland couldn't really afford to pay it. The Mets had just fired their own manager, Bobby Valentine, and Phillips was in a bit of a fix. Beane had thought he might even get a player from the Mets for Howe, but in the end settled on moving Howe's salary. Howe signed a four-year deal for more than $2 million a year to manage the New York Mets. In Howe's place Beane installed Ken Macha, the A's' bench coach.

That made him feel better for a bit. Then it didn't. He had the feeling he had come to the end of some line. Here they had run this low-budget franchise as efficiently as a low-budget franchise could be run, and no one had even noticed. No one cared if you found radically better ways to run a big-league baseball team. All anyone cared about was how you fared in the post-season crap shoot. For his work he had been paid about as well as a third-year relief pitcher. He was worth, easily, more than any player; his services were more substantially undervalued than those of any player he'd ever acquired. He could see only one way to exploit this grotesque market inefficiency: trade himself.

That superior management armed with science could be had so cheaply was easily the greatest inefficiency in all of baseball. John Henry, a Wall Street billionaire who had recently purchased the Boston Red Sox, understood this. Henry knew all about how to exploit market inefficiencies; he had long since decided that he wanted to reinvent his franchise in the image of the Oakland A's. The trouble was, how? Only one guy had ever actually proved he could impose reason on a big-league clubhouse, and that guy, two weeks after his team had been bounced from the playoffs, was now dissatisfied with his job. One thing led to another, and before long Billy Beane had agreed to run the Boston Red Sox. He would be guaranteed $12.5 million over five years, the most anyone had ever been paid to run a baseball team.

All that remained was for Beane to sign the Red Sox contract. And he couldn't do it. In the 24 hours after he accepted the Red Sox' job offer, Beane became as manic and irrational and incapable of sleep as he was back in May, after the A's were swept by the Blue Jays. As decisive as he was about most things, he was paralyzed when the decision involved himself. He had convinced himself that he wasn't taking the job just for the money. Since it was pretty clear he wasn't doing it for the love of the Red Sox, it raised a question of why he was doing it at all. He decided he was doing it just to show that he could do it. To prove that his own peculiar talents had concrete value. Dollar value. And that in any sane world he'd be paid a fortune for them.

Now he had a problem: he'd just proved that. Baseball columns everywhere were abuzz with the news that Billy Beane was about to become the highest-paid general manager in the history of the game. Now that everyone knew his true value, Beane didn't need to prove it anymore. Now the only reason to take the job was the money.

The next morning he called Henry and told him he couldn't do it. A few hours later he blurted to a reporter something he wished he hadn't said but was nevertheless the truth: ''I made one decision based on money in my life -- when I signed with the Mets rather than go to Stanford -- and I promised I'd never do it again.'' After that Beane confined himself to the usual blather about personal reasons. None of what he said was terribly rational or ''objective'' -- but then neither was he.

Within a week, he was back to scheming how to get the Oakland A's back to the playoffs, and DePodesta was back to being on his side. And he was left with his single greatest fear: that no one would ever really know. He and Paul might find ever more clever ways to build great ball clubs with no money, but unless they brought home a World Series ring or two, no one would know. And even then -- even if they did win a ring -- where did that leave him? He'd be just one more general manager among many who were celebrated for a day, then forgotten. People would never know that, for a brief moment, he was right and the world was wrong.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 6, Page 34 of the National edition with the headline: The Trading Desk. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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