Moneyball: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

For decades, baseball talents scouts used the same system for predicting the success of prospective players. Players were ranked by their abilities to “run, throw, field, hit, and hit with power.”

On a spring day in 1980 in San Diego, a group of prospective major league baseball players was playing a game with talent scouts watching from the bleachers. This was a key time in baseball history—in only a few years, the average big league salary had tripled. As a result, bad decisions from scouts could have million-dollar consequences. On that day, the scouts had been watching prospective players for months. The players were excellent—calm, fast, strong. The scouts shouted for the players to run a sixty-meter dash. To the scouts’ amazement, one player, Billy Beane, ran the dash in just 6.4 seconds.

Billy Beane had always been a superior athlete. As a high school freshman, he pitched for the varsity baseball team. As a junior, he was six foot four, 180 pounds, and batted .500 in a notoriously tough high school league. His coach, Sam Blalock, recognized that he was major-league material—professional talent scouts would come to Billy’s high school games and demand to see him play. The scouts were very impressed with Billy, but perhaps “they saw only what they wanted to see: a future big league star.”

In Billy’s senior year, his batting average went down from .500 to .300, possibly because of pressure from scouts. He would become furious when he didn’t play well, and Sam Blalock never knew how to control him. When he failed in small ways, he’d allow his frustration to interfere with his play. But the scouts seemed not to notice—their only question was, “Can I get him?”

In 1980, the head talent scout from the New York Mets, Roger Jongewaard, was rumored to be considering Billy Beane for his first pick (the other possibility was a then-unknown Darryl Strawberry, and the Mets seemed to prefer Billy to Strawberry). However, Billy, who got good grades, was interested in going to college on a sports scholarship, rather than entering the major leagues straight away. Despite Billy’s talent, many major league teams thought it would be foolish to make him an offer on a first round draft pick, since he might turn them down.

In 1980, Roger Jongewaard decided to take a big risk and extended his second first round draft pick to Billy Beane (his first, first round draft pick was Darryl Strawberry). When Jongewaard made Billy the offer, Billy was reluctant to accept. He’d been admitted to Stanford, and seemed intent on going. However, after Jongewaard took Billy on a trip to meet the Mets, Billy was impressed, and decided to sign.

Soon after Billy’s decision, he started to get cold feet. He confessed to his parents that he was having second thoughts about playing for the Mets; however, in the end, he accepted the Mets’ offer and took a signing bonus of 125,000 dollars. Billy believed that he could attend Stanford during the off-season; however, when Stanford realized that Billy wouldn’t be playing sports for the school, they rescinded his admission. Billy would be playing rookie ball with the Mets minor league team before he’d become a big-league player. Next, Billy’s parents invested his bonus in a real estate venture that promptly went bankrupt. “One day,” the chapter concludes, “Billy Beane could have been anything; the next he was just another minor league baseball player, and not even a rich one.”