Perhaps it was the moment when sport's number crunchers became fashionable. It was dramatised on the silver screen, with a data geek portrayed by Brad Pitt and the actor Arliss Howard looking uncannily like John W Henry as he passed him a note, containing a number: $12.5 million, a record salary for a baseball general manager.
On film, as in real life, Billy Beane spurned the offer, rejecting the Boston Red Sox to remain with baseball's Oakland A's. Fourteen years later, football's answer to Beane was headhunted himself; not by Henry and his later purchase, Liverpool, but by Merseyside's other Premier League club.