The champagne wasn’t dry yet — not quite — but the rough outlines of its work were clear: jagged shards of hair, curling improbably around the head of the Oakland GM like a crown of forked tongues, sticky and sweet. But how sweet? Only Billy Beane knows for sure.

I ask if this is vindication. “With a capital V,” he says, flashing the Churchillian two-finger victory salute. “Capital VIN,” he goes on. “Shoot, let’s go all caps: VINDICATION.” He sits back with a satisfied smile. Small payroll, big typeface. The look on Beane’s face suggests he could get used to that discrepancy.

The World Series victory of the 2007 Oakland Athletics in six games over the Atlanta Braves is sure to go down in history as the unlikeliest championship of all time, making last year’s fluke 83-win St. Louis champs look like a sure thing of Calvinistic proportions. It isn’t simply that Beane has assembled a championship team with the lowest payroll of any team playing today; he pulled off the feat with the lowest payroll in recorded history — in the ballpark of negative $7 million — thanks to some creative dealmaking that had several players paying the team out of their own pockets for roster spots.

Baseball experts have made a hobby of writing off Beane’s Oakland squad in years past, and the game’s pundits dined out for months on their measured opinions that the Athletics didn’t have what it took to go the distance. That was before the emergence of Travis Buck as an all-star outfielder. That was before the tidal wave known as Chad Gaudin emerged from the Oakland bullpen to swamp the American League en route to winning 18 games. When the ESPN personalities were swapping grinning bonhomie along with their picks for the season’s home run leader, no one mentioned Jack Cust, whose 47 round-trippers made him the first Athletic to wear the home run crown since Mark McGwire. If you’d mentioned Jack Cust to anyone in the baseball elite this Spring, you’d have been laughed out of the stadium. But Beane is the only one laughing now, in large part because his pet feline, Catteberg, is standing on his shoulder, licking the dried champagne from the short hairs at his temples.

The injuries to Nick Swisher and Bobby Crosby in late-June, thanks to a nightmarish on-field collision that resulted in Crosby inadvertently biting off one of his teammate’s eyebrows, would seem to have sounded the death knell for Oakland’s season. Instead, Beane was just getting started. Within a week the GM, who admits he slept for approximately fourteen hours over a twelve-day stretch, embarked on a whirlwind series of trades, dealing Joe Blanton, Lenny DiNardo, Shannon Stewart, Jason Kendall, Hiram Bocachica, Alan Embree, Kiko Calero, Marco Scutaro, Jay Witasick and Erasmo Ramirez to a variety of AL and NL opponents, frequently packaging all or most of the players received in another trade mere hours later. The American League Registrar’s office is still sorting through the paperwork, but it’s believed that upwards of 60 players passed through Oakland’s roster within a two-week span, including Orlando Hudson, Carlos Lee, Austin Kearns, Jose Vidro, Aaron Harang, Steve Trachsel, Jason Bergman, Brett Tomko (twice), Joe Borchard, Kelly Shoppach, Jose Guillen (three times), Juan Encarnacion, Neal Cotts, Elmer Dessens and Terry Shumpert, who left the game in 2003 but whom the Colorado Rockies apparently believe is still capable of filling a utility role.

The refurbished Oakland roster, including Mike Redmond, Aaron Rowand, Josh Willingham, Jon Garland, Jarrod Washburn and — coming full-circle — Marco Scutaro, might never have made the playoffs, save for Beane’s willingness to take chances on prospects far outside the mainstream. It wasn’t only the long-suffering perrenial castoffs such as Roberto Petagine and Benny Agbayani that seized their moment in the sun to propel Oakland to its first championship in 18 years. It was also Hollywood C-list mainstays Charlie Sheen and Dean Cain, both of whom proved more capable on the field than on the set. While the major league veterans were initially dubious of the pair, Cain quickly won converts with his surprisingly compact swing, while Sheen showcased a biting forkball he had developed over the recent production hiatus for Two and a Half Men.

Of course, all seemed lost when Rowand, after logging a mere three weeks in an Oakland uniform, went down for the season after hurling himself over the wall in Tampa Bay in pursuit of a B.J. Upton home run, his ruptured spleen (suffered during his landing on a variety of landscaping implements stacked there by the grounds crew) an apparent metaphor for Oakland’s playoff hopes. But again demonstrating uncanny outside-the-box tactics, Beane coaxed out of retirement the still rifle-armed Dwayne Murphy, who made his first start in an Oakland uniform in nearly twenty years at age 52. And in fact, the Murphy-to-Chavez-to-Redmond relay that cut down Grady Sizemore at the plate to clinch the AL pennant for Beane and the A’s has already been etched in Oakland lore.

The terms of the debate have been re-imagined, the rules of the game forever altered. Beane may have decamped to the still-jubilant Oakland clubhouse, joining Agbayani and Gaudin in an impromptu victory hip-hop freestyle (Beane rhymes “World Series” with “sabermetric theories” to much applause), but the quest to build his perfect team knows no expiration date. At 1:30 A.M., when the victory party has moved on one of several Bay Area night spots (before finally culminating in Sheen’s suite at the Marriott Oakland), Beane’s radar is still tuned to frequencies no other baseball executive can grasp. Yammering on his cell phone in the midst of a crowded dance floor, Beane barks questions to his scouting director Eric Kubota, calling from Dubai with information about Oakland’s newest prospect, Karim Al-Makri.

“He’s nineteen,” Beane later tells me, downing yet another vodka and Red Bull. “An apostate Sufi mystic playing in the Caliphate League. Can he hit? I don’t know. Can he field? Couldn’t tell you. But in three years of professional ball, he’s taken one called strike. Just one. Kubota says this kid has the most profound understanding of the strike zone since Ted Williams. We’re signing him tonight.”

I ask if I’ll see Al-Makri on Oakland’s 2008 World Champions.

Beane shrugs. “We’ll see in spring training. The kid’s still got to outplay Marco Scutaro.”

Michael Lewis is a good sport about how much better his life is than yours, particulalrly in regard to his being the author of bestsellers Moneyball, Liar’s Poker and The New New Thing, his residence in the south of France, and his frequent doggie-style couplings with former MTV News babe Tabitha Soren.