Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (21 page)

“It’s looking at process rather than outcomes,” Paul says. “Too many people make decisions based on outcomes rather than process.”

The route a pitch takes to the catcher’s mitt
is
an outcome, I say. It’s just a more subtle outcome.

“It’s not what happened,” says Paul, “it’s how our guy approached it.”

It’s impossible to determine, from the stands or the dugout or the luxury suites or even the commercial broadcast, whether a ball traveling 90 miles an hour was half an inch off or half an inch over home plate. Only here, in the video room, can they see the biggest thing they feel they need to know to evaluate their players: whether a pitch is a ball or a strike. “The strike zone is the heart of the game,” Bill James had written, and their behavior underscored the fact.

When the Yankees finish pummeling Eric Hiljus, and the A’s come to bat, David pulls out a neatly typed piece of paper that hints at Paul’s meaning. It reads:

Tejada: 38%

Chavez: 34%

Long: 31%

Hernandez: 29%

Pena: 27%

Menechino: 19%

Justice: 18%

Giambi: 17%

Hatteberg: 14%

The A’s front office record every pitch thrown to Oakland A’s hitters, both by type and location. They’ve mined these to determine the percentage of pitches outside the strike zone each player has swung at. Each plate appearance they think of as a miniature game in itself, in which the odds shift constantly. The odds depend on who is pitching and who is hitting, of course, but they also depend on the minute events within the event. Every plate appearance was like a hand of blackjack; the tone of it changed with each dealt card. A first-pitch strike, for instance, lowered a hitter’s batting average by about seventy-five points, and a first-pitch ball raised them about as much. But it wasn’t the first pitch that held the most drama for the cognoscenti; it was the third. “The difference between 1–2 and 2–1 in terms of expected outcomes is just enormous,” says Paul. “It’s the largest variance of expected outcomes of any one pitch. On 2–1 most average major league hitters become all-stars, yet on 1–2 they become anemic nine-hole hitters. People talk about first-pitch strikes. But it’s really the first two out of three.”

Any ball out of the strike zone was an opportunity for a batter to shift the odds in his favor. All you had to do was: not swing! The bottom half of the A’s lineup was systematically, willfully, shifting the odds in the pitchers’ favor. “I envy casino managers,” says Paul. “At least they can be sure that their blackjack dealers won’t hit on 19.”

The entire bottom half of the A’s lineup—Miguel Tejada, Eric Chavez, Ramon Hernandez, Carlos Pena, and Terrence Long—is playing a different, more reckless game than the top half—Jeremy Giambi, Scott Hatteberg, David Justice, Frank Menechino. The top half is hitting with discipline, and avoiding swinging at bad pitches. The bottom half is hacking away. The odd thing about this is that the top half was acquired through trades from other clubs, and the bottom half, with the exception of Terrence Long and Carlos Pena, is homegrown.

The guys who aren’t behaving properly at the plate are precisely those who have had the approach drilled into them by A’s hitting coaches from the moment they became pro players. The seemingly inverse correlation between the amount of discipline exhibited by a big league hitter and the amount of time his team has spent trying to
teach
him discipline has led Billy Beane to conclude that discipline can’t be taught. (Actually what he says is, “It can be taught, but we’d have to take guys in diapers to do it.”) You could see just by looking at David’s list why Billy felt he had to seize control of the amateur draft from his scouts. What most scouts thought of as a learned skill of secondary importance the A’s management had come, through hard experience, to view virtually as a genetic trait, and the one most likely to lead to baseball success.

Which raises another obvious question: if Miguel Tejada and Ramon Hernandez and Eric Chavez are still swinging at bad pitches after years of being told not to, how can any list make a difference? This time when I ask it, Feiny doesn’t smile at my stupidity. “They’ve spent five years with Miggy [they all call Tejada “Miggy”] in here trying to teach him what not to swing at,” he says, “and he still swings at it.”

“When you have it on paper, it’s evidence,” says David. “They say they don’t believe you, but when you show them they’re hitting .140 when they swing at the first pitch, it gets their attention. Sometimes.”

David Justice interrupts the conversation. Seconds after the A’s come into the dugout, Justice, who has been playing right field, appears in the video room. “Feiny, can I see my at bat?” he asks. He’s not even breathing hard. The great thing about baseball players, from the point of view of personal hygiene, is how seldom they break a sweat.

Justice sits and watches a replay of himself being called out on strikes. The third strike was clearly off the plate by about three inches. He races through the first few pitches to get to the bad call. “The ump set up on the inside,” Justice says, when he gets to the final pitch. “He can’t even see that outside pitch.”

He has a point: an umpire has to choose which of the catcher’s shoulders to look out over and he’s chosen to look out over the inside part of the plate. Justice wants to rewind the tape and prove his case all over again, but the A’s least disciplined hitters are up and out with amazing speed. The war of attrition is turning into a rout. Eric Hiljus has thrown fifty-four pitches in the first two innings. David Wells throws twelve pitches in the first and just six more—two each to Tejada, Chavez, and Long—in the second before he strolls back to the dugout. Justice can’t even finish complaining before he has to run out and play right field.

Justice was the second of three defective parts the A’s front office had hired to replace Jason Giambi’s bat. “Defective” wasn’t actually the word Paul had used. “Warts” was. As in, “What gets me really excited about a guy is when he has warts, and everyone knows he has warts, and the warts just don’t matter.” All you had to do to see what Paul might mean by warts was to stroll through the Oakland A’s clubhouse as the players emerged from the showers: not a pretty sight. Justice was an exception, however. Justice was still a physical specimen. He looked as handsome and cocky and fit as ever. Warts? For chrissake, I thought, he’s
David Justice.
He has more postseason hits than any player in history. He’s Halle Berry’s ex. Whatever had happened between him and Halle Berry, it was hard to find any obvious fault with David Justice.

“What’s wrong with him?” I ask, once he’s gone.

“He’s thirty-six,” says Paul.

The previous year Justice had started to show his age. He’d taken swings in the World Series that looked positively amateurish. But he’d also played most of the year injured and it was hard to say how much of his drastic decline was a result of the injury and how much of it was caused by old age. A baseball player typically ripens in his late twenties; as he enters his mid-thirties, he’s treated as guilty until he proves his innocence. Last year Justice had as much as confessed to the baseball crime of aging. And this is what had made him an Oakland A. In his prime, Justice had been the sort of sensational hitter the Oakland A’s could never have afforded to buy on the open market. They could afford him now only because no one else wanted him: the rest of baseball looked at Justice and saw a has-been. Billy Beane had cut a deal with the Yankees that left the A’s with Justice for one year at a salary of $3.5 million, half what the Yankees had paid him the year before. The Yankees picked up the other half. The Yankees were, in effect, paying David Justice to play against them. I tell Paul that doesn’t sound like a good way to beat the Yankees.

“He’s an experiment for us,” says Paul. “We see this as a game of skill, not an athletic event. What we want to see is: at an age of physical decline does the skill maintain its level, even when a player no longer has the physical ability to exploit it?”

It was a funny way to put it: an experiment. What general truth could be found out from the study of one man?

Justice isn’t one man, Paul says. He’s a type: an aging slugger of a particular sort. Paul has made another study. He’d found that an extraordinary ability to get on base was more likely to stay with a player to the end of his career than, say, an extraordinary ability to hit home runs. Players who walked a lot tended actually to walk even more as they got older, and Justice walked a lot. Just a few years ago Justice’s ability to wait for pitches he could drive—to not get himself out by swinging at a pitcher’s pitch—had enabled him to hit lots of home runs, too. Much of his power was now gone. His new Oakland teammates witnessed his dissipation up close. After he’d hit a long fly ball, Justice would return to the A’s dugout and say, matter of factly, “That used to be out.” There was something morbid about it, like watching a death, play-by-play.

The A’s front office didn’t care. They sought only to milk the last few ounces of superior on-base percentage out of David Justice before he expired.

“Does Justice have any idea that you think of him this way?” I asked.

“No.”

He didn’t. None of them did. At no point were the lab rats informed of the details of the experiment. They were praised for their walks, and criticized for swinging at pitches out of the strike zone. But they weren’t ever told that the front office had reduced offense to a science, or thought they had. They had no idea that their management had reduced them to their essential baseball ingredients and these did not include guts or heart or determination or anything else that ordinary fans, or their mothers, would love them for. The players were simply aware that some higher power guided their actions. They were also aware that the higher power was not, as on most teams, the field manager. Terrence Long complained that the A’s front office didn’t let him steal bases. Miguel Tejada said he was aware that Billy Beane wanted him to be a more patient hitter. “If I don’t take twenty walks,” he said, “Billy Beane send me to Mexico.” Eric Chavez recalled, in an interview with
Baseball America
, how oddly the A’s system, over which Billy had presided, trained him. “The A’s started showing me these numbers,” Chavez said, “how guys’ on-base percentages are important. It was like they didn’t want me to hit for average or for home runs, but walks would get me to the big leagues.” Billy Beane was a character in his players’ imaginations—though not a terribly well drawn one.

The A’s scored a run in the bottom of the third. Goliath 5, David 1. Finally I ask: “Where is Billy?”

“The weight room,” says Paul, without looking up.

The weight room?

“Billy’s a little strange during the games,” says David.

I
T WASN’T LONG
after a player was traded to Oakland before he realized that his new team ran differently from any of his previous ones, although it generally took him some time to figure out why. At some point he grasped that his new general manager wasn’t like his old one. Most GMs shook your hand when they signed you and phoned you when they got rid of you. Between your arrival and departure you might catch the odd glimpse of the boss, say, up in his luxury suite, but typically he was a remote figure. This GM wasn’t like that. This GM, so far as anyone could tell, never set foot inside his luxury suite.

That is what the new player noticed right away: that Billy Beane hung around the clubhouse more than the other GMs. David Justice, who had spent fourteen years with the Braves, the Indians, and the Yankees, claimed he’d seen more of Billy in the first half of the 2002 season than he had all the other GMs put together. The new member of the team would see Billy in the locker room asking some shell-shocked pitcher why he’d thrown a certain pitch in a certain count. Or he’d see Billy chasing down the clubhouse hallway after the Panamanian pinch hitter, badgering him about some disparaging comment he’d made about the base on balls. Or he’d dash up the tunnel from the dugout in the middle of the game to watch tape of his previous at bat, and find Billy in shorts and a T-shirt, dripping sweat from a workout, at the other end; and, if the game wasn’t going well, he might find Billy throwing stuff around the clubhouse.
Breaking things.

It was hard to know which of Billy’s qualities was most important to his team’s success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players. Most GMs hadn’t played the game and tended to be physically intimidated in the presence of big league players. Billy had not only played, he might as well wear a sign around his neck that said:
I’ve been here, so don’t go trying any of that big league bullshit on me.
He didn’t want your autograph. He wasn’t looking to be your buddy. Seldom did the player see Billy socially, away from the clubhouse. Billy kept his distance, even when he was right in your face. Nevertheless, he was a presence.

After a while the new player would start to wonder if there was any place previously reserved for men in uniform that Billy didn’t invade. There was, just one. The dugout. Major League Baseball rules forbade the general manager from sitting in the dugout. But even there the GM was never very far away, because the manager, Art Howe, walked around with a miniature Billy Beane perched on his shoulder, hollering in his ear. In the Oakland A’s dugout occurred the most extraordinary acts of mind control; if Art had a spoon in his head Billy could have bent it with his brain waves. One time Adam Piatt, the spare outfielder, had gone up to the plate in a tight game with a runner on first base with one out, and bunted the guy over. Just like you were supposed to do. Just like everyone in baseball did. Art hadn’t exactly disapproved—at heart Art was an old baseball guy. Instead, incredibly, he had wandered down to where Piatt sat in the dugout and said, “You did that on your own, right?”

The TV viewers saw only the wise old manager conferring with his young player. They probably assumed they were witnessing the manager making some fine point about the art of the sacrifice bunt. The manager was more concerned with the politics of the sacrifice bunt: Art Howe wanted to make sure that it wasn’t him who got yelled at by the GM after the game. Sure enough, in the papers the next day Piatt confessed that he had bunted on his own—that Art hadn’t given him the signal. Art, for his part, offered the reporters an impromptu lecture that might have been written by the GM himself on why the sacrifice bunt was a bad play. (Baseball players and coaches often used the newspapers to send memos to their general managers.)