Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (34 page)

And so the only moment that Billy Beane looked forward to, on a day he should have gloated through, was when he’d make his getaway. On his way out of the office, however, he’d been cut off by the team’s stunned marketing department. The people who sold the Oakland A’s couldn’t quite believe that the guy who’d built them was taking off. They explained to Billy that if he left, he might as well pile a bunch of money in the street and set it on fire: he’d be blowing the biggest chance they’d had in years to promote the Oakland A’s to the wider world. The winning streak had become a national news story. And so Billy, slightly miffed, stayed. He sat still for CBS Evening News, CNN, Fox Sports News, ESPN, and a few others, then went down to the weight room and hid, from the media and the game.

At some point between the treadmill and the stationary bicycle he noticed on his little white box that it was the bottom of the third inning and his team was ahead 11–0. For the first time in a very long while, he relaxed. Still dripping sweat, he set himself up in manager Art Howe’s empty office, with the television switched on. Nineteen games into a winning streak, up eleven–zip against one of the worst teams in baseball, with one of the best pitchers in baseball still on the mound for the Oakland A’s—this one game appeared safe to watch. It wasn’t going to violate the laws of probability; it wasn’t going to drive him mad, and cause him to do something he might later regret. At that moment, Billy Beane was so at peace with his world that he let me into it.

His feet were up on Art Howe’s Formica desk. He was feeling detached. Expansive. Delighted and delightful. This was the way he felt most of the time; this was the way he almost always handled himself away from baseball. He had, he confessed, expressed his concern when he saw that Art Howe had written John Mabry’s name on the lineup card, where Scott Hatteberg’s should have been. It was a shame for Hatteberg, I thought. Here he’s been performing these valuable and rather selfless services to the Oakland A’s offense, and the one game the world will watch, he isn’t allowed to play. Art explained to Billy that Hatteberg had never faced Kansas City’s ace, Paul Byrd. Mabry, on the other hand, not only had hit Byrd hard but claimed to be able to see him tipping his pitches—that is, Mabry could guess what Byrd was about to throw. Billy now says he deferred to Art’s judgment, as if deferring to Art’s judgment comes naturally to him. Mabry promptly made Art Howe look like a genius. He’d driven in one run with a single up the middle in the six-run first inning—and helped to chase Byrd from the game. Then, in the second inning, he’d whacked a solo home run.

With the score 11–0, and Tim Hudson still carving up the Royals lineup, the absence of Scott Hatteberg from the lineup is a distant memory. Billy Beane is right to feel his usual self: the odds of something going wrong are ridiculously small. He calls his daughter Casey, now twelve years old, and still living in Southern California.

“Hey Casey, you watching the game?”

Pause.

“American Idol?
You’re watching
American Idol??”

Casey is watching
American Idol
.

He tells Casey the news—the team is winning big, a nation of baseball fans is watching—teases her a bit, and lets her go.

Billy Beane should always be so calm during his team’s games. If he believes what he claims to believe—that the game can be reduced to a social science; that it is simply a matter of figuring out the odds, and exploiting the laws of probability; that baseball players follow strikingly predictable patterns—then there is no point in being anything but calm. To get worked up over plays, or even games, is as unproductive as a casino manager worrying over the outcomes of individual pulls of the slot machines. Billy as good as makes this point now by pointing at the TV, where Eric Chavez, having just made a difficult defensive play look routine, sheepishly starts kicking the dirt in front of him. “He’s almost afraid to acknowledge how good he really is,” says Billy. “And here’s the thing. He’s twenty-four years old. You know if he’s here now”—he holds his hand at his chest—“he’ll wind up here”—he raises his hand over his head. “You could make a case that Chavvy is the most naturally gifted player in the game.”

I ask him to make the case, and, in his current, detached mood, he’s more than happy to. Up eleven–zip against a sorry club, he’s reveling in the objective, scientific spirit.

“Age is such a critical factor in evaluating guys,” he says, then plucks the Oakland A’s media guide off Art Howe’s bookshelf. “Here. Chavvy is twenty–four. The season isn’t over. He’s got 31 homers, 28 doubles, 55 walks, a .283 batting average, and a .353 on-base percentage. Who do you want to compare him to?”

“Jason Giambi,” I say.

“All right,” as he pulls out the New York Yankees media guide. “But I know the answer to this already, because I already did it.” He finds Giambi’s career statistics. “When Jason was twenty-four years old, he spent half the year in Edmonton—on a Triple-A team. In the half he was in the big leagues he hit 6 homers, drew 28 walks, and hit .256. Who else?”

“Barry Bonds,” I say. Across the Bay, Bonds is making the argument every night that he is the finest hitter who ever played the game.

“That’s hard,” he says. “Bonds has reached that level where even talent can’t take you. But okay, let’s take Bonds.” He grabs the San Francisco Giants media guide. “I know what it’s going to show because I did this with him, too. Bonds was born in 1964. In 1988, he hit .283, with 24 homers, 72 walks, and 30 doubles. That gives you some idea of how good Chavvy is.”

“Who else?” he asks. But before I can think of anyone else, he says, “Let’s try A-Rod [Alex Rodriguez]. No one had a quicker start than A-Rod.” He pulls the Texas Rangers media guide. “A-Rod was 24 in 1999. In 1999, he hit .285, with 25 doubles, 42 homers, and 111 runs batted in.” He looks up. “That compares well enough, but then there’s defense. Chavvy is the best fielding third baseman in the game. A-Rod isn’t the best fielding shortstop.”

I’m still having trouble getting my mind around the notion of making such forecasts about human beings, and I say as much. My problem can be simply put: every player is different. Every player must be viewed as a special case. The sample size is always one. His answer is equally simple: baseball players follow similar patterns, and these patterns are etched in the record books. Of course, every so often some player may fail to embrace his statistical destiny, but on a team of twenty-five players the statistical aberrations will tend to cancel each other out. And most of them will conform fairly exactly to his expectations. About Eric Chavez’s career, for instance, he has not the slightest doubt. “The only thing that will stop Chavvy is if he gets bored,” he says. “People don’t understand that. He continues to frustrate people who take him out of context. He is
twenty-four years old.
What he’s done at twenty-four no one has done. Health permitted, his whole career is a lock.”

I mention that there are times when Billy is one of the people Chavvy frustrates. Chavvy, like Miguel Tejada, is Mister Swing at Everything. In his current mood, Billy waves the objection aside. He can’t understand how I can be so intolerant. “Chavvy’s young,” he says. “He’s good-looking. He’s a millionaire. He kind of owes it to himself to swing at everything. What were
you
like when you were twenty-four?”

This was the character whose behavior was consistent with the way he said he wanted to run his baseball team: rationally. Scientifically. This was the “objective” Billy Beane, the general manager who was certain that “you don’t change guys; they are who they are.” Who will describe his job as “a soap box derby. You build the car in the beginning of the year and after that all you do is push it down the hill.” To this Billy Beane’s way of thinking there was no point in meddling with the science experiment. There was no point in trying to get inside players’ heads, for instance, to reshape their approach to the game. They will be who they will be. When you listen to the “objective” Billy Beane talk about his players, you begin to wonder if baseball players have free will.

But there is another, less objective Billy Beane. And in the top of the fourth inning, when Miguel Tejada drops a routine, inning-ending double-play throw from second baseman Mark Ellis, the other Billy Beane awakens from his slumber. Even as the Royals score five runs they shouldn’t have, Billy remains calm—after all, it’s still 11–5, and Tim Hudson is still pitching—but he’s on alert. He begins to talk about his players in a different way. And he allows me to see that the science experiment is messier than the chief scientist usually is willing to admit.

In the Oakland fourth, center fielder Terrence Long hits a grounder back to the pitcher, and runs hard down the first-base line. This is new. Heretofore, when Terrence Long has grounded out, he has trotted down the line with supreme indifference to public opinion. Too young to know that you are what you pretend to be, Terrence Long has nearly perfected the art of seeming not to care. As it happens, a few days ago, Terrence walked out into the players’ parking lot and discovered that someone had egged his car. Hearing of the incident, Billy stopped by Terrence’s locker and told him that he’d had an e-mail from the culprit, an A’s fan, who said he was furious that he’d paid money to watch Terrence Long jog the bases. The effect on Terrence Long was immediate. He went from jogging to first on a routine ground out to running as fast as he can until the first moment he can stop without pissing off Billy Beane. As he sprints down the line, Billy says that Terrence’s real problem is “his own self-doubt, exacerbated by the media. That’s one of the mistakes that young players make—they actually read the papers.”

In the Oakland fifth, with the score still 11–5, Ramon Hernandez leads off. Twice in the first four innings the Oakland catcher has taken outside fastballs and driven doubles to the opposite field. This is new. All season long Ramon Hernandez has been trying and failing to pull outside fastballs. He’s been a complete bust on offense, and failed to conform to the Oakland A’s front office’s greater expectations of him. As it happens, the other day, Billy stopped by Ramon Hernandez’s locker and made a bet with him: each time he went the opposite way with an outside pitch, Billy would pay him fifty bucks; each time he tried to pull an outside pitch, he’d pay Billy fifty bucks. The point of the exercise, Billy now says, is “it gives me an excuse to henpeck Ramon. It’s a subversive way for me to keep nagging the shit out of him without him knowing it.”

Most of the players who pass across the television screen on this historic evening have been on the receiving end of Billy Beane’s subtle attempts to manipulate their behavior. He claims there is no point in trying to change people, and then he goes ahead and tries to change them anyway. He knows most of his players better than he would ever allow himself to be known by them, and while that is not saying very much, it’s still says something. “Look at Miggy’s face,” he says, at the end of the sixth inning. The television camera is on Tejada, in the dugout, looking surprisingly glum. “He’s the only guy in the lineup without a hit. This is what happens with younger players: they want to do too much. Watch him: he’ll try to do more than he should.” And sure enough, after Tim Hudson gets into trouble, and Chad Bradford is called in from the bullpen, he does.

W
HEN CHAD BRADFORD
is in the bullpen, he often thinks about his father. It helps put whatever pressure he’s feeling into perspective. The doctors had told his father he’d never walk again and the man had not only walked, he’d worked, and not only worked, but played catch. If his father could do
that,
how hard was this?

The thought usually made him feel better, but tonight, with so much on the line, it doesn’t. He’s feeling like a different pitcher than he was just a few weeks ago. Before the trouble started, he’d been exactly as effective as Paul DePodesta’s computer had predicted he would be. For nearly two full seasons he’s been living his dream. Chad himself had not quite believed it when, before the 2001 season, just after his back surgery, Billy Beane called him to tell him that he had traded for him with a view to his becoming the critical middle reliever in the Oakland A’s big league bullpen. Billy told Chad the statistics he thought he was capable of generating, and even Chad thought they were a stretch. Amazingly, to Chad, he’d done almost exactly what Billy Beane predicted he would do. “It’s like the guy knows what’s going to happen before it happens,” said Chad.

Now he’s unsure that Billy Beane’s faith in him is justified. He pulls his cap down over his eyes and walks briskly toward the mound, reaching it in exactly the same number of steps he always does. Outside, everything looked the same; inside, everything felt different. A few weeks ago, when he looked in to take the signal from the catcher, he was oblivious to his surroundings. He’d be repeating to himself his usual phrase, to shut down his mind to the pressure.

Make your pitch.

Make your pitch.

Make your pitch.

Tonight, he wasn’t oblivious; tonight, as he leaned in, he was aware of everything. The crowd noise. The signs. The national audience. And a new mantra, now running through his head:

Don’t Fuck This Up!

Don’t Fuck This Up!

Don’t Fuck This Up!

He’s having the worst slump in his entire professional career and while it isn’t actually all that bad a slump—one bad outing in Yankee Stadium, another in Fenway Park—he has no ability to put it into perspective. On his bookshelf at home there were two books, side by side, tattered by his constant use of them. One was
The Mental Game of Baseball
. The other was the Bible. He has a favorite passage, Philippians 4:13:
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
It’s giving him no solace. A few nights before, after another nerve-wracking outing, he’d called his wife, Jenny, who had taken the kids back to Byram for the start of the school year, and said, “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”