Moneyball

by Lewis, Michael

  Billy could run and Billy could throw and Billy could catch and Billy even had presence of mind in the field. Billy was quick-witted and charming and perceptive about other people, if not about himself. He had a bravado, increasingly false, that no one in a fifty-mile radius was ever going to see through. He looked more like a superstar than any actual superstar. He was a natural leader of young men. Billy’s weakness was simple: he couldn’t hit.

  Or, rather, he hit sometimes but not others; and when he didn’t hit, he unraveled. “Billy was of the opinion that he should never make an out,” said Pittaro. “Relief pitchers used to come down from the bullpen to watch Billy hit, just to see what he did when he struck out.” He busted so many bats against so many walls that his teammates lost count. One time he destroyed the dugout toilet; another time, in a Triple-A game in Tacoma, he went after a fan in the stands, and proved, to everyone’s satisfaction, that fans, no matter what challenges they hollered from the safety of their seats, were better off not getting into fistfights with ballplayers. From the moment Billy entered a batter’s box he set about devouring himself from the inside until, fully self-consumed, he went looking around him for something else to feed his rage. “He didn’t have a baseball mentality,” said Jeff Bittiger. “He was more like a basketball or a football player. Emotions were always such a big part of whatever he did. A bad at bat or two and he was done for the third and fourth at bats of the game.”

  Yet even inside the batter’s box, where he came unglued in a matter of a few seconds, Billy enjoyed sensational success. In 1983, in response to his special inconsistency against right-handed pitching, Billy played around with switch-hitting. Who tried hitting from the wrong side of the plate for the first time in his life in Double-A ball? Nobody. And yet by the middle of the Double-A season, against pitchers with big league stuff, Billy was hitting .300 left-handed. Then he slumped, and lost his nerve. He went back to hitting exclusively right-handed.

  In late 1984, Billy and Lenny both came up for a few weeks at the end of the season. Billy got his first big league hit off Jerry Koosman—who immediately picked him off first base. It was funny; it was also sad. Just as the game seemed willing to bend to his talent, it snapped back, and took whatever it had just given him away. In late 1985, Lenny was brought up for good to the big league team—for which Darryl Strawberry already had hit more than seventy home runs. Lenny played center, Strawberry played right, Billy played the guy who never made it out to left field. The next year Lenny hit critical home runs in the NLCS and the World Series, and wrote a book about them, in which he mentioned that it should have been Billy Beane, not he, who became the big league star. (Lenny didn’t read books; he wrote them.)

  Rather than make Billy a big leaguer, the Mets traded him to the Minnesota Twins. The Twins in 1986 had a new manager, Ray Miller, who announced that Billy Beane would be his starting left fielder. Billy immediately went out and hurt himself in spring training, but when he came back he was, for the first time in his big league career, sent out to left field as a regular rather than a substitute. That day the Twins were in Yankee Stadium facing Ron Guidry. Billy went five for five off Guidry, with a home run. Then he went hitless the next two nights and found himself written out of the Twins’ starting lineup—for good, as it turned out. Billy understood, or said he did. The team was losing and Ray Miller was new, and feeling pressure to play veterans.

  For the next three and a half seasons Billy was up and down between Triple-A and the big leagues, with the Twins, the Detroit Tigers, and, finally, the Oakland A’s. Inside the batter’s box he struggled to adapt, but every change he made was aimed more at preventing embarrassment than at achieving success. To reduce his strikeouts, he shortened his swing, and traded the possibility of hitting a home run for a greater likelihood of simply putting the ball in play. He crouched and hunched in an attempt to hit like a smaller man. He might have struck out less than he otherwise would have done, but at the cost of crippling his natural powers. Eight years into his professional baseball career he was, in some ways, a weaker hitter than when he was seventeen years old.

  At least, when it counted. When it didn’t count—when he didn’t think about it—anything could happen. One afternoon during Billy’s one-month stint with the Detroit Tigers, he was asked by the general manager, Bill Lajoie, to come out to Tiger Stadium on an off-day. Lajoie called in a few scrubs to help with the rehabilitation of a pitcher named Walt Terrell. Terrell, who had been injured, was about to reenter the Tigers’ starting rotation. Before that happened the pitching coach wanted Terrell to throw a simulated game. Billy was expected to stand in the box, as a foil.

  Once they’d taken the field there was just one thought on everyone’s mind: was Terrell his old self? Billy sat and watched Terrell dispatch a couple of hitters. He was indeed his old self. When Billy’s turn came to hit, nobody was paying him any attention. All eyes were on Terrell. Nobody much cared whether Billy Beane struck out or hooted at the moon. He couldn’t fail. He became, for a moment, a boy playing a game. While the coaches and the GM scrutinized their precious pitcher, Billy took the first pitch he liked and launched a major league fastball into the upper deck of Tiger Stadium.

  There was a new thought on everyone’s mind: who the fuck did that?

  Billy was no longer ignorable. The GM, Lajoie, came over to him. Billy, you looked like a different guy. The stance, the attitude—everything was different. Why don’t you do that all the time? By now everyone knew that Billy was the guy destined for the Hall of Fame who never panned out. “He was still at an age where he might have developed further as a player,” said Lajoie. The GM thought there was hope; the GM really didn’t understand. Nobody understood. Inside a batter’s box, during a baseball game, Billy was no longer able to be himself. Billy was built to move: inside a batter’s box he had to be perfectly still. Inside a batter’s box he experienced a kind of claustrophobia. The batter’s box was a cage designed to crush his spirit.

  In his last three and a half years of pro ball Billy watched a lot more baseball than he played, and demonstrated an odd knack for being near the center of other people’s action. “The Forrest Gump of baseball,” he later called himself. He was on the bench when the Twins won the 1987 World Series and also when the A’s won the 1989 World Series. He was forever finding himself next to people who were about to become stars. He’d played outfield with Lenny Dykstra and Darryl Strawberry. He’d subbed for Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco. He’d lockered beside Rickey Henderson. In his slivers of five years in the big leagues he played for four famous managers: Sparky Andersen, Tom Kelly, Davey Johnson, and Tony La Russa. But by the end of 1989 his career stat line (301 at bats, .219 batting average, .246 on-base percentage, .296 slugging percentage, and 11 walks against 80 strikeouts) told an eloquent tale of suffering. You didn’t need to know Billy Beane at all—you only needed to read his stats—to sense that he left every on-deck circle in trouble. That he had developed neither discipline nor composure. That he had never learned to lay off a bad pitch. That he was easily fooled. That, fooled so often, he came to expect that he would be fooled. That he hit with fear. That his fear masqueraded as aggression. That the aggression enabled him to exit the batter’s box as quickly as possible. One season in the big leagues he came to the plate seventy-nine times and failed to draw a single walk. Not many players do that.

  Billy’s failure was less interesting than the many attempts to explain it. His teammate and friend, Chris Pittaro, said, “Billy was as competitive and intense as anyone I ever played with. He never let his talent dictate. He fought himself too hard.” Billy’s high school coach, Sam Blalock, said that “he would have made it if he’d had the intangibles—if he would have had a better self-image. I think he would have been a big star in the big leagues. No. I know. He was amazing. If he’d wanted to, he could even have made it as a pitcher.” The scouts who had been so high on Billy when he was seventeen years old still spoke of him in odd tones when he was twenty-fi
ve, as if he’d become exactly what they all said he would be and it was only by some piece of sorcery that he didn’t have the numbers to prove it. Paul Weaver: “The guy had it all. But some guys just never figure it out. Whatever it is that allows you to perform day in, day out, and to make adjustments, he didn’t have it. The game is that way.” Roger Jongewaard: “He had the talent to be a superstar. A Mike Schmidt-type player. His problem was makeup. I thought Billy had makeup on his side. But he tried too hard. He tried to force it. He couldn’t stay loose.”

  Inside baseball, among the older men, that was the general consensus: Billy Beane’s failure was not physical but mental. His mind had shoved his talent to one side. He hadn’t allowed nature to take its course. It was hardly surprising that it occurred to the older men that what Billy really needed was a shrink.

  That, briefly, is what he got. The whole idea of a baseball shrink had been reinvented by the Oakland A’s in the early 1980s.*

  There’d been some flirtation with shrinking players back in the late 1940s. The old St. Louis Browns hired a psychologist named David Tracy who specialized in hypnotic therapy. Tracy wrote a book about his experience called Psychologist At Bat, which, if nothing else, gives you some idea why baseball didn’t rush to embrace the psychiatric profession. Here’s Tracy describing his technique: “I had [a Browns’ pitcher] lie down on the couch and I stood behind him. I held up my finger about six inches above his eyes and told him to look at it steadily as I talked: ‘Your legs are growing heavy, v-e-r-y heavy. Your arms are growing heavy, v-e-r-y heavy. You are going deep, d-e-e-p asleep.’”

  The first of the new breed was a charismatic former prep school teacher with some academic training in psychology named Harvey Dorfman. The A’s minor league coordinator Karl Kuehl, with whom Dorfman wrote the seminal book, The Mental Game of Baseball, had actually put Dorfman in uniform and let him sit in the dugout during games, so he could deal with the players’ assorted brain screams in real time. Kuehl had no time for a player’s loss of composure during a game. “If you were throwing equipment or whatever, you were going to spend time with Harvey, whether you wanted to or not,” said Kuehl. One of the most efficient destroyers of baseball equipment his teammates had ever seen, Billy was destined to spend time with Harvey. Harvey’s main impression of Billy was that Billy had played hide-and-seek with his demons, and that professional baseball had helped him to win. “Baseball organizations don’t understand that with a certain kind of highly talented player who has trouble with failure, they need to suck it up and let the kid develop,” Dorfman said. “You don’t push him along too fast. Take it slow, so his failure is not public exposure and humiliation. Teach him perspective—that baseball matters but it doesn’t matter too much. Teach him that what matters isn’t whether I just struck out. What matters is that I behave impeccably when I compete. The guy believes in his talent. What he doesn’t believe in is himself. He sees himself exclusively in his statistics. If his stats are bad, he has zero self-worth. He’s never developed a coping mechanism because he’s never had anything to cope with.”

  Billy’s view of himself was radically different. Baseball hadn’t yielded itself to his character. He thought it was just bullshit to say that his character—or more exactly, his emotional predisposition—might be changed. “You know what?” he said. “If it doesn’t happen, it never was going to happen. If you never did it, it wasn’t there to begin with.” All these attempts to manipulate his psyche he regarded as so much crap. “Sports psychologists are a crutch,” he said. “An excuse for why you are not doing it rather than a solution. If somebody needs them, there is a weakness in them that will prevent them from succeeding. It’s not a character flaw; it’s just a character flaw when it comes to baseball.” He was who he was. Baseball was what it was. And they were a bad match. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault,” he said. “I just didn’t have it in me.”

  During spring training of 1990 he finally capitulated to this realization. He no longer was a boy. He was a man. He had married his high school girlfriend and she was seven months pregnant with their first child. He had responsibilities and no real future to cover them. He had gone from promising to disappointing without ever quite figuring out how or why: but he wasn’t blind. All he had to do was look around to see that something had changed. “The luster and the shine came off because there was a whole new crop of guys coming in,” he said. “I was twenty-seven years old and by and large you are what you are when you’re twenty-seven.” He had blossomed into the physical specimen the scouts had dreamed he would become. And yet, somehow, the game had shrunk him.

  The game had also rendered him unfit for anything but itself. The people on the big club assumed that Billy would break camp in 1990 with them, and spend another season shuttling between the bench and Triple-A. Billy did something else instead. He walked out of the Oakland A’s dugout and into their front office, and said he wanted a job as an advance scout. An advance scout traveled ahead of the big league team and analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of future opponents. Billy was entering what was meant to be his prime as a baseball player, and he’d decided he’d rather watch than play. “I always say that I loved playing the game but I’m not sure that I really did,” he said. “I never felt comfortable.”

  When their fifth outfielder turned up looking for a desk job, the A’s front office didn’t know what to make of it. It was as unlikely as some successful politician quitting a campaign and saying he wanted to be a staffer, or a movie actor walking off the set and taking a job as key grip. None of the staff had played big league baseball and all of them wished they had. Most would have given their glove hands, or at least a few fingers, for a year in a big league uniform. The A’s general manager Sandy Alderson was maybe the most perplexed of all. “Nobody does that,” he said. “Nobody says, ‘I quit as a player. I want to be an advance scout.’” He hired Billy anyway. “I didn’t think there was much risk in making him an advance scout,” Alderson said, “because I didn’t think an advance scout did anything.” Chris Pittaro had gone into scouting after an injury ended his playing career. When Billy called to tell him what he’d done, Pittaro was incredulous. “When you’re in the game you always think something is going to break for you. No one gives up on that. I didn’t. I was forced to retire. Billy chose to retire. And that was something I couldn’t imagine.” In the end Billy Beane proved what he had been trying to say at least since he was seventeen years old: he didn’t want to play ball.

  With that, he concluded his fruitless argument with his talent. He decided that his talent was beside the point: how could you call it talent if it didn’t lead to success? Baseball was a skill, or maybe it was a trick: whatever it was he hadn’t played it very well. In his own mind he ceased to be a guy who should have made it and became a guy upon whom had been heaped a lot of irrational hopes and dreams. He had reason to feel some distaste for baseball’s mystical nature. He would soon be handed a weapon to destroy it.

  * * *

  Sandy Alderson has a clear memory from earlier that spring of 1990, of Billy Beane taking batting practice. He didn’t know much about Billy and wondered what kind of player he was. “He was very undisciplined at the plate,” Alderson said. “Not a lot of power. I remember after I watched him very specifically asking: why is this guy even on the team?” Not that it mattered. Tony La Russa was the A’s manager and, in the great tradition of big-shot baseball managers, he paid only faint attention to what the GM had to say.

  That was one of the many things about baseball Alderson was determined to change. When Billy came to work inside the A’s front office in 1993, he walked into the early stages of a fitful science experiment. When Alderson had been hired as the A’s general manager a decade earlier, he’d been a complete outsider to baseball. This was rare. Most GMs start out as scouts and rise up through the baseball establishment. Alderson was an expensively educated San Francisco lawyer (Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School) with no experience of the game, o
utside of a bit of time on school playing fields. He was also a former Marine Corps officer, and his self-presentation was much closer to “former Marine Corps officer” than “fancy-pants lawyer.” “Sandy didn’t know shit about baseball,” says Harvey Dorfman, the baseball psychologist Alderson more or less invented. “He was a neophyte. But he was a progressive thinker. And he wanted to understand how the game worked. He also had the capacity to instill fear in others.”

  When Alderson entered the game he wanted to get his mind around it, and he did. He concluded that everything from on-field strategies to player evaluation was better conducted by scientific investigation hypotheses tested by analysis of historical statistical baseball data—than by reference to the collective wisdom of old baseball men. By analyzing baseball statistics you could see through a lot of baseball nonsense. For instance, when baseball managers talked about scoring runs, they tended to focus on team batting average, but if you ran the analysis you could see that the number of runs a team scored bore little relation to that team’s batting average. It correlated much more exactly with a team’s on-base and slugging percentages. A lot of the offensive tactics that made baseball managers famous—the bunt, the steal, the hit and run—could be proven to have been, in most situations, either pointless or self-defeating. “I figured out that managers do all this shit because it is safe,” said Alderson. “They don’t get criticized for it.” He wasn’t particularly facile with numbers, but he could understand them well enough to use their conclusions. “I couldn’t do a regressions analysis,” he said, “but I knew what one was. And the results of them made sense to me.”