Moneyball

by Lewis, Michael

  Jeremy Giambi believes he has reached the wall before he does. He gropes the air behind him with his free hand, then he looks up. Somewhere in the night sky is a ball; where, apparently, he is unsure. He jumps, or, at any rate, simulates the act of jumping. The ball somehow flies under his glove and bangs off the wall for a double. As Soriano zips around first base, I yell at the television—I hadn’t come here to watch the underdog lose—and only just stop myself from saying that the fans should sue for malpractice. There was something indecent about hurling abuse at Oakland A’s fielders, like hollering at cripples. It wasn’t their fault they’d landed in the middle of a lab experiment. Jeremy Giambi never asked to play left field.

  Paul DePodesta hardly blinks. Life with no money was filled with embarrassing little trade-offs. The trick is to know precisely what trade-offs you were making. A farce in left field is merely the price of doing business with Jeremy Giambi’s bat. But it’s a complex transaction. The game is only two pitches old and already the cost is felt.

  Soriano is standing on third base and Derek Jeter on first (infield single) when Jason Giambi first comes to the plate. The three Yankees on the field will be paid nearly as much this year as the A’s entire twenty-five-man roster. Giambi—Giambi’s money—transforms the arena. If you drilled a hole in either the roof or the front wall of the video room you would quickly reach the largest crowd in Oakland A’s history: 54,513 people had come tonight, and not merely because the New York Yankees were in town. They’d come because the past two years the A’s had been within a few outs of knocking the Yankees from the play-offs. They’d come to watch the latest plot twist in one of the great David and Goliath stories in professional sports: Goliath, dissatisfied with his size advantage, has bought David’s sling. The Oakland fans wave signs at Giambi: TRAITOR. SELLOUT. GREED. They scream worse things.

  Yet in here, in the video room, their voices still cannot be heard. Six television screens display a soundless frenzy. No one in the video room so much as sighs. They have no interest in morality tales. Morality is for fans.

  As Jason Giambi steps into the batter’s box, the TV cameras flash back and forth between him and his younger brother in left field. The announcers wish to draw out a few comparisons. Poor Jeremy. He still needed a baseball genius to divine his true worth but any moron could see the value of his older brother, at the plate. In all of baseball for the past few years there has been only one batter more useful to an offense: Barry Bonds. Giambi has all the crude offensive attributes—home runs, high batting average, a perennially high number of RBIs. He also has the subtler attributes. When he’s in the lineup, for instance, the opposing pitcher is forced to throw a lot more pitches than when he isn’t. The more pitches the opposing starting pitcher throws, the earlier he’ll be relieved. Relief pitchers aren’t starting pitchers for a reason: they aren’t as good. When a team wades into the opponent’s bullpen in the first game of a series, it feasts, in games two and three, on pitching that is not merely inferior but exhausted. “Baseball is a war of attrition,” Billy Beane was fond of saying, “and what’s being attrited is pitchers’ arms.”

  A hitter like Giambi performed many imperceptible services for his team. His ability to wear down first string pitchers gave everyone else more chances to hit against the second string. This ability, like every other, grew directly from his perfect understanding of the strike zone. He had the hitter’s equivalent of perfect pitch, and the young men in the video room are attuned to its value.

  “Watch,” says Paul, as $17 million a year of hitter steps up to the plate and stares blankly at $237,500 of pitcher. “Giambi’s cut the strike zone completely in half.” It isn’t Giambi’s obvious powers that have him excited. It’s his self-control, and the effect it has on pitchers. Giambi makes it nearly impossible for even a very good pitcher to do what he routinely does with lesser hitters: control the encounter. And Eric Hiljus isn’t, tonight, a very good pitcher.

  David points to the screen and shows me the sliver of the plate over which a pitch must pass for Giambi to swing at it. The line he traces omits a chunk of the inner half of the plate. “He has a hole on the inside where he can’t do much with a pitch and so he lays off it,” says David.

  Every hitter has a hole. “The strike zone is too big to cover it all,” as Paul says. Ted Williams wrote a book, called The Science of Hitting, in which he imagined the strike zone as a grid of seventy-seven baseballs and further imagined what he could, and couldn’t, do with a baseball thrown to each of the seventy-seven spots. There were eleven spots, all low and most away, where, if the pitch was thrown to them and Ted Williams swung, he hit under .270. Barry Bonds, during spring training, had given an interview with ESPN in which he as much as said, “if you make your pitch, you can get me out.” The issue wasn’t whether a hitter had a weakness, but where it was. Every pitcher in the big leagues knew that Giambi’s hole was waist-high, on the inside corner of the plate. It was about the size of a pint of milk, two baseballs in height and one baseball in width.

  Which raised an obvious question: why don’t the pitchers just aim for the milk pint? When I ask it, Feiny smiles and shakes his head. “They do,” David says. “But he’s so good he’ll step back and rip one foul into the upper deck. After that, the pitcher won’t ever go inside again.”

  “And his weakness is right next to his greatest strength,” says Paul. “If they miss by two inches over the plate, the ball is gone. The pitcher is out there thinking: ‘I can get him out there. But if I miss by even a fraction, he’ll destroy me.’”

  It’s not clear what Eric Hiljus is thinking—other than he has no interest in flirting with the inside part of the plate. His first pitch is a ball just off the outside corner; his second pitch, a fastball, closer to the middle. Giambi yanks it into right field for a single that drives Soriano home.

  The A’s hitters go quietly in the first. In the top of the second, Eric Hiljus continues to indulge Yankee hitters with fastballs down the middle of the plate and they strike for four more runs, three on a home run by Derek Jeter. About the third time that I shout while the rest of the video room remains silent, I realize I am not only watching the game differently but am watching a different game. My eyes keep drifting to the one TV screen that, almost apologetically, displays the commercial broadcast. They focus on a different screen—an internal feed directly from the center field camera—that offers them the clearest view of the strike zone. I’m watching the whole game, and responding the way an ordinary fan responds. I’m looking for story lines and dramatic events and other fuel for my emotions. They’re watching fragments—not the game itself but derivatives of the game—and responding, so far as I can tell, not at all. Finally, I say something about it.

  “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 e
very 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. The
y 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.

  * * *