Moneyball

by Lewis, Michael

  Micah Bowie gets the final out in the Kansas City eighth, and the A’s go quickly in their half. In the top of the ninth, facing closer Billy Koch, the Royals get a man as far as second base. With two outs and two strikes against a weak hitter, Luis Alicea, the game, once again, looks over. Then Alicea lines a single into left center.

  11-11.

  From somewhere in the clubhouse I hear a sharp cry, then the clatter of metal on metal. I open Art Howe’s door to sneak a peek, and spot Scott Hatteberg running from the batting cage to the tunnel that leads to the Oakland dugout.

  Hatteberg isn’t particularly ready to play. He’s in the wrong state of mind, and carrying the wrong bat. After Art Howe told him he wasn’t playing tonight, he’d poured himself a cup of coffee, then another. He’d sat down briefly and chatted with some guy he’d never met, and whose name he couldn’t remember, who wanted to show him some bats he had handcrafted. Hatteberg had picked out one of the guy’s bats, a shiny black maple one with a white ring around its neck. He liked the feel of it.

  Like most of the players, Hatteberg, as a minor leaguer, had signed a contract with the Louisville Slugger company, in which he agreed to use only the company’s bats. All but certain that he would not play tonight, he had taken his contraband bat with him to the dugout. By the time the score was 11-0, certain that he would never play, he had the bat between his knees and four cups of coffee in his bloodstream. He is, by the bottom of the ninth, chemically altered. He’s also holding a bat he’s never hit with.

  The score remains 11-11. The Kansas City closer, Jason Grimsley, is on the mound, throwing his usual blazing sinkers. Jermaine Dye flies to right for the first out. The television camera pans the A’s dugout and from their expressions you can see that a lot of the players think the game is as good as lost. In losing an eleven-run lead, they’d lost more than that. They look as if they know the last good thing already has happened to them.

  Art Howe tells Scott Hatteberg to grab a bat. He’s pinch-hitting. Hatteberg grabs the bat given to him by the anonymous craftsman. It violates the contract he signed as a minor leaguer with the Louisville Slugger company, but what the hell.

  He had faced Grimsley just two days before, in a similar situation. Tie game, bottom of the ninth, but that time there were men on base. He didn’t need to watch tape tonight. With a pitcher like Grimsley you always know what you’ll be getting: 96-mph heat. You also, usually, know where you’ll be getting it: at the bottom of, or just below, the strike zone. Two days ago Grimsley had thrown him six straight sinking fastballs, down and away. With two strikes on him, Hatteberg had swung at the last of them and hit a weak ground ball to second base. (Miguel Tejada had followed him with a game-winning single up the middle.) As disappointing as that experience had been, it now served a purpose. He’d seen six pitches from Jason Grimsley. He’s gathered his information. He knew that, if at all possible, he shouldn’t fool around with Grimsley’s low sinkers.

  Tonight, as he steps into the box, he promises himself that he won’t swing at anything down in the zone until he has two strikes. He’ll wait for what he wants until he has no choice but to accept whatever happens to be coming. He’s looking for something up—something he can drive for a double, and get himself in scoring position.

  He settles into his usual open stance, and waggles the shiny black contraband bat back and forth through the zone, like a golfer on the first tee. As Grimsley comes into the stretch, his face contorts in the most unsettling way. He actually grins as he pitches, and it’s not a friendly grin. It’s the grin of a man who enjoys pulling wings off flies. The effect on the TV viewer is unnerving. But Hatty doesn’t see Grimsley’s face. He’s gazing at the general area where he expects the ball to leave Grimsley’s hand. He needs to see just one pitch, to get his timing down. He’s thinking: if I can lay off the first pitch I might get a pitch up in the zone. Over and over he’s telling himself: lay off the first pitch. The man who will this year lead the entire American League in laying off first pitches feels he needs to give himself a pep talk to lay off the first pitch. It must be the caffeine.

  He lays off the first pitch. It’s a ball, just low. Another round of horrible facial expressions, and Grimsley’s ready again. The second pitch is another fastball, but it’s high in the strike zone. Hatty takes his short swing; the ball finds the barrel of his bat, and rockets into deep right center field.

  He leaves the batter’s box in a crouching run. He’s moving just as fast as he does when he hits a slow roller to the third baseman. He doesn’t see Grimsley raging. He doesn’t hear fifty-five thousand fans erupting. He doesn’t notice the first baseman turning to leave the field. He doesn’t know that there’s a fellow from Cooperstown following him around the bases, picking them up, and will soon come looking for his bat. The only one in the entire Coliseum who does not know where the ball is going is the man who hit it. Scott Hatteberg alone watches the ball soar through the late night air with something like detachment.

  The ball doesn’t just leave the park; it lands high up in the stands, fifty feet or so beyond the 362 sign in deep right center field. When he’s finally certain that the ball is gone for good, Scott Hatteberg raises both hands over his head, less in triumph than disbelief. Rounding first, he looks into the Oakland dugout. But there’s no one left inside—the players are all rushing onto the field. Elation transforms him. He shouts at his teammates. He’s not saying: Look what I just did. He’s saying: Look what we just did! We won! As he runs, he sheds years at the rate of about one every twenty feet. By the time he touches home plate, he’s less man than boy.

  And, not five minutes later, Billy Beane was able to look me in the eye and say that it was just another win.

  Chapter XII

  The Speed of the Idea

  Billy Beane never allowed himself sentimental feelings about a game, or a player, or his own experiences. He’d walled himself off from his finer feelings, or tried to. He defined himself by his distaste for, rather than his romance with, his ballplaying past. This set him apart from most people who made their living in the game. Former big league ballplayers usually have friendly ghosts.

  The sympathy most former ballplayers had for their own professional experiences—for the way they played the game—was nevertheless a problem for the anti-traditional Oakland A’s. They needed to employ men with experience, but with that experience came the usual feelings and hunches and instincts. Billy often felt as if he were having to fight the past in his players and coaches—that Paul DePodesta was the only person in the entire organization who drew the same conclusions from the same data as he did. And, as the play-offs approached, this problem always intensified.

  One day before the end of the regular season, Ron Washington and Thad Bosley, the A’s infield and hitting coaches, came together in a batting cage, just off the visitors’ clubhouse in The Ballpark in Arlington. Their talk began innocently enough. The team was about to play its second to last game of the regular season, against the Texas Rangers. Ray Durham was getting in some extra hacks, with Wash and Boz looking on, less coaches than connoisseurs.

  Crack!

  Wash and Boz were having one last, soulful look at Ray Durham before Durham went the way of all of Billy Beane’s rent-a-stars. There was little chance Billy would re-sign Ray Durham for next season. There wasn’t enough wrong with him. There wasn’t anything wrong with him. Durham had what every general manager in the game had always prized: pop in the leadoff slot, speed on the base paths, and a reputation, less deserved now than five years ago, as a good second baseman. In the free market Durham probably would be overpriced; but even if he was fairly priced, Billy wouldn’t keep him. There was nothing inefficient about the market for Ray Durham’s services.

  “Look at Ray,” says Wash.

  Crack!

  “That little sonofabitch got some juice in that body,” says Wash. “He will hurt you, you throw the ball in the wrong place.”

  “Swings like a m
an,” says Boz. “And that man’s a menace.”

  “He stands up there like some little Punch and Judy,” says Wash. “But he can hurt you.”

  Crack! It’s unclear whether Ray is listening to any of this.

  “You know what impressed me the most about Ray when he first came over?” says Boz. “The way he runs down the first-base line.”

  “He’s the only base stealer we got,” says Wash. “You know what a base stealer is?”

  I assumed I didn’t.

  “A base stealer is a guy who when everyone in the goddamn yard know he gonna get the bag, he gets the bag.”

  Crack!

  Wash had been recruited to play baseball by the Kansas City Royals in the early seventies, at a time when the Royals were trying to take track stars and turn them into baseball players. Those Royals had made a fetish of speed, and Wash, a speedster, was the beneficiary. The way Wash tells it, with the first pitch of every game he and his teammates started running, and they didn’t stop until the last. “There was sometimes you didn’t run,” he says, but then he has to think hard about what times those might be. “You didn’t run on Nolan Ryan,” he finally says, “because when you ran on Nolan Ryan all you did was piss Nolan Ryan off. You’da kept your ass on first base, the hitter might have done something.”

  Not thinking where it might lead, I ask Wash how many bases he stole in his youth.

  “I stole fifty-seven one year,” he says.

  Ray Durham turns, slightly, and cocks his head in mock amazement: no shit?

  Wash is looking straight at Ray when he says, “Boz stole ninety.”

  Boz just nods.

  Ray drops his bat in wonder. “You stole ninety?” he says.

  Boz just nods again, like it’s no big deal.

  “Damn!” Ray’s now engaged. He’s like an American tourist who has just discovered the German on the train next to him is a long-lost cousin. “It’s different here, huh?” he says.

  The question is rhetorical. Ray Durham knows firsthand just how different it is here. Two months ago, freshly plucked for next to nothing by Billy Beane from the Chicago White Sox, Durham was seated in a dugout before his first game with his new team. The Oakland beat reporters swarmed around him. Their second question was, “How do you feel about Billy Beane putting you in center field?” That was the first Ray Durham had heard of Billy’s quixotic plans for him. He hadn’t played in the outfield since high school. Durham dutifully said that he was willing to consider anything to help the team, a statement his saucer eyes translated beautifully into a question: Are you fucking kidding me? In nanoseconds Durham’s agent was on the phone to Billy to explain that his client, an All-Star second baseman, was a free agent at the end of the year. While happy to perform the usual offensive services for this low-rent team that, by some miracle, had got their sweaty peasant hands on him for half a season, Ray Durham did not intend to jeopardize his financial future by making a spectacle of himself in center field for the Oakland A’s.

  Ray had put an end to that particular stab at baseball efficiency. But when the A’s coaches told him to stop trying to steal bases, he had stopped. His whole career Ray Durham had been hired to steal bases; the moment he arrived in Oakland, his coaches told him to stay put wherever he was until the ball was hit. Billy had traded for Ray not because Ray stole bases but because Ray had a talent for getting on base—for not making outs. And so, for the first time in his career, Ray mostly played it safe on the bases. From the aesthetic point of view, this was a pity. Let Ray Durham do what he pleased on the base paths and he became a human thrill ride. The other night in Seattle, after a passed ball, he went from second to third in a heartbeat and then, instead of stopping like a sane person, just flew around the bag and headed toward home. The entire stadium suffered a little panic attack. The Seattle catcher dove and spun, the Seattle pitcher felt his sphincter in his throat, and forty thousand Seattle fans gasped like they’d just reached the first crest on a giant roller coaster. A millisecond later Ray screeched to a halt, trotted back to third, and chuckled. Ray knew how to use his legs to fuck with people’s minds.

  Not running is about as natural to Ray as not breathing, but until now he’s bottled up not just his speed but his feelings. Now he says, “It’s different here, huh?”

  Wash snorts. “It’s the shit,” he says. “We have twenty-five stolen bases all year. Eight were guys going on their own and getting it. Ten were 3-2 counts. Seven, Art gave the green light.” One hundred and sixty games into the season Art Howe has given base runners the green light a grand total of seven times. It’s got to be some kind of record.

  “Ray, how many bags you got this season?” asks Wash.

  “Twenty-five,” says Ray.

  “When he came over, he had twenty-two,” says Wash. “So he got three bags here. Two of those he took on his own.”

  “You run on this team and you’re on your own,” says Boz, ominously.

  “Yeah,” says Wash. “There’s a rule on this club. It’s okay if you get it. If you don’t, you got hell to pay.” That would cast Billy Beane as Satan.

  Ray shakes his head in wonder, and goes back to taking his cuts.

  Crack!

  “If you say base-running isn’t important, you forget how to run the bases,” says Boz.

  “You wanna see something funny,” Wash says. “Come sit with me in the third-base box and watch that shit comin’ at me. Nobody on this club know how to go from first to third.” In addition to being the infield coach on a team that can’t afford to waste money on defense, Wash is the third-base coach on a team that can’t afford to waste money on speed. Whenever a ball goes to the wall, he’s required to make these weirdly elaborate calculations to take into account the base-running talents Billy Beane has provided him with. He doesn’t want to hear that foot speed is overpriced.

  Ray can no longer concentrate on his hitting. “Cautious doesn’t work in the play-offs,” he says.

  Wash and Boz don’t say anything to that. Ray’s got three weeks, at most, before he’s a free agent deciding which multi-milliondollar offer to accept: Ray can say whatever he wants about Billy Beane’s approach to baseball. In a few days the Oakland A’s will face the Minnesota Twins in the first round of the play-offs, and all the noise on the television and in the papers is about how the play-offs are different from the regular season. How the play-offs are about “manufacturing” runs. The play-offs were all about street cred, and science didn’t have any.

  “I don’t see a lot of play-off games where the score is 8-5,” says Ray. “It’s always 1-0 and 2-1.”

  “The fact of it is,” says Wash, “Billy Beane hates to make outs on the base paths.”

  Ray shakes his head sadly and resumes taking his cuts.

  I’ve stumbled upon a revolutionary cell within the Oakland A’s, three men who still believe in the need for speed. These aren’t stupid men. Ray’s obviously as shrewd as a loan shark. Ron Washington can’t open his mouth without saying something that belongs in Bartlett’s. Boz had succeeded in more than just baseball. After thirteen seasons in the big leagues, he’d spent seven more writing and producing music. Boz had something of the outsider’s perspective—which is why Billy had hired him. Boz embraced his unusual role with the Oakland A’s, not “hitting coach,” but “on-base instructor.” He didn’t mind the front office’s indifference to batting average. Their indifference to the running game was another matter.

  “Ray was bred on being aggressive running the bases,” says Wash. “Until he got here he never got chastised for being aggressive on the base paths.”

  Crack! Ray lines a pitch off the foot of bullpen catcher Brandon Buckley, who has been pitching to him from behind a screen. As Brandon hops around and tries to figure out if he’s broken something, Ray turns and says, “The White Sox always told us an aggressive mistake is not really a mistake.”

  Wash is overcome with fellow feeling. Here they have this specimen
of base-running prowess and no one gives a shit. He says, “Ray, what you thinkin’ about when you put the ball in play?”

  “Second base.”

  “As long as the ball is rolling?”

  “I’m runnin’.”

  “You runnin’.”

  “A single is a double,” says Ray.

  “A double is a triple,” says Wash.

  Nobody says anything for a minute. Then Wash says, “Different situation here. Somebody on this team runs and get his ass thrown out and you got all kinds of gurus who tell you that you just took yourself out of the inning.”

  “I never seen anything like it,” says Ray.

  * * *

  Two things happened toward the end of every season, after Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s have secured a play-off spot. The first was a slightly unseemly attempt by a small handful of staff members to use the newspapers to create pressure on the GM to improve their standard of living. The most transparent of these was an interview given by manager Art Howe to the San Jose Mercury News, on the subject of a long-term contract for himself. “With all the years I’ve been here and with what we’ve accomplished,” he said, “I would think I deserve it. My thinking is, if I don’t get it here, I’ll get it somewhere else.” After Art’s wife confessed that she, too, was befuddled by Billy Beane’s unwillingness to secure their retirement years, Art mentioned how struck he was by how different baseball teams arrange their pecking order. “Down in Anaheim,” he said, “all they talked about is the manager. I don’t think most people even know who the general manager is down there.”