Moneyball by Lewis, Michael (mobile ebook reader txt) 📕

“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.

It 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