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

into a tight game. In tight situations Art was supposed to use Chad Bradford. Bradford was the ace of the pen. So that it would be clear in Art’s head, Billy had instructed him to think of Bradford as “the closer before the ninth inning.” Art’s first answer about Magnante was that he thought Mags, the lefty, would be more effective than Bradford, the righty, against a left-handed slugger like Thome. Which is nuts, since Mags hasn’t gotten anyone out in weeks and Bradford has been good against lefties. Art’s second answer is that Billy put Mags on the team, and if a guy is on the team, you need to use him. Art won’t say this directly to Billy but he’ll think it. The coaching staff had grown tired of hearing Billy holler at them for using Magnante. “The guy has got braces on both legs,” says pitching coach Rick Peterson. “We’re not going to use him as a pinch runner. If you don’t want us to use him, trade him.”

Mike Magnante goes into his stretch and looks in for the signal. He just last month turned thirty-seven, and is four days shy of the ten full years of big league service he needs to collect a full pension. It’s not hard to see what’s wrong with him, to discern the defect that makes him available to the Oakland A’s. He is pearshaped and slack-jawed and looks less like a professional baseball player than most of the beat reporters who cover the team. But he has a reason to hope: his history of pitching better in the second half than the first. The team opened the season with three lefties in the bullpen, which is two more than most clubs carried. A month ago they’d released one, Mike Holtz, and two days ago sent down the other, Mike Venafro. The story Mike Magnante told himself on the eve of July 29, 2002, was that he hadn’t pitched often enough to find his rhythm. He’d go a week when he made only three pitches in a game. With the other Mikes gone, he finally had his chance to find his rhythm.

He makes an almost perfect pitch to Lee Stevens, a fastball low and away. The catcher is set up low and outside. When you saw the replay, you understood that he’d hit his spot. If he’d missed, it was only by half an inch. It’s the pitch Mike Magnante wanted to make. Good pitch, bad count. The ball catches the fat part of the bat. It rises and rises and the two runners on base begin to circle ahead of the hitter. Mags can only stand and watch: an opposite field shot at night in Oakland is a rare, impressive sight. It is Lee Stevens’s first home run as a Cleveland Indian. By the time the ball lands, the first and third basemen are closing in on the mound like bailiffs, and Art Howe is on the top of the dugout steps. He’s given up five runs and gotten nobody out. It wasn’t the first time that he’d been knocked out of the game, but it wasn’t often he’d been knocked out on his pitch. That’s what happens when you’re thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.

The game is effectively over. Chad Bradford will come on and get three quick outs, too late. The Indians’ own left-handed relief pitcher, Ricardo Rincon, strikes out David justice on three pitches and gets Eric Chavez to pop out on four. The contrast cast Mags in unflattering light. The A’s had the weakest left-handed relief pitching in the league and the Indians had some of the strongest. To see the difference, Billy Beane didn’t even need to watch the game.

Having just finished an enthusiastic impersonation of a baseball owner pretending to be a farm animal receiving a beating, Billy Beane rose back into his desk chair and waited, impatiently, for Mark Shapiro to call. Mark Shapiro was the general manager of the Cleveland Indians.

When Billy sat upright in his office, a few yards from the Coliseum, he faced a wall covered entirely by a white board and, on it, the names of the several hundred players controlled by the Oakland A’s. Mike Magnante’s name was on that board. Swiveling around to his rear he faced another white board with the names of the nearly twelve hundred players on other major league rosters. Ricardo Rincon’s name was on that board. At this point in the year Billy didn’t really need to look at these boards to make connections; he knew every player on other teams that he wanted, and every player in his own system that he didn’t want. The trick was to persuade other teams to buy his guys for more than they were worth, and sell their guys for less than they were worth. He’d done this so effectively the past few years that he was finding other teams less eager to do business with him. The Cleveland Indians were not yet one of those teams.

Waiting for Shapiro to call him, Billy distracted himself by paying attention to several things at once. On his desk was the most recent issue of Harvard Magazine, containing an article about a Harvard professor of statistics named Carl Morris (the Bill James fan). The article explained how Morris had used statistical theory to determine the number of runs a team could expect to score in the different states of a baseball game. No outs with no one on base: 55. No outs with a runner on first base: 90. And so on for each of the twenty-four possible states of a baseball game. “We knew this three years ago,” says Billy, “and Harvard thinks it’s original.”

He shoves a wad of tobacco into his upper lip, then turns back to his computer screen, which displays the Amazon.com home page. In his hand he’s got a review he’s