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

tenacious sanity of the slightly mad. A big league pitcher who wishes to avoid attention, Chad Bradford has learned to disguise his superstitions as routines. There are things he always doeslike throwing exactly the same number of pitches in the bullpen, in exactly the same order; or like telling his wife to leave the stadium the moment he enters a game. There are things he never does—like touch the rosin bag.

His twin desires—to succeed, and to remain unnoticed—grow less compatible by the day. Chad Bradford’s 2002 statistics imply, to the A’s front office, that he is not just the best pitcher in their bullpen but one of the most effective relief pitchers in all of baseball. The Oakland A’s pay Chad Bradford $237,000 a year, but his performance justifies many multiples of that. At one point the Oakland A’s front office says that if Bradford simply continues doing what he’s done he’ll one day be looking at a multi-year deal at $3 million plus per. The wonder isn’t merely that they have him so cheaply, but that they have him at all. The wonder is that, until they snapped him up for next to nothing, nobody in the big leagues paid any attention at all to Chad Bradford.

In this respect, if no other, Chad Bradford resembled a lot of the Oakland A’s pitchers. The A’s had the best staff in the American League and yet of all their pitchers only Mark Mulder, one of the team’s three brilliant starters, had failed to inspire serious doubts at some point in his career in the baseball scouting mind. The team’s second ace, Tim Hudson, was a short right-handed pitcher who couldn’t get himself drafted at all in 1996, after his junior year in college, and then not until the sixth round of the 1997 draft. The team’s third ace, Barry Zito, had been spat upon by both the Texas Rangers, who took him in the third round of the 1998 draft but declined to pay him the $50,000 required to sign him, and the San Diego Padres, for whom Zito privately auditioned and badly wanted to play. The Padres told Zito that he didn’t throw hard enough to make it in the big leagues. The Oakland A’s disagreed and selected him with the ninth pick of the 1999 draft. Three years later a top executive for those same San Diego Padres would say that the reason the Oakland A’s win so many games with so little money is that “Billy got lucky with those pitchers.”

And he did. But if an explanation is where the mind comes to rest, the mind that stopped at “lucky” when it sought to explain the Oakland A’s recent pitching success bordered on narcoleptic. His reduced circumstances had forced Billy Beane to embrace a different mental model of the Big League Pitcher. In Billy Beane’s mind, pitchers were nothing like high-performance sports cars, or thoroughbred racehorses, or any other metaphor that implied a cool, inbuilt superiority. They were more like writers. Like writers, pitchers initiated action, and set the tone for their games. They had all sorts of ways of achieving their effects and they needed to be judged by those effects, rather than by their outward appearance, or their technique. To place a premium on velocity for its own sake was like placing a premium on a big vocabulary for its own sake. To say all pitchers should pitch like Nolan Ryan was as absurd as insisting that all writers should write like John Updike. Good pitchers were pitchers who got outs; how they did it was beside the point.

Pitchers were like writers in another way, too: their output was harder than it should have been to predict. A twenty-two-year-old phenom with superior command wakes up one morning in such a precarious mental state that he’s hurling pitches over the catcher’s head. Great prospects flame out, sleepers become stars. A thirty-year-old mediocrity develops a new pitch and becomes, overnight, an ace. There are pitchers whose major league statistics are much better than their minor league ones. How did that happen? It was an odd business, this getting of outs. Obviously a physical act, it was also, in part, an act of the imagination. In the minor leagues Tim Hudson develops a new pitch, a devastating change-up, that makes him look like a different pitcher from the one the A’s drafted in the sixth round. Between junior and real college, Barry Zito refines the delivery of his curveball to the point where it is indistinguishable, as it leaves his hand, from his otherwise uninteresting fastball. The adjustments that lead to pitching success are mental as much as they are physical acts.

Of all the odd out-getters on the Oakland A’s pitching staff, Chad Bradford is the least orthodox. He has made it to the big leagues less on the strength of his arm than on the quality of his imagination. No one sees that now; because no one really knows who he is, or cares. When you know just a bit about him, you can see what powerful tricks a pitcher’s imagination can play. But to do that you had to go back a ways, to before Chad Bradford became the man now making a spectacle of himself before 55,528 fans in Oakland’s Coliseum.

Chad Bradford grew up the youngest child of a lower-middle-class family in a small town called Byram, Mississippi, outside of the larger one called Jackson. “Country” is how he describes himself. Not long before Chad’s second birthday his father suffered a stroke that nearly killed him, and left him paralyzed. The doctors had told his father that he’d never walk again. His father insisted that just wasn’t true. He looked up from his bed, stone-faced, and announced his intention to raise his three boys and earn a living. Through an act of will, which he also thought of as an act of God, he did just that. By Chad’s seventh birthday his father was