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

always did when he couldn’t decide what to do. He called Moose, and asked him what he should do.

“Chad,” Moose asked, more minister than coach. “How bad you want to play pro baseball?”

“It’s all I ever dreamed of.”

“Then you’re a fool not to take their money.”

He spent his first full season in the minor leagues in high A ball. It didn’t go well. In small-time college baseball his 86-mph fastball seemed respectable enough. Out here it looked faintly ridiculous. He had a wife and a son and couldn’t help but wonder if he’d made a mistake not finishing school. They’d run through the signing bonus. He was making a thousand dollars a month in the minor leagues. In the off-season he drove a forklift and swept out trailers. “I’m looking at my numbers in the off-season,” he said, “and I’m thinking: should I be doing this?” When he turned up in spring training for the 1998 season, the White Sox asked him the same question. The pitching coaches informed him that he’d been officially classified a “fringe prospect.” “They said, ‘If you have a good season, you can stay around. If not, you’re on your way out.’”

His goal at the start of the 1998 season was simply to keep his job. Late that spring several people noticed that he seemed to be approaching that job differently. He’d changed his delivery, so that he came at the hitter from a lower angle. In college he had drifted, unthinkingly, from two o clock to three o clock, from a three-quarters delivery to straight sidearm. That’s where he was at the end of his dismal first season in the minor leagues. Now, for the first time in his career, he found his point of release well below his waist. But until he watched tape of himself Chad had no idea that he’d changed anything at all. He never did: his development into a pitcher who looked like he belonged in a slow-pitch softball game was unconscious. Feeling himself falling, he had reached back blindly for something to grab hold of; the curious motion was the first stable object he found. “Moose took me from twelve to two,” he said. “But I honestly don’t know how I went down lower from there. I have no idea what happened. I can’t explain it.” All he knew was that when he threw it from lower down, his ball had a new movement to it that flummoxed hitters during minor league spring training, and continued to flummox them in Double-A ball.

In late June, the Chicago White Sox promoted Chad from Double-A to its Triple-A team in Calgary. When he arrived, he found out why: his new home field was high in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, wind blowing out. The place was famously hellish on pitching careers: the guy he’d come to replace had simply quit and skipped town. The first game after Chad arrived, his team’s starter gave up six runs in the first two thirds of an inning. The first reliever came on and gave up another seven runs without getting an out. What should have been ordinary fly balls rocketed through the thin mountain air every which way out of the park. Still in the top of the first inning, and his team already down 13-0, the Calgary manager pointed to Chad. “When I see I’m next,” said Chad, “I’m thinking, ‘what the hell am I doing here?’” He went into the game and found the answer waiting for him. When he left the game two hours later, it was the top of the eighth and the score was 14-12. He’d gone six and a third innings and given up a single run. The pitcher who replaced him promptly gave up five more runs and the final score was 19-12.

An obscure, soft-tossing Double-A pitcher, who had never gone more than a couple of innings in a minor league game, had thrown six and a third merciless innings in maybe the toughest ballpark in Triple-A. As astonishing as the performance had been, the really curious thing was how he’d done it: by dropping down even further. As usual, Chad didn’t realize what had happened until afterward. Maybe it was the thinness of the air, maybe the pressure, but some invisible force, or some distant memory, had willed his arm earthward. For the first time in his life he was attacking hitters underhanded. He only knew one other guy who threw like that.

When asked how he explained his miraculous success, all Chad could say is that “the Good Lord had a plan for me.” The Good Lord’s plan, it would seem, was to illustrate to baseball players the teachings of Charles Darwin. Each time Chad Bradford was thrust into a new and more challenging environment he adapted, unconsciously, albeit not as the White Sox, or he, hoped he would adapt. When he’d been scouted by Warren Hughes, Chad’s fastball came in at around 86 mph. Hughes had sold Chad to his White Sox bosses as a guy who would grow stronger, and one day pitch sidearm, with control, at 90 mph plus. Chad himself adored the thought that he might one day throw as hard as most guys—that he would be normal. Instead, Chad came to throw underhand at between 81 and 84 mph.

Dropping his release point had various effects, but the most obvious was to reduce the distance between his hand, when the ball left it, and the catcher’s mitt. His 84-mile-per-hour fastball took about as much time to reach the plate as a more conventionally delivered 94-mile-per-hour one. Underhanded, his sinker rose before it fell, like a tennis serve with vicious topspin. Ditto his slider, which made straight for a right-handed hitter’s eye before swooping down and away. Even hitters who had faced him before fought the instinct to flinch, and found it nearly impossible to get under his pitches and lift them into the mountain air. They’d start their swing at a