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

Oakland fourth, center fielder Terrence Long hits a grounder back to the pitcher, and runs hard down the first-base line. This is new. Heretofore, when Terrence Long has grounded out, he has trotted down the line with supreme indifference to public opinion. Too young to know that you are what you pretend to be, Terrence Long has nearly perfected the art of seeming not to care. As it happens, a few days ago, Terrence walked out into the players’ parking lot and discovered that someone had egged his car. Hearing of the incident, Billy stopped by Terrence’s locker and told him that he’d had an e-mail from the culprit, an A’s fan, who said he was furious that he’d paid money to watch Terrence Long jog the bases. The effect on Terrence Long was immediate. He went from jogging to first on a routine ground out to running as fast as he can until the first moment he can stop without pissing off Billy Beane. As he sprints down the line, Billy says that Terrence’s real problem is “his own self-doubt, exacerbated by the media. That’s one of the mistakes that young players make—they actually read the papers.”

In the Oakland fifth, with the score still 11-5, Ramon Hernandez leads off. Twice in the first four innings the Oakland catcher has taken outside fastballs and driven doubles to the opposite field. This is new. All season long Ramon Hernandez has been trying and failing to pull outside fastballs. He’s been a complete bust on offense, and failed to conform to the Oakland A’s front office’s greater expectations of him. As it happens, the other day, Billy stopped by Ramon Hernandez’s locker and made a bet with him: each time he went the opposite way with an outside pitch, Billy would pay him fifty bucks; each time he tried to pull an outside pitch, he’d pay Billy fifty bucks. The point of the exercise, Billy now says, is “it gives me an excuse to henpeck Ramon. It’s a subversive way for me to keep nagging the shit out of him without him knowing it.”

Most of the players who pass across the television screen on this historic evening have been on the receiving end of Billy Beane’s subtle attempts to manipulate their behavior. He claims there is no point in trying to change people, and then he goes ahead and tries to change them anyway. He knows most of his players better than he would ever allow himself to be known by them, and while that is not saying very much, it’s still says something. “Look at Miggy’s face,” he says, at the end of the sixth inning. The television camera is on Tejada, in the dugout, looking surprisingly glum. “He’s the only guy in the lineup without a hit. This is what happens with younger players: they want to do too much. Watch him: he’ll try to do more than he should.” And sure enough, after Tim Hudson gets into trouble, and Chad Bradford is called in from the bullpen, he does.

When Chad Bradford is in the bullpen, he often thinks about his father. It helps put whatever pressure he’s feeling into perspective. The doctors had told his father he’d never walk again and the man had not only walked, he’d worked, and not only worked, but played catch. If his father could do that, how hard was this?

The thought usually made him feel better, but tonight, with so much on the line, it doesn’t. He’s feeling like a different pitcher than he was just a few weeks ago. Before the trouble started, he’d been exactly as effective as Paul DePodesta’s computer had predicted he would be. For nearly two full seasons he’s been living his dream. Chad himself had not quite believed it when, before the 2001 season, just after his back surgery, Billy Beane called him to tell him that he had traded for him with a view to his becoming the critical middle reliever in the Oakland A’s big league bullpen. Billy told Chad the statistics he thought he was capable of generating, and even Chad thought they were a stretch. Amazingly, to Chad, he’d done almost exactly what Billy Beane predicted he would do. “It’s like the guy knows what’s going to happen before it happens,” said Chad.

Now he’s unsure that Billy Beane’s faith in him is justified. He pulls his cap down over his eyes and walks briskly toward the mound, reaching it in exactly the same number of steps he always does. Outside, everything looked the same; inside, everything felt different. A few weeks ago, when he looked in to take the signal from the catcher, he was oblivious to his surroundings. He’d be repeating to himself his usual phrase, to shut down his mind to the pressure.

Make your pitch.

Make your pitch.

Make your pitch.

Tonight, he wasn’t oblivious; tonight, as he leaned in, he was aware of everything. The crowd noise. The signs. The national audience. And a new mantra, now running through his head:

Don’t Fuck This Up!

Don’t Fuck This Up!

Don’t Fuck This Up!

He’s having the worst slump in his entire professional career and while it isn’t actually all that bad a slump—one bad outing in Yankee Stadium, another in Fenway Park—he has no ability to put it into perspective. On his bookshelf at home there were two books, side by side, tattered by his constant use of them. One was The Mental Game of Baseball. The other was the Bible. He has a favorite passage, Philippians 4:13: I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. It’s giving him no solace. A few nights before, after another nerve-wracking outing, he’d called his wife, Jenny, who had taken the kids back to Byram for the start of the school year, and said, “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

The Oakland A’s pitching coach, Rick Peterson, thinks that Chad’s problems began in early August, when ESPN announcer Jeff Brantley had come into Oakland and