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

speed. These aren’t stupid men. Ray’s obviously as shrewd as a loan shark. Ron Washington can’t open his mouth without saying something that belongs in Bartlett’s. Boz had succeeded in more than just baseball. After thirteen seasons in the big leagues, he’d spent seven more writing and producing music. Boz had something of the outsider’s perspective—which is why Billy had hired him. Boz embraced his unusual role with the Oakland A’s, not “hitting coach,” but “on-base instructor.” He didn’t mind the front office’s indifference to batting average. Their indifference to the running game was another matter.

“Ray was bred on being aggressive running the bases,” says Wash. “Until he got here he never got chastised for being aggressive on the base paths.”

Crack! Ray lines a pitch off the foot of bullpen catcher Brandon Buckley, who has been pitching to him from behind a screen. As Brandon hops around and tries to figure out if he’s broken something, Ray turns and says, “The White Sox always told us an aggressive mistake is not really a mistake.”

Wash is overcome with fellow feeling. Here they have this specimen of base-running prowess and no one gives a shit. He says, “Ray, what you thinkin’ about when you put the ball in play?”

“Second base.”

“As long as the ball is rolling?”

“I’m runnin’.”

“You runnin’.”

“A single is a double,” says Ray.

“A double is a triple,” says Wash.

Nobody says anything for a minute. Then Wash says, “Different situation here. Somebody on this team runs and get his ass thrown out and you got all kinds of gurus who tell you that you just took yourself out of the inning.”

“I never seen anything like it,” says Ray.

Two things happened toward the end of every season, after Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s have secured a play-off spot. The first was a slightly unseemly attempt by a small handful of staff members to use the newspapers to create pressure on the GM to improve their standard of living. The most transparent of these was an interview given by manager Art Howe to the San Jose Mercury News, on the subject of a long-term contract for himself. “With all the years I’ve been here and with what we’ve accomplished,” he said, “I would think I deserve it. My thinking is, if I don’t get it here, I’ll get it somewhere else.” After Art’s wife confessed that she, too, was befuddled by Billy Beane’s unwillingness to secure their retirement years, Art mentioned how struck he was by how different baseball teams arrange their pecking order. “Down in Anaheim,” he said, “all they talked about is the manager. I don’t think most people even know who the general manager is down there.”

The other thing that invariably happened was an unsystematic rethink in the engine room about this quixotic course the captain has set all season long. Coaches, players, reporters: everyone at once starts to worry that the Oakland A’s don’t bunt or run. Especially run. Billy Beane’s total lack of interest in the stolen base—which has served the team so well for the previous 162 games—is regarded, in the postseason, as sheer folly. Even people who don’t run very fast start saying that “you need to make things happen” in the postseason. Take the action to your opponent. “The atavistic need to run,” Billy Beane calls it.

The regular season is all but forgotten, but it shouldn’t be. Any way you looked at it, it had been a miracle. In all of Major League Baseball only the New York Yankees won as many games as the Oakland A’s. All but written off when they let Jason Giambi leave for greener pastures, the A’s had won 103 games, one more than they had the year before. Maybe more astonishingly, at least for economic determinists, the teams in baseball’s best division, the American League West, finished in inverse order to their payrolls.

Wins

Losses

Games Behind

Payroll*

Oakland

103

59

—

$41,942,665

Anaheim

99

63

4

$62,757,041

Seattle

93

69

10

$86,084,710

Texas

72

90

31

$106,915,180

The payroll figures are Major League Baseball’s on August 31, 2002. The wacky funhouse mirror quality of the 2002 season, in which several poor teams made the play-offs and no very rich teams made the World Series, had no discernable effect on Major League Baseball’s view of the role of money in baseball success. Commissioner Bud Selig continued to insist that the Oakland A’s—who also had turned a slight profit—were doomed. “We’re asking them [the Oakland A’s] to compete in a stadium they can’t compete in,” he said, in February 2003. “They’re not viable without a new stadium.”

The more money the teams spent on players, at least in the American League West, the less able those players were to win baseball games. The same wasn’t exactly true in every other division, but there had been plenty of other astonishing endings: big-budget disasters (the Mets, the Dodgers, the Orioles) and low-budget successes (the Twins).

In spite of the Oakland A’s fantastic success, there was a subtle pressure to change the way they did business. Most of it came from the media. About the fifteenth time he heard some TV pundit say that the Oakland A’s couldn’t win because they didn’t “manufacture runs,” Billy began to worry his coaches and players might actually believe it. He printed out the 2002 offensive statistics for the Oakland A’s and the Minnesota Twins and sat down with the coaches. The Twins team batting average was 11 points higher than the A’s, and their slugging percentage was 5 points higher. And yet they had scored thirty-two fewer runs. Why? Their team on-base percentage was a shade lower, and they’d been caught stealing sixty-two times, to Oakland’s twenty, and had twice as many sacrifice bunts. That is, they’d squandered outs. “They were trying to manipulate the game instead of letting the game come to them,” said Billy. “The math works. But no matter how many times you prove it, you always have to prove it again.”

The moment the play-offs began, you could feel the world of baseball insiders rising up to swat down the possibility that the