Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (32 page)

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 rising ball and finish it at a falling one. The best they could usually do with any of his pitches was to beat them into the ground. As miserable as the Canadian Rockies were for most pitchers, they might as well have been created for Chad Bradford to pitch in. No matter how thin the air, no matter how strong the outgoing breeze, it remained impossible to hit a ground ball over the wall.

Guided by some combination of the survival instinct and the failure to imagine any earthly role for himself other than Big League Pitcher, Chad Bradford dominated Triple-A hitters, even as every other pitcher on the Calgary team struggled. In a ballpark built for sluggers, he pitched fifty-one innings with an earned run average of 1.94, and gave up only three home runs. Hitters routinely complained how uncomfortable they felt against him, how hard Chad was to read, how
deceptive
he was. This was funny. Off the pitcher’s mound, Chad had no ability to deceive anyone about anything. He was who he was. Country. Every now and then he might try to get away with something at home—like not cleaning out the garage when he’d told his wife that he would. He simply couldn’t do it. “I’ll all but gotten away with something and then I’ll come clean,” he said. “I just hate the guilt.” On the pitcher’s mound, he had no guilt. The moment he scuffed the rubber with his foot he became a pitiless con artist, a sinister magician. He sawed pretty ladies in two, and made rabbits vanish.

He assumed, in a vague sort of way, that if he kept getting hitters out, the White Sox front office would have no choice but to call him up. He was right. Tossing a ball around with an older minor leaguer one day, he was called into the Calgary manager’s office. His new assignment: catch the first plane to Dallas. He’d join the White Sox bullpen in their upcoming series with the Texas Rangers. He went right back on the field and resumed tossing the ball around. The older player he’d been tossing with, a pitcher named Larry Casian who would retire at the end of the year, asked what the manager had wanted; and Chad told him. Casian asked why on earth Chad was out playing catch on a Triple-A field when he was meant to be flying to the big leagues. Chad said he didn’t know, and kept throwing. “I think I was in shock,” he said. Eight years after his minister and coach had showed him a trick to spare him the embarrassment of being cut from his high school team, he was getting a chance to practice it in the major leagues.

They called him into the second game of the three-game series at The Ballpark in Arlington. He didn’t feel he belonged; he felt out of his depth. “You think: how’m I gonna do this? You think it’s like a totally different game than the one you played your whole life.” He retired the first seven batters he faced, in order. The last two months of the season he pitched thirty and two-thirds innings in relief for the White Sox, and finished with an earned run average of 3.23. At one point he’d made a dozen consecutive scoreless appearances. In a season justly famous for the number of home runs hit, none were hit off Chad Bradford.

In the off-season he went back, as he always did, and always would, to Byram, Mississippi. For the first time, though he didn’t know why, he did not work out on the pitching mound his father had built, and rebuilt, for him. Dropping down and throwing sidearm had ended their games of catch. Making the big leagues severed this final dependency. He didn’t think anything of it; leaving the old mound behind was just the next thing to do. When he turned up for camp in the spring of 1999, he thought, “Great. I’m in the big leagues.”

He wasn’t. The White Sox didn’t trust Chad Bradford’s success. The White Sox front office didn’t trust his statistics. Unwilling to trust his statistics, they fell back on more subjective evaluation. Chad didn’t look like a big leaguer. Chad didn’t act like a big leaguer. Chad’s success seemed sort of flukey. He was a trickster that big league hitters were certain to figure out. The White Sox brass didn’t say any of this to Chad’s face, of course. During 1999 spring training the White Sox GM, a former big league pitcher named Ron Schueler, told Chad that his pitches weren’t moving like they used to move. He was sending Chad down to Triple-A. Chad didn’t have the nerve to say what he thought but he thought it all the same:
My ball doesn’t move? But all I have is movement!
When he got to Triple-A, a coach assured him that his ball moved as it always had, and that the GM just needed something to tell him other than the truth, that the White Sox front office viewed him as a “Triple-A guy.”

The Good Lord might have had a plan for Chad Bradford but apparently even He was required to respect the mystery of life behind the big league clubhouse door. For the next two years Chad pitched mainly in the minor leagues, bouncing up only briefly, and usually successfully, to the big league team. For two years he simply dominated Triple-A hitters and watched pitchers with much less impressive statistics leapfrog him. “I watched guys get called up from Double-A. I realized I was a just-in-case guy. Just in case somebody got hurt. Just in case somebody got traded. That no matter how well I did, I wasn’t going to get called up.” He talked to his wife about quitting the White Sox and going to pitch in Japan, where he might make a good living. He found that the only way he could get himself out of bed in the morning and to the ballpark was to remind himself that he wasn’t pitching only for the White Sox. “By the middle of the 1999 season I was pitching for every other big league team that might be watching,” he said. “I’m just sitting there hoping someone’s watching.”

Someone was.

T
HE POOL OF PEOPLE
Chad Bradford didn’t know who had nevertheless found him worthy of their attention had tripled. When he was an amateur, one big league scout had taken an interest in him. As a professional, he had two more distant admirers. One was Paul DePodesta, who couldn’t quite believe that the White Sox were keeping this deadly pitching force in Triple-A, and had mentioned to Billy Beane how nice it would be if he somehow could talk the Chicago White Sox into making Chad Bradford an Oakland A. The other was a bored paralegal in Chicago named Voros McCracken. Looking for a way to ignore whatever he was meant to be doing for the Chicago law firm that he loathed working for, Voros McCracken had taken up fantasy baseball. He didn’t know it, but he was about to explain why the Chicago White Sox had so much trouble grasping the true value of Chad Bradford—and why the Oakland A’s did not.

Voros was thinking of drafting Chad Bradford for his fantasy baseball team. But before he did, he wanted to achieve a better understanding of major league pitching. Specifically, he wanted to know how you could tell if a pitcher was any good.

Voros had played baseball as a kid, and there had been a time when he had been obsessively interested in it. The moment his interest became an intellectual obsession was in 1986 when, at the age of fourteen, he picked up the most recent Bill James
Abstract
. He was astonished by what he found inside. “Basically, everything you know about baseball when you are fourteen years old, you know from baseball announcers,” said Voros. “Here was this guy who was telling me that at least eighty percent of what baseball announcers told me was complete bullshit, and then explained very convincingly why it was.” Voros’s interest in baseball waned in his late teens and early twenties; but when he redis-covered it, in the form of fantasy leagues on the Internet, it was in the spirit of Bill James.

The Internet of course had consequences for the search for new baseball knowledge. One of the things the Internet was good for was gathering together people in different places who shared a common interest. Internet discussion groups, and Web sites like baseballprimer and baseballprospectus, sprung up, created by young men who, as boys, had been seduced by the writings of Bill James. In one of the discussion groups, where he went to discuss what to do with his fantasy baseball team, Voros saw someone say that no matter how much research was done, no one would be able to distinguish pitching from defense. That is, no one would ever come up with good fielding statistics or, therefore, good pitching statistics. If you don’t know how to credit the fielder for what happens after a ball gets put into play, you also, by definition, don’t know how to debit the pitcher. And, therefore, you would never be able to say with real certainty how good any given pitcher was. Or, for that matter, any given fielder.

When Voros read that, “I thought, ‘That’s a stupid attitude. Can’t you do
something
?’ It didn’t make any sense to me that the way to approach the problem was to give up.” He tried to think about it logically. He divided the stats a pitcher had that the defense behind him could affect (hits and earned runs) from the stats a pitcher did all by himself (walks, strikeouts, and home runs). He then ranked all the pitchers in the big leagues by this second category. When he ran the stats for the 1999 season, he wound up with a list topped by these five: Randy Johnson, Kevin Brown, Pedro Martinez, Greg Maddux, and Mike Mussina. “I looked at that list,” said Voros, “and said, ‘Damn, that looks like the five best pitchers in baseball.’” He then asked the question: if his reductive approach of looking at just walks, strikeouts, and homers identified the five best pitchers in baseball, how important could all the other stuff be?

As it happened, 1999 was supposedly an “off” year for Greg Maddux. His earned run average had risen from 2.22 in 1998 to 3.57 in 1999, mainly because he gave up fifty-seven more hits in thirty-two fewer innings. Several times during the season Maddux himself mentioned that he was astonished by how many cheap hits he was giving up; but of course no one paid any attention to that. What Voros noticed was that Maddux’s hits allowed per balls put in play was far above what it usually was—in fact, it was among the highest in the big leagues. As it happened, the same year, Maddux’s teammate, pitcher Kevin Millwood, had one of the lowest hits allowed per balls in play. Even stranger, their statistics the following year were reversed. Millwood had one of the highest ratios of hits per balls in play, Maddux one of the lowest. It didn’t make any sense.