Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (35 page)

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 done a piece on him, identifying Chad on national television as one of the premier setup men in the game. Attention disturbed Chad’s concentration. Peterson had been critical to Oakland’s pitching success. He kept the Oakland pitchers healthy; and, in some cases, he also kept them focused. He was fond of saying that “if you have twelve different pitchers, you’ve got to speak twelve different languages.” The difference between Chad and the other pitchers was that the others’ language had words for the phrase “I belong in the big leagues.” Chad’s language lacked the vocabulary of personal defiance. Of self-confidence. Throughout his career, Chad had responded to trouble not by looking inside himself to see what was there, but by dropping his point of release lower to the ground. His knuckles now scrape the dirt when he throws. “He’s got nowhere to go,” said Peterson, “unless he throws upside down.”

His pitching coach is trying to teach Chad how to go inside. After one of his weak outings, when he was looking lost, Peterson had made him sit down and watch tape of himself slicing and dicing big league hitters for the first five months of the season. As Chad watched the tape of his old self, Peterson made his point.

“You’re a Christian, right, Chad?”

“Yeah.”

“You believe in Jesus?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you ever seen him?”

“No, I’ve never seen him.”

“Ever seen yourself get hitters out?”

“Yeah.”

“So why the fuck do you have faith in Jesus when you never seen him, but you don’t have faith in your ability to get hitters out when you get hitters out all the time?”

His coach left him with that thought. Chad sat there and said to himself: “Okay. That makes sense.” But a little while later the doubts returned. For his entire career hardly anyone has believed in him and now that they do, he can’t quite believe in himself. “It’s my greatest weakness,” he said. “I have zero self-confidence. The only way I can explain it is that I’m not the guy who throws ninety-five miles an hour. The guy who throws ninety-five can always see his talent. But I don’t have that. My stuff depends on deception. For it to work, there’s so much that has to go right. When it starts not going right, I think, ‘Oh my gosh, I hope I can keep foolin ’em. Then I start to ask, ‘How much longer can I keep foolin em?’”

He’s having—with him, there isn’t a more accurate way to put it—a crisis of faith. When he knows, he always hits his spots; when he hopes, he never does; and he’s now just hoping. Oblivious to how good he is, he is susceptible to the argument that his success is a trick, or a fluke, or a spell that at any moment might break. He doesn’t much care that he is, for the first time in his miraculous career, the only one still making this argument.

That night in early September he’s fighting himself more fiercely than ever before. Billy Beane knows it. His cheap out-getting machine has a programming glitch. He has no idea how to fix it—how to get inside Chad Bradford’s head. Sloth, indolence, a lack of discipline, an insufficient fear of management—these problems Billy knows how to attack. Insecurity is beyond him. If he knew how to solve the problem, he might be finishing up his playing career and preparing himself for election to the Hall of Fame. But he still doesn’t know; and it worries him. Chad doesn’t know that he will retire batters at such a predictable rate, in such a predictable way, that he might as well be a robot. As a result, he might not do it.

B
ILLY BEANE
only watches all of what happens next because he’s somehow allowed himself to be trapped into watching the game with me. What happens next is that Chad Bradford shows the world how quickly a big lead in baseball can be lost. He gets the final out in the seventh inning, on a ground ball. The eighth inning is the problem. Art Howe allows Chad to return to the mound to face a series of left-handed hitters.

“I’m glad Art’s leaving him in,” says Billy. “He’s wasted if you only use him to get an out.”

I ask if it worries him that Chad relies so heavily on faith. That Chad’s genuine, understandable belief that the Good Lord must be responsible for his fantastic ability to get big league hitters out leaves him open to the suspicion that the Good Lord might have changed His mind.

“No,” says Billy. “I’m a believer, too. I just happen to believe in the power of the ground ball.”

In nearly seventy relief appearances this year Chad Bradford has walked exactly ten batters, about one every thirty he has faced. He opens the eighth inning by walking Brent Mayne.

As Mayne trots down to first base, the Oakland crowd stirs and hollers. Someone from the center field bleachers hurls a roll of toilet paper onto the field. It takes a minute to clear, leaving Chad time with his hellish thoughts. When play resumes, fifty-five thousand people rise up and bang and shout, perhaps thinking this will help Chad to settle down.

“Why should noise have any more effect on the hitter than the pitcher?” says Billy, a bit testily. “If you’re playing away, you just pretend they are cheering for you.”

Chad walks the second hitter, Dee Brown. It’s the first time all year he’s walked two batters in a row. The TV cameras pan to Miguel Tejada and second baseman Mark Ellis, conferring behind their gloves.

“In the last ten years guys started covering their lips with their gloves,” snaps Billy. “I’ve never known a single lip-reader in baseball. What, has there been a rash of lipreading I don’t know about?”

The third batter, Neifi Perez, hits a slow ground ball to the second baseman. John Mabry, playing first, races across and cuts it off. Chad just stands on the mound and watches the play develop. By the time it has, it’s too late for him to cover first base. The bases are now loaded, with nobody out. Another roll of toilet paper streams from the bleachers into center field. The crowd is on its feet, making more noise than ever, still thinking, Lord knows why, that their attention is what Chad Bradford needs to get him through his troubles.

Billy stares at the television with disgust, like a theatre critic being forced to watch a mangled interpretation of
Hamlet
. “I can’t believe I have to sit here and watch this shit,” he says. He pulls his little white box onto the desk in front of him. Its plastic shine has been rubbed dull. “I would be dying right now if I was walking around watching this,” he says. He’s fantasizing: if I hadn’t trapped him with the TV inside this office he would be out in the parking lot, marching around glancing every five seconds at the white box. He’d rather be dying out there than whatever he’s doing in here.

The next batter, Luis Ordaz, is the one who makes good on Billy’s prediction about Miguel Tejada (“Watch him: he’ll try to do more than he should”). Ordaz hits a routine ground ball to Tejada’s right. Instead of making the routine play, the force at third, Tejada tries to make the acrobatic one, the force at home. His leaping throw bounces in the dirt in front of Ramon Hernandez and all runners are safe: 11–6. Bases still loaded, nobody yet out.

Art Howe virtually leaps out of the dugout to yank Chad from the game. On his way to his seat on the bench Chad stares at the ground, and works to remain expressionless. He came in with a six-run lead. He leaves with the tying run in the on-deck circle. The ball never left the infield.

“Jesus Christ, what a fucking embarrassment,” says Billy. He reaches under the desk and extracts a canister of Copenhagen. He jams the chaw into his upper lip. “Why am I even watching this shit?”

The new pitcher, Ricardo Rincon, gets two quick outs, and gives up just one run on a sacrifice fly: 11–7. With two outs and runners on first and third, Art Howe walks out yet again. This time he calls for right-hander Jeff Tam, newly arrived from Triple-A, to face the right-handed Mike Sweeney, who is, at the moment, leading the American League in hitting.

“Fuck,” says Billy. “Why? They all take this lefty-righty shit too far. What’s wrong with leaving Rincon in?”

Tam had two years in the A’s bullpen where he played the role now played by Chad Bradford. There was a time when Ron Washington, the infield coach, took to calling Tam “Toilet Paper” (“Because he’s always cleanin’ up everybody else’s shit”). But something happened, either in Tam’s head or his delivery, and for the past two years he hasn’t been the same guy. “Relievers are like volatile stocks,” Billy says. “They’re the one asset you need to watch closely, and trade for quick profits.”

As his manager and reliever confer, Billy Beane looks at me apologetically. In under forty-five minutes he’s passed from detachment to interest, from interest to irritation, from irritation to anger, and is now, obviously, on the brink of rage. He’s embarrassed by his emotions but not enough to control them. “All right,” he finally says, “you’ll have to excuse me, I’m going to have to pace around here.”

With that, he walks out into the clubhouse, closing the door behind him, and begins to storm around. Past the trainer’s room where poor Tim Hudson, who must be wondering what he needs to do to get a win, is having heat applied to his shoulder. Past Scott Hatteberg and Greg Myers, the two lefties on the bench who had thought they had the night off, rushing back through the clubhouse to the batting cage to take some practice swings, in case they are asked to pinch-hit. And, finally, past the video room where Paul DePodesta stews on the improbability of the evening. Paul already has calculated the odds of winning twenty games in a row. (He puts them at fourteen in a million.) Now he’s calculating the odds of losing an eleven-run lead. (“It may not be fourteen in a million but it’s close.”)

In his
1983 Abstract
, Bill James had contemplated tonight’s game. James had observed in baseball what he called a “law of competitive balance.” “There exists in the world a negative momentum,” he wrote,

which acts constantly to reduce the differences between strong teams and weak teams, teams which are ahead and teams which are behind, or good players and poor players. The corollaries are:

1. Every form of strength covers one weakness and creates another, and therefore every form of strength is also a form of weakness and every weakness a strength.

2. The balance of strategies always favors the team which is behind.

3. Psychology tends to pull the winners down and push the losers upwards.

More metaphysics than physics, it was as true of people as it was of baseball teams. People who want very badly to win, and to be seen to have won, enjoy a tactical advantage over people who don’t. That very desire, tantamount to a need, is also a weakness. In Billy Beane, the trait is so pronounced that it is not merely a weakness. It is a curse.

When play resumes, Jeff Tam and Mike Sweeney fight a great battle. On the tenth pitch of the at bat, after fouling off four pitches with Superman swings, Sweeney takes a slider from Tam and golfs it off the 1-800-BAR-NONE sign, just over the left field wall.

11–10.

Something big crashes in the clubhouse.

On the TV over Art Howe’s desk, Art himself is again on his way to the mound, to replace Jeff Tam with a lefty named Micah Bowie. Mike Sweeney enthusiastically explains to his teammates in the Kansas City dugout how he thought his home run was a foul ball. The announcers say what a pity it is that Miguel Tejada “tried to do too much” with the routine ground ball to third. Had he not, the A’s would be out of the inning. Billy bursts back in the room—cheeks red, teeth black. “Fucking Tam,” he says. “He thinks he’s going to fool the best hitter in the league with his slider.” He mutes the television, grabs his tin of Copenhagen, and vanishes, leaving me to watch the game alone in his manager’s office.

The manager’s office is now completely silent. The fifty-five thousand people outside are making about as much noise as fifty-five thousand people can make, but none of it reaches this benighted place. Pity Art Howe. What little he has done to make the office a home suggests a view of the world so different from Billy Beane’s that it’s a wonder he’s kept his job as long as he has. There’s a framed aphorism, called “The Optimist’s Creed.” There is a plaque containing the wisdom of Vince Lombardi. There is an empty coffee pot, with a canister of non-dairy creamer. Behind the manager’s white Formica desk is a sign that says
Thank You For Not Smoking
. There are photos that hint at a fealty to baseball’s mystique: one of Art standing on the dugout steps, another of Art and Cal Ripken, Jr. (signed by Ripken). On the television, Art maintains his stoical expression. Beneath him flashes the news that no Athletics team has lost an eleven-run lead since the Philadelphia A’s lost one to the St. Louis Browns in 1936. Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it’s still being made all over the place, all the time.

Micah Bowie gets the final out in the Kansas City eighth, and the A’s go quickly in their half. In the top of the ninth, facing closer Billy Koch, the Royals get a man as far as second base. With two outs and two strikes against a weak hitter, Luis Alicea, the game, once again, looks over. Then Alicea lines a single into left center.

11–11.

From somewhere in the clubhouse I hear a sharp cry, then the clatter of metal on metal. I open Art Howe’s door to sneak a peek, and spot Scott Hatteberg running from the batting cage to the tunnel that leads to the Oakland dugout.

Hatteberg isn’t particularly ready to play. He’s in the wrong state of mind, and carrying the wrong bat. After Art Howe told him he wasn’t playing tonight, he’d poured himself a cup of coffee, then another. He’d sat down briefly and chatted with some guy he’d never met, and whose name he couldn’t remember, who wanted to show him some bats he had handcrafted. Hatteberg had picked out one of the guy’s bats, a shiny black maple one with a white ring around its neck. He liked the feel of it.

Like most of the players, Hatteberg, as a minor leaguer, had signed a contract with the Louisville Slugger company, in which he agreed to use only the company’s bats. All but certain that he would not play tonight, he had taken his contraband bat with him to the dugout. By the time the score was 11–0, certain that he would never play, he had the bat between his knees and four cups of coffee in his bloodstream. He is, by the bottom of the ninth, chemically altered. He’s also holding a bat he’s never hit with.