Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (39 page)

When Jeremy Brown comes to the plate on this mid-October afternoon in Scottsdale, Arizona, it’s the bottom of the second inning. There’s no score, and there’s no one on base. The big left-hander on the other team has made short work of the A’s first three hitters. He throws Jeremy a fastball off the plate. Jeremy just looks at it. Ball one. Pitch number two is a change-up on the outside corner, where Jeremy can’t do much with it anyway, so he just lets it be. Strike one. Jeremy Brown knows something about pitchers: “They almost always make a mistake,” he says. “All you have to do is wait for it.” Give the game a chance to come to you and often enough it will. When he takes the change-up for a called strike, he notices the possibility of a future mistake. The pitcher’s arm motion, when he throws his change-up, is noticeably slower than it is when he throws his fastball.

The pitcher’s next pitch is a fastball off the plate. Ball two. It’s 2–1: a hitter’s count.

The fourth pitch is the mistake: the pitcher goes back to his change-up. Jeremy sees his arm coming through slowly again, and this time he knows to wait on it. The change-up arrives waist-high over the middle of the plate. The line drive Jeremy hits screams over the pitcher’s right ear and into the gap in left center field.

As he leaves the batter’s box, Jeremy sees the left and center fielders converging fast. The left fielder, thinking he might make the catch, is already running himself out of position to play the ball off the wall. Jeremy knows he hit it hard, and so he knows what’s going to happen next—or imagines he does. The ball is going to hit the wall and ricochet back into the field. The left fielder, having overrun it, will have to turn around and chase after it. Halfway down the first-base line, Jeremy Brown has one thought in his mind:
I’m gonna get a triple.

It’s a new thought for him. He isn’t built for triples. He hasn’t hit a triple in years. He thrills to the new idea: Jeremy Brown, hitter of triples. A funny thing has happened since he became, by some miracle, the most upwardly mobile hitter in the Oakland A’s minor league system. Surrounded by people who keep telling him he’s capable of almost anything, he’s coming to believe it himself.

He races around first (“I’m haulin’ ass now”) and picks up the left fielder, running with his back to him, but not the ball. He’s running as hard as he’s ever run—and then he’s not. Between first and second base his feet go out from under him and he backflops into the dirt, like Charlie Brown. He notices, first, a shooting pain in his hand: he’s jammed his finger. He picks himself up, to scramble back to the safety of first base, when he sees his teammates in the dugout. The guys are falling all over each other, laughing. Swish. Stanley. Teahen. Kiger. Everybody’s laughing at him again. But their laughter has a different tone; it’s not the sniggering laughter of the people who made fun of his body. It’s something else. He looks out into the gap in left center field. The outfielders are just standing there: they’ve stopped chasing the ball. The ball’s gone. The triple of Jeremy Brown’s imagination, in reality, is a home run.

POSTSCRIPT: INSIDE BASEBALL’S RELIGIOUS WAR

A
NYONE WHO WANDERS
into Major League Baseball can’t help but notice the stark contrast between the field of play and the uneasy space just off it, where the executives and the scouts make their livings. The game itself is a ruthless competition. Unless you’re very good, you don’t survive in it. But in the space just off the field of play there really is no level of incompetence that won’t be tolerated. There are many reasons for this, but the big one is that baseball has structured itself less as a business than as a social club. The Club includes not only the people who manage the team but also, in a kind of Women’s Auxiliary, many of the writers and the commentators who follow it, and purport to explain it. The Club is selective, but the criteria for admission and retention are nebulous. There are many ways to embarrass the Club, but being bad at your job isn’t one of them. The greatest offense a Club member can commit is not ineptitude but disloyalty. Had he not been an indiscreet writer, Jim Bouton might have made a second career scouting and coaching big league prospects. But because he wrote
Ball Four
he was as good as banished from the Club.

That’s not to say that there are not good baseball executives and bad baseball executives, or good baseball scouts and bad baseball scouts. It’s just that they aren’t very well sorted out. Baseball doesn’t subject its executives to anything like the pressures of playing baseball, or even of running a business. When a big league baseball team spends huge sums of money and loses, heads may roll, but they don’t roll very far. Club insiders have a remarkable talent for hanging around, scouting young players, opining on the game, until some other high-level job opens up. Whereupon, with genuine hope in their hearts, they go for their interview with all the other Club members who were fired the last time around. There are no real standards, because no one wants to put too fine a point on the question: what qualifies these people for this job? Taking into account any quality other than clubability would make everyone’s membership a little less secure.

This book, as I’ve said many pages ago, began with a simple, obvious observation: some baseball executives seemed to be much better than others at getting wins out of dollars. The idea didn’t begin with me—an excellent baseball writer named Doug Pappas had long hammered on this idea of efficiency. Pappas had pointed out that one team, the Oakland A’s, had been consistently so much more efficient than anyone else that they appeared to be in a different business. I have tried to explain how this could be.

To fully appreciate the response to
Moneyball
from inside the Club you need a bit of otherwise irrelevant background. When I began my reporting I didn’t know anyone inside the Oakland A’s; I’d never even heard of Billy Beane, the Oakland GM. In the year I spent studying his organization the only explicit interest Beane took in my project—the only time he mentioned it—were the few times he said I shouldn’t focus too much on him. He and the other critical character in the Oakland front office, assistant GM Paul DePodesta, were never exactly rude to me but they made it pretty clear that they had more interesting things to do than talk to me. The only power they ever had over my project was to throw me out of their office or clubhouse—which they did, on occasion. But the sad truth is that I was a matter of some indifference to them. As far as they knew I wasn’t even writing a book about the Oakland A’s. I was writing a book about the collision of reason and baseball. (They weren’t the only ones whose eyes glazed over when I tried to explain what I was up to.) They would be in it but so would other teams. So, for that matter, would players whose lives had been changed by the new value system they were introducing. A long section of the book would be devoted to the spiritual father of their enterprise, the baseball writer Bill James.

It was only after I had spoken with other teams, and found they didn’t have much to add to this particular story, that I came to focus on the A’s management and players. By that time the baseball season was over, and I had my material. As always happens when the material is strong, the story became telescoped in the writing. I felt compelled to jettison everything that didn’t have to do with putting together a baseball team. The result wasn’t anything like a biography of a man; it was more like a biography of an idea—that left its main character, Billy Beane, for thirty-five pages at a time.

Until they saw it, the Oakland front office had only the faintest notion of what my book would be like. Oakland’s staff read the book when reviewers read it, about a month before the hardcover hit the stores. Each member of that staff had a slightly different reaction to it. Beane’s was something like horror. He was surprised that so much of the thing was about him and disturbed that I’d portrayed him as a maniac. I probably should have felt more guilt about this than I did. I assumed most readers understood that this wasn’t the whole man, and that I had my own agenda. I wanted to capture Beane doing what he did so well and interestingly: value, acquire, and manage baseball players. And when he did this, in his most intense moments, he was a bit of a maniac.

That’s the background to what happened next, which was something new in my experience as a writer. The Club of people who made their living just off the field of play—GMs and scouts, along with some of the noisier members of the Women’s Auxiliary, the writers and commentators—flipped out. Not at me, mind you: at
Billy Beane
. For the six months of the 2003 baseball season, the sun did not set without some professional blowhard—half of the radio guys seemed to think it was clever to call themselves “Mad Dog”—spouting off about Beane’s outsized ego. To catalog the scorn heaped on the poor man—whose only crime was not throwing me out of his office often enough—would take too long. But it’s worth citing a few examples:

It was Beane who had a best-selling book,
Moneyball
, written mostly about him, in which he bragged endlessly about outsmarting wealthy clubs by reinventing the way players are evaluated.—Art Thiel,
Seattle Post Intelligencer

…the other person being mentioned as Evans’ possible successor, Oakland’s Billy Beane, has done a terrific job with modest funds with the A’s, but he’s also a shameless self-promoter who wrote a book about his imagined genius and is despised by scouts around baseball.—Doug Krikorian,
Long Beach Press Telegram

Two things are apparent in the recently released book
Moneyball, The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
. Oakland general manager Billy Beane’s ego has exploded….—Tracy Ringolsby,
The Rocky Mountain News

I’ll return later to the second thing apparent to Mr. Ringolsby, because he speaks for a big faction of the Club. What seemed apparent to me, terrifyingly so, was that baseball insiders were going to compel my subjects to recant—to say that this book about their organization was laughably off-target and could safely be ignored. If the Oakland A’s had a dollar for every journalist who asked Billy Beane or Paul DePodesta if they’d been “misquoted,” they could have gone out and bought a proper center fielder. The public pressure on Beane, especially, was intense: no man was ever accused of saying more things he never said, or doing more things he never did. A few insiders took the novel approach of accusing Beane of lying that he’d been misquoted, when he’d never said he’d been misquoted in the first place. “He was not misquoted for two hundred and some pages,” thundered an outraged Seattle GM, Pat Gillick, just before swearing he would never read the book, and just after his expensive Mariners, once again, had been left in the dust by the low-budget A’s.

But the Oakland A’s didn’t recant, and a phony debate soon heated up. It wasn’t as interesting as a real debate, in that there was no chance for an exchange of ideas. It was more like a religious war—or like the endless, fruitless dispute between creationists and evolutionary theorists. On one side, parrying half-baked questions and insults, was the community of baseball fans who thought hard about the use and abuse of baseball statistics. On the other side, hurling the half-baked questions and insults, were the Club members, who felt a deep, inchoate desire to preserve their status.

Q: If Billy Beane thinks he’s such a goddamn genius, how come he didn’t draft (fill in the high school phenom)? How come he’s paying Jermaine Dye $11 million a year?

A: The point is not that Billy Beane is infallible; the point is that he has seized upon a system of thought to make what is an inherently uncertain judgment, the future performance of a baseball player, a little less uncertain. He’s not a fortune-teller. He’s a card counter in a casino.

Q: If Billy Beane’s so smart, and he says that on-base percentage is so important, how come the A’s don’t score more runs?

A: They don’t score more runs because their on-base percentage is not that great—much worse than it used to be. The market for on-base percentage has changed, thanks in large part to the success of the Oakland A’s. Still, the A’s on-base percentage retains one important trait: it’s good for the money. And the point is not to have the highest on-base percentage, but to win games as cheaply as possible. And the way to win games cheaply is to buy the qualities in a baseball player that the market undervalues, and sell the ones that the market overvalues.

Q: What kind of egomaniac claims that he discovered all these statistics? On-base percentage! My old buddy (fill in the name of old buddy) has known about on-base percentage since 1873.

A: The Oakland’s A’s never claimed to have discovered sophisticated statistical analysis. They claim to be ramming it down the throat of an actual big league baseball team.

I had gone to some trouble to show that all the ideas Beane slapped together were hatched by someone else’s brain. Indeed, any reader of
Moneyball
who had read Bill James or followed the work of some of the best baseball writers (Peter Gammons, Rob Neyer, Alan Schwarz) or the two leading Web sites, baseballprospectus and baseballprimer, might fairly wonder what all the fuss was about:
We knew this already.
The fuss, so far as I was concerned, was that the rubber had finally met the road, and, for putting it there, Billy Beane deserved a lot of credit. (Or blame, depending on your point of view.) Intellectual courage was his contribution. He’d had the nerve to seize upon ideas rejected, or at least not taken too seriously, by his fellow Club members, and put them into practice. But I’d never thought of Beane as a genius. He was more like a gifted Wall Street trader with no talent for research.

Over and over again during the 2003 season I found myself facing one reaction from the wider reading public and another from inside the Club. But it wasn’t until Joe Morgan weighed in that I fully understood the discrepancy. Hall of Fame player, ESPN announcer, general man around baseball, Morgan was the closest thing to Club Social Chairman. And when Joe Morgan decided he needed to talk about
Moneyball
, the tone of the discourse went from weird to stark raving mad. In one of his mid-season ESPN chat sessions Morgan was asked what he thought of the book. Morgan wrote: