Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (41 page)

That special something, or its absence, happens to be the other thing that, in Ringolsby’s view, was instantly apparent in
Moneyball
. The problem wasn’t just that Billy Beane’s ego was out of control. It was that the author of
Moneyball
“has a limited knowledge of baseball and total infatuation with Billy Beane.”
A limited knowledge of baseball
—it sounds damning enough, but what does it mean? What it surely does
not
mean is that Ringolsby has performed on a baseball field under pressure—or that I have not—for he has never come near the field of play. Nor does it mean that he has actually tried to understand what these people in Oakland are up to, for he’s never bothered to interview them. Think of it! A guy who makes his living writing about baseball working himself up into a fine lather, year after year, about this radical experiment in Oakland and never once bothering to pick up the phone and ask Billy Beane to explain what he’s up to.
A limited knowledge of baseball
: What it means, so far as I can tell, is that he’s just another unathletic guy who’s assigned himself the job of keeping people out of the game who, in his view, have no business inside. He’s not a writer. He’s a bouncer.

But he has his own moment, this fellow. When he sits down to write his column he knows in his heart that he speaks for a lot of people who work just off the field of play. He may only belong to the Women’s Auxiliary, but his view of the game reflects those of actual Club members. A lot of people who make the decisions about building baseball teams think a lot like he does. That’s why it’s possible, on the field of play, for a team with no money to win so many games.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I never could have written this book without the help and encouragement of the Oakland A’s. Many people who work for the organization feature prominently in this story but a few who were important to me do not, and I would like to thank them here. The team’s co-owner, Steve Schott, took me to a ball game and encouraged me to pursue my line of inquiry. The front office’s first line of defense, Betty Shinoda, Wilona Perry, and Maggie Baptist, never made me feel anything but welcome. Jim Young and Debbie Gallas made my life easier than it should have been in the press box. Mickey Morabito, who had no interest in letting me anywhere near the team’s plane, took me along for the ride. Keith Lieppman and Ted Polakowski, who must have wondered why I so longed to pester their minor league players, instead helped me to do it. Steve Vucinich might have asked what business I had in his clubhouse; instead he did everything to make me feel welcome short of steaming LEWIS on the back of an Oakland A uniform and sending me out to the mound. Jim Bloom introduced me to big league players and helped me to sell them on my project. Two of those players, Tim Hudson and Barry Zito, helped me far more than their brief appearances in this book suggest.

Several old friends read parts or all of the manuscript and saved me from myself: Tony Horwitz, Gerry Marzorati, Jacob Weisberg, and Chris Wiman. Several new friends combed through the first draft and helped to save me from baseball: Rob Neyer, Dan Okrent, and Doug Pappas. Dick Cramer and Pete Palmer offered invaluable counsel on both the theory and history of sabermetrics. Alan Schwarz provided assistance on the history of baseball statistics, which was remarkably generous, given that he is himself writing a book on the subject.

Roy Eisenhardt introduced me to Billy Beane, a fact that went a long way with Billy, with reason. Looking through my notes it’s clear that the book arose from what amounts to a year long open-ended conversation with Billy Beane, Paul DePodesta, and David Forst. And yet not once did any of them seek to control or dilute what I might write. I will always be grateful to them for their generosity of spirit.

I am blessed to write for the publishing equivalent of the Oakland A’s. Encouraging me to write about baseball was as bold as telling Scott Hatteberg to play first base. For this I am more than usually grateful to my editor, Starling Lawrence, and his assistant, Morgen Van Vorst. The Norton sales director, Bill Rusin, should have put a stop to this project before it began, but he at least pretended to approve of it. I am grateful to have had the chance to present the book to Oliver Gilliland, but it goes only a little way to alleviating the sorrow of knowing that it was the last time I ever will.

For help in just about every phase of this project I am grateful to my wife, Tabitha Soren. Her official stats, impressive as they are, still don’t do justice to her performance.

^*
There’d been some flirtation with shrinking players back in the late 1940s. The old St. Louis Browns hired a psychologist named David Tracy who specialized in hypnotic therapy. Tracy wrote a book about his experience called
Psychologist At Bat
, which, if nothing else, gives you some idea why baseball didn’t rush to embrace the psychiatric profession. Here’s Tracy describing his technique: “I had [a Browns’ pitcher] lie down on the couch and I stood behind him. I held up my finger about six inches above his eyes and told him to look at it steadily as I talked: ‘Your legs are growing heavy, v-e-r-y heavy. Your arms are growing heavy, v-e-r-y heavy. You are going deep, d-e-e-p asleep.”

_*
For a fuller, more respectable account of the history of the box score, see Jules Tygiel’s
Past Time: Baseball As History
(2000).

_*
An invisible subplot of baseball fanaticism is its effect on the spouses of the fanatics. “Bill hid his interest in baseball when we first started dating,” said his wife. “If I had known the extent of it, I’m not sure we’d have gotten very far.”

^*
The name derives from SABR, the acronym of the Society for American Baseball Research. In 2002, the society had about seven thousand members.

^*
When the Library of America published its wonderful anthology of America’s great baseball writing in 2001, it included pieces by Robert Frost and John Updike and other fancy literary types, none of whom ever said anything as interesting about baseball as Bill James, and yet, inexplicably, nothing at all by James.

^*
They wound up scoring 800 and allowing 653.

^*
These “percentages” are designed to drive anyone who thinks twice about them mad. It’s one thing to give 110 percent for the team, but it is another to get on base 1,000 percent of the time. On-base “percentage” is actually on-base “per thousand.” A batter who gets on base four out of ten times has an on-base “percentage” of four hundred (.400). Slugging “percentage” is even more mind-bending, as it is actually “per four thousand.” A perfect slugging “percentage”—achieved by hitting a home run every time—is four thousand: four bases for every plate appearance. But for practical purposes, on-base and slugging are assumed to be measured on identical scales. At any rate, the majority of big league players have on-base percentages between three hundred (.300) and four hundred (.400) and slugging percentages between three hundred and fifty (.350) and five hundred and fifty (.550).

^*
Despite hitting in a pitcher’s park, Hatteberg would finish the 2002 season tied—with A’s teammate Ray Durham—for thirteenth in the American League in on-base percentage. Behind him, in addition to the rest of the Oakland A’s, were a lot of multimillionaires you might not expect to find there: Derek Jeter, Johnny Damon, Nomar Garciaparra.

^*
Hatteberg would finish the 2002 season third in the league in pitches seen per plate appearance, behind Frank Thomas and Jason Giambi.

^†
Hatteberg’s ratio of walks to strikeouts in the 2002 season was fourth in the American League, behind John Olerud, Mike Sweeney, and Scott Spezio.

^*
Tom Ruane, a researcher associated with Retrosheet, which had evolved from Bill James’s Project Scoresheet, offers this calculation: the only team since 1961 with a better second-half record over a four-year stretch than the Oakland A’s in 1999–2002 were the 1991–94 Atlanta Braves, and
no
team over a four-year stretch has improved itself in midseason by so much.

^*
You might think the players would want to eliminate the need for the rich teams that signed free agents to compensate the poor ones that had lost them. The practice was a tax on free agency. But the practice also gave the players’ union veto power over any changes that the owners might want to make in the amateur draft, and this they valued even more highly.

^†
He was right about the draft picks.

^*
In the five-game series, Scott Hatteberg went 7–14 with three walks, no strikeouts, a home run, and a pair of doubles. He scored five runs and knocked in three. Chad Bradford faced ten batters and got nine of them out, seven on ground balls. The tenth batter hit a bloop single. Bradford snapped out of his slump after the twentieth win. His confidence returned about the same time Scott Hatteberg started telling him what the hitters said on the rare occasions they got to first base against him. After Anaheim’s second baseman, Adam Kennedy, blooped a single off Bradford, he turned to Hatty and said, “Jesus Christ, there’s no way that’s eighty-four miles an hour.”

^*
The job went to Theo Epstein, the twenty-eight-year-old Yale graduate with no experience playing professional baseball.