Moneyball: Chapters 8–10

He was the infield coach because he had a gift for making players want to be better than they were—though he would never allow himself such a pretentious thought.

In a matter of hours the A's front office had jettisoned three of their starting eight, including one guy everyone had tagged as Rookie of the Year (Pena) and another guy everyone thought was the front office's pet (Giambi).

He labored over the most rudimentary task: getting into position to receive throws from other infielders.

Posted on the bulletin board of the Oakland A's clubhouse was a memo, signed by Bob Watson, from Major League Baseball: Players of the opposing teams shall not fraternize at any time while in uniform.

Jeff Bagwell gets on by a fielder's error, and Hatty lets him know what a Bagwell fan he is, prompting Bagwell to go into this Eeyore-like dirge about what a poor natural hitter he actually is.

His own high school coach—on retainer from the Phillies—told him he'd be making the mistake of his life if he turned down the Phillies eighty-five grand and went to college.

Hitting, for him, was a considered act. He didn't know how to hit without thinking about it, and so he kept right on thinking about it. In retrospect, this was a striking act of self-determination; at the time it just seemed like an unpleasant experience.

They were trying to subordinate the interest of the individual hitter to those of the team.

Right after he came over from the Phillies, in exchange for Jeremy Giambi, Mabry had been torrid.

"Just lay off the bad pitches, John," says Feiny teasingly.
"Feiny," says Mabry testily. "You ever been in a major league batter's box?"

Of the many false beliefs peddled by the TV announcers, this fealty to "clutch hitting" was maybe the most maddening to Billy Beane.

Brian Sabean listens to Billy's magnanimous offer of Mike Venafro; all Billy wants in return is a minor league player.

He knows Gammons will tell others what he tells him. Then the quid pro quo: Gammons tells Billy that the Montreal Expos have decided to trade their slugging outfielder, Cliff Floyd, to the Boston Red Sox.

What he really meant was that, in the course of a single season, there was more than one team called the Oakland Athletics. There was, for a start, the team that had opened the season and that, on May 23, he'd booted out of town. Three eighths of his starting lineup, and a passel of pitchers.

In mid-May, as the Oakland A's were being swept in Toronto by the Blue Jays, Billy's behavior became erratic. Driving home at night he'd miss his exit and wind up ten miles down the road before he'd realize what had happened.

All the way to the clubhouse he tried to talk Billy down from his pique. He tried to explain to his boss how irrational he'd become. He wasn't thinking objectively. He was just looking for someone on whom to vent his anger.

In a short two months with the Oakland A's, for instance, Carlos Pena had transformed himself from a player Billy Beane coveted more than any other minor leaguer into a player everyone valued more highly than Billy did.

The Blue Ribbon Panel Report had put oomph behind a movement, led by Milwaukee Brewer owner and baseball commissioner Bud Selig, to constrain players' salaries and share revenues among teams.

One of Selig's proposals—tentatively agreed to by the players' union—was to eliminate compensation for free agents.

The history of the union negotiations tells you that they're never going to acquiesce to the slightest detail.

The Red Sox, amazingly, have agreed to cover the $2 million or so left on Cliff Floyd's contract, and offered a smorgasbord of major and minor league players for Montreal to choose from—among them Red Sox pitcher Rolando Arrojo and a South Korean pitcher named Seung-jun Song.

Everyone else in that conversation had money. All he had was chutzpah.

Oakland A's fans, too, were apathetic compared to the maniacs in Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium.

On this night the less important end of the bench held a cynical, short, lefty sidewinder Billy Beane had tried and failed to give away, Mike Venafro, and two guys newly arrived from Triple-A: Jeff Tam and Micah Bowie.

On the more important end of the bench was a clubfooted screwball pitcher with knee problems, a short, squat Mexican left-hander who spoke so little English that he called everyone on the team "Poppy"; and a tempestuous flamethrower with uneven control of self and ball.

Specifically, she complained that he never did anything to let people know how handsome and charming he actually was. For instance, he never allowed the television cameras to see his winsome smile, even when he sat in the dugout after a successful outing.

The odd thing about Chad Bradford is that he wants so badly to be normal. Normal is what he's not. It's not just that he throws funny. His idiosyncratic streak runs straight down to the bottom of his character.

By the time he reached the big leagues, he'd weaned himself of his lucky rock but not of the frame of mind that created it.

He had the tenacious sanity of the slightly mad. A big league pitcher who wishes to avoid attention, Chad Bradford has learned to disguise his superstitions as routines.

A twenty-two-year-old phenom with superior command wakes up one morning in such a precarious mental state that he's hurling pitches over the catcher's head.

Great prospects flame out, sleepers become stars.

His father didn't have any particular ambition for him, except that he should be happy, remain a Christian, and that his happiness and his Christianity should occur within the confines of Mississippi.

Anyone Chad told he planned to become a professional baseball pitcher looked at him with the same gawking awe as his presence on a big league mound would later elicit.

Anyone who wandered by Central Hinds Academy's baseball field of an evening in the early 1990s would see a gangly, peach-fuzzed young man sidearming pitches at his preacher...

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.

Voros's interest in baseball waned in his late teens and early twenties; but when he rediscovered it, in the form of fantasy leagues on the Internet, it was in the spirit of Bill James.

What happened next bolsters one's faith in the American educational system: Voros McCracken set out to prove himself wrong.

Instead, baseball kept thrusting before Voros beguiling situations explained by his theory.

A couple of months into the 2000 season, for instance, the newspapers were full of stuff about how heretofore mediocre White Sox pitcher James Baldwin, off to a great start, had somehow become the next Pedro Martinez.

There was an equally obvious answer: there were no ground ball pitchers like Chad Bradford. Ground ball pitchers who threw overhand tended to be sinker ball pitchers and they tended to have control problems and also tended not to strike out a lot of guys. Chad Bradford was, statistically and humanly, an outlier.