Moneyball: Chapter 11–Epilogue

They explained to Billy that if he left, he might as well pile a bunch of money in the street and set it on fire: he'd be blowing the biggest chance they'd had in years to promote the Oakland A's to the wider world. The winning streak had become a national news story. And so Billy, slightly miffed, stayed.

Billy as good as makes this point now by pointing at the TV, where Eric Chavez, having just made a difficult defensive play look routine, sheepishly starts kicking the dirt in front of him. "He's almost afraid to acknowledge how good he really is," says Billy.

I ask him to make the case, and, in his current, detached mood, he's more than happy to. Up eleven–zip against a sorry club, he's reveling in the objective, scientific spirit.

As he sprints down the line, Billy says that Terrence's real problem is "his own self-doubt, exacerbated by the media. That's one of the mistakes that young players make—they actually read the papers."

As it happens, the other day, Billy stopped by Ramon Hernandez's locker and made a bet with him: each time he went the opposite way with an outside pitch, Billy would pay him fifty bucks; each time he tried to pull an outside pitch, he'd pay Billy fifty bucks. The point of the exercise, Billy now says, is "it gives me an excuse to henpeck Ramon. It's a subversive way for me to keep nagging..."

He has a favorite passage, Philippians 4:13: I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. It's giving him no solace.

Sloth, indolence, a lack of discipline, an insufficient fear of management—these problems Billy knows how to attack.

Billy stares at the television with disgust, like a theatre critic being forced to watch a mangled interpretation of Hamlet.

"Relievers are like volatile stocks," Billy says. "They're the one asset you need to watch closely, and trade for quick profits."

"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.

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.

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.

There's a framed aphorism, called "The Optimist's Creed."

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).

Elation transforms him. He shouts at his teammates. He's not saying: Look what I just did. He's saying: Look what we just did! We won!

Ray Durham was getting in some extra hacks, with Wash and Boz looking on, less coaches than connoisseurs.

Those Royals had made a fetish of speed, and Wash, a speedster, was the beneficiary.

And so, for the first time in his career, Ray mostly played it safe on the bases. From the aesthetic point of view, this was a pity. Let Ray Durham do what he pleased on the base paths and he became a human thrill ride.

"Ray was bred on being aggressive running the bases," says Wash. "Until he got here he never got chastised for being aggressive on the base paths."

Here they have this specimen of base-running prowess...

The first was a slightly unseemly attempt by a small handful of staff members to use the newspapers to create pressure on the GM to improve their standard of living.

After Art's wife confessed that she, too, was befuddled by Billy Beane's unwillingness to secure their retirement years, Art mentioned how struck he was by how different baseball teams arrange their pecking order.

Billy Beane's total lack of interest in the stolen base—which has served the team so well for the previous 162 games—is regarded, in the postseason, as sheer folly. Even people who don't run very fast start saying that "you need to make things happen" in the postseason. Take the action to your opponent. "The atavistic need to run," Billy Beane calls it.

"We're asking them [the Oakland A's] to compete in a stadium they can't compete in," he said, in February 2003. "They're not viable without a new stadium."

About the fifteenth time he heard some TV pundit say that the Oakland A's couldn't win because they didn't "manufacture runs," Billy began to worry his coaches and players might actually believe it.

Their team on-base percentage was a shade lower, and they'd been caught stealing sixty-two times, to Oakland's twenty, and had twice as many sacrifice bunts. That is, they'd squandered outs.

At some point during each game Morgan explained to the audience the flaw in the A's thinking—not that he had any deep understanding of what that thinking entailed.

Billy Beane had been surprisingly calm throughout his team's play-off debacle.

The fact that his team had lost to the clearly inferior Minnesota Twins festered.

Manny Ramirez's glove was requisitioned by general management, and the slugger would spend the rest of his Red Sox career as a designated hitter.

In Oakland, Billy Beane's imminent departure quickly rippled through the organization.

In the forty-eight hours after he accepted John Henry's job offer, Billy became as manic and irrational and incapable of sleep as he had been back in May, after the A's had been swept by the Blue Jays.

As decisive as he was about most things, he was paralyzed when the decision involved himself.

Jeremy's new friend, Nick Swisher, was always the first to find whatever they'd written, but Swish approached the thing with defiance.