We’re going to run the organization from the top down. We’re controlling player personnel. That’s our job. I don’t apologize for that. There’s this belief that a baseball team starts with the manager first. It doesn’t.
—Billy Beane, quoted in the Boston Herald, January 16, 2003
THE OAKLAND A’S clubhouse was famously the cheapest and least charming real estate in professional baseball and the video room was the meanest corner of it. Off-limits to reporters, just a few yards down the hall from the showers, the video room was where the players came to hide from newspaper reporters, and to study themselves. One wall was stacked with old tapes of A’s games, the other with decrepit video equipment. Stained Formica desks, a pair of old video screens on each one, squatted on either end of the room. The only decoration was a plastic map of the United States—because occasionally the players wanted to see which states they’d fly over on the next road trip—and two pieces of a bat split against one of the Formica desks by former A’s outfielder Matt Stairs. About six baseball players could fit inside the room at once, and often did.
Between Matt Stairs’s broken bat and the U.S. map usually sat a young man named Dan Feinstein—Feiny, everyone called him. Twenty minutes before game time all that was left of the players in the video room was Miguel Tejada’s Fig Newton wrappers. Feiny spotted them and shook his head. The A’s shortstop was one of those people who had to be told to clean up his own mess, and Feiny was one of those people who wouldn’t hesitate to do it.
Feiny was putting his college degree in medieval European history to work preparing videotapes for the Oakland A’s. He took pride in his decrepit little space. Feiny argued that while rich teams had far more expansive and tasteful facilities, they paid a price for their luxury: their players never had to share close quarters. They weren’t forced to get to know one another by smell. Feiny came to know all of the Oakland players, by smell and swing, and he was determined that they should also know themselves. The night I arrived, the A’s were playing the New York Yankees, for whom David Wells was scheduled to pitch. Next to Feiny there was a long row of tapes: Tejada vs. Wells. Menechino vs. Wells. Chavez vs. Wells. I looked at the tapes, and then at Feiny, who said, “I don’t have a good feeling about tonight.” “Why not?” I asked. “They’re better than us,” he said.
Next to Feiny, at one end of the video room, sat David Forst, twenty-five-year-old former Harvard shortstop. Two years earlier, after he’d graduated with an honors degree in sociology, Forst had been invited to the Red Sox spring training camp. Dismissed in the final cut, he sent his résumé around big league front offices and it caught Paul DePodesta’s eye. And so, surely for the first time since the dead ball era, the Harvard Old Boys’ network came to baseball. Paul himself sat at the desk on the other end of the room. I ask them if it ever troubled them to devote their lives, and expensive educations, to a trivial game. They look at me as if I’ve lost my mind, and Paul actually laughed. “Oh, you mean as opposed to working in some deeply meaningful job on Wall Street?” he said.
It wasn’t hard to see what Billy had seen in Paul when he’d hired him: an antidote to himself. Billy was an undisciplined omnivore. He let everything in and then worried about the consequences later. He ate about ten thousand calories of junk food each day on the assumption that he could always run them off. Ideas he consumed as rapidly and indiscriminately as cheese puffs. He had been put on this earth to devour all of it; Paul, on the other hand, seemed to be trying to establish some kind of record for fuel efficiency. Food he treated with suspicion, as if the world’s chefs were conspiring to poison him. He’d somehow gotten through a private prep school and college without ever allowing a sip of alcohol to pass his lips, not because he had any conventional moral objection to drinking but because research had established that alcohol killed brain cells. About his career he was fantastically deliberate. He’d already turned down one lucrative offer, from the Toronto Blue Jays, to become, at twenty-eight, the youngest general manager in the history of baseball, and he was prepared to turn down more until exactly the right one came along. Paul was finicky about ideas, too, but he had let in one big one: that there was still such a thing as new baseball knowledge.
Paul was obviously a creature of reason but, beneath his reason, other qualities percolated. He’d played sports in high school, and then proved that a young man with the build of St. Francis of Assisi could play wide receiver for the Harvard varsity football team. (“He had the big heart,” said his former coach, Mac Singleton.) Paul wasn’t the sort of person who typically rises to power inside a big league organization, and yet he had. He was an outsider who had found a way to enter a place designed to keep outsiders out. Billy Beane had turned himself into a human bridge between two warring countries—the fiefdom of Playing Pro Ball and the Republic of Thinking About How to Play Pro Ball—and Paul was dashing across it. Under his arm he carried both the toolkit and the spirit of Bill James. “The thing that Bill James did that we try to do,” Paul said, “is that he asked the question why.”
The question Paul might have been asking on this night early in the 2002 season was: why the hell did we let Jason Giambi leave? The question that he had, in fact, asked was: why does it matter that we let Jason Giambi leave?
The A’s front office realized right away, of course, that they couldn’t replace Jason Giambi with another first baseman just like him. There wasn’t another first baseman just like him and if there were they couldn’t have afforded him and in any case that’s not how they thought about the holes they had to fill. “The important thing is not to recreate the individual,” Billy Beane would later say. “The important thing is to recreate the aggregate.” He couldn’t and wouldn’t find another Jason Giambi; but he could find the pieces of Giambi he could least afford to be without, and buy them for a tiny fraction of the cost of Giambi himself.
The A’s front office had broken down Giambi into his obvious offensive statistics—walks, singles, doubles, home runs—along with his less obvious ones—pitches seen per plate appearance, walk to strikeout ratio—and asked: which can we afford to replace? And they realized that they could afford, in a roundabout way, to replace his most critical offensive trait, his on-base percentage, along with several less obvious ones.
The previous season Giambi’s on-base percentage had been .477, the highest in the American League by 50 points. (Seattle’s Edgar Martinez had been second at .423; the average American League on-base percentage was .334.) There was no one player who got on base half the time he came to bat that the A’s could afford; on the other hand, Jason Giambi wasn’t the only player in the Oakland A’s lineup who needed replacing. Johnny Damon (on-base percentage .324) was gone from center field, and the designated hitter Olmedo Saenz (.291) was headed for the bench. The average on-base percentage of those three players (.364) was what Billy and Paul had set out to replace. They went looking for three players who could play, between them, first base, outfield, and DH, and who shared an ability to get on base at a rate thirty points higher than the average big league player. The astonishing thing, given how important on-base percentage was, or the Oakland A’s front office believed it was, was how little it cost. To buy it they simply had to be willing to sacrifice other qualities in a player—such as the ability to outrun the hot dog vendor in a sixty-yard dash. “We don’t get the guys who are perfect,” said Paul. “There has to be something wrong with them for them to get to us.” To fill the hole left by Giambi, the A’s had gone out and acquired, or promoted from within the organization, three players most teams didn’t want to have anything to do with: former Yankee outfielder David Justice; former Red Sox catcher Scott Hatteberg; and Jason Giambi’s little brother, Jeremy. They could only afford them, Paul explained, because all were widely viewed by Major League Baseball executives as defective.
As the Oakland A’s trot out to their positions in the field, Paul takes his usual seat in front of one of the video screens. The camera pans to left field. There stands Jeremy Giambi, shifting back and forth unhappily, like a man waiting for an unpleasant phone call. He must know that he is standing in a place where he faces almost certain public humiliation. Paul can guess what Jeremy is thinking: Please don’t hit it to me. Perhaps also: If you do hit it to me, please be so kind as to hit it at me.
On the second pitch of the game, Alfonso Soriano doesn’t. The Yankees’ second baseman takes a fastball in the middle of the plate from A’s pitcher Eric Hiljus and smacks it deep into left field. Jeremy Giambi makes his way frantically back toward the left field wall, like a postman trying to escape a mad dog. He is the slowest man on the slowest team in professional baseball. When he runs, he manages somehow at the same time to convey personal embarrassment. He is too busy right now to wonder why he is playing left field at all, but he well might. He is playing left field not because he has any particular gift for plucking balls from the air but because he is even more gloriously inept when faced with the task of picking them up off the ground. Jeremy Giambi is in left field, to be exact, because the most efficient distribution of the A’s resources was to stick him there.
Jeremy Giambi believes he has reached the wall before he does. He gropes the air behind him with his free hand, then he looks up. Somewhere in the night sky is a ball; where, apparently, he is unsure. He jumps, or, at any rate, simulates the act of jumping. The ball somehow flies under his glove and bangs off the wall for a double. As Soriano zips around first base, I yell at the television—I hadn’t come here to watch the underdog lose—and only just stop myself from saying that the fans should sue for malpractice. There was something indecent about hurling abuse at Oakland A’s fielders, like hollering at cripples. It wasn’t their fault they’d landed in the middle of a lab experiment. Jeremy Giambi never asked to play left field.
Paul DePodesta hardly blinks. Life with no money was filled with embarrassing little trade-offs. The trick is to know precisely what trade-offs you were making. A farce in left field is merely the price of doing business with Jeremy Giambi’s bat. But it’s a complex transaction. The game is only two pitches old and already the cost is felt.
Soriano is standing on third base and Derek Jeter on first (infield single) when Jason Giambi first comes to the plate. The three Yankees on the field will be paid nearly as much this year as the A’s entire twenty-five-man roster. Giambi—Giambi’s money—transforms the arena. If you drilled a hole in either the roof or the front wall of the video room you would quickly reach the largest crowd in Oakland A’s history: 54,513 people had come tonight, and not merely because the New York Yankees were in town. They’d come because the past two years the A’s had been within a few outs of knocking the Yankees from the play-offs. They’d come to watch the latest plot twist in one of the great David and Goliath stories in professional sports: Goliath, dissatisfied with his size advantage, has bought David’s sling. The Oakland fans wave signs at Giambi: TRAITOR. SELLOUT. GREED. They scream worse things. Yet in here, in the video room, their voices still cannot be heard. Six television screens display a soundless frenzy. No one in the video room so much as sighs. They have no interest in morality tales. Morality is for fans.
As Jason Giambi steps into the batter’s box, the TV cameras flash back and forth between him and his younger brother in left field. The announcers wish to draw out a few comparisons. Poor Jeremy. He still needed a baseball genius to divine his true worth but any moron could see the value of his older brother, at the plate. In all of baseball for the past few years there has been only one batter more useful to an offense: Barry Bonds. Giambi has all the crude offensive attributes—home runs, high batting average, a perennially high number of RBIs. He also has the subtler attributes. When he’s in the lineup, for instance, the opposing pitcher is forced to throw a lot more pitches than when he isn’t. The more pitches the opposing starting pitcher throws, the earlier he’ll be relieved. Relief pitchers aren’t starting pitchers for a reason: they aren’t as good. When a team wades into the opponent’s bullpen in the first game of a series, it feasts, in games two and three, on pitching that is not merely inferior but exhausted. “Baseball is a war of attrition,” Billy Beane was fond of saying, “and what’s being attrited is pitchers’ arms.”
A hitter like Giambi performed many imperceptible services for his team. His ability to wear down first string pitchers gave everyone else more chances to hit against the second string. This ability, like every other, grew directly from his perfect understanding of the strike zone. He had the hitter’s equivalent of perfect pitch, and the young men in the video room are attuned to its value.
“Watch,” says Paul, as $17 million a year of hitter steps up to the plate and stares blankly at $237,500 of pitcher. “Giambi’s cut the strike zone completely in half.” It isn’t Giambi’s obvious powers that have him excited. It’s his self-control, and the effect it has on pitchers. Giambi makes it nearly impossible for even a very good pitcher to do what he routinely does with lesser hitters: control the encounter. And Eric Hiljus isn’t, tonight, a very good pitcher.
David points to the screen and shows me the sliver of the plate over which a pitch must pass for Giambi to swing at it. The line he traces omits a chunk of the inner half of the plate. “He has a hole on the inside where he can’t do much with a pitch and so he lays off it,” says David.
Every hitter has a hole. “The strike zone is too big to cover it all,” as Paul says. Ted Williams wrote a book, called The Science of Hitting, in which he imagined the strike zone as a grid of seventy-seven baseballs and further imagined what he could, and couldn’t, do with a baseball thrown to each of the seventy-seven spots. There were eleven spots, all low and most away, where, if the pitch was thrown to them and Ted Williams swung, he hit under .270. Barry Bonds, during spring training, had given an interview with ESPN in which he as much as said, “if you make your pitch, you can get me out.” The issue wasn’t whether a hitter had a weakness, but where it was. Every pitcher in the big leagues knew that Giambi’s hole was waist-high, on the inside corner of the plate. It was about the size of a pint of milk, two baseballs in height and one baseball in width.
Which raised an obvious question: why don’t the pitchers just aim for the milk pint? When I ask it, Feiny smiles and shakes his head. “They do,” David says. “But he’s so good he’ll step back and rip one foul into the upper deck. After that, the pitcher won’t ever go inside again.”
“And his weakness is right next to his greatest strength,” says Paul. “If they miss by two inches over the plate, the ball is gone. The pitcher is out there thinking: ‘I can get him out there. But if I miss by even a fraction, he’ll destroy me.’”
It’s not clear what Eric Hiljus is thinking—other than he has no interest in flirting with the inside part of the plate. His first pitch is a ball just off the outside corner; his second pitch, a fastball, closer to the middle. Giambi yanks it into right field for a single that drives Soriano home.
The A’s hitters go quietly in the first. In the top of the second, Eric Hiljus continues to indulge Yankee hitters with fastballs down the middle of the plate and they strike for four more runs, three on a home run by Derek Jeter. About the third time that I shout while the rest of the video room remains silent, I realize I am not only watching the game differently but am watching a different game. My eyes keep drifting to the one TV screen that, almost apologetically, displays the commercial broadcast. They focus on a different screen—an internal feed directly from the center field camera—that offers them the clearest view of the strike zone. I’m watching the whole game, and responding the way an ordinary fan responds. I’m looking for story lines and dramatic events and other fuel for my emotions. They’re watching fragments—not the game itself but derivatives of the game—and responding, so far as I can tell, not at all. Finally, I say something about it.
“It’s looking at process rather than outcomes,” Paul says. “Too many people make decisions based on outcomes rather than process.”
The route a pitch takes to the catcher’s mitt is an outcome, I say. It’s just a more subtle outcome.
“It’s not what happened,” says Paul, “it’s how our guy approached it.”
It’s impossible to determine, from the stands or the dugout or the luxury suites or even the commercial broadcast, whether a ball traveling 90 miles an hour was half an inch off or half an inch over home plate. Only here, in the video room, can they see the biggest thing they feel they need to know to evaluate their players: whether a pitch is a ball or a strike. “The strike zone is the heart of the game,” Bill James had written, and their behavior underscored the fact.
When the Yankees finish pummeling Eric Hiljus, and the A’s come to bat, David pulls out a neatly typed piece of paper that hints at Paul’s meaning. It reads:
Tejada: 38%
Chavez: 34%
Long: 31%
Hernandez: 29%
Pena: 27%
Menechino: 19%
Justice: 18%
Giambi: 17%
Hatteberg: 14%
The A’s front office record every pitch thrown to Oakland A’s hitters, both by type and location. They’ve mined these to determine the percentage of pitches outside the strike zone each player has swung at. Each plate appearance they think of as a miniature game in itself, in which the odds shift constantly. The odds depend on who is pitching and who is hitting, of course, but they also depend on the minute events within the event. Every plate appearance was like a hand of blackjack; the tone of it changed with each dealt card. A first-pitch strike, for instance, lowered a hitter’s batting average by about seventy-five points, and a first-pitch ball raised them about as much. But it wasn’t the first pitch that held the most drama for the cognoscenti; it was the third. “The difference between 1–2 and 2–1 in terms of expected outcomes is just enormous,” says Paul. “It’s the largest variance of expected outcomes of any one pitch. On 2–1 most average major league hitters become all-stars, yet on 1–2 they become anemic nine-hole hitters. People talk about first-pitch strikes. But it’s really the first two out of three.”
Any ball out of the strike zone was an opportunity for a batter to shift the odds in his favor. All you had to do was: not swing! The bottom half of the A’s lineup was systematically, willfully, shifting the odds in the pitchers’ favor. “I envy casino managers,” says Paul. “At least they can be sure that their blackjack dealers won’t hit on 19.”
The entire bottom half of the A’s lineup—Miguel Tejada, Eric Chavez, Ramon Hernandez, Carlos Pena, and Terrence Long—is playing a different, more reckless game than the top half—Jeremy Giambi, Scott Hatteberg, David Justice, Frank Menechino. The top half is hitting with discipline, and avoiding swinging at bad pitches. The bottom half is hacking away. The odd thing about this is that the top half was acquired through trades from other clubs, and the bottom half, with the exception of Terrence Long and Carlos Pena, is homegrown.
The guys who aren’t behaving properly at the plate are precisely those who have had the approach drilled into them by A’s hitting coaches from the moment they became pro players. The seemingly inverse correlation between the amount of discipline exhibited by a big league hitter and the amount of time his team has spent trying to teach him discipline has led Billy Beane to conclude that discipline can’t be taught. (Actually what he says is, “It can be taught, but we’d have to take guys in diapers to do it.”) You could see just by looking at David’s list why Billy felt he had to seize control of the amateur draft from his scouts. What most scouts thought of as a learned skill of secondary importance the A’s management had come, through hard experience, to view virtually as a genetic trait, and the one most likely to lead to baseball success.
Which raises another obvious question: if Miguel Tejada and Ramon Hernandez and Eric Chavez are still swinging at bad pitches after years of being told not to, how can any list make a difference? This time when I ask it, Feiny doesn’t smile at my stupidity. “They’ve spent five years with Miggy [they all call Tejada “Miggy”] in here trying to teach him what not to swing at,” he says, “and he still swings at it.”
“When you have it on paper, it’s evidence,” says David. “They say they don’t believe you, but when you show them they’re hitting .140 when they swing at the first pitch, it gets their attention. Sometimes.”
David Justice interrupts the conversation. Seconds after the A’s come into the dugout, Justice, who has been playing right field, appears in the video room. “Feiny, can I see my at bat?” he asks. He’s not even breathing hard. The great thing about baseball players, from the point of view of personal hygiene, is how seldom they break a sweat.
Justice sits and watches a replay of himself being called out on strikes. The third strike was clearly off the plate by about three inches. He races through the first few pitches to get to the bad call. “The ump set up on the inside,” Justice says, when he gets to the final pitch. “He can’t even see that outside pitch.”
He has a point: an umpire has to choose which of the catcher’s shoulders to look out over and he’s chosen to look out over the inside part of the plate. Justice wants to rewind the tape and prove his case all over again, but the A’s least disciplined hitters are up and out with amazing speed. The war of attrition is turning into a rout. Eric Hiljus has thrown fifty-four pitches in the first two innings. David Wells throws twelve pitches in the first and just six more—two each to Tejada, Chavez, and Long—in the second before he strolls back to the dugout. Justice can’t even finish complaining before he has to run out and play right field.
Justice was the second of three defective parts the A’s front office had hired to replace Jason Giambi’s bat. “Defective” wasn’t actually the word Paul had used. “Warts” was. As in, “What gets me really excited about a guy is when he has warts, and everyone knows he has warts, and the warts just don’t matter.” All you had to do to see what Paul might mean by warts was to stroll through the Oakland A’s clubhouse as the players emerged from the showers: not a pretty sight. Justice was an exception, however. Justice was still a physical specimen. He looked as handsome and cocky and fit as ever. Warts? For chrissake, I thought, he’s David Justice. He has more postseason hits than any player in history. He’s Halle Berry’s ex. Whatever had happened between him and Halle Berry, it was hard to find any obvious fault with David Justice.
“What’s wrong with him?” I ask, once he’s gone.
“He’s thirty-six,” says Paul.
The previous year Justice had started to show his age. He’d taken swings in the World Series that looked positively amateurish. But he’d also played most of the year injured and it was hard to say how much of his drastic decline was a result of the injury and how much of it was caused by old age. A baseball player typically ripens in his late twenties; as he enters his mid-thirties, he’s treated as guilty until he proves his innocence. Last year Justice had as much as confessed to the baseball crime of aging. And this is what had made him an Oakland A. In his prime, Justice had been the sort of sensational hitter the Oakland A’s could never have afforded to buy on the open market. They could afford him now only because no one else wanted him: the rest of baseball looked at Justice and saw a has-been. Billy Beane had cut a deal with the Yankees that left the A’s with Justice for one year at a salary of $3.5 million, half what the Yankees had paid him the year before. The Yankees picked up the other half. The Yankees were, in effect, paying David Justice to play against them. I tell Paul that doesn’t sound like a good way to beat the Yankees.
“He’s an experiment for us,” says Paul. “We see this as a game of skill, not an athletic event. What we want to see is: at an age of physical decline does the skill maintain its level, even when a player no longer has the physical ability to exploit it?”
It was a funny way to put it: an experiment. What general truth could be found out from the study of one man?
Justice isn’t one man, Paul says. He’s a type: an aging slugger of a particular sort. Paul has made another study. He’d found that an extraordinary ability to get on base was more likely to stay with a player to the end of his career than, say, an extraordinary ability to hit home runs. Players who walked a lot tended actually to walk even more as they got older, and Justice walked a lot. Just a few years ago Justice’s ability to wait for pitches he could drive—to not get himself out by swinging at a pitcher’s pitch—had enabled him to hit lots of home runs, too. Much of his power was now gone. His new Oakland teammates witnessed his dissipation up close. After he’d hit a long fly ball, Justice would return to the A’s dugout and say, matter of factly, “That used to be out.” There was something morbid about it, like watching a death, play-by-play.
The A’s front office didn’t care. They sought only to milk the last few ounces of superior on-base percentage out of David Justice before he expired.
“Does Justice have any idea that you think of him this way?” I asked.
“No.”
He didn’t. None of them did. At no point were the lab rats informed of the details of the experiment. They were praised for their walks, and criticized for swinging at pitches out of the strike zone. But they weren’t ever told that the front office had reduced offense to a science, or thought they had. They had no idea that their management had reduced them to their essential baseball ingredients and these did not include guts or heart or determination or anything else that ordinary fans, or their mothers, would love them for. The players were simply aware that some higher power guided their actions. They were also aware that the higher power was not, as on most teams, the field manager. Terrence Long complained that the A’s front office didn’t let him steal bases. Miguel Tejada said he was aware that Billy Beane wanted him to be a more patient hitter. “If I don’t take twenty walks,” he said, “Billy Beane send me to Mexico.” Eric Chavez recalled, in an interview with Baseball America, how oddly the A’s system, over which Billy had presided, trained him. “The A’s started showing me these numbers,” Chavez said, “how guys’ on-base percentages are important. It was like they didn’t want me to hit for average or for home runs, but walks would get me to the big leagues.” Billy Beane was a character in his players’ imaginations—though not a terribly well drawn one.
The A’s scored a run in the bottom of the third. Goliath 5, David 1. Finally I ask: “Where is Billy?”
“The weight room,” says Paul, without looking up.
The weight room?
“Billy’s a little strange during the games,” says David.
IT WASN’T LONG after a player was traded to Oakland before he realized that his new team ran differently from any of his previous ones, although it generally took him some time to figure out why. At some point he grasped that his new general manager wasn’t like his old one. Most GMs shook your hand when they signed you and phoned you when they got rid of you. Between your arrival and departure you might catch the odd glimpse of the boss, say, up in his luxury suite, but typically he was a remote figure. This GM wasn’t like that. This GM, so far as anyone could tell, never set foot inside his luxury suite.
That is what the new player noticed right away: that Billy Beane hung around the clubhouse more than the other GMs. David Justice, who had spent fourteen years with the Braves, the Indians, and the Yankees, claimed he’d seen more of Billy in the first half of the 2002 season than he had all the other GMs put together. The new member of the team would see Billy in the locker room asking some shell-shocked pitcher why he’d thrown a certain pitch in a certain count. Or he’d see Billy chasing down the clubhouse hallway after the Panamanian pinch hitter, badgering him about some disparaging comment he’d made about the base on balls. Or he’d dash up the tunnel from the dugout in the middle of the game to watch tape of his previous at bat, and find Billy in shorts and a T-shirt, dripping sweat from a workout, at the other end; and, if the game wasn’t going well, he might find Billy throwing stuff around the clubhouse. Breaking things.
It was hard to know which of Billy’s qualities was most important to his team’s success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players. Most GMs hadn’t played the game and tended to be physically intimidated in the presence of big league players. Billy had not only played, he might as well wear a sign around his neck that said: I’ve been here, so don’t go trying any of that big league bullshit on me. He didn’t want your autograph. He wasn’t looking to be your buddy. Seldom did the player see Billy socially, away from the clubhouse. Billy kept his distance, even when he was right in your face. Nevertheless, he was a presence.
After a while the new player would start to wonder if there was any place previously reserved for men in uniform that Billy didn’t invade. There was, just one. The dugout. Major League Baseball rules forbade the general manager from sitting in the dugout. But even there the GM was never very far away, because the manager, Art Howe, walked around with a miniature Billy Beane perched on his shoulder, hollering in his ear. In the Oakland A’s dugout occurred the most extraordinary acts of mind control; if Art had a spoon in his head Billy could have bent it with his brain waves. One time Adam Piatt, the spare outfielder, had gone up to the plate in a tight game with a runner on first base with one out, and bunted the guy over. Just like you were supposed to do. Just like everyone in baseball did. Art hadn’t exactly disapproved—at heart Art was an old baseball guy. Instead, incredibly, he had wandered down to where Piatt sat in the dugout and said, “You did that on your own, right?”
The TV viewers saw only the wise old manager conferring with his young player. They probably assumed they were witnessing the manager making some fine point about the art of the sacrifice bunt. The manager was more concerned with the politics of the sacrifice bunt: Art Howe wanted to make sure that it wasn’t him who got yelled at by the GM after the game. Sure enough, in the papers the next day Piatt confessed that he had bunted on his own—that Art hadn’t given him the signal. Art, for his part, offered the reporters an impromptu lecture that might have been written by the GM himself on why the sacrifice bunt was a bad play. (Baseball players and coaches often used the newspapers to send memos to their general managers.)
Before long the new member of the Oakland A’s realized: Billy Beane ran the whole show. He was like a Hollywood producer who insisted on meddling not only with the script but also the lights and camera and sets and wardrobes. He wasn’t just making the trades and supervising scouts and getting his name in the papers and whatever else a GM did. He was deciding whether to bunt or steal; who played and who sat; who hit in which spot in the lineup; how the bullpen was used; even the manager’s subtle psychological tactics. If you watched the games closely you noticed that Art Howe always stood on the dugout steps above the players, his chin raised and a philosophical expression upon his face. Art had a great chin. When he stood up and thrust it out, he looked like George Washington crossing the Delaware. No manager in baseball better conveyed, with the thrust of his chin, the idea that he was completely in control of any situation. They flashed up on the television screen that stoic image of Art ten times a game and at some point the announcers felt moved to mention Art’s calming effect on young players. Art became known throughout baseball as the steady hand on the tiller. Why? Because he looked the part!
The whole thing was a piece of theatre. Billy had told Art how and where to stand during a game so that the players would be forced to look up to him, and take strength from his countenance, because when Art sat on the bench, as he preferred to do, he looked like a prisoner of war.
It was a different scene here in Oakland, and some players enjoyed it more than others. The thirty-nine-year-old utility infielder, Randy Velarde, complained often to reporters that the team was run from the front office and that the front office wouldn’t let anyone bunt or steal. The twenty-three-year-old star pitcher, Barry Zito, said that it didn’t matter who played for the Oakland A’s or how much money the team had to spend: as long as Billy Beane ran the team, it had a shot at championships. A player who preferred to remain anonymous, asked how it would affect the team if Art Howe was fired, said that he couldn’t see what difference it would make since “Billy runs the team from the weight room anyway.” And it was true: before every home game Billy would put on his jock and head for the weight room. During the first couple of innings he’d run a few miles and lift a few weights and generally remind whichever pitchers and bench players who had sneaked out of the dugout to get in their workouts that they played for the only team in the history of baseball on which the general manager was also the best athlete. After that, what he did depended on the situation.
What he didn’t do was watch the games. When he watched his team live, he became so upset he’d become a danger to baseball science. He’d become, as he put it, “subjective.” His anger might lead him to do something unconsidered. The notion that he would huddle in his luxury suite with friends and family and visiting dignitaries—well, that just wasn’t going to happen. Some visiting dignitary would hint he might like to see a game from Billy’s box and Billy would say, “Fine, just don’t think I’ll be seeing it with you.” His guest thought Billy was joking, until he discovered he had the suite to himself.
Billy couldn’t bear to watch; on the other hand, he couldn’t bear not to watch. He carried around in his pocket a little white box, resembling a pager, that received a satellite feed of live baseball scores. The white box was his chief source of real time information about the team he ran. He’d get into his SUV and drive in circles around the Coliseum, peeking every few minutes at the tiny white box. Or he’d set himself up in a place inside the clubhouse, white box in hand. He was like some tragic figure in Greek mythology whose offenses against the gods had caused them to design for him this exquisite torture: you must desperately need to see what you cannot bear to see.
Only every now and then Billy Beane did see. He’d permit himself a furtive glimpse of the action on live television, behind the closed door of Art Howe’s office. And when he did, he usually wound up needing to complain to someone, whereupon he’d go find Paul and David in the video room.
Tonight happened to be one of those nights. In the middle of the fourth inning, with the A’s still trailing 5–1, Billy appears in the doorway of the video room. He’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt soaked with sweat. His cheeks are flushed. In his hand is his little white box. He hasn’t watched the game exactly, but he has deduced its essence from his little white box.
“Fucking Hiljus,” he says. “Why doesn’t he just write them a note saying it’ll be coming down the middle of the plate?”
He actually doesn’t want to talk about the game. He wants to find a subject that will take his mind off the game. He turns to me. He’s heard that I have just come back from living in Paris. He’s never been to Paris.
“Is the Bastille still there,” he asks, “or did they tear it down after the Revolution?”
“Still there,” I say distractedly. I’m watching David Justice begin his second trip to the plate. I want to see what he does with whatever knowledge he acquired from watching himself cheated by the umpire. Who cares about the Bastille?
Billy Beane does. He’s intensely curious about it. He’s just now listening to some endless work of European history as he drives to and from the ballpark.
Justice quickly falls behind and Wells worries the outside corner of the plate. Wells knows what Justice knows, that the umpire will give the pitcher an outside strike he doesn’t deserve. They’re no longer playing a game; they’re playing game theory. This time Justice doesn’t take the outside pitches for the balls they are. He reaches out and fouls them off. Finally Wells makes a mistake, a pitch over the plate, and Justice lines a single to the opposite field.
“What’s it look like?”
“What?”
“What’s the Bastille look like?”
“It’s just a pile of rocks, I think,” I say.
“You mean you never went?”
I confess that I’ve never actually seen the Bastille. This kills Billy’s interest. I’m a Bastille fraud. His mind, having no place else to go, returns to the action on the video screens. Justice is on first with nobody out and Miguel Tejada is coming to the plate. That simple fact, at this early point in the season, is enough to set Billy off.
“Oh great,” he says, with real disgust. “Here comes Mister Swing at Everything.”
I look down at David’s chart. Mister Swing at Everything is who Tejada, on this night early in the 2002 season, seems to be. When I look up, Billy Beane is gone. For good. He’s taken his white box into his car and will drive the long way home, listening to European history, to make certain the game is over before he is anywhere near a television set.
Mister Swing at Everything has thus far in the game lived up to his reputation. Miguel Tejada had grown up poor in the Dominican Republic, and in the Dominican Republic they had a saying, “You don’t walk off the island.” The Dominican hitters were notorious hackers because they had been told they had to be to survive. For years the A’s had tried to beat out of Tejada his free-swinging ways, and they’d changed him a bit, though not as much as they’d hoped to change him. Still, their ideas are in his head. “Fucking Pitch!” Tejada screams to himself and the TV cameras each time he hacks away at some slider in the dirt or heater in his eyes. He’s gotten himself out twice so far this game and he may have grown weary of the experience, because he just watches as Wells’s first pitch passes across the heart of the plate. Wells, perhaps having decided that Tejada is beginning to worry about that one-way trip to Mexico, tries to come back to the same place, which he really shouldn’t do. Tejada meets the pitch with a quick crude stroke and crushes it into the left field bleachers. Yankees 5, Oakland 3. Goliath, meet David.
Two innings later, in the bottom of the sixth, David Justice leads off the inning again, and this time draws a walk from Wells. Minutes later he crosses the plate, the score is 5–4 and the bases are loaded with two outs. The A’s leadoff hitter, Jeremy Giambi, steps into the box. The one talent every fan and manager in the game associated with a leadoff hitter was the talent Jeremy Giambi most obviously lacked. “I’m the only manager in baseball,” A’s manager Art Howe complained, “who has to pinch-run for his leadoff man.” Sticking the ice wagon in the leadoff slot had been another quixotic front office ploy. What Jeremy did have was a truly phenomenal ability to wear pitchers out, and get himself on base. In the first regard he was actually his brother’s superior. He draws a walk from Mike Stanton and ties the game at 5–5.
Inside the video room, for the first time, we can hear the crowd. Fifty-five thousand fans are beside themselves. The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.
In the top of the seventh, the A’s reliever Mike Magnante provides no relief. He gives up a double to Bernie Williams. Derek Jeter walks to the plate, Jason Giambi steps into the on-deck circle, and Art Howe brings in Jim Mecir. Mecir doesn’t trot, he hobbles out of the A’s bullpen. He really doesn’t look like a professional ballplayer—which is to say, I am beginning to understand, he looks like he belongs on the Oakland A’s. The Oakland A’s are baseball’s answer to the Island of Misfit Toys.
“What’s wrong with him?” I ask.
“He’s got a clubfoot,” says Paul.
I think he’s joking but he’s not. Mecir was born with two clubfeet. As a child he’d had operations to correct them but he still walked with a limp. Somehow he had turned his deformity into an advantage. His strange delivery—he wasn’t able to push off the mound with his right foot—put an unusually violent spin on his screwball. The pitch had proven to be ruthlessly effective against left-handed hitters.
Mecir walks Jeter. Giambi steps in. Mecir immediately attacks the hole in Giambi’s swing, the waist-high inside pitch. Screwball after screwball dives over the inside part of the plate. The first is a ball but the second is a strike and Giambi doesn’t even think of swinging at either one of them. The count is 1–1. The third pitch, Giambi takes for a ball. The odds shift dangerously toward him. Mecir defies them: another called strike on the inside corner. His fifth pitch should have been his last. It’s a thing of beauty; Giambi flinches as it passes him on the inside corner of the plate. Strike three. A cheer erupts in the video room.
The umpire calls it a ball.
It’s a terrible call, in a critical situation, bad enough to crack even Paul. “I’m sick of the fucking Yankees getting every call!” he shouts, then, looking for something to swat, settles on the wall. He leaves the video room. Even he doesn’t want to watch what happens next: you can’t give Jason Giambi four strikes and expect to live to tell about it. Giambi fouls off the next pitch and then drives the seventh pitch he sees into right field for a double, scoring two runs.
The A’s fail to score again. A few minutes after he’s done his impersonation of his boss, Paul returns to watch his team lose, wearing a mask of reason. After all, it was just one game. Nothing had happened to dissuade him that his original prediction for the A’s season (ninety-five wins and a play-off spot) was wrong. Ninety-five wins meant sixty-seven losses; this was just one of those. Or so he says.
As he does, Scott Hatteberg appears in the video room. He’s the third and final defective part assembled by the A’s front office to replace Jason Giambi. He wants to see his videotape.
Hatteberg had spent the first six years of his career as a catcher with the Boston Red Sox. He’d become a free agent at the end of the 2001 season and the Red Sox had no interest in signing him. He was, when Billy Beane signed him, a second string, washed-up catcher. And so here he was: the final piece of a messy puzzle. I watch him closely as he reviews his tape but can identify no deformity. He’s six one, 215, and the weight looks more like muscle than fat. He still has both arms, all ten fingers. He’s not obviously misshapen. His quick smile reveals a fine set of teeth. His hearing is above average, too. He overhears me ask Paul why Billy had eliminated the curious job created by Sandy Alderson: team shrink. “Some teams need psychiatrists more than others,” Hatteberg says. “In Boston we had an entire staff.”
Above-average wit, too.
“So, what’s wrong with him?” I ask, after he leaves.
“His catching career was over,” said Paul. “He got hurt and can’t throw.”
It turned out that Scott Hatteberg had been on the Oakland A’s wish list for several years. He’d never done anything flashy or sensational. He didn’t hit an attention-getting number of home runs. He had never hit much over or under .270. He had the same dull virtues as David Justice and Jeremy Giambi: plate discipline and an ability to get on base. He, like them, was a blackjack dealer who understood never to hit on 19. The rest of baseball viewed Hatteberg as a catcher who could hit some, rather than as an efficient device for creating runs who could also catch. When he’d ruptured a nerve in his throwing elbow his catching days were finished, and so, in the eyes of most of baseball, was he. Therefore, he came cheap.
That he had lost his defensive position meant little to the Oakland A’s, who were forever looking for dirt-cheap opportunities to accept bad defense for an ability to get on base. One trick of theirs was to pounce on a player just after he’d had what appeared to be a career-threatening injury. Billy Beane had a favorite saying, which he’d borrowed from the Wall Street investor Warren Buffett: the hardest thing to find is a good investment. Hatteberg wasn’t like Jeremy Giambi, a minor leaguer they were hoping would cut it in the bigs. He wasn’t like David Justice, an aging star in rapid decline. He was a commodity that shouldn’t have existed: a big league player, in his prime, with stats that proved he had an unusual ability to create runs, and available at the new, low price of less than a million bucks a year. The only question Billy and Paul had about Scott Hatteberg was where on the baseball field to put him. Between Justice, who couldn’t play in the field every day and stay healthy, and Jeremy Giambi, who couldn’t play in the field every day and stay sane, they already had one full-time designated hitter. Hatteberg, to hit, would need to play some position in the field. Which one?