Moneyball - Michael Lewis [107]
CHAD BRADFORD grew up the youngest child of a lower-middle-class family in a small town called Byram, Mississippi, outside of the larger one called Jackson. “Country” is how he describes himself. Not long before Chad’s second birthday his father suffered a stroke that nearly killed him, and left him paralyzed. The doctors had told his father that he’d never walk again. His father insisted that just wasn’t true. He looked up from his bed, stone-faced, and announced his intention to raise his three boys and earn a living. Through an act of will, which he also thought of as an act of God, he did just that. By Chad’s seventh birthday his father was able not only to walk but, in a fashion, to play catch with his son. He would never again be able to lift his arm over his shoulder, so he couldn’t throw properly. But he could get a glove up to stop a ball. And after he caught the ball from Chad, he would toss it back to him underhanded. The strange throwing motion stuck in the little boy’s mind.
Playing catch with his father was one of the things that made Chad happiest. 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. The Bradfords didn’t know any professional baseball players; they didn’t know anyone who knew any professional baseball players. But twice Chad was asked by his school-teachers to write autobiographical essays, and both times he took professional baseball as his theme. At the age of eight he wrote: What I Want to Be When I Grow Up.
If I were a A grown up
I would be a baseball player
And I would play for the Dodgers.
I hope to play for the Cardinals too.
I hope to play for the Oriole too
And for all the teams I would
Play shotestop.
“Shotestop” being the phonetic spelling, in Byram, Mississippi. Five years later, when Chad was thirteen, his teacher asked him and the other students to write the stories of their lives, as they looked back on them from their imagined old age. With the perspective of hindsight Chad Bradford could see that he had married right out of school, had two children, a son and a daughter, and become not a big league shortstop but a big league pitcher. He imagined no other future for himself and so it was lucky that no other future awaited him. Right after his high school graduation, at the age of eighteen, he married his girlfriend, Jenny Lack, who soon bore him a son, then a daughter. Between the two births, at the age of twenty-three, Chad Bradford made his debut in the major leagues with the Chicago White Sox. The power of an imagination can arise from what it refuses to foresee.
Between the eighth grade and the big leagues there was only one hitch: Chad wasn’t any good. His ambition was a fantasy. Just about every baseball player who makes it to the big leagues was all-everything in high school; just about every big league pitcher dominated high school hitters. As a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore Chad Bradford was lucky just to make the team. He didn’t play any sport other than baseball and didn’t exhibit any particular athletic ability. Central Hinds Academy in Byram, Mississippi, had graduated hundreds of baseball players more promising than Chad Bradford and none of them had ever played professionally. 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. As a consequence he stopped telling people.
One of the people he didn’t tell was his high school baseball coach, Bill “Moose” Perry. Chad, like everyone he knew, was raised Baptist. Moose wasn’t just his coach but also