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By Root 422 0

his minister. This curious blending of roles meant, in practice, that when Moose needed to slap sense into one of his players, he felt sure he did it with the hand of God. Moose looked at Chad Bradford, aged fifteen, and saw a player who needed slapping. To Moose, Chad Bradford was just a silly, lazy boy, who had come out for the baseball team not because he had any aptitude for, or interest in, the game but because he wanted to hang around with his friends who did. “The one thing Chad was, he was a good student,” said Moose, years later, looking for something nice to say. “And the way it was at that school, if they showed any ability in anything, you wanted to encourage them. But Chad’s promise was basically that he wanted to be there. That was it. It’s horrible to say, but it’s true.”

Chad told Moose that he wanted to pitch, but Moose couldn’t see how. “He might have been the type of guy who would pitch games that were meaningless,” said Moose, “but I wouldn’t have let him pitch any game that mattered. His curveball didn’t do anything but spin. He didn’t throw hard. His fastball, it was like setting it up there on a hittin’ tee.”

Moose had other jobs, aside from coaching and preaching to high school baseball players. One of them was chapel leader for the New York Mets’ Double-A team in Jackson, Mississippi. In that capacity, a few years earlier, he’d led Billy Beane in worship. (Billy, a lapsed Catholic, says he went to hedge his bets.) The season before Chad Bradford’s sophomore year, Moose preached to a sidearm pitcher from a visiting team. After the service Moose asked the pitcher how he got his effects, and the pitcher gave him a tutorial. One winter afternoon, before the season started, when the Central Hinds Academy baseball field was underwater and the team couldn’t practice properly, Moose took Chad aside on the football field and asked him to try out this stuff the minor leaguer had shown him. Chad dropped his arm down just above a straight sidearm, from twelve to two o’clock, and, sure enough, his fastball moved. He still couldn’t throw anything but a fastball, but now it tailed in on right-handed hitters and away from lefties. Chad could always throw the ball over the plate; now, thanks to his minister and coach, he could throw the ball over the plate in a way that hitters didn’t enjoy.

All of a sudden Moose had a pitcher he could use, at least in theory. In practice Chad was still, as Moose put it, “silly.” To make him less so, to toughen him up, Moose insisted that Chad cuss each time he threw a pitch. 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, with each pitch booming out: “Shit!”

Throwing sidearm didn’t come naturally to Chad. He’d leave practice every night and go home to the family’s warm little brick house and play catch with his father, who remained unable to lift his partially paralyzed right arm over his shoulder and so still pitched the ball back to him underhand. His father remembers when Chad came home with his new sidearm delivery—and new movement on his ball. “I couldn’t catch it!” he says. “It was whoosh. Whoosh. He like to have killed me. Right then I said, ‘Uh-oh, no more pitch and catch.’”

Chad turned his attention to the side of the house. The gap between the two holly bushes in front was about the width of home plate. He’d practice sidearming the ball against the brick without hitting the bushes. He broke a few windows. His father announced he would build Chad a pitcher’s mound. (“My dad can build anything.”) His father hooked a piece of chain-link fence to a four-by-four post, tacked a carpet on top, and drew a strike zone on the carpet. He walked off sixty feet six inches, and, out of the Mississippi mud, sculpted a pitcher’s mound. Every day after practice Chad threw off that mound. Years later, when he was in the minor leagues, he would come home to Byram, Mississippi, in the off-season, and throw off the mound his father had built for him.

The motion