Moneyball - Michael Lewis [119]
I’m still having trouble getting my mind around the notion of making such forecasts about human beings, and I say as much. My problem can be simply put: every player is different. Every player must be viewed as a special case. The sample size is always one. His answer is equally simple: baseball players follow similar patterns, and these patterns are etched in the record books. Of course, every so often some player may fail to embrace his statistical destiny, but on a team of twenty-five players the statistical aberrations will tend to cancel each other out. And most of them will conform fairly exactly to his expectations. About Eric Chavez’s career, for instance, he has not the slightest doubt. “The only thing that will stop Chavvy is if he gets bored,” he says. “People don’t understand that. He continues to frustrate people who take him out of context. He is twenty-four years old. What he’s done at twenty-four no one has done. Health permitted, his whole career is a lock.”
I mention that there are times when Billy is one of the people Chavvy frustrates. Chavvy, like Miguel Tejada, is Mister Swing at Everything. In his current mood, Billy waves the objection aside. He can’t understand how I can be so intolerant. “Chavvy’s young,” he says. “He’s good-looking. He’s a millionaire. He kind of owes it to himself to swing at everything. What were you like when you were twenty-four?”
This was the character whose behavior was consistent with the way he said he wanted to run his baseball team: rationally. Scientifically. This was the “objective” Billy Beane, the general manager who was certain that “you don’t change guys; they are who they are.” Who will describe his job as “a soap box derby. You build the car in the beginning of the year and after that all you do is push it down the hill.” To this Billy Beane’s way of thinking there was no point in meddling with the science experiment. There was no point in trying to get inside players’ heads, for instance, to reshape their approach to the game. They will be who they will be. When you listen to the “objective” Billy Beane talk about his players, you begin to wonder if baseball players have free will.
But there is another, less objective Billy Beane. And in the top of the fourth inning, when Miguel Tejada drops a routine, inning-ending double-play throw from second baseman Mark Ellis, the other Billy Beane awakens from his slumber. Even as the Royals score five runs they shouldn’t have, Billy remains calm—after all, it’s still 11–5, and Tim Hudson is still pitching—but he’s on alert. He begins to talk about his players in a different way. And he allows me to see that the science experiment is messier than the chief scientist usually is willing to admit.
In the Oakland fourth, center fielder Terrence Long hits a grounder back to the pitcher, and runs hard down the first-base line. This is new. Heretofore, when Terrence Long has grounded out, he has trotted down the line with supreme indifference to public opinion. Too young to know that you are what you pretend to be, Terrence Long has nearly perfected the art of seeming not to care. As it happens, a few days ago, Terrence walked out into the players’ parking lot and discovered that someone had egged his car. Hearing of the incident, Billy stopped by Terrence’s locker and told him that he’d had an e-mail from the culprit, an A’s fan, who said he was furious that he’d paid money to watch Terrence Long jog the bases. The effect on Terrence Long was immediate. He went from jogging to first on a routine ground out to running as fast as he can until the first moment he can stop without pissing off Billy Beane. 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.”
In the Oakland fifth, with the score still