Moneyball - Michael Lewis [27]
The game had also rendered him unfit for anything but itself. The people on the big club assumed that Billy would break camp in 1990 with them, and spend another season shuttling between the bench and Triple-A. Billy did something else instead. He walked out of the Oakland A’s dugout and into their front office, and said he wanted a job as an advance scout. An advance scout traveled ahead of the big league team and analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of future opponents. Billy was entering what was meant to be his prime as a baseball player, and he’d decided he’d rather watch than play. “I always say that I loved playing the game but I’m not sure that I really did,” he said. “I never felt comfortable.”
When their fifth outfielder turned up looking for a desk job, the A’s front office didn’t know what to make of it. It was as unlikely as some successful politician quitting a campaign and saying he wanted to be a staffer, or a movie actor walking off the set and taking a job as key grip. None of the staff had played big league baseball and all of them wished they had. Most would have given their glove hands, or at least a few fingers, for a year in a big league uniform. The A’s general manager Sandy Alderson was maybe the most perplexed of all. “Nobody does that,” he said. “Nobody says, ‘I quit as a player. I want to be an advance scout.’” He hired Billy anyway. “I didn’t think there was much risk in making him an advance scout,” Alderson said, “because I didn’t think an advance scout did anything.” Chris Pittaro had gone into scouting after an injury ended his playing career. When Billy called to tell him what he’d done, Pittaro was incredulous. “When you’re in the game you always think something is going to break for you. No one gives up on that. I didn’t. I was forced to retire. Billy chose to retire. And that was something I couldn’t imagine.” In the end Billy Beane proved what he had been trying to say at least since he was seventeen years old: he didn’t want to play ball.
With that, he concluded his fruitless argument with his talent. He decided that his talent was beside the point: how could you call it talent if it didn’t lead to success? Baseball was a skill, or maybe it was a trick: whatever it was he hadn’t played it very well. In his own mind he ceased to be a guy who should have made it and became a guy upon whom had been heaped a lot of irrational hopes and dreams. He had reason to feel some distaste for baseball’s mystical nature. He would soon be handed a weapon to destroy it.
SANDY ALDERSON has a clear memory from earlier that spring of 1990, of Billy Beane taking batting practice. He didn’t know much about Billy and wondered what kind of player he was. “He was very undisciplined at the plate,” Alderson said. “Not a lot of power. I remember after I watched him very specifically asking: why is this guy even on the team?” Not that it mattered. Tony La Russa was the A’s manager and, in the great tradition of big-shot baseball managers, he paid only faint attention to what the GM had to say.
That was one of the many things about baseball Alderson was determined to change. When Billy came to work inside the A’s front office in 1993, he walked into the early stages of a fitful science experiment. When Alderson had been hired as the A’s general manager a decade earlier, he’d been a complete outsider to baseball. This was rare. Most GMs start out as scouts and rise up through the baseball establishment. Alderson was an expensively educated San Francisco lawyer (Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School) with no experience