Moneyball - Michael Lewis [30]
The need to treat the big league team as the sacrosanct province of people who had played in the big leagues struck Alderson, who liked the idea of order and discipline cascading unimpeded from the top, as a kind of madness. “In what other business,” he asked, “do you leave the fate of the organization to a middle manager?” But that is what the Oakland A’s, along with the rest of major league baseball, had always done. Tony La Russa was a middle manager and Tony La Russa had his own ideas about how to score runs, and those ideas guided the bats of his hitters. A player would come up through the A’s farm system being told that he needed to be patient, that he needed to take his walks; and then the moment he got to the big club, he was told to unleash his natural aggression. Even players brainwashed by Alderson’s minor league system in the new approach were susceptible to these arguments. Given the slightest opening, many of them regressed, and began hacking away. “It may have something to do with how dominant these players are as they come up,” said Alderson. “Patience and discipline at the plate has never been reinforced. They say, ‘They’re not paying me to walk.’ And so if you don’t lean on them, they don’t.”
Before it had a chance to become a proper argument, the conflict between the old and the new baseball men was resolved by the budget crisis. Tony La Russa left when the new owners renounced the old habit of bankrolling millions of dollars in losses. Alderson set out to find a manager who would understand that he wasn’t the boss, and landed upon the recently fired manager of the Houston Astros, Art Howe. “Art Howe was hired to implement the ideas of the front office, not his own,” said Alderson. “And that was new.”
BILLY WOULD SAY later that his wife left him because she was unnerved by his intensity—that she could even see it in his hands when he drove an automobile. At any rate, he soon found himself out of not only a baseball uniform but a wife as well. Baseball marriages were like that: their most vulnerable moment was immediately after a player retired, and it dawned on husband and wife that they’d actually be spending time together. “They end when the career ends,” said Billy. “Until then you can put up with anything because you’re always leaving the next day.” His wife moved back to San Diego and took their infant daughter, christened Casey, with her. Billy spent his weeks scouting and his weekends speeding down, and then back up, the highway between Oakland and San Diego. He couldn’t afford the plane tickets.
His motor was still fueled less by desire than anxieties—and he now had two of them. One was that he wouldn’t know his own daughter. The other was that he wouldn’t cut it in the front office. “If baseball’s all you can do and you know that’s all you can do,” he said, “it breeds in you a certain creative desperation.” When he wasn’t speeding down some California highway he was jetting around the country watching games and listening to the other scouts talk about players. Whatever shred of doubt he’d had that most of them had no idea what they were talking about, he lost.
What he hadn’t lost was his ferocious need to win. He had just transferred it to a different place, from playing to making decisions about players. But this time he had guidance—from a graduate of not one but two Ivy League colleges—and he was willing to follow it. “What Billy figured out at some point,” said Sandy Alderson, “is that he wanted to be me more than he wanted to be Jose Canseco.” In 1993 Alderson, impressed by the creative enthusiasm with which Billy seemed to attack every task he was given, brought him into the front office, made him his assistant, and told him his job was to go out and find undervalued minor league players. And then he handed Billy the pamphlet he’d commissioned from