Moneyball - Michael Lewis [72]
The entire bottom half of the A’s lineup—Miguel Tejada, Eric Chavez, Ramon Hernandez, Carlos Pena, and Terrence Long—is playing a different, more reckless game than the top half—Jeremy Giambi, Scott Hatteberg, David Justice, Frank Menechino. The top half is hitting with discipline, and avoiding swinging at bad pitches. The bottom half is hacking away. The odd thing about this is that the top half was acquired through trades from other clubs, and the bottom half, with the exception of Terrence Long and Carlos Pena, is homegrown.
The guys who aren’t behaving properly at the plate are precisely those who have had the approach drilled into them by A’s hitting coaches from the moment they became pro players. The seemingly inverse correlation between the amount of discipline exhibited by a big league hitter and the amount of time his team has spent trying to teach him discipline has led Billy Beane to conclude that discipline can’t be taught. (Actually what he says is, “It can be taught, but we’d have to take guys in diapers to do it.”) You could see just by looking at David’s list why Billy felt he had to seize control of the amateur draft from his scouts. What most scouts thought of as a learned skill of secondary importance the A’s management had come, through hard experience, to view virtually as a genetic trait, and the one most likely to lead to baseball success.
Which raises another obvious question: if Miguel Tejada and Ramon Hernandez and Eric Chavez are still swinging at bad pitches after years of being told not to, how can any list make a difference? This time when I ask it, Feiny doesn’t smile at my stupidity. “They’ve spent five years with Miggy [they all call Tejada “Miggy”] in here trying to teach him what not to swing at,” he says, “and he still swings at it.”
“When you have it on paper, it’s evidence,” says David. “They say they don’t believe you, but when you show them they’re hitting .140 when they swing at the first pitch, it gets their attention. Sometimes.”
David Justice interrupts the conversation. Seconds after the A’s come into the dugout, Justice, who has been playing right field, appears in the video room. “Feiny, can I see my at bat?” he asks. He’s not even breathing hard. The great thing about baseball players, from the point of view of personal hygiene, is how seldom they break a sweat.
Justice sits and watches a replay of himself being called out on strikes. The third strike was clearly off the plate by about three inches. He races through the first few pitches to get to the bad call. “The ump set up on the inside,” Justice says, when he gets to the final pitch. “He can’t even see that outside pitch.”
He has a point: an umpire has to choose which of the catcher’s shoulders to look out over and he’s chosen to look out over the inside part of the plate. Justice wants to rewind the tape and prove his case all over again, but the A’s least disciplined hitters are up and out with amazing speed. The war of attrition is turning into a rout. Eric Hiljus has thrown fifty-four pitches in the first two innings. David Wells throws twelve pitches in the first and just six more—two each to Tejada, Chavez, and Long—in the second before he strolls back to the dugout. Justice can’t even finish complaining before he has to run out and play right field.
Justice was the second of three defective parts the A’s front office had hired to replace Jason Giambi’s bat. “Defective” wasn’t actually the word Paul had used. “Warts” was. As in, “What gets me really excited about a guy is when he has warts, and everyone knows he has warts, and the warts just don’t matter.” All you had to do to see what Paul might mean by warts was to stroll through the Oakland A’s clubhouse as the players emerged from the showers: not a pretty sight. Justice was an exception, however. Justice was still a physical specimen. He looked as handsome and cocky and fit as ever. Warts? For chrissake, I thought, he’s David Justice. He has more postseason hits than any player in