Moneyball - Michael Lewis [74]
The A’s scored a run in the bottom of the third. Goliath 5, David 1. Finally I ask: “Where is Billy?”
“The weight room,” says Paul, without looking up.
The weight room?
“Billy’s a little strange during the games,” says David.
IT WASN’T LONG after a player was traded to Oakland before he realized that his new team ran differently from any of his previous ones, although it generally took him some time to figure out why. At some point he grasped that his new general manager wasn’t like his old one. Most GMs shook your hand when they signed you and phoned you when they got rid of you. Between your arrival and departure you might catch the odd glimpse of the boss, say, up in his luxury suite, but typically he was a remote figure. This GM wasn’t like that. This GM, so far as anyone could tell, never set foot inside his luxury suite.
That is what the new player noticed right away: that Billy Beane hung around the clubhouse more than the other GMs. David Justice, who had spent fourteen years with the Braves, the Indians, and the Yankees, claimed he’d seen more of Billy in the first half of the 2002 season than he had all the other GMs put together. The new member of the team would see Billy in the locker room asking some shell-shocked pitcher why he’d thrown a certain pitch in a certain count. Or he’d see Billy chasing down the clubhouse hallway after the Panamanian pinch hitter, badgering him about some disparaging comment he’d made about the base on balls. Or he’d dash up the tunnel from the dugout in the middle of the game to watch tape of his previous at bat, and find Billy in shorts and a T-shirt, dripping sweat from a workout, at the other end; and, if the game wasn’t going well, he might find Billy throwing stuff around the clubhouse. Breaking things.
It was hard to know which of Billy’s qualities was most important to his team’s success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players. Most GMs hadn’t played the game and tended to be physically intimidated in the presence of big league players. Billy had not only played, he might as well wear a sign around his neck that said: I’ve been here, so don’t go trying any of that big league bullshit on me. He didn’t want your autograph. He wasn’t looking to be your buddy. Seldom did the player see Billy socially, away from the clubhouse. Billy kept his distance, even when he was right in your face. Nevertheless, he was a presence.
After a while the new player would start to wonder if there was any place previously reserved for men in uniform that Billy didn’t invade. There was, just one. The dugout. Major League Baseball rules forbade the general manager from sitting in the dugout. But even there the GM was never very far away, because the manager, Art Howe, walked around with a miniature Billy Beane perched on his shoulder, hollering in his ear. In the Oakland A’s dugout occurred the most extraordinary acts of mind control; if Art had a spoon in his head Billy could have bent it with his brain waves. One time Adam Piatt, the spare outfielder, had gone up to the plate in a tight game with a runner on first base with one out, and bunted the guy over. Just like you were supposed to do. Just like everyone in baseball did. Art hadn’t exactly disapproved—at heart Art was an old baseball guy. Instead, incredibly, he had wandered down to where Piatt sat in the dugout and said, “You did that on your own, right?”
The TV viewers saw only the wise old manager conferring with his young player. They probably assumed they were witnessing the manager making some fine point about the art of the sacrifice bunt. The manager was more concerned with the politics of the sacrifice bunt: Art Howe wanted to make sure that it wasn’t him who got yelled at by the GM after the game. Sure enough, in the papers the next day Piatt confessed that he had bunted on his own—that Art hadn’t given