Moneyball - Michael Lewis [76]
Only every now and then Billy Beane did see. He’d permit himself a furtive glimpse of the action on live television, behind the closed door of Art Howe’s office. And when he did, he usually wound up needing to complain to someone, whereupon he’d go find Paul and David in the video room.
Tonight happened to be one of those nights. In the middle of the fourth inning, with the A’s still trailing 5–1, Billy appears in the doorway of the video room. He’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt soaked with sweat. His cheeks are flushed. In his hand is his little white box. He hasn’t watched the game exactly, but he has deduced its essence from his little white box.
“Fucking Hiljus,” he says. “Why doesn’t he just write them a note saying it’ll be coming down the middle of the plate?”
He actually doesn’t want to talk about the game. He wants to find a subject that will take his mind off the game. He turns to me. He’s heard that I have just come back from living in Paris. He’s never been to Paris.
“Is the Bastille still there,” he asks, “or did they tear it down after the Revolution?”
“Still there,” I say distractedly. I’m watching David Justice begin his second trip to the plate. I want to see what he does with whatever knowledge he acquired from watching himself cheated by the umpire. Who cares about the Bastille?
Billy Beane does. He’s intensely curious about it. He’s just now listening to some endless work of European history as he drives to and from the ballpark.
Justice quickly falls behind and Wells worries the outside corner of the plate. Wells knows what Justice knows, that the umpire will give the pitcher an outside strike he doesn’t deserve. They’re no longer playing a game; they’re playing game theory. This time Justice doesn’t take the outside pitches for the balls they are. He reaches out and fouls them off. Finally Wells makes a mistake, a pitch over the plate, and Justice lines a single to the opposite field.
“What’s it look like?”
“What?”
“What’s the Bastille look like?”
“It’s just a pile of rocks, I think,” I say.
“You mean you never went?”
I confess that I’ve never actually seen the Bastille. This kills Billy’s interest. I’m a Bastille fraud. His mind, having no place else to go, returns to the action on the video screens. Justice is on first with nobody out and Miguel Tejada is coming to the plate. That simple fact, at this early point in the season, is enough to set Billy off.
“Oh great,” he says, with real disgust. “Here comes Mister Swing at Everything.”
I look down at David’s chart. Mister Swing at Everything is who Tejada, on this night early in the 2002 season, seems to be. When I look up, Billy Beane is gone. For good. He’s taken his white box into his car and will drive the long way home, listening to European history, to make certain the game is over before he is anywhere near a television set.
Mister Swing at Everything has thus far in the game lived up to his reputation. Miguel Tejada had grown up poor in the Dominican Republic, and in the Dominican Republic they had a saying, “You don’t walk off the island.” The Dominican hitters were notorious hackers because they had been told they had to be to survive. For years the A’s had tried to beat out of Tejada his free-swinging ways, and they’d changed him a bit, though not as much as they’d hoped to change him. Still, their ideas are in his head. “Fucking Pitch!” Tejada screams to himself and the TV cameras each time he hacks away at some slider in the dirt or heater in his eyes. He’s gotten himself out twice so far this game and he may have grown weary of the experience, because he just watches as Wells’s first pitch passes across the heart of the plate. Wells, perhaps having decided that Tejada is beginning to worry about that one-way trip to Mexico, tries to come back to the same place, which he really shouldn’t do. Tejada meets the pitch with a quick crude stroke and crushes it into the left field bleachers.