Read Online Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) by Michael Lewis - Free Book Online Page B

gifts required to play pro ball were, in some ways, less extraordinary than the mental ones. Only a psychological freak could approach a 100-mph fastball aimed not all that far from his head with total confidence. “Lenny was so perfectly designed, emotionally, to play the game of baseball,” said Billy. “He was able to instantly forget any failure and draw strength from every success. He had no concept of failure. And he had no idea of where he was. And I was the opposite.”
    Living with Lenny, Billy became even less sure that he was destined to be the star everyone told him he would be. He began, in the private casino of his mind, to hedge his bets. He told teammates he might quit baseball and go back to college and play football. He might enter politics; everyone said he’d be good at it. He took to reading some nights—a radical idea for a minor league baseball player—to compensate for the formal education he now realized he wasn’t getting. Lenny would come home and find Billy curled up in a chair with a book. “He’d look at me,” recalls Billy, “and say, ‘Dude, you shouldn’t be doing that. That shit’ll ruin your eyes.’ Lenny’s attitude was: I’m going to do nothing that will interfere with getting to the big leagues, including learning.” Maybe more to the point, Lenny—a thirteenth-round draft pick!—hadn’t the slightest doubt that he was going to make it to the big leagues and make it big. “I started to get a sense of what a baseball player was,” Billy said, “and I could see it wasn’t me. It was Lenny.”
    That thought led to another: I’m not sure I like it here . Before Billy was sent back to the minor leagues in the first cuts of 1984 spring training, he was confronted by the Mets’ big league manager, Davey Johnson. Johnson told Billy that he didn’t think he, Billy, really wanted to play baseball. “I didn’t take it as a criticism,” said Billy. “I took it as ‘I think he’s right.’ I was so geared to going to college. I was sort of half in and half out.”
    The half that was in stayed in. He didn’t quit baseball. He kept grinding his way up through the minor leagues, propelled by his private fears and other people’s dreams. The difference between who he was, and who other people thought he should be, grew by the day. A lot of people who watched Billy Beane play still thought what J. P. Ricciardi thought when he played with Billy that first year in Little Falls. “He was so physically gifted that I thought he would overcome everything,” said Ricciardi. “I remember coming home from that first season and telling my friends, ‘I just played with this guy who you gotta see to believe. He isn’t like other animals.’” Teammates would look at Billy and see the future of the New York Mets. Scouts would look at him and see what they had always seen. The hose. The wheels. The body. The Good Face.
    Billy was smart enough to fake his way through his assigned role: young man of promise. “Billy never looked bad, even when he struggled,” recalls the scout who had signed him, Roger Jongewaard. “He was the most talented player I ever played with,” says Chris Pittaro, who made it to the big leagues with the Tigers and won a World Series with the Twins. “He had the ability to do things in a game that ninety-five percent of the people in the big leagues could not do in practice because they didn’t have the physical ability. There aren’t many plays I remember from fifteen years ago but I remember some of Billy’s. We were in Albuquerque in ’87 [in Triple-A ball] and Billy made this play in right field. He had to run up and down over the bullpen mound to make a catch, and then throw a tagging runner out at the plate. I remember being astonished—first of all, that he even got to the ball. Second, that he ran up and down a pitcher’s mound at full speed without breaking stride. Third, that he even thought to make that throw. Speed. Balance. Presence