Free Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) by Michael Lewis

of mind. I think that the runner when he found the ball waiting for him was more surprised than anybody.”
    Billy could run and Billy could throw and Billy could catch and Billy even had presence of mind in the field. Billy was quick-witted and charming and perceptive about other people, if not about himself. He had a bravado, increasingly false, that no one in a fifty-mile radius was ever going to see through. He looked more like a superstar than any actual superstar. He was a natural leader of young men. Billy’s weakness was simple: he couldn’t hit.
    Or, rather, he hit sometimes but not others; and when he didn’t hit, he unraveled. “Billy was of the opinion that he should never make an out,” said Pittaro. “Relief pitchers used to come down from the bullpen to watch Billy hit, just to see what he did when he struck out.” He busted so many bats against so many walls that his teammates lost count. One time he destroyed the dugout toilet; another time, in a Triple-A game in Tacoma, he went after a fan in the stands, and proved, to everyone’s satisfaction, that fans, no matter what challenges they hollered from the safety of their seats, were better off not getting into fistfights with ballplayers. From the moment Billy entered a batter’s box he set about devouring himself from the inside until, fully self-consumed, he went looking around him for something else to feed his rage. “He didn’t have a baseball mentality,” said Jeff Bittiger. “He was more like a basketball or a football player. Emotions were always such a big part of whatever he did. A bad at bat or two and he was done for the third and fourth at bats of the game.”
    Yet even inside the batter’s box, where he came unglued in a matter of a few seconds, Billy enjoyed sensational success. In 1983, in response to his special inconsistency against right-handed pitching, Billy played around with switch-hitting. Who tried hitting from the wrong side of the plate for the first time in his life in Double-A ball? Nobody. And yet by the middle of the Double-A season, against pitchers with big league stuff, Billy was hitting .300 left-handed. Then he slumped, and lost his nerve. He went back to hitting exclusively right-handed.
    In late 1984, Billy and Lenny both came up for a few weeks at the end of the season. Billy got his first big league hit off Jerry Koosman—who immediately picked him off first base. It was funny; it was also sad. Just as the game seemed willing to bend to his talent, it snapped back, and took whatever it had just given him away. In late 1985, Lenny was brought up for good to the big league team—for which Darryl Strawberry already had hit more than seventy home runs. Lenny played center, Strawberry played right, Billy played the guy who never made it out to left field. The next year Lenny hit critical home runs in the NLCS and the World Series, and wrote a book about them, in which he mentioned that it should have been Billy Beane, not he, who became the big league star. (Lenny didn’t read books; he wrote them.)
    Rather than make Billy a big leaguer, the Mets traded him to the Minnesota Twins. The Twins in 1986 had a new manager, Ray Miller, who announced that Billy Beane would be his starting left fielder. Billy immediately went out and hurt himself in spring training, but when he came back he was, for the first time in his big league career, sent out to left field as a regular rather than a substitute. That day the Twins were in Yankee Stadium facing Ron Guidry. Billy went five for five off Guidry, with a home run. Then he went hitless the next two nights and found himself written out of the Twins’ starting lineup—for good, as it turned out. Billy understood, or said he did. The team was losing and Ray Miller was new, and feeling pressure to play veterans.
    For the next three and a half seasons Billy was up and down between Triple-A and the big leagues, with the Twins, the Detroit Tigers, and, finally, the Oakland