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

aggression enabled him to exit the batter’s box as quickly as possible. One season in the big leagues he came to the plate seventy-nine times and failed to draw a single walk. Not many players do that.
    Billy’s failure was less interesting than the many attempts to explain it. His teammate and friend, Chris Pittaro, said, “Billy was as competitive and intense as anyone I ever played with. He never let his talent dictate. He fought himself too hard.” Billy’s high school coach, Sam Blalock, said that “he would have made it if he’d had the intangibles—if he would have had a better self-image. I think he would have been a big star in the big leagues. No. I know . He was amazing. If he’d wanted to, he could even have made it as a pitcher.” The scouts who had been so high on Billy when he was seventeen years old still spoke of him in odd tones when he was twenty-five, as if he’d become exactly what they all said he would be and it was only by some piece of sorcery that he didn’t have the numbers to prove it. Paul Weaver: “The guy had it all. But some guys just never figure it out. Whatever it is that allows you to perform day in, day out, and to make adjustments, he didn’t have it. The game is that way.” Roger Jongewaard: “He had the talent to be a superstar. A Mike Schmidt–type player. His problem was makeup. I thought Billy had makeup on his side. But he tried too hard. He tried to force it. He couldn’t stay loose.”
    Inside baseball, among the older men, that was the general consensus: Billy Beane’s failure was not physical but mental. His mind had shoved his talent to one side. He hadn’t allowed nature to take its course. It was hardly surprising that it occurred to the older men that what Billy really needed was a shrink.
    That, briefly, is what he got. The whole idea of a baseball shrink had been reinvented by the Oakland A’s in the early 1980s. *
    The first of the new breed was a charismatic former prep school teacher with some academic training in psychology named Harvey Dorfman. The A’s minor league coordinator Karl Kuehl, with whom Dorfman wrote the seminal book, The Mental Game of Baseball , had actually put Dorfman in uniform and let him sit in the dugout during games, so he could deal with the players’ assorted brain screams in real time. Kuehl had no time for a player’s loss of composure during a game. “If you were throwing equipment or whatever, you were going to spend time with Harvey, whether you wanted to or not,” said Kuehl. One of the most efficient destroyers of baseball equipment his teammates had ever seen, Billy was destined to spend time with Harvey. Harvey’s main impression of Billy was that Billy had played hide-and-seek with his demons, and that professional baseball had helped him to win. “Baseball organizations don’t understand that with a certain kind of highly talented player who has trouble with failure, they need to suck it up and let the kid develop,” Dorfman said. “You don’t push him along too fast. Take it slow, so his failure is not public exposure and humiliation. Teach him perspective—that baseball matters but it doesn’t matter too much. Teach him that what matters isn’t whether I just struck out. What matters is that I behave impeccably when I compete. The guy believes in his talent. What he doesn’t believe in is himself. He sees himself exclusively in his statistics. If his stats are bad, he has zero self-worth. He’s never developed a coping mechanism because he’s never had anything to cope with.”
    Billy’s view of himself was radically different. Baseball hadn’t yielded itself to his character. He thought it was just bullshit to say that his character—or more exactly, his emotional predisposition—might be changed. “You know what?” he said. “If it doesn’t happen, it never was going to happen. If you never did it, it wasn’t there to begin with.” All these attempts to manipulate his psyche he