The next year went well enough for him—he was, after all, Billy Beane—and by the summer of 1982 he had been promoted to the Mets’ Double-A team in Jackson, Mississippi. He played left, Strawberry played right, and the whole team played the field. For a lot of the players it was their first exposure to the Southern female—the most flagrant cheater in the mutual disarmament pact known as feminism. Lipstick! Hairdos! Submissiveness! Baseball was a game but chasing women was a business, in which Billy Beane was designed to succeed without even trying. Billy had the rap. Billy, said his old teammate J. P. Ricciardi, “could talk a dog off a meat wagon.” Billy was forever having to explain to another teammate of his, Steve Springer, that when you’d just met some girl, what you didn’t do was tell her you played pro ball. It wasn’t fair to her; you had to give the girl a chance to turn you down. Billy’s way of giving her a chance was to tell her that what he did for a living was collect roadkill off local highways. Springer didn’t have Billy’s awesome God-given ability with women; he thought he needed the Mets to stand a chance; and this need of his led to one of those great little moments that make even the most dismal minor league baseball careers worth remembering. They were leaving one of the local burger joints when two pretty girls called after them, in their fetching drawls: “You boys Yankees?” Springer turned around and said, “No, we’re the Mets.”
Off the field Billy was Billy; on the field Billy was crumbling. The only thing worse than an ambivalent minor league baseball player was an ambivalent minor league baseball player with a terror of failure, forced to compare himself every afternoon to Darryl Strawberry. “People would look at Billy and Darryl and think about the untapped potential that might be brought out of them,” recalls Jeff Bittiger, who was the ace of the staff on the same team. “They weren’t just supposed to be big leaguers. They were supposed to be big league all-stars.” That year Strawberry would be named the most valuable player in the Texas League. Billy would hit only .220. Often they’d hit third and fourth in the lineup, and so Billy spent a lot of hours in the outfield dwelling on Strawberry’s heroics and his own failure. “That was the first year I really questioned if I’d made the right decision to sign,” Billy said.
Darryl Strawberry presented one kind of problem for Billy; Lenny Dykstra presented another, perhaps even more serious one. Billy and Lenny lived together and played side by side in minor league outfields for nearly two years, beginning in 1984. In the spring of that year both were invited to the Mets’ big league spring training camp. With Strawberry now a fixture in the Mets’ right field, the talk in the minors was that Billy was being groomed to replace George Foster in left, and Lenny was supposed to replace Mookie Wilson in center. Lenny thought of himself and Billy as two buddies racing together down the same track, but Billy sensed fundamental differences between himself and Lenny. Physically, Lenny didn’t belong in the same league with him. He was half Billy’s size, and had a fraction of Billy’s promise—which is why the Mets hadn’t drafted him until the thirteenth round. Mentally, Lenny was superior, which was odd considering Lenny wasn’t what you’d call a student of the game. Billy remembers sitting with Lenny in a Mets dugout watching the opposing pitcher warm up. “Lenny says, ‘So who’s that big dumb ass out there on the hill?’ And I say, ‘Lenny, you’re kidding me, right? That’s Steve Carlton. He’s maybe the greatest left-hander in the history of the game.’ Lenny says, ‘Oh yeah! I knew that!’ He sits there for a minute and says, “So, what’s he got?’ And I say, ‘Lenny, come on. Steve Carlton. He’s got heat and also maybe the nastiest slider ever.’ And Lenny sits there for a while longer as if he’s taking that in. Finally he just says, ‘Shit, I’ll stick him.’ I’m sitting there thinking, that’s a magazine cover out there on the hill and all Lenny can think is that he’ll stick him.”
The point about Lenny, at least to Billy, was clear: Lenny didn’t let his mind screw him up. The physical 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
