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 of mind. I think that the runner when he found the ball waiting or 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
