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 A’s. Inside the batter’s box he struggled to adapt, but every change he made was aimed more at preventing embarrassment than at achieving success. To reduce his strikeouts, he shortened his swing, and traded the possibility of hitting a home run for a greater likelihood of simply putting the ball in play. He crouched and hunched in an attempt to hit like a smaller man. He might have struck out less than he otherwise would have done, but at the cost of crippling his natural powers. Eight years into his professional baseball career he was, in some ways, a weaker hitter than when he was seventeen years old.
At least, when it counted. When it didn’t count—when he didn’t think about it—anything could happen. One afternoon during Billy’s one-month stint with the Detroit Tigers, he was asked by the general manager, Bill Lajoie, to come out to Tiger Stadium on an off-day. Lajoie called in a few scrubs to help with the rehabilitation of a pitcher named Walt Terrell. Terrell, who had been injured, was about to reenter the Tigers’ starting rotation. Before that happened the pitching coach wanted Terrell to throw a simulated game. Billy was expected to stand in the box, as a foil.
Once they’d taken the field there was just one thought on everyone’s mind: was Terrell his old self? Billy sat and watched Terrell dispatch a couple of hitters. He was indeed his old self. When Billy’s turn came to hit, nobody was paying him any attention. All eyes were on Terrell. Nobody much cared whether Billy Beane struck out or hooted at the moon. He couldn’t fail. He became, for a moment, a boy playing a game. While the coaches and the GM scrutinized their precious pitcher, Billy took the first pitch he liked and launched a major league fastball into the upper deck of Tiger Stadium.
There was a new thought on everyone’s mind: who the fuck did that?
Billy was no longer ignorable. The GM, Lajoie, came over to him. Billy, you looked like a different guy. The stance, the attitude—everything was different. Why don’t you do that all the time? By now everyone knew that Billy was the guy destined for the Hall of Fame who never panned out. “He was still at an age where he might have developed further as a player,” said Lajoie. The GM thought there was hope; the GM really didn’t understand. Nobody understood. Inside a batter’s box, during a baseball game, Billy was no longer able to be himself. Billy was built to move: inside a batter’s box he had to be perfectly still. Inside a batter’s box he experienced a kind of claustrophobia. The batter’s box was a cage designed to crush his spirit.
In his last three and a half years of pro ball Billy watched a lot more baseball than he played, and demonstrated an odd knack for being near the center of other people’s action. “The Forrest Gump of baseball,” he later called himself. He was on the bench when the Twins won the 1987 World Series and also when the A’s won the 1989 World Series. He was forever finding himself next to people who were about to become stars. He’d played outfield with Lenny Dykstra and Darryl Strawberry. He’d subbed for Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco. He’d lockered beside Rickey Henderson. In his slivers of five years in the big leagues he played for four famous managers: Sparky Andersen, Tom Kelly, Davey Johnson, and Tony La Russa. But by the end of 1989 his career stat line (301 at bats, .219 batting average, .246 on-base percentage, .296 slugging percentage, and 11 walks against 80 strikeouts) told an eloquent tale of suffering. You didn’t need to know Billy Beane at all—you only needed to read his stats—to sense that he left every on-deck circle in trouble. That he had developed neither discipline nor composure. That he had never learned to lay off a bad pitch. That he was easily fooled. That, fooled so often, he came to expect that he would be fooled. That he hit with fear. That his fear masqueraded as aggression. That the 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
