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.*
There’d been some flirtation with shrinking players back in the late 1940s. The old St. Louis Browns hired a psychologist named David Tracy who specialized in hypnotic therapy. Tracy wrote a book about his experience called Psychologist At Bat, which, if nothing else, gives you some idea why baseball didn’t rush to embrace the psychiatric profession. Here’s Tracy describing his technique: “I had [a Browns’ pitcher] lie down on the couch and I stood behind him. I held up my finger about six inches above his eyes and told him to look at it steadily as I talked: ‘Your legs are growing heavy, v-e-r-y heavy. Your arms are growing heavy, v-e-r-y heavy. You are going deep, d-e-e-p asleep.’”
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 regarded as so much crap. “Sports psychologists are a crutch,” he said. “An excuse for why you are not doing it rather than a solution. If somebody needs them, there is a weakness in them that will prevent them from succeeding. It’s not a character flaw; it’s just a character flaw when it comes to baseball.” He was who he was. Baseball was what it was. And they were a bad match. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault,” he said. “I just didn’t have it in me.”
During spring training of 1990 he finally capitulated to this realization. He no longer was a boy. He was a man. He had married his high school girlfriend and she was seven months pregnant with their first child. He had responsibilities and no real future to cover them. He had gone from promising to disappointing without ever quite figuring out how or why: but he wasn’t blind. All he had to do was look around to see that something had changed. “The luster and the shine came off because there was a whole new crop of guys coming in,” he said. “I was twenty-seven years old and by and large you are what you are when you’re twenty-seven.” He had blossomed into the physical specimen the scouts had dreamed he would become. And yet, somehow, the game had shrunk him.
The game had also rendered him unfit for anything but itself. The people on the big club assumed that Billy would break camp in 1990 with them, and spend another season shuttling between the bench and Triple-A. Billy did something else instead. He walked out of the Oakland A’s dugout and into their front office, and said he wanted a job as an advance scout. An advance scout traveled ahead of the big league team and analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of future opponents. Billy was entering what was meant to be his prime as a baseball player, and he’d decided he’d rather watch than play. “I always say that I loved playing the game but I’m not sure that I really did,”
