Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) Read Free Page B

instinctive athletic event than a learned skill. Handed an athlete of Billy’s gifts, Blalock assumed, a coach should just let him loose. “I was young and a little bit scared,” Blalock says, “and I didn’t want to screw him up.” He’d later change his mind about what baseball was, but he’d never change his mind about Billy’s talent. Twenty-two years later, after more than sixty of his players, and two of his nephews, had been drafted to play pro baseball, Blalock would say that he had yet to see another athlete of Billy’s caliber.
    They all missed the clues. They didn’t notice, for instance, that Billy’s batting average collapsed from over .500 in his junior year to just over .300 in his senior year. It was hard to say why. Maybe it was the pressure of the scouts. Maybe it was that the other teams found different ways to pitch to him, and Billy failed to adapt. Or maybe it was plain bad luck. The point is: no one even noticed the drop-off. “I never looked at a single statistic of Billy’s,” admits one of the scouts. “It wouldn’t have crossed my mind. Billy was a five-tool guy. He had it all.” Roger Jongewaard, the Mets’ head scout, says, “You have to understand: we don’t just look at performance. We were looking at talent.” But in Billy’s case, talent was a mask. Things went so well for him so often that no one ever needed to worry about how he behaved when they didn’t go well. Blalock worried, though. Blalock lived with it. The moment Billy failed, he went looking for something to break. One time after Billy struck out, he whacked his aluminum bat against a wall with such violence that he bent it at a right angle. The next time he came to the plate he was still so furious with himself that he insisted on hitting with the crooked bat. Another time he threw such a tantrum that Blalock tossed him off the team. “You have some guys that when they strike out and come back to the bench all the other guys move down to the other end of the bench,” says Blalock. “That was Billy.”
    When things did not go well for Billy on the playing field, a wall came down between him and his talent, and he didn’t know any other way to get through the wall than to try to smash a hole in it. It wasn’t merely that he didn’t like to fail; it was as if he didn’t know how to fail.
    The scouts never considered this. By the end of Billy’s senior year the only question they had about Billy was: Can I get him? And as the 1980 major league draft approached, they were given reason to think not. The first bad sign was that the head scout from the New York Mets, Roger Jongewaard, took a more than usual interest in Billy. The Mets held the first overall pick in the 1980 draft, and so Billy was theirs for the taking. Word was that the Mets had winnowed their short list to two players, Billy and a Los Angeles high school player named Darryl Strawberry. Word also was that Jongewaard preferred Billy to Strawberry. (He wasn’t alone.) “There are good guys and there are premium guys,” says Jongewaard. “And Billy was a premium premium guy. He had the size, the speed, the arm, the whole package. He could play other sports. He was a true athlete. And then, on top of all that, he had good grades in school and he was going with all the prettiest girls. He had charm. He could have been anything.”
    The other bad sign was that Billy kept saying he didn’t want to play pro baseball. He wanted to go to college. Specifically, he wanted to attend Stanford University on a joint baseball and football scholarship. He was at least as interested in the school as the sports. The baseball recruiter from the University of Southern California had tried to talk Billy out of Stanford. “They’ll make you take a whole week off for final exams,” he’d said. To which Billy had replied, “That’s the idea, isn’t it?” A few of the scouts had tried to point out that Billy didn’t actually play football—he’d quit