Moneyball: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

In a night in September 2002, Oakland A’s fans were salivating to watch their favorite team win its twentieth straight game. Reporters from CNN, ESPN, and other channels wanted to interview Billy Beane about how he’d put together a record-setting team. Billy was reluctant to handle so much publicity but he did so nonetheless. Afterwards, as usual, he holed up in the weight room, furtively listening to the game on his radio—at one point, the A’s were up 11-0.

Michael Lewis talks with Billy Beane in the middle of the game. Billy talks about how his shortstop, Eric Chavez, is probably the most gifted player in baseball—statistically, he outstrips many more famous athletes. As Billy talks, Lewis considers some of the contradictions in his management style. Billy is scientific. He often says that managing a baseball team is like a soapbox derby: “You build the car in the beginning of the year and after that all you do is push it down the hill.” And yet, there’s a side to Billy’s personality that is superstitious and deeply invested in the game. Another contradiction in Billy’s personality: he always says that “players don’t change,” and yet he spends untold hours trying to change his players’ game for the better.

In the middle of the game, Chad Bradford replaces Tim Hudson as pitcher. Chad has been having a slump, perhaps because he’s begun to experience a crisis in self-confidence—even though he’s become one of the best pitchers in the league, he questions his own talent. He walks hitters, sometimes two in a row. Soon, the bases are loaded, with nobody out. Quickly, the score becomes 11-6, 11-7. Disgusted, Billy mutters, “what a fucking embarrassment.”

Back in the eighties, Bill James argued that psychology always pulls winners down and builds the losers up. Here, tonight, the Oakland A’s, the heavy favorites, are getting pulled down by the audience’s expectations. The score is now 11-10; a few minutes later, at the bottom of the ninth, it’s 11-11. Art Howe puts Scott Hatteberg in the game as a pinch-hitter. Hatteberg, disciplined as ever, tells himself he won’t swing at anything down low in the strike zone until he has two strikes. After laying off the first pitch and getting ball, the second pitch comes in high, right where Hatteberg is looking for it. Hatteberg hits the ball into the stands—then, as if in disbelief, he runs around the bases. “Not five minutes later,” Michael Lewis concludes, “Billy Beane was able to look me in the eye and say that it was just another win.”