I was just looking over some numbers about our batting order, and I wanted to run something by you. This table shows the average number of runners that have been on base when each of our regular hitters has come to the plate this season:
The way the lineup is set up now, Moch is coming up with the most runners on, because he’s batting third with the combo of Hibbert, Serge, and you hitting in front of him. I was thinking that since you’re tied for the team lead in homers, it might make sense to get you into a spot where you’d have more of those opportunities to drive guys in.
Have you considered batting Hibb leadoff, with Serge second, you in the 3 hole, and Moch somewhere in the bottom third? I’m thinking that might help us in a couple ways:
1) It would get Hibb more plate appearances. Right now, he comes up less often than everyone else, because he’s batting ninth. He’s one of our best overall hitters and on-base guys, so the more he gets to bat, the more we pack the basepaths. We’d still keep the Hibb-Serge-you sequence in order, and Hibb led off last season, so he’s comfortable in that role.
2) It would help us make the most of your power by putting you in the best RBI spot. Right now you’re more likely to come up with the bases empty, in which case the best you can do is hit a solo shot (like you did last night). It would also mean more runners on for Joel and Isaac.
Thought it might be worth trying, at least temporarily until Moch heats up again. Let me know what you think.
While I’m waiting for a response, I scan the news and see that the statistically oriented general manager of the Angels, Jerry Dipoto, has resigned after clashing with manager Mike Scioscia, who after the season will tell a reporter, in a Lentini-esque turn of phrase, “I think the manager is the manager.” I wonder whether I should start drafting my own farewell. Then Feh’s answer arrives, in a big block of text.
What’s up Ben. I hear what you’re saying but it’s never a good idea to make changes just because a few games don’t go our way. The message it sends are that I am panicking, and I am not because I know there are stretches where things go your way, and there are stretches where they don’t. You can’t give up on a guy cause he has a rough week. Maybe a little later. Plus I already debated this before the season. I am not a middle of the order guy, I am a lead off hitter. And Hibby is a 9 hole guy. That’s why he is succeeding the way he is. And that’s why I am too because of the opportunities he is creating for me. He will get pitched differently in the 1 hole and there is a lot more pressure to set the table. I also don’t have the confidence to put anyone else in 3 hole in terms of experience because that is where you get pitched the toughest. I will get Moch dialed back in. It’s not like he is getting dominated.
There’s so much I want to say. Such as: I didn’t suggest this because we lost a few games, I suggested this because it’s made sense from the start. And: If you can’t make changes when you’re winning or when you’re losing, when is it safe to make them? Or: Doesn’t which kind of hitter you are depend on where and with whom you’re playing? Maybe you’re a leadoff hitter in the Atlantic League, but look around: In the Pacific Association, you’re one of the best power hitters we have. Or: If Hibby is succeeding only because he’s hitting ninth, how do you explain his success in the leadoff slot last season (and the fact that he told me he was just as happy hitting there)? Plus: What does experience have to do with batting third? In April, Cubs rookie Kris Bryant made his major league debut in the cleanup spot, because Bryant is a cleanup kind of hitter, twenty-three years old or not. Why can’t you be more like Cubs manager Joe Maddon?
Instead, I say, “OK, thanks for thinking about it.” My email didn’t work wonders. All in all, it went worse than when T. J. Gavlik tried to explain the concept of “blue balls” to Yuki Yasuda using obscene hand gestures alone. But: Feh read, he responded, and he didn’t blow up about it. Maybe he’ll mull it over. Maybe I’m in his head.
In the evening, I go back to Pittsburg as planned. The Diamonds take an early lead, but the Admirals come back to force extra innings, perhaps inspired by a Pittsburg sound-system mistake that results in rally music playing with the visitors up. Behind me, an older Vallejo fan—probably a player’s relative, like almost every Vallejo fan—relays a litany of loud, extremely simplistic advice. “Make him come to you,” he says when the Admirals are up. “Sit on the fastball, wait on the curve.” With the Admirals in the field, he’s even more vocal. “Be ready, defense. Look it into your glove. Don’t stand flat-footed. Step and throw.” As the game goes on, his advice grows more granular: “Get the ball first, and then make the play,” is one sentence he says, out loud, to a team of professional players. He’s two innings away from telling them which base they can throw to for a force play, four innings away from reminding them to breathe and circulate blood through their bodies. But the Diamonds walk off in the tenth, in part because the defense disobeys him: A ball gets by catcher Tyler Nordgren, allowing the winning run to reach second and then score on a single. The Admirals supporter gets up slowly and walks off, aggrieved. I feel for him. Sam and I are learning the same lesson: Knowing what we want a team to do isn’t nearly enough.
While I’m half-stewing, half-scouting in Pittsburg, Sam and Theo have the promised meeting in San Rafael, pulling Yoshi into the grandstand before batting practice. Theo points out that “approximately 100 percent of our losses” can be pinned on bullpen mismanagement and asks why we’re still acting as if it’s spring training and making moves based mostly on whose turn it is to throw. To Theo’s relief, Yoshi agrees with every critique: He tells Theo that the pitchers are tired of being neglected by Feh in favor of the hitters, and of being mishandled by Godsey. Theo and Sam ask Yoshi if he would be interested in taking over the pitching-coach duties, including the power to make pitching changes. The surprise reveal is that Feh has already talked to Yoshi about assuming more responsibility for relievers, since the walkie-talkie way isn’t working. Theo goes down to the dugout to tell Feh he endorses the idea and, easy as that, Jerome’s reign is over.
Six days later, Feh tells me that he’s finally looked at some statistics, which he “[doesn’t] like to do as a player.” When I look at the lineup, I see Hibbert leading off and Lentini listed third.
10
FEHBALL
On a drizzly off-day in June, the team opens the cardboard “Bang Box,” where over the past month the players have deposited handwritten kangaroo-court charges levied against each other for lack-of-feel faux pas. For instance: “Gonzo left his open Parkpoint water bottle on top of stereo amp. Would you rather us not have a stereo? #sabotage.” Or: “Sleepy: Overslept. $2.50.” These charges will be litigated and fines will be assessed. I’ve been led to believe that I will be among those fined, for tattling (inadvertently) to Theo about one of the players’ claims to having put down twenty-five alcoholic drinks a night during the season.
As court comes to order, Fehlandt sees me across the clubhouse and calls out that I have to go. “No stat guys allowed,” he orders. I redden, and I dig in. I have no real way of knowing whether he is serious—he used almost the exact same language on the first day of the season when he saw me in the clubhouse before the game, and when I asked him then whether he meant it, he laughed and said that, no, of course not, he was joking, he loved having me there. So I stay. Yoshi, the bench coach, reassures me that I am part of the team and thus welcome.
There are other nonplayers in the room—including the clubhouse attendant, Mac, and Captain Morgan. And it isn’t as if I am some exec who is never around the team; Ben or I have been in the dugout every game, bench coaches in corduroys. A number of players know I intend to be at the kangaroo court and haven’t indicated any surprise—and, yeah, I fully expect to be fined. Two minutes pass and Fehlandt sees me again, and again he calls out that I have to leave.
“I’m not leaving, Feh,” I tell him.
“Players only,” he says, “you gotta go.”
“I’ve got to be here to defend myself.”
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Joel Carranza jumps in, incredulous. “Defend yourself from what?”
Aw, hell. Now it isn’t just me and Feh. Now there are going to be players, at least a few, telling me to get out. I know this battle is lost, and I know I’m going to lose face.
“I might be in there,” I say, motioning toward the Bang Box.
Carranza laughs. “You ain’t going to be in there!”
Tommy Lyons, the first-base coach, raises his eyebrows. “Actually … I think he might be.”
But I know that no player will stand up for me if any players are against my being there. And when somebody from the veterans’ side of the room yells “Get the fuck out!” well, I grab my bag and go.
I’m furious. Fehlandt kicking me out feels like a microcosm of everything he’s done wrong this season: Instead of seeing us as part of the team, he sees us as outsiders, as the other. And instead of looking for ways to bring the other into the circle and make us part of the team, he protects his territory and makes life much, much harder. He could have made a statement by saying that I could stay for court. Barring that, he could have quietly pulled me aside and said that it’s probably not the right place for a guy with a tape recorder to be. Instead, he’s widened the divide.
I pace outside the clubhouse, hearing muffled crashes of laughter from inside, and for the first time I think that I’d like to fire Fehlandt. Not that I would fire a manager for kicking me out of kangaroo court, where, heck, maybe I really shouldn’t be. But my disgust at how closed-circled he is summons the possibility to mind for the first time, and brings into focus how doomed this collaboration is. Ben and I can either dictate to him exactly what to do, or we can concede the season to his traditional style of play, or we can fire him. The anger I feel makes the last option seem the most satisfying.
At the kangaroo court, Fehlandt gets a max fine of five bucks for wearing the wrong jersey on Jose Canseco night, a gaffe that Canseco himself pointed at just as a photographer snapped. He will pin the citation and the photo outside the doorway to his office. Meanwhile, I will stew.
We’re a first-place team, running away with the first-half crown, 18-4 after twenty-two games, and all we can do is worry. Ben is terrified that we’ve been lucky on batted balls—that our pitchers aren’t as good as they have looked—and frustrated that our manager doesn’t want to listen to advice on tactics, lineup decisions, or the virtues of Taylor Eads. I’m also troubled by the slow realization that not all ballplayers are the socially flexible and tribally generous individuals I’d convinced myself they were. The clique-free clubhouse we were so proud of early is now—and, in retrospect, always was—clearly cliquey.
The most troubling clique is the one at the top, formed by our manager and his boys, the veterans Sergio Miranda and Gered Mochizuki. Serge and Moch are skilled ballplayers who see themselves as mentors and leaders, but the rest of the club sees them as nonhustlers who are a little too up-front about their desire to leave this team for something better. Neither quite fits in with the younger ones—“Everybody Feh brought to this team is a fuck,” one player tells me at Steiners one night, referring not just to Miranda and Mochizuki but also to pitcher/coach Jerome Godsey. (Jon Rand, another guy Feh brought to this team, seems to be exempt from this, as most of the team is unaware of where he came from.)
That game against San Rafael when Schwieger, again left in too long against the heart of the Pacifics’ order, was trying to work out of a seventh-inning jam with a one-run lead? When he got what looked to be the final out of the inning, a weak grounder toward Gered Mochizuki, except Mochizuki’s throw was late? Not an automatic play, not an error, but a play that was easy to notice because of a number of other moments in that game—when Miranda, for instance, tried to take second on what he thought was a wild pitch, but jogged so slowly that he was gunned down easily. (The pitch hit the umpire and fell right at the catcher’s feet.) Or when Schwieger allowed a deep fly ball to center field that Fehlandt fielded off the wall and fired in to second base—in time, it appeared, to challenge the batter going for a double, except that Miranda was unaccountably far from the bag and couldn’t make the tag. Or when Mochizuki struck out on a pitch that got to the backstop but didn’t bother to run to first—especially galling because, with Fehlandt running in to score on the wild pitch, there would have been no attempted throw to first to retire Moch. Or when Miranda grounded out and loped toward first, a potentially close play losing all suspense.
“Wouldn’t…” I begin, but then pause, hesitant to assume too much about how baseball players play ten levels higher than I ever reached. “Wouldn’t Serge have had a pretty good chance of beating that?”
“Yeah,” Gonzo says, “but we don’t play baseball around here. We play Fehball.”
Fehball: Where your boys don’t have to do what everybody else has to do. Where one day Moch carelessly wears Fehlandt’s pants, and Feh runs around in pants way too small for him and can’t figure out why he feels off his game. Where one day Miranda shows up late to a game because he’d slipped away for a quick Vegas trip that ended up being not so quick. Where Miranda misses a subsequent game entirely, and also asks a ballpark employee to fill his water bottle with beer while another game (which he’s exited early) is still going.
So that was the frustration in the air when Mochizuki failed to convert the third out of the inning, and that was part of the frustration Schwieger felt when he walked toward the dugout after being removed from the game immediately afterward, and when he did what he always does when he allows a hit: He yelled profanity into his glove, mad at himself, mad at bad luck, mad at the other team, and a little bit mad at Moch.
That’s what Matt Kavanaugh was in a position to overhear from the Pacifics’ third-base coach’s box, and that’s what Kavanaugh made sure to tell Moch about after the game, which is why I arrive the next day and hear screaming in the clubhouse, so exaggerated and over the top I assume I’m hearing horseplay or video games. But what I see upon taking one step into (and immediately one step back out of) the clubhouse is actually Mochizuki bent down and screaming at Schwieger. He calls him a bitch, he tells him to fight him right here and right now, he picks up a chair, and for a second I think he’s going to assault his teammate with it in front of everybody. Mercifully, the chair is just for emphasis, and he lifts it up over his head to slam it into the ceiling and then onto the ground. Schwieg, meanwhile, stares blankly at the floor, refusing to escalate against a player who, by now, some of the team considers a cancer.
When Fehlandt addresses the team after the game—a loss, our third in a row—he makes it clear to everybody that, no, you should not be starting fights with your teammates, so cut that out. “If we’re fighting in here, we’re not fighting them out there,” he says, as twenty pairs of eyes focus on him. There’s one pair of eyes that doesn’t. Mochizuki has his back to the manager and is leaning on a knee and shoveling spaghetti and salad into his mouth. It looks—to me—like blatant disrespect. If it looks like that to me, then I know it looks that way to much of the team.
Fehball.
Ben, Theo, and I wonder what can be done. I vote that Moch has to go; he scares me. Theo and Ben prefer to release Miranda, because we don’t have another shortstop but we do have another second baseman, Yuki Yasuda. Yasuda, who records every pitch he sees in a spreadsheet, never gives away an at-bat, and only swings at strikes, has played extremely well but rarely gets to start, partly out of veteran deference, partly because Fehlandt doesn’t like to change his lineup, and partly perhaps because Fehlandt never trusted him. (“Do I really have to keep the Japanese guy?” he asked us after the first day of spring training.) Yuki is frustrated. He’s been talking quietly with Yoshi about finding another opportunity in that great big world of shitty baseball teams.
Ultimately, we decide that Theo has to tell Fehlandt what the perception is; even he will see the problem if he realizes that he’s losing the team because of this perceived favoritism. When Theo talks to him, Fehlandt agree
s. He calls Sergio in for a meeting and releases him, and our Opening Day lineup is down by one man. San Rafael immediately signs him. (“That’s just a classic San Rafael move,” Tommy Lyons says.)
Five days later, Sean starts again. Nobody’s quite sure why; Sean got a call saying he’d start, so he did. He pitches brilliantly. We’re leading 3-1 going to the ninth. Because Sean is our closer—and thus today we don’t have a closer—he goes back out for the ninth. The first batter reaches on an error, and everything unravels, first against Sean and then against Paul Hvozdovic, who relieves but is not the closer (because the closer is the closer). We lose 7-3: proof, Feh insists, that we need a closer more than a starter. So Sean’s back in the bullpen. Now we’re 20-10, with a three-game lead and just nine games left in the first half, but it feels as if we might never win again.
Meetings get called. Fehlandt brings the team together in the clubhouse to remind everybody to hit their spots and have a plan at the plate and just trust their talent. Mochizuki interrupts.
“Can I say one quick thing?” he says. “You know before we started in spring training like I didn’t think we were gonna go fucking—our record? Did you guys think that, no? I, we fucking were kind of nervous, okay, and then we started winning games and winning games when that built us to how we think we are, when in reality we aren’t shit. The reason why we fucking got this record was (1) lucky, (2) we put ourselves in good position, and (3) we fucking with this you know just trying to do our best. We got lucky, we won a couple games as a team, and that’s why we got our record.”
As Fehlandt and Isaac try to wrestle the floor away from this, Moch persists—“We need to just fuck what we did like fuck it and just be like I’m just saying and go about it like it’s a brand-new season that just…”
And that’s that meeting.
Then Eric Gullotta calls Theo and Ben into his law office to find out why his team is collapsing. “The best team doesn’t always win,” Theo tries to explain. “Right now we’re not the best team. We’re not playing like a good team.”
The Only Rule Is It Has to Work Page 21