The Only Rule Is It Has to Work Read online

  Fehlandt isn’t buying it. “It looks like he has a lot of upside, but he’s got a lot of ego and a lot of attitude,” he says. “That’s not necessarily good or bad, but the way he carries himself is bad. For example: He’s never played in a league where he wears one-flap helmets. But the first thing he did on the first day was take my helmet and use it. I’m like, ‘Where’s my fuckin’ helmet?’ And all of a sudden it comes sliding down the grassy hill and spinning at my feet. And today I see him in another one-flap and I thought it was mine again, and I’m like, this motherfucker. I say something to him and it ended up being Martinez’s, but my point is—I already see how he’s all about looks and swag.”

  “What’s the … why the one-flap?” I ask.

  “It feels sooooo much better. Like the two-flap feels like you’re in Little League.”

  “That … doesn’t seem like that big a deal, what he did.”

  “Believe me, I know people, and I know mentalities. He’s an overall selfish player.”

  “We talked about guys having really good instincts in baseball; I don’t think there’s any proof that Will Price has very good instincts in life,” Theo says. “That said, I do think that I’ve seen a little swagger, a little cockiness, but for the most part I’ve seen a nice kid who’s not really dialed in to the fact that he should be a little quieter and fall in line.”

  “I don’t see him being the guy,” Fehlandt says. “I don’t think he’s coachable. He’s not making his own adjustments.”

  “What did you think about his 3-0 swing in the scrimmage?” I ask.

  “Oh, that was a 3-0 swing? See, that goes to everything I was telling you. He’s a selfish player. He wanted to hit a tater.” (He did hit a tater.) “I’m not giving him the 3-0. He took it upon himself. I don’t think any of those other guys are swinging on 3-0, but he is, because who he is defines the player he is. And I’m telling you, the ego and the attitude are what got him in trouble and they’re obviously still in there.

  “Like I said, he’s a good player, but if there’s a chance to have a team where there’s guaranteed not going to be a chance of this, I want that. I’ve been in a lot of clubhouses and those things matter. These little fucks with the attitude that they think they own everything, they really fucking fire me up. Part of it is I just don’t want to be the fucking parent.”

  “But Feh,” I say, “you are! You’re the manager!”

  “These guys are over eighteen. Yes, I need to be a manager, but I don’t have to be a parent. If you come here and can’t be a grown-up and carry yourself as a professional, then you’re not a professional.”

  “The things you’re talking about,” I say, “it just takes more than three days to figure out if they’re inherent flaws that can never be fixed. He’s a kid. He’s clearly gonna be a kid. But we’re the Pacific Association. We’re gonna have kids. There’s gonna be kids that need to be mentored, need to be taught.”

  “The personality type will tell you. I had that ego. I had that attitude and motherfucking no one could tell me anything. It took such a long road of so much work. He’s not there!”

  “How long did it take you to get there?”

  “It was three years ago. It took me twenty years to realize it, and people I cared about were trying to tell me.”

  “We don’t know if it will take Will twenty years,” Theo says. “It might take him thirty years! It might never happen. But I think we can give him six more days.”

  “The thing is,” I tell Fehlandt, “it is your job to coach these guys. I don’t want to lose a guy just because a small problem got to be a big problem. If he needs to be pulled aside and talked to, that’s your job. And so far nobody has pulled him aside. Look: It’s good to have a clubhouse where everybody’s awesome. It’s even better to have a clubhouse where not only is everybody awesome, but the guys who aren’t become awesome.”

  Will Price gets a reprieve, for a few days at least. Whether he makes the team or not isn’t that big a deal (though Will would disagree). But territory is being claimed right now, and it already feels as if our strategy—stay quiet and unthreatening, just observe and claim authority by demonstrating a calm and rational approach—is failing. It’s becoming clear that power in this sport goes to the one who acts, and while we’re observing and taking notes, Fehlandt is writing seventy-eight lineup cards in his head.

  * * *

  So we act. We get our own day of spring training.

  The Stompers are going to have something like a scrimmage against the Sonoma Valley High varsity, with each club pitching to its own players. We use this game to practice shift work. We lay out six possible defensive alignments: an infield shift (three men over, corner infielder stays somewhat close to his home); a full overshift (three men over, and the fourth goes nearly all the way); the wall (four men move to one side of second base); a five-man infield; a four-man outfield; and, to keep things light, an eight/ten split, in which eight men defend one batter but ten can defend the next. The last is, of course, absurd; there’s no equivalent in a real baseball game. But the point of this whole exercise is, mostly, to see whether batters will try to beat a shift—to aim for the huge chunk of green we’ve left exposed—and whether they’ll succeed. A secondary aim is to see how unnatural our defenders look when they’re standing thirty feet from their normal position. The pitcher or catcher gets to choose which alignment he wants to pitch to.

  The high schoolers love this idea. Our guys stare blankly while we explain the six options. “So we have to do each one once in the game?” Isaac Wenrich asks me. “No, you have to do one on every player, no matter what,” I reply. The point isn’t necessarily for it to work; the point is to see where it fails.

  And yet, as I stand behind the pitcher—where I’ll relay his shift choice to the rest of the defense—I’m terrified. We’re asking these players to do something weird, something that all the baseball coaches they’ve ever had—the guys with credibility and experience, with strong handshakes and refined spitting techniques—have chosen not to do. We’re the corduroy boys. What are the odds that the corduroy boys would have discovered something that all those coaches didn’t? These shifts, make-believe shifts in a meaningless scrimmage against high school sophomores, are the first time our players have seen our vision. This is our pink warm-up shirt: If it works, we’re confident they’ll embrace it. If it doesn’t, we’re not confident we’ll have the courage to keep trying. And if it’s somewhere in between, it probably counts as a loss for us.

  “I don’t believe in shifts,” Isaac tells me before we take the field. He’s going to be choosing the alignment for the first couple of innings, and he’s not mad or anything, but he definitely wants me to know it’s a bunch of bullshit. Not because players don’t hit into certain tendencies, but because “any good hitter only has to adjust. There’s no way that a shift should work if you’re facing a real hitter.”

  For two innings, he calls each time for the least extreme option available to him—the basic infield pull shift, three men over, with the corner man staying in the general region of his position to cut off a bunt. Nobody beats the shift, but it’s clear they’re trying, aiming for the opposite field. But the reason the pull shift works so well is that it’s extremely difficult to hit a ground ball to the opposite field. If a hitter aims in that direction, he usually gets under the ball, and in our first two innings we see six balls put in play, five of them fly balls to the opposite field and one a pulled grounder. They’re trying like hell to hit the open hole, and not a single one does. The brilliance of the shift dawns on some of them. “It fucks with your head,” the lefty-hitting Gered Mochizuki says after his fly ball to left field. “You see all that space and you think you’re going to get there, but you’re doing something that doesn’t feel natural to do.” It’s hard enough to hit a baseball, and trying to hit a baseball to a specific, tiny sliver of the field is almost impossible. “I love this shit,” he concludes.

  In the third inning, we pu
ll a fifth man into the infield against Matt Hibbert. He hits a hard ground ball right up the middle—where a defender is standing. Fehlandt bats for the second time, after striking out the first time; he pulls a line drive single into left, the one hitter on the team who refuses to get out of his normal hit-it-hard approach. Then Sergio Miranda lines right to our first baseman, who turns a double play. We bring a five-man infield in for Will Price, betting that he won’t change his approach if we leave right field entirely open, and he doesn’t—he pulls a ground ball right to our shortstop, playing a few extra steps in the hole. A couple batters try to bunt, but their attempts roll foul. I’m feeling cockier.

  So when Isaac Wenrich joins the lineup in the sixth inning, I break out the Wall for the first time. All four infielders are separated from the next guy by about twenty feet, and Isaac has the entire left side of the infield—plus ten feet or so on the right of second base. All he has to do is adjust. Good hitters adjust, and Isaac—who hit well in the Pacific Association a year earlier—is undeniably a good hitter.

  But he can’t. In his first try he strikes out, after fouling a pop-up the other way for strike two—the telltale sign of a deliberate antishift approach. When he bats again the next inning, he keeps his front side firm and lets the ball get deep, and he manages to hit a ground ball to the left of second base. “Beat that shift!” he yells triumphantly as he busts out of the batter’s box—except the ball isn’t hit hard, and the farthest defender over (the third baseman) is able to charge it and flip a throw to the shortstop covering second, who tries to turn the double play but airmails his throw. A good throw would have gotten him. Isaac’s triumph was actually just a fielder’s choice. We learn two things: Baseball is really hard, and Ben and I might be smart.

  * * *

  “I just want to formally introduce us,” I say after the game, because it was getting awkward how much we had avoided formally introducing ourselves. The players are all sitting on a grassy berm, done for the day other than this little introduction and a salmon dinner waiting for them in the parking lot. “I know it’s been weird that we’ve just been hanging around in corduroys and acting odd. So in about the next five minutes I want to explain what we’re about, what we’re gonna do, and how you can help us.

  “So what we’re about: I know there are things that statheads do that nobody likes. One is looking at you guys not as people but as number generators. We don’t feel that way at all. From the first tryout, when we saw Danny Baps, we completely fell in love with this team and with this collection of guys. And we know nothing works if you’re not comfortable and we know nothing works if you’re not confident. We know you guys have way more wisdom about baseball than we ever will. We’re not going to tell you that you know less than us, because you absolutely know more than us. We are very, very, very aware of that. So don’t ever think that we’re just some assholes who are going to be, ‘oh, geez, I played until I was thirteen.’ We’re not like that. Y’all are good. We think we’re pretty smart. Fehlandt is a genius. He will tell you that he has changed my mind about a lot of things. We’re out here to learn, not to tell you how smart we are.”

  “You can talk to ’em,” Fehlandt says from his recline.

  “The other thing is there’s this idea that if we have data, then it’s bulletproof and you can’t argue with it. That’s not true. Data is only a little bit of information. There’s context to everything. You can misuse it, you can slant it. We’ve worked with writers who seemed really smart because they had a lot of data, and then it turned out they were wrong about everything. We’re not going to be all certain about anything; we’re just going to be testing things and doing what we can to help you out.

  “What we’re going to be doing: We’re going to be advance scouting. Whatever game is being played that you’re not in, we’re going to be at, and we’ve got software to scout it, some stringers to help us scout it, we’re going to be videotaping every game out there. At Arnold we’re going to have PITCHf/x, which is the cameras that major league parks use to track the pitch from your hand. For every pitch we’re going to have the break, the velocity, the location, the speed off the bat, the angle, the trajectory, all this stuff. You’re the only indy league team that’s ever going to have this. There’s no way to have this at parks like this, except we called and asked them and they liked the idea a lot and put it in for us.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do with all that. We’re going to be very conservative early on. We’re not going to tell you to play five-man infield on day one. We’re going to start slow, listen to you guys, hear what you want. We’ve got access to things if you want information. If you want to know if something would work we can probably run tests on it and answer that. We’ve got equipment like this—” I hold up a two-inch piece of yellow plastic—“the Zepp sensor, which tracks the speed and the angle of your bat. We’re going to try to get these on everybody’s bat who is comfortable with it. We’re thinking about ways we can use the fans better to help us win. I talked to a director of player development for a major league team and he’s like, ‘You gotta have naps in the clubhouse, everybody’s gotta have naps.’ I don’t know if we’re going to have naps in the clubhouse, but we’ll probably talk to you guys about it and see what you think.”

  “Fuck naps in the clubhouse,” Fehlandt says.

  “This guy swears by it. I don’t know. But mainly we’re going to be starting really slow. You’re going to look at us and wonder, ‘What are they doing, are they doing anything?’ We’re observing and trying to learn, and not go too fast. You can help us by being patient and recognizing that we’re not going to be moving that fast. Our goal is to win the first half and go undefeated in the second half. We want to be unstoppable by the second half. Please be patient, and be open-minded. I know I’ve worked at a lot of places and when they tell you you’re gonna do something new my first reaction is always ‘That’s a terrible idea, I don’t want to do that.’ I just ask that you get through that first moment of ‘fuck that’ and give it, uh, a second moment of ‘fuck that,’ I guess, before you give up on it. And the third thing is give us a lot of feedback. You guys are experiencing this—you collect way more data in one at-bat than PITCHf/x can ever give us. We want to hear from you and know what makes you uncomfortable, what you think we can do better, what you want from an advance scout, how you want it presented to you. If we’re giving you too much detail you can ask.”

  There are five seconds of silence.

  “Sounds great,” says T. J. Gavlik, and I walk back to where Ben is. The awkwardest, halfheartedest round of applause carries me along.

  * * *

  The Stompers go to San Quentin for a game against the prisoners. Will Price has been talked to, but his change of behavior is neither subtle nor effective. When a call goes out in the prison parking lot for somebody to carry the equipment bag in, it’s Will who quickly volunteers. This can be seen as rookie deference (good) or as eyewash (bad), the practice of looking like you’re trying real hard, but doing it just for show. At this stage, either would be an improvement for Will, but after carrying the bag a hundred yards he puts it down momentarily to show his ID at a guard station. Five minutes later, we all notice the abandoned bag, and Will ahead in the distance. “If that guy makes the team, he’ll go broke on kangaroo court fines,” Andrew Parker predicts.

  The San Quentin yard has two teams—the San Quentin A’s and the San Quentin Giants—who practice for three hours every weekday and host church groups, men’s leagues, college teams, and each other. Against outsiders, they win about 70 percent of their games. It’s said they have a huge home field advantage—namely that, for the first couple of innings, the visitors are scared to pitch inside. The Giants and A’s have merged to form an All-Star team against us, but their ace, who carried a no-hitter into the fifth inning against San Rafael a year earlier, and who’ll supposedly throw 200 pitches in a game to prevent the San Quentin bullpen from blowing his leads, is unavailable due to a
disciplinary issue that is unanimously dismissed as “some bullshit” by the players. This is a hard blow for the All-Stars—losing the team’s best player without receiving even a compensation pick in return.

  Instead, we face a tall left-hander who is rumored on the prison yard to have pitched in the San Francisco Giants’ minor league system before he was sent here for killing his wife. (He did not, and he was not.) He’s good. Throws in the mid-80s, knows how to spin the ball, and has enough command to get calls from an overeager umpire, who has a strike call—“That’s a Rembrandt!”—vigilantly in search of strikes. Our hitters are late on his fastballs and ahead on his curves, shooting foul balls into the basketball courts, where prisoners play, unprotected, under constant threat from these missiles. The chalk lines are pancake flour, supplied by donations. A goose wanders the outfield, which has lost almost all its grass—there’s a drought in California, and the first place a state cuts water is to its prisons. “They cut our showers,” a prisoner tells me, “so they sure as shit ain’t going to water the outfield.”

  It’s a bizarre mix of serious and loose. Serious: They won’t let us wear jeans inside, so our assistant GM Sean Boisson, Ben, and I rush off to Target to buy khakis that will make us less likely to be mistaken for a prisoner and shot. Our players are open about how afraid they are—there are signs promising that guards will shoot through us in the event of a hostage situation, and Fehlandt has been making the same rape jokes (“night night, best keep your butthole tight”) for days. Loose: Once we’re inside, there are no minders; no restricted movement; and, we notice eventually, practically no guards in the yard itself. There are towers, including one just above the field, but for the five hours we spend on this field we are almost always one thousand feet or more away from the nearest guard on the ground. Which means that if a San Quentin prisoner—and, yes, there are murderers among them—wanted to snap our necks, he’d have time to enjoy the experience before anybody could get to us. Of course, the prisoners don’t want to snap our necks. This is the biggest game of the year for them, the one time they get to play a real team. Or, for the dozens of fans lined up along the outfield lines, or on a little porch out beyond right field, the one time they get to see real baseball. They get to boo their own guys for screwing up, or yell at the umpires, who themselves get to show off how seriously they take this, talking to each other between pitches to make sure they all rotate in the right direction if a ball is hit into the outfield.