Jeremy Brown
A debate rages between the traditionalist scouts and Billy Beane over the merits of an overweight prospected name Jeremy Brown. Imagery is effectively and humorously used to underline the point of contention:
“I don’t know,” says the scout. “A body like that can be low energy.”
“Sometimes low energy is just being cool,” says Billy
“Yeah,” says the scout. “Well, in this case low energy is because when he walks, his thighs stick together.”
“I repeat: we’re not selling jeans here,” says Billy.
“That’s good,” says the scout. “Because if you put him in corduroys, he’d start a fire.”
Billy Beane
One particular description of Oakland A’s GM is rich and vivid with imagery that describes his personal eating habits as a means of conveying the deeper recesses of his psyche:
“Billy was an undisciplined omnivore. He let everything in and then worried about the consequences later. He ate about ten thousand calories of junk food each day on the assumption that he could always run them off. Ideas he consumed as rapidly and indiscriminately as cheese puffs. He had been put on this earth to devour all of it”
Baseball Superstitions
Baseball players are—hands-down and with no room for argument—the most superstition professional athletes in the world. Which is just one obstacle that introducing such a radical new paradigm as "moneyball" into the equation faced such an uphill battle. The imagery used to describe Chad Bradford is merely typical and not even close to being the among the strangest in baseball legend:
“He had the tenacious sanity of the slightly mad. A big league pitcher who wishes to avoid attention, Chad Bradford has learned to disguise his superstitions as routines. There are things he always does—like throwing exactly the same number of pitches in the bullpen, in exactly the same order; or like telling his wife to leave the stadium the moment he enters a game. There are things he never does—like touch the rosin bag.”
Jeremy Brown, Part II
Jeremy Brown, the man for whom pants on fire had nothing to do with lying, is the star of the book’s final images of baseball romanticism. He still carries the burden of that big body and those thunder thighs and at first it seems the author is intent on making a laughingstock out of Jeremy in just the say way that his teammates have been described as doing. And then, as it often does in the game of baseball, everything changes in the blink of an eye:
“He’s running as hard as he’s ever run—and then he’s not. Between first and second base his feet go out from under him and he backflops into the dirt, like Charlie Brown. He notices, first, a shooting pain in his hand: he’s jammed his finger. He picks himself up, to scramble back to the safety of first base, when he sees his teammates in the dugout. The guys are falling all over each other, laughing…it’s not the sniggering laughter of the people who made fun of his body. It’s something else…outfielders are just standing there: they’ve stopped chasing the ball. The ball’s gone…a home run.”
