Fresh new glimpse at ‘Moneyball’ A’s
Photographer Soren traces the rest of the story in those players’ lives
MESA, Ariz. — “Moneyball” was a big deal, first as a best-selling book, then as an award-winning movie, but the members of the A’s 2002 draft class that was so prominently featured have scattered around the country, largely forgotten.
Tabitha Soren didn’t stop shadowing those players, however. And using, at times, a technique almost as old as the sport itself, the Berkeley photographer chronicled their journey in an unconventional baseball book, “Fantasy Life,” that provides an intimate and long-term glimpse into the lives of the famed draft class.
Soren, a former MTV newscaster who is married to “Moneyball” author Michael Lewis, followed players at their homes, on the field, at the pool, at their new workplaces. It’s reminiscent of the movie “Boyhood,” covering a 15-year span with the same cast of characters.
“When do you hear from athletes when they’re not stars and no longer in the game?”
Soren said. “It’s so poignant. I was really asking them, ‘What’s it like to live without the thing you love the most?’ ”
Many players stuggle with their post-baseball lives, a subject that is rarely explored. Jeremy Brown — the “fat catcher” from “Moneyball” — was laid off from his job as a coal miner, which Soren depicts. Infielder Mark Kiger was homeless for a time, as he explains in “Fantasy Life,” after blowing his money on drugs and cars.
“He had the roughest time, but he lived the hardest and he didn’t have a Plan B,” said Soren, who calls Kiger her redemption story because of the way he rebuilt his life. “He bottomed out and he’s on the upswing, for real.”
On the flip side, Joe Blanton has a winery in Napa — and he’s still pitching, coming out of retirement in 2015 and enjoying one of his best seasons ever in 2016 with the Dodgers.
Soren, a ’90s pop-culture icon from her nine-year stint at MTV, didn’t know much about baseball when she started, but there was the natural connection with her husband’s book, which was turned into an Academy Award-nominated movie starring Brad Pitt as A’s general manager Billy Beane. Soren dedicates “Fantasy Life” to her husband and Beane, “my favorite bromance,” she said.
Soren became interested in fine-art photography while on a journalism fellowship at Stanford in 1997, and her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions — including later this summer at San Francisco City Hall — and in many major publications, including the New York Times and Vanity Fair.
“Fantasy Life” features scrapbook sections that include players’ baby photos and youth-league baseball memorabilia; at an exhibit of the photos in Los Angeles, she included a collection of bone spurs the players donated. Noted local author Dave Eggers provided five “linked stories” for the book, and Soren solicited personal essays from 10 of the players, sprinkling them throughout the work.
Perhaps the easiest subject to shoot was former A’s and Yankees outfielder Nick Swisher, who used to do pushups before photo ops to make sure his muscles bulged. “But he didn’t mind me taking photos of the pushups, either,” Soren said. “If you’re giving him attention, Nick’s happy.”
Soren reserved the oldest technique for the youngest men in the book, who include some of the A’s most promising current prospects. Using a tintype procedure — shooting with a long exposure onto a metal plate, which produces only one image, with no negative, Soren captured some extraordinary moments, such as current A’s infielder/designated hitter Ryon Healy slumped over after striking out to end a playoff game with Class A Stockton. The tintypes feature images that are occasionally slightly warped, with drips of chemicals or with flashes of yellow and orange from the tricky process.
“I made every mistake in the book: shaking the emulsion, and then it would have bubbles all over them, or the temperature wouldn’t be right and they’d get sticky and I couldn’t get them out of the machine, or they’d have fingerprints or I’d drop them in the darkroom,” she said. “You can’t even use a red light; it has to be total blackness.
“Then I started loving the messiness around the edges where things stuck or the wrinkles that added to the picture. I felt it showed the arduousness of the game.”
Soren’s experience with the sport is so limited that while she was still working as a news anchor for MTV, she once declined the chance to throw out the first pitch at a Mariners game because, “I thought they were going to hit it — I thought it was the actual first pitch of the game. I was like, ‘What if it isn’t over the plate? What if they hit it and it hits me?’ ”
Because she doesn’t have a baseball background, however, Soren brings an unusual perspective. Look more closely at one lovely shot with a colorful and intricate design and you’ll discover the subject matter is wads of gnawed gum and chewing tobacco. A sports photographer would be too focused on game action to bother with such minutia, Soren figures.
Usually, Soren’s work explores psychological states, such as a series on flight-or-fright responses and another on panic attacks, so some might think “Fantasy Life” is a departure for her. Not so, she said.
“This is about what it’s like to try to touch greatness, the psychological state of striving,” she said. “It makes total sense to me, but a lot of people who know my work are going to be scratching their heads.”
“Moneyball” is about the A’s ground-breaking use of advanced statistics, and Soren was asked to provide statistics for the players in her work. So she made up her own: how many times each player had been married, how much he’d made, his favorite achievement. “Stats I understand and I can appreciate,” she said.
Ultimately, “Moneyball” and “Fantasy Life” share more than just the Lewis-Soren marriage and a focus on the 2002 draft class. They’re both out-of-the-box, intensely personal visions of the A’s, unlike any other baseball book. And for Soren, it became a labor of love.
“You just had to want to stick with it, and my interest in baseball was not as intense as my interest in these human beings became,” she said. “It’s a mysterious game.”
“This is about what it’s like to try to touch greatness, the psychological state of striving.” Tabitha Soren, photographer