Moneyball

by Lewis, Michael

  These secondary traits in a hitter, especially in the extreme form in which they were found in Scott Hatteberg, had real value to a baseball offense. And yet they were being priced by the market as if they were worth nothing at all.

  Where did these traits come from? That was a big question the Oakland A’s front office had asked themselves. Were they learned skills, or part of a guy’s character? Nature or nurture? If nature, as they were coming to believe, physical gift or mental predisposition? Scott Hatteberg had something to say on these matters.

  As far back as Hatteberg could remember—and he could remember Little League—two things were true about himself as a hitter. The first was that he had a preternatural ability to put a bat on a ball. Not necessarily to hit the ball out of the park; simply to make contact. (“Swinging and missing to me is like ‘Jesus, what happened?’”) The second was that it angered him far less to take a called strike than to swing at a pitch he couldn’t do much with, and hit some lazy fly or weak grounder. Walks didn’t particularly thrill him but they were far better than the usual alternative. “There was nothing I hated more,” he said, “than swinging at the first pitch and grounding out. It struck me as a worthless experience.”

  It was also true that, as a boy, he had sought and found useful role models that encouraged his natural tendencies. The first and most important of these was Don Mattingly. Mattingly posters decorated his bedroom wall. He kept clips of old articles about Don Mattingly. On a trip to Florida he went to the Yankees’ training facility and sneaked under a security rope to catch a glimpse of the great Mattingly. Security guards caught him and tossed him out of Legends Field—though not until he had a good look at his hero in the batting cage. Whenever the Yankees played the Mariners he’d make the two-and-a-half-hour drive into Seattle from Yakima—where he mostly grew up—just to see Mattingly play. “He was a little guy,” said Hatteberg, “and I was tiny growing up. So I was drawn to him. And I loved his swing. It was just poetic, his swing. It was similar to the way I swung—or wanted to swing. We both kind of squatted down a little bit.” Mattingly was also, like him, a finicky hitter: he cared more than most what he swung at.

  Hatteberg identified with this particular trait of Mattingly’s though it was difficult to put into a single word. A baseball man might call it “patience” but it was more like “thoughtfulness.” Mattingly, like him, but unlike a lot of the guys he played with, did not treat hitting a baseball as pure physical reaction. Hitting was something that you did better if you thought about it. Hatty owned a record of Mattingly talking about hitting. The Art of Hitting .300, it was called. He’d listened to it dozens of times. “One thing Mattingly said,” Hatteberg recalled, “was that you could look at a guy’s strikeouts and his walks and tell what kind of year he’d had. That stuck in my head.” (The odd thing about Mattingly’s sermon is that he himself never drew all that many walks.)

  The trouble with Billy Beane had been that he couldn’t find a way to get his whole self into a batter’s box. Scott Hatteberg couldn’t keep himself out of it; the pieces of his character fit too neatly together for him to leave any one of them outside the box. The outside world didn’t fully understand this; it often tried to make him into something he was not. The Phillies had drafted him in the eighth round out of high school, for instance, when he himself didn’t think he was ready. Scouts pressed him to sign, told him it was for his own good. Hatteberg had always been small, especially for a catcher, and when he graduated from high school he was only five ten and weighed 160 pounds. “I looked like I had pneumonia,” he said. The Phillies ignored his objections. His own high school coach—on retainer from the Phillies—told him he’d be making the mistake of his life if he turned down the Phillies eighty-five grand and went to college. He turned down the money and went to college. “If I didn’t make it in college,” he said, “I wasn’t going to make it anyway.”

  He’d made it in college, and was taken in the first round of the 1991 draft by the Red Sox. Once in the minors, crude ability got him as far as Double-A ball. There he encountered the two obstacles that routinely ended professional hitting careers: pitchers who had not only stuff but control too; and game theory. In Double-A, as in the big leagues, a hitter saw the same pitchers more than once. More to the point, the pitchers saw you more than once, and invested some energy in trying to exploit what they learned about you. He began to keep records of his at bats: what pitchers threw him, how he responded. Keeping written records, like seeing lots of pitches during each at bat, was a way to gather information. The more information he had about a pitcher, the better he hit against him. He didn’t have the luxury of coasting on raw talent; very few guys did. Sure, you might get to the big leagues and even have a sensational month or two, but if you had some fatal flaw you were found out. Kevin Maas! Maas comes up in 1990 with the Yankees and hits ten home runs in his first seventy-seven at bats. Had he kept hitting them out at that rate for a full season he’d have broken Roger Maris’s single-season home run record as a rookie. He didn’t. He stopped hitting home runs; he stopped hitting period. After a couple of frustrating seasons, Kevin Maas was out of baseball.

  Why do you think that happened? Hatteberg knew, or thought he did: it happened because the big leagues was a ruthlessly efficient ecosystem. Every hitter had a weakness. Once he arrived in the big leagues, teams saw him often enough to find that weakness, and exploit it. “Once your hole has been exposed,” Hatteberg said, “you have to make an adjustment or the whole league will get you out. Any pitcher who can’t exploit that hole isn’t in the big leagues.” If you were unable to adapt, you were doomed. If you had a weakness for pitches out of the strike zone, without some extraordinary talent to compensate for it, you were doomed. Hatteberg took that logic one better: he believed that if he swung at anything he couldn’t hit hard, even if the pitch was a strike, he was doomed. “If I just went up there and hacked,” he said, “I’d have been weeded out well before the big leagues.” He forced himself to look for a certain pitch from each pitcher, and then trained himself to see that pitch. He knew not just what he could do but what he couldn’t do. He knew what pitches he couldn’t hit well.

  Billy Beane thought himself out of the big leagues. Scott Hatteberg thought himself into them. He’d been called up for the first time at the tail end of the 1995 season. With the division title in the bag, the team went into Yankee Stadium for a meaningless game—if any game between the Red Sox and the Yankees can be meaningless. Hatty was assigned to catchh relievers in the bullpen, and didn’t expect to play. He went out to Yankee Stadium early anyway because he didn’t want to miss seeing the Yankees’ first baseman, Don Mattingly, take batting practice. The game itself was a mess. The Red Sox quickly fell behind. In the top of the eighth inning the Yankee pitcher, David Cone, was working on a two-hit shutout. With the Red Sox down 9-0, the manager called the bullpen and told Hatteberg to pinch-hit. Hatteberg ran down from the pen, stepped into the batter’s box, and stared down the first-base line. Don Mattingly was staring back.

  Hatty took the first pitch, as he nearly always did, to get comfortable. Ball one. The second pitch was ball two. Cone had his best stuff that day. Hatteberg knew on the third pitch he’d see something in the strike zone, and he did. “I just about came out of my shoes,” he said. Foul ball. Cone just missed with the next pitch and the count went to 3-1. A hitter’s count. Hatteberg thought: If I get a hit, I get the ball. They always gave you the ball after your first big league hit. Then he had another thought: I’m one ball away from meeting Don Mattingly. It was Scott Hatteberg’s first appearance in a big league batter’s box and he was looking to draw a walk.

  David Cone wasn’t going to let him have it. Cone’s next pitch was less a pitch than an invitation, an inside fastball in what Hatteberg called his “happy zone,” and he ripped it down the right field line. It banged off the right field wall a few inches below the top and bounded back crazily into the field of play. The Yankees right fielder, Paul O
’Neill, saw it for what it was, a clean double, and gave up on it. Under a full head of steam Hatteberg rounded first, picked up O’Neill jogging for the ball, and…Don Mattingly. Mattingly stood directly in his line of vision. A twenty-five-year-old making his major League debut might be forgiven for hearing a soundtrack in his head: My first big league hit! My first big league hit! Hatteberg heard another voice. It said: Where am I going? Halfway toward second base he pulled up, and trotted back to his childhood. “Hey Don, how you doin’?” he said.

  The television announcers, Bob Costas and Bob Uecker, were, at that moment, expressing their bewilderment at what they’d just seen—this rookie who has decided he prefers a single to a double. They agreed that rookies all had a thing or two to learn before they truly belonged in the big leagues. Mattingly just looked at him strangely and said, “Hey, rookie, anyone show you where second base is?” The next few moments, before he was driven around the bases to score the only Red Sox run of the game, etched them selves into Hatteberg’s memory in Van Eyckian detail. Mattingly standing behind him. Mattingly creeping in behind him, pretending to care if he ran. Mattingly razzing him. Hey, rookie, you’re about as fast as me. Hey, rookie, you ought to get those brakes checked. A few weeks later Mattingly retired. Hatteberg never saw him again.

  Even in new, stressful situations, the quality at the center of Scott Hatteberg—his compulsion to make himself at home in the game, to slow the game down, to make it come to him, to make it his game—was apparent. He was one of those people whose personality was inextricable from his performance. No: whose personality was necessary for his performance. The funny thing is that pro baseball took one look at that personality and decided it needed to be beaten out of him.

  By late 1996 he was in the big leagues for good. Once he arrived, however, he faced another challenge: the idiocy of the Boston Red Sox. His cultivated approach to hitting—his thoughtfulness, his patience, his need for his decisions to be informed rather than reckless—was regarded by the Boston Red Sox as a deficiency. The Red Sox encouraged their players’ mystical streaks. They brought into the clubhouse a parade of shrinks and motivational speakers to teach the players to harness their aggression. Be men! There was one in particular Hatteberg remembers who told the team that every man had a gland in his chest, called the thymus gland. “You were supposed to bang your chest before you hit,” recalls Hatteberg, “to release all this untapped energy and aggression.” (One former Red Sox player, Bill Selby, still does it.) Hatty sensed he might be in for trouble when he saw how the Red Sox management treated Wade Boggs. He’d spent a lot of time with Boggs in the batting cage during spring training, trying to learn whatever he could from the master. Boggs, a perennial All-Star, famously never swung at the first pitch—or any pitch after that he didn’t love. Boggs was as efficient a machine as there ever was for acquiring information about opposing pitchers. By the time Wade Boggs was done with his first at bat, his team had seen everything the opposing pitcher had.

  Boggs’s refusal to exhibit the necessary aggression led to his ostracism by the Red Sox. “They would get on him for taking a walk when there was a guy on second,” recalled Hatteberg. “They called him selfish for that.”

  If Wade Boggs wasn’t allowed his patience, Hatteberg figured, he certainly wouldn’t be, either. When Hatteberg let a pitch go by for a strike—because it was a strike he couldn’t do much with—Red Sox managers would holler at him from the dugout. Coaches would try to tell him that he was hurting the team if he wasn’t more inclined to swing with men on base, or in 2-0 counts. The hitting coach, former Rex Sox slugger Jim Rice, rode Hatty long and hard. Rice called him out in the clubhouse, in front of his teammates, and ridiculed him for having a batting average in the .270s when he hit .500 when he swung at the first pitch. “Jim Rice hit like a genetic freak and he wanted everyone else to hit the way he did,” Hatteberg said. “He didn’t understand that the reason I hit .500 when I swung at the first pitch was that I only swung at first pitches that were too good not to swing at.” Hatty had a gift for tailoring the game to talents. It was completely ignored. The effect of Jim Rice on Scott Hatteberg was to convince him that “this is why poor hitters make the best hitting coaches. They don’t try to make you like them, because they sucked.”

  Each time Scott Hatteberg came to bat for the Boston Red Sox he had, in effect, to take an intellectual stand against his own organization in order to do what was right for the team. Hitting, for him, was a considered act. He didn’t know how to hit without thinking about it, and so he kept right on thinking about it. In retrospect, this was a striking act of self-determination; at the time it just seemed like an unpleasant experience. Not once in his ten years with the Red Sox did anyone in Boston suggest there was anything of value in his approach to hitting—in working the count, narrowing the strike zone, drawing walks, getting on base, in not making outs. “Never,” he said. “No coach ever said anything. It was more, get up there and slug. Their philosophy was just to buy the best hitters money can buy, and set them loose.” The Red Sox couldn’t have cared less if he had waged some fierce battle at the plate. If he had, say, fought off the pitcher for eight straight pitches and lined out hard to center field. All that mattered was that he had made an out. At the same time, they praised him when he didn’t deserve it. “I’d have games when I’d have two hits and I didn’t take a good swing the whole game,” he said, “and it was like ‘Great game, Hatty.’”

  Pro ball never made the slightest attempt to encourage what he did best: take precise measurements of the strike zone and fit his talents to it. The Boston Red Sox were obsessed with outcomes; he with process. That’s what kept him sane. He didn’t think of it quite this way, but what he’d been trying to do all along was tame a chaotic experience with reason. To an astonishing degree, he had succeeded.

  To the Oakland A’s front office, Hatteberg was a deeply satisfying scientific discovery. The things he did so peculiarly well at the plate were the things only science—or, at any rate, closer than normal scrutiny—could turn up. He was, in his approach to hitting, Billy Beane’s opposite, but he was also Billy Beane’s creation. The moment he arrived in Oakland, the friction in his hitting life vanished. In Oakland, he experienced something like the reverse of his Boston experience. “Here I go 0 for 3 with two lineouts and a walk and the general manager comes by my locker and says, ‘Hey, great at bats.’ For the first time in my career I’ve had people tell me, ‘I love your approach.’ I knew how I approached hitting but I never thought that it was anything anyone cared to think about.” All these things he did just because that’s how he had to do them if he was to succeed were, in Oakland, encouraged. The Oakland A’s had put into words something he had only felt. “When you go to the plate,” Hatty said, “it’s about the only thing you do that is an individual thing or seems like an individual thing. When you go to the plate, it’s about the only thing you do alone in baseball. Here they have turned it into a team thing.”

  That was a byproduct of the Oakland experiment. They were trying to subordinate the interest of the individual hitter to those of the team. Some hitters responded better than others to this approach. Hatteberg’s response: “This is the most fun I’ve had since Triple-A.”

  * * *

  Before and after games Hatteberg would go to the video room to study opposing pitchers and himself. On one of these nights the A’s were playing the Seattle Mariners. The left-hander Jamie Moyer was scheduled to pitch for Seattle. Moyer had been a hugely successful big league pitcher, in spite of lacking conventional stuff. When he first came up, with the Chicago Cubs, Moyer threw as hard as the next guy. But he’d been hurt, and forced to adapt. Now, a few months before his fortieth birthday, he survived on his mastery of the strike zone and his knowledge of opposing hitters. He was the pitching equivalent of Scott Hatteberg. Had they taken a different approach to the game, neither would have lasted long in the big leagues.

  Hatteberg hadn’t had much chance to see Moy
er, and so the tape was even more important to him than usual. “Don’t think I’ve done too well against this guy,” he said as he slammed the videotape into the machine. “Feiny, what am I lifetime against Moyer?”

  Feiny doesn’t look up from his seat at the center of the video room. “0 for 9,” says Feiny.

  “I’m 0 for 9,” says Hatteberg, cheerily, and smacks the table in front of him. “That’s not too promising, is it?”

  Feiny doesn’t say anything. He’s busy cutting tape of the Texas Rangers, the A’s next opponent. On his screen Alex Rodriguez waits for a pitch. “He’s cheating,” says Hatty. Feiny looks up; he’s being drawn in by Hatteberg’s desire for conversation. “Look at that,” says Hatty. We all look up at the freeze-frame of A-Rod on Feiny’s screen. Sure enough, just before the pitch comes to the plate, A-Rod, moving nothing but his eyeballs, glances back to see where the catcher behind him is set up.

  “I used to hate it when I caught when guys did that,” says Hatty. “I’d go, ‘Dude, you’re gonna get hit.’”

  “Anyone else but A-Rod,” agrees Feiny, “and he gets drilled.”

  Hatty turns back to the Jamie Moyer tapes. Moyer had beaten the A’s several times already this season. Hatteberg had been in the lineup just once. Hatty has been a subplot in a running dispute between the front office and Art Howe. The front office want Hatteberg in the lineup all the time. Art Howe wants to do the usual thing, and keep lefties out of the lineup against lefties. The last two times the A’s faced Moyer, Hatteberg hadn’t been in the lineup. Moyer had shut out the A’s both times, and given up a grand total of six hits. Now the front office were having their way. (The surprising thing is how long it took.) All this Hatteberg knows. He doesn’t say it, but he wants badly to prove his manager wrong and his front office right.