He watches Jamie Moyer pitch against a series of left-handed hitters. Moyer’s under six feet tall and narrow-shouldered, with the demeanor of a chartered accountant. When his fastball registers 82 miles per hour on the radar gun, he’s having a good day. “I’ve faced guys who threw harder in high school,” says Hatteberg. “This guy wouldn’t get drafted. He could go out and try out for a team right now and if they didn’t know who he was he wouldn’t get signed.”
That one of the best pitchers in the big leagues couldn’t get beyond a tryout tells you something about the big leagues. It also tells you something about pitchers. A good pitcher, Hatteberg explained, creates a kind of parallel universe. It doesn’t matter how hard he throws, in absolute terms, so long as he is able to distort the perception of the hitters. The reactions of the hitters on the tape reveal that when Moyer is on the mound, the batter’s box feels like the Twilight Zone. We watch as Moyer renders the Yankees outfielder, John Vander Wal, helpless. He actually jams him with a fastball—that is, Vander Wal is unable to get his bat around quickly enough to hit it squarely.
“You know how many times Moyer jams guys with an eighty mile-an-hour fastball?” says Hatteberg. “All the time. It’s because he sets it up with a sixty-nine-mile-an-hour change-up.” He fast-forwards to a slow curve, and an even slower change-up. “See,” he says, “All this other shit is what makes his fastball look like ninety-four.” He watches Moyer jam two more left-handed hitters with 82-mph fastballs and says, “He’ll do this to me, too. If he gets two strikes on me, he’ll try to get me pitching me inside.” Then he reconsiders, and smiles, and says, “Unless he thinks I’m looking inside.”
Moyer was one of the few pitchers in baseball who would think about Scott Hatteberg as much as Hatteberg thought about him. Moyer would know that Hatteberg never swung at the first pitch—except to keep a pitcher honest—and so Moyer might just throw a first-pitch strike. But Moyer would also know that Hatteberg knew that Moyer knew. Which brought Hatteberg back to square one.
He was knee-deep in game theory, and he had only an hour before he had to play the game. One of the big reasons he watched tape was to see if a pitcher “patterned himself”—that is, if you could count on seeing a certain pitch from him in a certain count. Moyer scrambled his pitches so thoroughly that looking for patterns was a waste of time. Moyer he watched just to imagine how it might go.
Then John Mabry walked into the video room.
“Hey, Hatty.”
Hatty makes room for Mabry at the video screen. Hatty glances back at Feiny and says “I understand there’s been some lipreading going on in here.”
“Oh yeah?” says Mabry.
Feiny reddens and Mabry smiles—sort of. Mabry and Feiny have something like a running argument going, about why Mabry doesn’t play more. Right after he came over from the Phillies, in exchange for Jeremy Giambi, Mabry had been torrid. Over the course of several weeks, playing irregularly, he’d hit over .400, with half a dozen homers, and still the manager seemed reluctant to write his name in the lineup. He’d asked Feiny why. The manager won’t put him in the lineup, Feiny has explained, because the front office don’t want him in the lineup.
What bothered Billy Beane about Mabry’s approach to hitting was that it was the opposite of Scott Hatteberg’s. When Mabry stepped into a batter’s box, he intended to swing from the heels at the first pitch that looked tasty. Mabry made an enthusiastic case that a pinch hitter, to succeed, needs to be wildly aggressive, but it’s not a case Billy cares to hear. Billy, for reasons he refuses to explain, is willing to have John Mabry in an A’s uniform but he doesn’t want to go so far as to let Mabry play. When Art Howe put Mabry in a few games, to give other guys a rest, and Mabry had started hitting homers, both Billy and Paul reacted as if they had walked into the casino, stuck a quarter into a slot machine, and hit the jackpot. They’d gotten lucky; it was now time to leave with their winnings. “Mabry’s a great guy,” Billy had said the other night, “but sooner or later Tattoo’s going to show up and take him off the island.”
A few days earlier Mabry had complained to Feiny about his lack of playing time, and Feiny had tried to help him out. “You know, John,” he’d said, “maybe you want to try taking a few pitches.”
That night Mabry had played—with Feiny’s voice in his head. The first time he came to the plate he took the first five pitches he saw—till the count was full: 3-2. The next pitch he took a giant hack at, and struck out. The television camera read his lips as he walked back to the dugout. “Fucking Feinstein,” he said. Mabry wound up walking twice and one of those walks led to a run that won the game; still, it was unclear whether he had forgiven Feiny—or even if he thought Feiny needed forgiving.
Mabry, too, is playing tonight. He sees the tape of Moyer, and wants to discuss him.
“This guy is hard to prepare for,” Mabry says. “He chews up young guys because he feeds on their aggression.”
“He’s just so different from everyone else,” says Hatty. “You’re gauged for harder speeds. You almost have to remember your old high school swing.”
“He preys on your aggression,” says Mabry, making whatever Moyer does sound slightly vampirish. “He makes you think you can hit pitches you can’t even reach.”
“If it’s not a strike, how hard it is to lay off?” asks Feiny. He’s still staring into his own screen, watching Alex Rodriguez at bat.
“Oh, it’s hard,” says Mabry. On the screen Moyer doesn’t seem to be pitching so much as tossing. I’ve seen less arc on ceremonial first pitches.
“Just lay off the bad pitches, John,” says Feiny teasingly.
“Feiny,” says Mabry testily. “You ever been in a major league batter’s box?”
Feiny doesn’t answer.
“I’m telling you,” says Mabry, turning back. He points to the screen, on which Moyer tosses another cream puff. “You see that coming at you and it looks like you can hit it three miles.”
“So just don’t swing, John,” says Feiny.
“Yeah,” says Mabry, turning around again to glare at Feiny. “Well, the time you don’t swing is the time he throws you three strikes.”
“He is a really smart guy,” agrees Hatty, looking to settle the dispute. “He’s tough to plan for.”
But Mabry is still staring at Feiny, who is refusing to stare back. “Feiny, have you ever faced a major league pitcher?”
“No, John,” says Feiny, wearily, “I’ve never faced a major league pitcher.”
“I didn’t think so,” says Mabry. “I didn’t think Feiny had ever faced a major league pitcher.”
That looked as if it might be a conversation-stopper. Then David Justice walks in. He sees that they’ve been watching the tape of Moyer and knows instantly what they’re arguing about. They’re arguing about the price of greed in the batter’s box. Your only hope against a pitcher with Moyer’s command of the strike zone, Justice says, is to give up on the idea that you are going to get rich and satisfy yourself with just making a living. “You think you can hit it out,” says Justice, “but you can’t hit it at all.”
“Exactly,” says Mabry.
“Which is why you don’t swing at it,” says Feiny.
Mabry just gets up and leaves. When he’s gone, Hatteberg considers why everyone doesn’t prepare for Jamie Moyer as he does by watching tape, imagining what will happen, deciding what to look for, deciding what he will never swing at. “Some of the guys who are the best are the dumbest,” he says. “I don’t mean dumbest. I mean they don’t have a thought. No system.”
Stupidity is an asset?
“Absolutely. Guys can’t set you up. You have no pattern. You can’t even remember your last at bat.” He laughs. “Arrogance is an asset, too. Stupidity and arrogance: I don’t have either one. And it taunts me.”
He soon needs to stop thinking about playing and actually play. During the game he’s as finicky as ever. He waits for pitches like a man picking
through an apple bin at a grocery store, looking for the ripest. The first time up, the fruit’s no good. He just stares at the first four pitches, all millimeters off the plate, and walks down to first base. His second time up, Moyer throws strikes. Hatteberg watches the first go by, and fouls off the second. With two strikes he thought Moyer would pitch him inside, and he does. He lines it into right field for a single, and knocks in what would prove to be the only run of the game. The third at bat he hits a shot to deep left that looked gone for a moment but wound up being caught on the warning track.
But none of those first three at bats stuck in Hatty’s mind like the fourth. The fourth and final time he came to the plate, Moyer teased him with pitches on the edge of the strike zone and quickly got ahead 0-2. The next four pitches were either balls Hatty took or strikes he fouled off, because he couldn’t do anything more with them. Six pitches into the at bat, with the count 2-2, Jamie Moyer walks off the mound. He actually says something to Hatty, and stands there, as if waiting for an answer.
This is new. Hatty’s at bats, inevitably, are conversations, but the non-verbal kind. The pitcher isn’t supposed to stop in the middle of the game for a sociable chat. “I’d never had a pitcher talk to me while I was in the batter’s box,” he says. With Moyer just standing there, refusing to budge, Hatteberg steps out of the box: “What?” he shouts.
“Just tell me what you want,” says Moyer wearily.
Hatty shrugs, as he doesn’t know what to say.
“Tell me what you want and I’ll throw it,” says Moyer.
Hatty was always having to make a guess about what was coming next. His ability to do it depended on his knowing that the pitcher was trying to fool him. This more straightforward approach made him uneasy. It screwed up some inner calculation, threw him off-balance. He didn’t feel comfortable. For once, he couldn’t think of anything to say. And so he didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to know. He preferred to stick with his approach.
On the next pitch Moyer throws a change-up and Hatteberg hits right back at him. Just another out—and yet it wasn’t. He did what he did so quietly that the market in general never perceived the value in it. Scott Hatteberg will finish the season at or near the top of a couple of odd statistical categories, and one not-so-odd one. He’ll be first in the entire American League in not swinging at first pitches, and third in the percentage of pitches he doesn’t swing at (64.5 percent). Trivial accomplishments, if they did not lead to another, less trivial one. At the end of the season Paul DePodesta will measure the performance of every A’s hitter. He’ll want to know how efficient each has been with his plate opportunities. He’ll answer that question in an unorthodox way, by asking: how many runs would a lineup produce that consisted of nine perfect replicas of that hitter? If Scott Hatteberg, for example, had taken every single at bat for the Oakland A’s in 2002, how many runs would he have generated? Nine Scott Hattebergs generate between 940 and 950 runs, tied for the Oakland A’s lead with Miguel Tejada and Eric Chavez, obviously much flashier hitters. The offensively explosive 2002 New York Yankees, by comparison, scored 897 runs. Nine Scott Hattebergs are, by some measure, the best offense in baseball.
Chapter IX
The Trading Desk
It’s not like I’m making pitching changes
during the game.
—Billy Beane, quoted in the Boston Herald, January 16, 2003
It was late July, which is to say that Mike Magnante had picked a bad time to pitch poorly. “Mags,” as everyone called him, had come in against Cleveland in the top of the seventh with two runners on and a three-run lead. The first thing he did was to walk Jim Thome—no one could blame him for that. He then gave up a bloop single to Milton Bradley and the inherited runners scored—just plain bad luck, that. But then he threw three straight balls to Lee Stevens. Stevens dutifully took a strike, then waited for Mags to throw his fifth pitch.
The first question Billy Beane will ask Art Howe after the game is why the fuck he’d brought Magnante into a tight game. In tight situations Art was supposed to use Chad Bradford. Bradford was the ace of the pen. So that it would be clear in Art’s head, Billy had instructed him to think of Bradford as “the closer before the ninth inning.” Art’s first answer about Magnante was that he thought Mags, the lefty, would be more effective than Bradford, the righty, against a left-handed slugger like Thome. Which is nuts, since Mags hasn’t gotten anyone out in weeks and Bradford has been good against lefties. Art’s second answer is that Billy put Mags on the team, and if a guy is on the team, you need to use him. Art won’t say this directly to Billy but he’ll think it. The coaching staff had grown tired of hearing Billy holler at them for using Magnante. “The guy has got braces on both legs,” says pitching coach Rick Peterson. “We’re not going to use him as a pinch runner. If you don’t want us to use him, trade him.”
Mike Magnante goes into his stretch and looks in for the signal. He just last month turned thirty-seven, and is four days shy of the ten full years of big league service he needs to collect a full pension. It’s not hard to see what’s wrong with him, to discern the defect that makes him available to the Oakland A’s. He is pearshaped and slack-jawed and looks less like a professional baseball player than most of the beat reporters who cover the team. But he has a reason to hope: his history of pitching better in the second half than the first. The team opened the season with three lefties in the bullpen, which is two more than most clubs carried. A month ago they’d released one, Mike Holtz, and two days ago sent down the other, Mike Venafro. The story Mike Magnante told himself on the eve of July 29, 2002, was that he hadn’t pitched often enough to find his rhythm. He’d go a week when he made only three pitches in a game. With the other Mikes gone, he finally had his chance to find his rhythm.
He makes an almost perfect pitch to Lee Stevens, a fastball low and away. The catcher is set up low and outside. When you saw the replay, you understood that he’d hit his spot. If he’d missed, it was only by half an inch. It’s the pitch Mike Magnante wanted to make. Good pitch, bad count. The ball catches the fat part of the bat. It rises and rises and the two runners on base begin to circle ahead of the hitter. Mags can only stand and watch: an opposite field shot at night in Oakland is a rare, impressive sight. It is Lee Stevens’s first home run as a Cleveland Indian. By the time the ball lands, the first and third basemen are closing in on the mound like bailiffs, and Art Howe is on the top of the dugout steps. He’s given up five runs and gotten nobody out. It wasn’t the first time that he’d been knocked out of the game, but it wasn’t often he’d been knocked out on his pitch. That’s what happens when you’re thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.
The game is effectively over. Chad Bradford will come on and get three quick outs, too late. The Indians’ own left-handed relief pitcher, Ricardo Rincon, strikes out David justice on three pitches and gets Eric Chavez to pop out on four. The contrast cast Mags in unflattering light. The A’s had the weakest left-handed relief pitching in the league and the Indians had some of the strongest. To see the difference, Billy Beane didn’t even need to watch the game.
* * *
Having just finished an enthusiastic impersonation of a baseball owner pretending to be a farm animal receiving a beating, Billy Beane rose back into his desk chair and waited, impatiently, for Mark Shapiro to call. Mark Shapiro was the general manager of the Cleveland Indians.
When Billy sat upright in his office, a few yards from the Coliseum, he faced a wall covered entirely by a white board and, on it, the names of the several hundred players controlled by the Oakland A’s. Mike Magnante’s name was on that board. Swiveling around to his rear he faced another white board with the names of the nearly twelve hundred players on other major league rosters. Ricardo Rincon’s name was on that board. At this point in the year Billy didn’t really need to look at these boards to make connections; he knew every player on other teams that he wanted, and ev
ery player in his own system that he didn’t want. The trick was to persuade other teams to buy his guys for more than they were worth, and sell their guys for less than they were worth. He’d done this so effectively the past few years that he was finding other teams less eager to do business with him. The Cleveland Indians were not yet one of those teams.
Waiting for Shapiro to call him, Billy distracted himself by paying attention to several things at once. On his desk was the most recent issue of Harvard Magazine, containing an article about a Harvard professor of statistics named Carl Morris (the Bill James fan). The article explained how Morris had used statistical theory to determine the number of runs a team could expect to score in the different states of a baseball game. No outs with no one on base: 55. No outs with a runner on first base: 90. And so on for each of the twenty-four possible states of a baseball game. “We knew this three years ago,” says Billy, “and Harvard thinks it’s original.”
He shoves a wad of tobacco into his upper lip, then turns back to his computer screen, which displays the Amazon.com home page. In his hand he’s got a review he’s ripped out of Time magazine, of a novel called The Dream of Scipio, a thriller with intellectual pretension. He reads the sentence of the review that has made him a buyer: “Civilization had made them men of learning, but in order to save it they must leave their studies and become men of action.” As he taps on his computer keyboard, the television over his head replays Mike Magnante’s home run ball of the night before. The Oakland A’s announcers are trying to explain why the Oakland A’s are still behind the Anaheim Angels and the Seattle Mariners in the division standings. “The main reason this team is trailing in the American League West,” an announcer says, “is that they haven’t hit in the clutch, they haven’t hit with guys in scoring position.” Billy drops the book review, forgets about Amazon, and reaches for the TV remote control. Of the many false beliefs peddled by the TV announcers, this fealty to “clutch hitting” was maybe the most maddening to Billy Beane. “It’s fucking luck,” he says, and faces around the dial until he finds Moneyline with Lou Dobbs. He prefers watching money shows to watching baseball anyway.
Moneyball Page 20
