Moneyball by Lewis, Michael (mobile ebook reader txt) 📕

at $237,500 of pitcher. “Giambi’s cut the strike zone completely in half.” It isn’t Giambi’s obvious powers that have him excited. It’s his self-control, and the effect it has on pitchers. Giambi makes it nearly impossible for even a very good pitcher to do what he routinely does with lesser hitters: control the encounter. And Eric Hiljus isn’t, tonight, a very good pitcher.

David points to the screen and shows me the sliver of the plate over which a pitch must pass for Giambi to swing at it. The line he traces omits a chunk of the inner half of the plate. “He has a hole on the inside where he can’t do much with a pitch and so he lays off it,” says David.

Every hitter has a hole. “The strike zone is too big to cover it all,” as Paul says. Ted Williams wrote a book, called The Science of Hitting, in which he imagined the strike zone as a grid of seventy-seven baseballs and further imagined what he could, and couldn’t, do with a baseball thrown to each of the seventy-seven spots. There were eleven spots, all low and most away, where, if the pitch was thrown to them and Ted Williams swung, he hit under .270. Barry Bonds, during spring training, had given an interview with ESPN in which he as much as said, “if you make your pitch, you can get me out.” The issue wasn’t whether a hitter had a weakness, but where it was. Every pitcher in the big leagues knew that Giambi’s hole was waist-high, on the inside corner of the plate. It was about the size of a pint of milk, two baseballs in height and one baseball in width.

Which raised an obvious question: why don’t the pitchers just aim for the milk pint? When I ask it, Feiny smiles and shakes his head. “They do,” David says. “But he’s so good he’ll step back and rip one foul into the upper deck. After that, the pitcher won’t ever go inside again.”

“And his weakness is right next to his greatest strength,” says Paul. “If they miss by two inches over the plate, the ball is gone. The pitcher is out there thinking: ‘I can get him out there. But if I miss by even a fraction, he’ll destroy me.’”

It’s not clear what Eric Hiljus is thinking—other than he has no interest in flirting with the inside part of the plate. His first pitch is a ball just off the outside corner; his second pitch, a fastball, closer to the middle. Giambi yanks it into right field for a single that drives Soriano home.

The A’s hitters go quietly in the first. In the top of the second, Eric Hiljus continues to indulge Yankee hitters with fastballs down the middle of the plate and they strike for four more runs, three on a home run by Derek Jeter. About the third time that I shout while the rest of the video room remains silent, I realize I am not only watching the game differently but am watching a different game. My eyes keep drifting to the one TV screen that, almost apologetically, displays the commercial broadcast. They focus on a different screen—an internal feed directly from the center field camera—that offers them the clearest view of the strike zone. I’m watching the whole game, and responding the way an ordinary fan responds. I’m looking for story lines and dramatic events and other fuel for my emotions. They’re watching fragments—not the game itself but derivatives of the game—and responding, so far as I can tell, not at all. Finally, I say something about it.

“It’s looking at process rather than outcomes,” Paul says. “Too many people make decisions based on outcomes rather than process.”

The route a pitch takes to the catcher’s mitt is an outcome, I say. It’s just a more subtle outcome.

“It’s not what happened,” says Paul, “it’s how our guy approached it.”

It’s impossible to determine, from the stands or the dugout or the luxury suites or even the commercial broadcast, whether a ball traveling 90 miles an hour was half an inch off or half an inch over home plate. Only here, in the video room, can they see the biggest thing they feel they need to know to evaluate their players: whether a pitch is a ball or a strike. “The strike zone is the heart of the game,” Bill James had written, and their behavior underscored the fact.

When the Yankees finish pummeling Eric Hiljus, and the A’s come to bat, David pulls out a neatly typed piece of paper that hints at Paul’s meaning. It reads:

Tejada: 38%

Chavez: 34%

Long: 31%

Hernandez: 29%

Pena: 27%

Menechino: 19%

Justice: 18%

Giambi: 17%

Hatteberg: 14%

The A’s front office record every pitch thrown to Oakland A’s hitters, both by type and location. They’ve mined these to determine the percentage of pitches outside the strike zone each player has swung at. Each plate appearance they think of as a miniature game in itself, in which the odds shift constantly. The odds depend on who is pitching and who is hitting, of course, but they also depend on the minute events within the event. Every plate appearance was like a hand of blackjack; the tone of it changed with each dealt card. A first-pitch strike, for instance, lowered a hitter’s batting average by about seventy-five points, and a first-pitch ball raised them about as much. But it wasn’t the first pitch that held the most drama for the cognoscenti; it was the third. “The difference between 1-2 and 2-1 in terms of expected outcomes is just enormous,” says Paul. “It’s the largest variance of expected outcomes of any one pitch. On 2-1 most average major league hitters become all-stars, yet on 1-2 they become anemic nine-hole hitters. People talk about first-pitch strikes. But it’s really the first two out of three.”

Any ball out of the strike zone was an opportunity for a batter to shift the odds in