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

I think he’s joking but he’s not. Mecir was born with two clubfeet. As a child he’d had operations to correct them but he still walked with a limp. Somehow he had turned his deformity into an advantage. His strange delivery he wasn’t able to push off the mound with his right foot put an unusually violent spin on his screwball. The pitch had proven to be ruthlessly effective against left-handed hitters.

Mecir walks Jeter. Giambi steps in. Mecir immediately attacks the hole in Giambi’s swing, the waist-high inside pitch. Screwball after screwball dives over the inside part of the plate. The first is a ball but the second is a strike and Giambi doesn’t even think of swinging at either one of them. The count is 1-1. The third pitch, Giambi takes for a ball. The odds shift dangerously toward him. Mecir defies them: another called strike on the inside corner. His fifth pitch should have been his last. It’s a thing of beauty; Giambi flinches as it passes him on the inside corner of the plate. Strike three. A cheer erupts in the video room.

The umpire calls it a ball.

It’s a terrible call, in a critical situation, bad enough to crack even Paul. “I’m sick of the fucking Yankees getting every call!” he shouts, then, looking for something to swat, settles on the wall. He leaves the video room. Even he doesn’t want to watch what happens next: you can’t give Jason Giambi four strikes and expect to live to tell about it. Giambi fouls off the next pitch and then drives the seventh pitch he sees into right field for a double, scoring two runs.

The A’s fail to score again. A few minutes after he’s done his impersonation of his boss, Paul returns to watch his team lose, wearing a mask of reason. After all, it was just one game. Nothing had happened to dissuade him that his original prediction for the A’s season (ninety-five wins and a play-off spot) was wrong. Ninety-five wins meant sixty-seven losses; this was just one of those. Or so he says.

As he does, Scott Hatteberg appears in the video room. He’s the third and final defective part assembled by the A’s front office to replace Jason Giambi. He wants to see his videotape.

Hatteberg had spent the first six years of his career as a catcher with the Boston Red Sox. He’d become a free agent at the end of the 2001 season and the Red Sox had no interest in signing him. He was, when Billy Beane signed him, a second string, washed-up catcher. And so here he was: the final piece of a messy puzzle. I watch him closely as he reviews his tape but can identify no deformity. He’s six one, 215, and the weight looks more like muscle than fat. He still has both arms, all ten fingers. He’s not obviously misshapen. His quick smile reveals a fine set of teeth. His hearing is above average, too. He overhears me ask Paul why Billy had eliminated the curious job created by Sandy Alderson: team shrink. “Some teams need psychiatrists more than others,” Hatteberg says. “In Boston we had an entire staff.”

Above-average wit, too.

“So, what’s wrong with him?” I ask, after he leaves.

“His catching career was over,” said Paul. “He got hurt and can’t throw.”

It turned out that Scott Hatteberg had been on the Oakland A’s wish list for several years. He’d never done anything flashy or sensational. He didn’t hit an attention-getting number of home runs. He had never hit much over or under .270. He had the same dull virtues as David Justice and Jeremy Giambi: plate discipline and an ability to get on base. He, like them, was a blackjack dealer who understood never to hit on 19. The rest of baseball viewed Hatteberg as a catcher who could hit some, rather than as an efficient device for creating runs who could also catch. When he’d ruptured a nerve in his throwing elbow his catching days were finished, and so, in the eyes of most of baseball, was he. Therefore, he came cheap.

That he had lost his defensive position meant little to the Oakland A’s, who were forever looking for dirt-cheap opportunities to accept bad defense for an ability to get on base. One trick of theirs was to pounce on a player just after he’d had what appeared to be a career-threatening injury. Billy Beane had a favorite saying, which he’d borrowed from the Wall Street investor Warren Buffett: the hardest thing to find is a good investment. Hatteberg wasn’t like Jeremy Giambi, a minor leaguer they were hoping would cut it in the bigs. He wasn’t like David Justice, an aging star in rapid decline. He was a commodity that shouldn’t have existed: a big league player, in his prime, with stats that proved he had an unusual ability to create runs, and available at the new, low price of less than a million bucks a year. The only question Billy and Paul had about Scott Hatteberg was where on the baseball field to put him. Between Justice, who couldn’t play in the field every day and stay healthy, and Jeremy Giambi, who couldn’t play in the field every day and stay sane, they already had one full-time designated hitter. Hatteberg, to hit, would need to play some position in the field. Which one?

Chapter

VIII

Scott Hatteberg, Pickin’ Machine

The lights on the Christmas tree were off, his daughters were in bed, his wife was asleep—and he was up, walking around. His right hand still felt like it belonged to someone else. He’d played half a season for the Red Sox with a ruptured nerve in his elbow, that he crushed each time he straightened his throwing arm. He’d finally caved, and had the nerve moved back where it was meant to be; but when the operation was over he couldn’t hold a baseball, much less throw one.