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

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