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

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 Moyer, 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.

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