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

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