Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (24 page)

He was having fun. He began to make plays people didn’t expect him to make; he began to make plays
Wash
didn’t expect him to make. He still thought the whole Oakland experiment had been more than a tad unorthodox. “I think it’s odd,” he said, “the way they shove guys in on defense every which way.” But by midsummer, he was overhearing people referring to him as an “above-average” first baseman. By the end of July, when you asked Wash what he made of the transformation of Scott Hatteberg into an above-average first baseman, he just shook his head and smiled. “He made a liar of me,” he said. “Now he goes out and does what he does and he’s a ballplayer, reacting.” Then he’d think about it for a moment and say, “These are the kind of guys you go to war with. The Scott Hattebergs.”

A knack for playing first base had little to do with the Oakland A’s interest in Scott Hatteberg. It was a bonus that Hatty had made himself as good as he did but he could have played worse without wearing out his welcome. Hatty had been on a collision course with Oakland from the moment Paul DePodesta and Billy Beane had concluded that on-base percentage was three times more important than slugging percentage, and that certain secondary traits in a hitter, widely ignored by the rest of baseball, were also critically important to the success of the team. Hatty had some power, but what he really had was an approach to hitting that helped an offense to create runs. When he was with the Red Sox he had gotten on base at a rate about 25 points higher than the league average, and did so while (a) not playing regularly, and (b) being worn out behind home plate. Rested and playing regularly, he’d only get on base more.
*

He’d do something else, too: wear out opposing pitching. Scott Hatteberg’s at bats went on and on; they were nearly as drawn out as Jason Giambi’s—this in spite of the fact that pitchers didn’t have nearly so much reason to fear Hatteberg as they did Giambi.
*
Hatteberg’s was a more subtle, less visible strength. He was unafraid of striking out and this absence of fear showed itself in how often he hit with two strikes. The reason for his fearlessness was how seldom he struck out. He consistently worked himself into deep counts and yet, in spite of hitting often with two strikes, routinely put the ball in play. The ratio of his walks to his strikeouts was among the highest in the league.
*

His talent for avoiding strikeouts was another of his secondary traits that, in the Oakland calculus, added value, subtly, to Scott Hatteberg. The strikeout was the most expensive thing a hitter routinely could do. There had been a lie at the heart of the system to train A’s minor league hitters. To persuade young men to be patient, to work the count, to draw walks, to wait for the pitcher to make a mistake that they could drive out of the park, the A’s hitting coaches had to drill into hitters’ heads the idea that there was nothing especially bad about striking out. “For a long time I think they believed that a strikeout was no different from making any other out,” said Paul. “But it is.”

Ideally what you wanted was for a hitter neither to strike out, nor to adjust his approach to the task at hand simply to avoid striking out. The ideal was hard to find. Most hitters had holes, and knew it; most hitters hated to hit with two strikes. They knew that if they got two strikes on them, they were especially vulnerable. Paul had done some advance scouting of big league teams. Most big league hitters, even very good ones, had some glaring weakness. Paul could usually see quickly how a pitcher should pitch to any given big league hitter, and how he could put him away. Hatty, he couldn’t figure. Hatty’s at bats often didn’t begin until he had two strikes on him. Hatty wasn’t afraid to hit with two strikes; he seemed almost to welcome the opportunity. That was because Hatty had no hole. Obviously that couldn’t be right: every hitter had a hole. But Paul had watched him plenty of times and he still couldn’t find Hatteberg’s weakness.

These secondary traits in a hitter, especially in the extreme form in which they were found in Scott Hatteberg, had real value to a baseball offense. And yet they were being priced by the market as if they were worth nothing at all.

Where did these traits come from? That was a big question the Oakland A’s front office had asked themselves. Were they learned skills, or part of a guy’s character? Nature or nurture? If nature, as they were coming to believe, physical gift or mental predisposition? Scott Hatteberg had something to say on these matters.

As far back as Hatteberg could remember—and he could remember Little League—two things were true about himself as a hitter. The first was that he had a preternatural ability to put a bat on a ball. Not necessarily to hit the ball out of the park; simply to make contact. (“Swinging and missing to me is like ‘Jesus, what happened?’”) The second was that it angered him far less to take a called strike than to swing at a pitch he couldn’t do much with, and hit some lazy fly or weak grounder. Walks didn’t particularly thrill him but they were far better than the usual alternative. “There was nothing I hated more,” he said, “than swinging at the first pitch and grounding out. It struck me as a worthless experience.”

It was also true that, as a boy, he had sought and found useful role models that encouraged his natural tendencies. The first and most important of these was Don Mattingly. Mattingly posters decorated his bedroom wall. He kept clips of old articles about Don Mattingly. On a trip to Florida he went to the Yankees’ training facility and sneaked under a security rope to catch a glimpse of the great Mattingly. Security guards caught him and tossed him out of the Yankees’ spring training Facility—though not until he had a good look at his hero in the batting cage. Whenever the Yankees played the Mariners he’d make the two-and-a-half-hour drive into Seattle from Yakima—where he mostly grew up—just to see Mattingly play. “He was a little guy,” said Hatteberg, “and I was
tiny
growing up. So I was drawn to him. And I loved his swing. It was just poetic, his swing. It was similar to the way I swung—or wanted to swing. We both kind of squatted down a little bit.” Mattingly was also, like him, a finicky hitter: he cared more than most what he swung at.

Hatteberg identified with this particular trait of Mattingly’s though it was difficult to put into a single word. A baseball man might call it “patience” but it was more like “thoughtfulness.” Mattingly, like him, but unlike a lot of the guys he played with, did not treat hitting a baseball as pure physical reaction. Hitting was something that you did better if you thought about it. Hatty owned a record of Mattingly talking about hitting.
The Art of Hitting .300
, it was called. He’d listened to it dozens of times. “One thing Mattingly said,” Hatteberg recalled, “was that you could look at a guy’s strikeouts and his walks and tell what kind of year he’d had. That stuck in my head.” (The odd thing about Mattingly’s sermon is that he himself never drew all that many walks.)

The trouble with Billy Beane had been that he couldn’t find a way to get his whole self into a batter’s box. Scott Hatteberg couldn’t keep himself out of it; the pieces of his character fit too neatly together for him to leave any one of them outside the box. The outside world didn’t fully understand this; it often tried to make him into something he was not. The Phillies had drafted him in the eighth round out of high school, for instance, when he himself didn’t think he was ready. Scouts pressed him to sign, told him it was for his own good. Hatteberg had always been small, especially for a catcher, and when he graduated from high school he was only five ten and weighed 160 pounds. “I looked like I had pneumonia,” he said. The Phillies ignored his objections. His own high school coach—on retainer from the Phillies—told him he’d be making the mistake of his life if he turned down the Phillies eighty-five grand and went to college. He turned down the money and went to college. “If I didn’t make it in college,” he said, “I wasn’t going to make it anyway.”

He’d made it in college, and was taken in the first round of the 1991 draft by the Red Sox. Once in the minors, crude ability got him as far as Double-A ball. There he encountered the two obstacles that routinely ended professional hitting careers: pitchers who had not only stuff but control too; and game theory. In Double-A, as in the big leagues, a hitter saw the same pitchers more than once. More to the point, the pitchers saw you more than once, and invested some energy in trying to exploit what they learned about you. He began to keep records of his at bats: what pitchers threw him, how he responded. Keeping written records, like seeing lots of pitches during each at bat, was a way to gather information. The more information he had about a pitcher, the better he hit against him. He didn’t have the luxury of coasting on raw talent; very few guys did. Sure, you might get to the big leagues and even have a sensational month or two, but if you had some fatal flaw you were found out. Kevin Maas! Maas comes up in 1990 with the Yankees and hits ten home runs in his first seventy-seven at bats. Had he kept hitting them out at that rate for a full season he’d have broken Roger Maris’s single-season home run record as a rookie. He didn’t. He stopped hitting home runs; he stopped hitting period. After a couple of frustrating seasons, Kevin Maas was out of baseball.

Why do you think that happened? Hatteberg knew, or thought he did: it happened because the big leagues was a ruthlessly efficient ecosystem. Every hitter had a weakness. Once he arrived in the big leagues, teams saw him often enough to find that weakness, and exploit it. “Once your hole has been exposed,” Hatteberg said, “you have to make an adjustment or the whole league will get you out. Any pitcher who can’t exploit that hole isn’t in the big leagues.” If you were unable to adapt, you were doomed. If you had a weakness for pitches out of the strike zone, without some extraordinary talent to compensate for it, you were doomed. Hatteberg took that logic one better: he believed that if he swung at
anything
he couldn’t hit hard, even if the pitch was a strike, he was doomed. “If I just went up there and hacked,” he said, “I’d have been weeded out well before the big leagues.” He forced himself to look for a certain pitch from each pitcher, and then trained himself to see that pitch. He knew not just what he could do but what he couldn’t do. He knew what pitches he couldn’t hit well.

Billy Beane thought himself out of the big leagues. Scott Hatteberg thought himself into them. He’d been called up for the first time at the tail end of the 1995 season. With the division title in the bag, the team went into Yankee Stadium for a meaningless game—if any game between the Red Sox and the Yankees can be meaningless. Hatty was assigned to catch relievers in the bullpen, and didn’t expect to play. He went out to Yankee Stadium early anyway because he didn’t want to miss seeing the Yankees’ first baseman, Don Mattingly, take batting practice. The game itself was a mess. The Red Sox quickly fell behind. In the top of the eighth inning the Yankee pitcher, David Cone, was working on a two-hit shutout. With the Red Sox down 9–0, the manager called the bullpen and told Hatteberg to pinch-hit. Hatteberg ran down from the pen, stepped into the batter’s box, and stared down the first-base line. Don Mattingly was staring back.

Hatty took the first pitch, as he nearly always did, to get comfortable. Ball one. The second pitch was ball two. Cone had his best stuff that day. Hatteberg knew on the third pitch he’d see something in the strike zone, and he did. “I just about came out of my shoes,” he said. Foul ball. Cone just missed with the next pitch and the count went to 3–1. A hitter’s count. Hatteberg thought:
If I get a hit, I get the ball.
They always gave you the ball after your first big league hit. Then he had another thought:
I’m one ball away from meeting Don Mattingly.
It was Scott Hatteberg’s first appearance in a big league batter’s box and he was looking to draw a walk.

David Cone wasn’t going to let him have it. Cone’s next pitch was less a pitch than an invitation, an inside fastball in what Hatteberg called his “happy zone,” and he ripped it down the right field line. It banged off the right field wall a few inches below the top and bounded back crazily into the field of play. 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 themselves 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.