Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (25 page)

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 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.”

B
EFORE 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 the hitters. The reactions of the hitters on the tape reveal that when Moyer is on the mound, the batter’s box feels like the Twilight Zone. We watch as Moyer renders the Yankees outfielder, John Vander Wal, helpless. He actually jams him with a fastball—that is, Vander Wal is unable to get his bat around quickly enough to hit it squarely.

“You know how many times Moyer jams guys with an eighty-mile-an-hour fastball?” says Hatteberg. “
All the time.
It’s because he sets it up with a sixty-nine-mile-an-hour change-up.” He fast-forwards to a slow curve, and an even slower change-up. “See,” he says, “All this other shit is what makes his fastball look like ninety-four.” He watches Moyer jam two more left-handed hitters with 82-mph fastballs and says, “He’ll do this to me, too. If he gets two strikes on me, he’ll try to get me pitching me inside.” Then he reconsiders, and smiles, and says, “Unless he thinks I’m looking inside.”

Moyer was one of the few pitchers in baseball who would think about Scott Hatteberg as much as Hatteberg thought about him. Moyer would know that Hatteberg never swung at the first pitch—except to keep a pitcher honest—and so Moyer might just throw a first-pitch strike. But Moyer would also know that Hatteberg knew that Moyer knew. Which brought Hatteberg back to square one.

He was knee-deep in game theory, and he had only an hour before he had to play the game. One of the big reasons he watched tape was to see if a pitcher “patterned himself”—that is, if you could count on seeing a certain pitch from him in a certain count. Moyer scrambled his pitches so thoroughly that looking for patterns was a waste of time. Moyer he watched just to imagine how it might go.

Then John Mabry walked into the video room.

“Hey, Hatty.”

Hatty makes room for Mabry at the video screen. Hatty glances back at Feiny and says “I understand there’s been some lipreading going on in here.”

“Oh yeah?” says Mabry.

Feiny reddens and Mabry smiles—sort of. Mabry and Feiny have something like a running argument going, about why Mabry doesn’t play more. Right after he came over from the Phillies, in exchange for Jeremy Giambi, Mabry had been torrid. Over the course of several weeks, playing irregularly, he’d hit over .400, with half a dozen homers, and still the manager seemed reluctant to write his name in the lineup. He’d asked Feiny why. The manager won’t put him in the lineup, Feiny has explained, because the front office don’t want him in the lineup.

What bothered Billy Beane about Mabry’s approach to hitting was that it was the opposite of Scott Hatteberg’s. When Mabry stepped into a batter’s box, he intended to swing from the heels at the first pitch that looked tasty. Mabry made an enthusiastic case that a pinch hitter, to succeed, needs to be wildly aggressive, but it’s not a case Billy cares to hear. Billy, for reasons he refuses to explain, is willing to have John Mabry in an A’s uniform but he doesn’t want to go so far as to let Mabry
play.
When Art Howe put Mabry in a few games, to give other guys a rest, and Mabry had started hitting homers, both Billy and Paul reacted as if they had walked into the casino, stuck a quarter into a slot machine, and hit the jackpot. They’d gotten lucky; it was now time to leave with their winnings. “Mabry’s a great guy,” Billy had said the other night, “but sooner or later Tattoo’s going to show up and take him off the island.”

A few days earlier Mabry had complained to Feiny about his lack of playing time, and Feiny had tried to help him out. “You know, John,” he’d said, “maybe you want to try taking a few pitches.”

That night Mabry had played—with Feiny’s voice in his head. The first time he came to the plate he took the first five pitches he saw—till the count was full: 3–2. The next pitch he took a giant hack at, and struck out. The television camera read his lips as he walked back to the dugout. “Fucking Feinstein,” he said. Mabry wound up walking twice and one of those walks led to a run that won the game; still, it was unclear whether he had forgiven Feiny—or even if he thought Feiny needed forgiving.

Mabry, too, is playing tonight. He sees the tape of Moyer, and wants to discuss him.

“This guy is hard to prepare for,” Mabry says. “He chews up young guys because he feeds on their aggression.”

“He’s just so different from everyone else,” says Hatty. “You’re gauged for harder speeds. You almost have to remember your old high school swing.”

“He preys on your aggression,” says Mabry, making whatever Moyer does sound slightly vampirish. “He makes you think you can hit pitches you can’t even reach.”

“If it’s not a strike, how hard it is to lay off?” asks Feiny. He’s still staring into his own screen, watching Alex Rodriguez at bat.

“Oh, it’s hard,” says Mabry. On the screen Moyer doesn’t seem to be pitching so much as tossing. I’ve seen less arc on ceremonial first pitches.

“Just lay off the bad pitches, John,” says Feiny teasingly.

“Feiny,” says Mabry testily. “You ever been in a major league batter’s box?”

Feiny doesn’t answer.

“I’m telling you,” says Mabry, turning back. He points to the screen, on which Moyer tosses another cream puff. “You see that coming at you and it looks like you can hit it three miles.”