Moneyball - Michael Lewis [144]
* The name derives from SABR, the acronym of the Society for American Baseball Research. In 2002, the society had about seven thousand members.
* When the Library of America published its wonderful anthology of America’s great baseball writing in 2001, it included pieces by Robert Frost and John Updike and other fancy literary types, none of whom ever said anything as interesting about baseball as Bill James, and yet, inexplicably, nothing at all by James.
* They wound up scoring 800 and allowing 653.
* These “percentages” are designed to drive anyone who thinks twice about them mad. It’s one thing to give 110 percent for the team, but it is another to get on base 1,000 percent of the time. On-base “percentage” is actually on-base “per thousand.” A batter who gets on base four out of ten times has an on-base “percentage” of four hundred (.400). Slugging “percentage” is even more mind-bending, as it is actually “per four thousand.” A perfect slugging “percentage”—achieved by hitting a home run every time—is four thousand: four bases for every plate appearance. But for practical purposes, on-base and slugging are assumed to be measured on identical scales. At any rate, the majority of big league players have on-base percentages between three hundred (.300) and four hundred (.400) and slugging percentages between three hundred and fifty (.350) and five hundred and fifty (.550).
* Despite hitting in a pitcher’s park, Hatteberg would finish the 2002 season tied—with A’s teammate Ray Durham—for thirteenth in the American League in on-base percentage. Behind him, in addition to the rest of the Oakland A’s, were a lot of multimillionaires you might not expect to find there: Derek Jeter, Johnny Damon, Nomar Garciaparra.
* Hatteberg would finish the 2002 season third in the league in pitches seen per plate appearance, behind Frank Thomas and Jason Giambi.
† Hatteberg’s ratio of walks to strikeouts in the 2002 season was fourth in the American League, behind John Olerud, Mike Sweeney, and Scott Spezio.
* Tom Ruane, a researcher associated with Retrosheet, which had evolved from Bill James’s Project Scoresheet, offers this calculation: the only team since 1961 with a better second-half record over a four-year stretch than the Oakland A’s in 1999–2002 were the 1991–94 Atlanta Braves, and no team over a four-year stretch has improved itself in midseason by so much.
* You might think the players would want to eliminate the need for the rich teams that signed free agents to compensate the poor ones that had lost them. The practice was a tax on free agency. But the practice also gave the players’ union veto power over any changes that the owners might want to make in the amateur draft, and this they valued even more highly.
† He was right about the draft picks.
* In the five-game series, Scott Hatteberg went 7–14 with three walks, no strikeouts, a home run, and a pair of doubles. He scored five runs and knocked in three. Chad Bradford faced ten batters and got nine of them out, seven on ground balls. The tenth batter hit a bloop single. Bradford snapped out of his slump after the twentieth win. His confidence returned about the same time Scott Hatteberg started telling him what the hitters said on the rare occasions they got to first base against him. After Anaheim’s second baseman, Adam Kennedy, blooped a single off Bradford, he turned to Hatty and said, “Jesus Christ, there’s no way that’s eighty-four miles an hour.”
* The job went to Theo Epstein, the twenty-eight-year-old Yale graduate with no experience playing professional baseball.