Moneyball - Michael Lewis [82]
Players of the opposing teams shall not fraternize at any time while in uniform.
—Official Baseball Rule 3.09
By the summer of 2002, the memo might as well have been addressed directly to Scott Hatteberg. First base as he played it became a running social event. “Guys come to first,” he said, “and they step into my little office. And I do like to chat.” Rafael Palmeiro draws a walk and Hatty asks him which A’s lefty is tougher to hit, Mark Mulder or Barry Zito. (Mulder, Raffy says.) Jeff Cirillo hits a single and, with only the tiniest prompting, starts to bitch and moan about hitting ninth in the Seattle lineup. Jeff Bagwell gets on by a fielder’s error, and Hatty lets him know what a Bagwell fan he is, prompting Bagwell to go into this Eeyore-like dirge about what a poor natural hitter he actually is. “He keeps saying, ‘I hate my swing I hate my swing,’ and I’m like, ‘Dude, you are unbelievable.’” Hatty encouraged all of it, and more. “The funny part is the etiquette,” he said. “When a guy gets on, knowing when to break the ice. I try to be courteous. If a guy got a hit I might say, ‘Nice piece of hitting there.’ Before you know it, they’re chattering away.”
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