Moneyball - Michael Lewis [84]
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