Moneyball - Michael Lewis [88]
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