Moneyball Lewis, Michael (best biographies to read .TXT) 📖

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.

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.

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 count, to draw walks, to wait for the pitcher to make a mistake that they could drive out of the park, the A’s hitting coaches had to drill into hitters’ heads the idea that there was nothing especially bad about striking out. “For a long time I think they believed that a strikeout was no different from making any other out,” said Paul. “But it is.”

Ideally what you wanted was for a hitter neither to strike out, nor to adjust his approach to the task at hand simply to avoid striking out. The ideal was hard to find. Most hitters had holes, and knew it; most hitters hated to hit with two strikes. They knew that if they got two strikes on them, they were especially vulnerable. Paul had done some advance scouting of big league teams. Most big league hitters, even very good ones, had some glaring weakness. Paul could usually see quickly how a pitcher should pitch to any given big league hitter, and how he could put him away. Hatty, he couldn’t figure. Hatty’s at bats often didn’t begin until he had two strikes on him. Hatty wasn’t afraid to hit with two strikes; he seemed almost to welcome the opportunity. That was because Hatty had no hole. Obviously that couldn’t be right: every hitter had a hole. But Paul had watched him plenty of times and he still couldn’t find Hatteberg’s weakness.

These secondary traits in a hitter, especially in the extreme form in which they were found in Scott Hatteberg, had real value to a baseball offense. And yet they were being priced by the market as if they were worth nothing at all.

Where did these traits come from? That was a big question the Oakland A’s front office had asked themselves. Were they learned skills, or part of a guy’s character? Nature or nurture? If nature, as they were coming to believe, physical gift or mental predisposition? Scott Hatteberg had something to say on these matters.

As far back as Hatteberg could remember—and he could remember Little League—two things were true about himself as a hitter. The first was that he had a preternatural ability to put a bat on a ball. Not necessarily to hit the ball out of the park; simply to make contact. (“Swinging and missing to me is like ‘Jesus, what happened?’”) The second was that it angered him far less to take a called strike than to swing at a pitch he couldn’t do much with, and hit some lazy fly or weak grounder. Walks didn’t particularly thrill him but they were far better than the usual alternative. “There was nothing I hated more,” he said, “than swinging at the first pitch and grounding out. It struck me as a worthless experience.”

It was also true that, as a boy, he had sought and found useful role models that encouraged his natural tendencies. The first and most important of these was Don Mattingly. Mattingly posters decorated his bedroom wall. He kept clips of old articles about Don Mattingly. On a trip to Florida he went to the Yankees’ training facility and sneaked under a security rope to catch a glimpse of the great Mattingly. Security guards caught him and tossed him out of Legends Field—though not until he had a good look at his hero in the batting cage. Whenever the Yankees played the Mariners he’d make the two-and-a-half-hour drive into Seattle from Yakima—where he mostly grew up—just to see Mattingly play. “He was a little guy,” said Hatteberg, “and I was tiny growing up. So I was drawn to him. And I loved his swing. It was just poetic, his swing. It was similar to the way I swung—or wanted to swing. We both kind of squatted down a little bit.” Mattingly was also, like him, a finicky hitter: he cared more than most what he swung at.

Hatteberg identified with this particular trait of Mattingly’s though it was difficult to put into a single word. A baseball man might call it “patience” but it was more like “thoughtfulness.” Mattingly, like him, but unlike a lot of the guys he played with, did not treat hitting a baseball as pure physical reaction. Hitting was something that you did better if you thought about it. Hatty owned a record of Mattingly talking about hitting. The Art of Hitting .300, it was called. He’d listened to it dozens of times. “One thing Mattingly said,” Hatteberg recalled, “was that you could look at a guy’s strikeouts and his walks and tell what kind of year he’d had. That stuck in my head.” (The odd thing about Mattingly’s sermon is that he himself never drew all that many walks.)

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