It wasn’t long after a player was traded to Oakland before he realized that his new team ran differently from any of his previous ones, although it generally took him some time to figure out why. At some point he grasped that his new general manager wasn’t like his old one. Most GMs shook your hand when they signed you and phoned you when they got rid of you. Between your arrival and departure you might catch the odd glimpse of the boss, say, up in his luxury suite, but typically he was a remote figure. This GM wasn’t like that. This GM, so far as anyone could tell, never set foot inside his luxury suite.
That is what the new player noticed right away: that Billy Beane hung around the clubhouse more than the other GMs. David Justice, who had spent fourteen years with the Braves, the Indians, and the Yankees, claimed he’d seen more of Billy in the first half of the 2002 season than he had all the other GMs put together. The new member of the team would see Billy in the locker room asking some shell-shocked pitcher why he’d thrown a certain pitch in a certain count. Or he’d see Billy chasing down the clubhouse hallway after the Panamanian pinch hitter, badgering him about some disparaging comment he’d made about the base on balls. Or he’d dash up the tunnel from the dugout in the middle of the game to watch tape of his previous at bat, and find Billy in shorts and a T-shirt, dripping sweat from a workout, at the other end; and, if the game wasn’t going well, he might find Billy throwing stuff around the clubhouse. Breaking things.
It was hard to know which of Billy’s qualities was most important to his team’s success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players. Most GMs hadn’t played the game and tended to be physically intimidated in the presence of big league players. Billy had not only played, he might as well wear a sign around his neck that said: I’ve been here, so don’t go trying any of that big league bullshit on me. He didn’t want your autograph. He wasn’t looking to be your buddy. Seldom did the player see Billy socially, away from the clubhouse. Billy kept his distance, even when he was right in your face. Nevertheless, he was a presence.
After a while the new player would start to wonder if there was any place previously reserved for men in uniform that Billy didn’t invade. There was, just one. The dugout. Major League Baseball rules forbade the general manager from sitting in the dugout. But even there the GM was never very far away, because the manager, Art Howe, walked around with a miniature Billy Beane perched on his shoulder, hollering in his ear. In the Oakland A’s dugout occurred the most extraordinary acts of mind control; if Art had a spoon in his head Billy could have bent it with his brain waves. One time Adam Piatt, the spare outfielder, had gone up to the plate in a tight game with a runner on first base with one out, and bunted the guy over. Just like you were supposed to do. Just like everyone in baseball did. Art hadn’t exactly disapproved—at heart Art was an old baseball guy. Instead, incredibly, he had wandered down to where Piatt sat in the dugout and said, “You did that on your own; right?”
The TV viewers saw only the wise old manager conferring with his young player. They probably assumed they were witnessing the manager making some fine point about the art of the sacrifice bunt. The manager was more concerned with the politics of the sacrifice bunt: Art Howe wanted to make sure that it wasn’t him who got yelled at by the GM after the game. Sure enough in the papers the next day Piatt confessed that he had bunted on his own—that Art hadn’t given him the signal. Art, for his part, offered the reporters an impromptu lecture that might have been written by the GM himself on why the sacrifice bunt was a bad play. (Baseball players and coaches often used the newspapers to send memos to their general managers.)
Before long the new member of the Oakland A’s realized: Billy Beane ran the whole show. He was like a Hollywood producer who insisted on meddling not only with the script but also the lights and camera and sets and wardrobes. He wasn’t just making the trades and supervising scouts and getting his name in the papers and whatever else a GM did. He was deciding whether to bunt or steal; who played and who sat; who hit in which spot in the lineup; how the bullpen was used; even the manager’s subtle psychological tactics. If you watched the games closely you noticed that Art Howe always stood on the dugout steps above the players, his chin raised and a philosophical expression upon his face. Art had a great chin. When he stood up and thrust it out, he looked like George Washington crossing the Delaware. No manager in baseball better conveyed, with the thrust of his chin, the idea that he was completely in control of any situation. They flashed up on the television screen that stoic image of Art ten times a game and at some point the announcers felt moved to mention Art’s calming effect on young players. Art became known throughout baseball as the steady hand on the tiller. Why? Because he looked the part!
The whole thing was a piece of theatre. Billy had told Art how and where to stand during a game so that the players would be forced to look up to him, and take strength from his countenance, because when Art sat on the bench, as he preferred to do, he looked like a prisoner of war.
It was a different scene here in Oakland, and some players enjoyed it more than others. The thirty-nine-year-old utility infielder, Randy Velarde, complained often to reporters that the team was run from the front office and that the front office wouldn’t let anyone bunt or steal. The twenty-three-year-old star pitcher, Barry Zito, said that it didn’t matter who played for the Oakland A’s or how much money the team had to spend: as long as Billy Beane ran the team, it had a shot at championships. A player who preferred to remain anonymous, asked how it would affect the team if Art Howe was fired, said that he couldn’t see what difference it would make since “Billy runs the team from the weight room anyway.” And it was true: before every home game Billy would put on his jock and head for the weight room. During the first couple of innings he’d run a few miles and lift a few weights and generally remind whichever pitchers and bench players who had sneaked out of the dugout to get in their workouts that they played for the only team in the history of baseball on which the general manager was also the best athlete. After that, what he did depended on the situation.
What he didn’t do was watch the games. When he watched his team live, he became so upset he’d become a danger to baseball science. He’d become, as he put it, “subjective.” His anger might lead him to do something unconsidered. The notion that he would huddle in his luxury suite with friends and family and visiting dignitaries—well, that just wasn’t going to happen. Some visiting dignitary would hint he might like to see a game from Billy’s box and Billy would say, “Fine, just don’t think I’ll be seeing it with you.” His guest thought Billy was joking, until he discovered he had the suite to himself.
Billy couldn’t bear to watch; on the other hand, he couldn’t bear not to watch. He carried around in his pocket a little white box, resembling a pager, that received a satellite feed of live baseball scores. The white box was his chief source of real time information about the team he ran. He’d get into his SUV and drive in circles around the Coliseum, peeking every few minutes at the tiny white box. Or he’d set himself up in a place inside the clubhouse, white box in hand. He was like some tragic figure in Greek mythology whose offenses against the gods had caused them to design for him this exquisite torture: you must desperately need to see what you cannot bear to see.
Only every now and then Billy Beane did see. He’d permit himself a furtive glimpse of the action on live television, behind the closed door of Art Howe’s office. And when he did, he usually wound up needing to complain to someone, whereupon he’d go find Paul and David in the video room.
Tonight happened to be one of those nights, In the middle of the fourth inning, with the A’s still trailing 5-1, Billy appears in the doorway of the video room. He’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt soaked with sweat. His cheeks are flushed. In his hand is his little white box. He hasn’t watched the game exactly, but he has deduced its essence from his little white box.
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br /> “Fucking Hiljus,” he says. “Why doesn’t he just write them a note saying it’ll be coming down the middle of the plate?”
He actually doesn’t want to talk about the game. He wants to find a subject that will take his mind off the game. He turns to me. He’s heard that I have just come back from living in Paris. He’s never been to Paris.
“Is the Bastille still there,” he asks, “or did they tear it down after the Revolution?”
“Still there,” I say distractedly. I’m watching David Justice begin his second trip to the plate. I want to see what he does with whatever knowledge he acquired from watching himself cheated by the umpire. Who cares about the Bastille?
Billy Beane does. He’s intensely curious about it. He’s just now listening to some endless work of European history as he drives to and from the ballpark.
Justice quickly falls behind and Wells worries the outside corner of the plate. Wells knows what Justice knows, that the umpire will give the pitcher an outside strike he doesn’t deserve. They’re no longer playing a game; they’re playing game theory. This time Justice doesn’t take the outside pitches for the balls they are. He reaches out and fouls them off. Finally Wells makes a mistake, a pitch over the plate, and Justice lines a single to the opposite field.
“What’s it look like?”
“What?”
“What’s the Bastille look like?”
“It’s just a pile of rocks, I think,” I say.
“You mean you never went?”
I confess that I’ve never actually seen the Bastille. This kills Billy’s interest. I’m a Bastille fraud. His mind, having no place else to go, returns to the action on the video screens. Justice is on first with nobody out and Miguel Tejada is coming to the plate. That simple fact, at this early point in the season, is enough to set Billy off.
“Oh great,” he says, with real disgust. “Here comes Mister Swing at Everything.”
I look down at David’s chart. Mister Swing at Everything is who Tejada, on this night early in the 2002 season, seems to be. When I look up, Billy Beane is gone. For good. He’s taken his white box into his car and will drive the long way home, listening to European history, to make certain the game is over before he is anywhere near a television set.
Mister Swing at Everything has thus far in the game lived up to his reputation. Miguel Tejada had grown up poor in the Dominican Republic, and in the Dominican Republic they had a saying, “You don’t walk off the island.” The Dominican hitters were notorious hackers because they had been told they had to be to survive. For years the A’s had tried to beat out of Tejada his free-swinging ways, and they’d changed him a bit, though not as much as they’d hoped to change him. Still, their ideas are in his head. “Fucking Pitch!” Tejada screams to himself and the TV cameras each time he hacks away at some slider in the dirt or heater in his eyes. He’s gotten himself out twice so far this game and he may have grown weary of the experience, because he just watches as Wells’s first pitch passes across the heart of the plate. Wells, perhaps having decided that Tejada is beginning to worry about that one-way trip to Mexico, tries to come back to the same place, which he really shouldn’t do. Tejada meets the pitch with a quick crude stroke and crushes it into the left field bleachers. Yankees 5, Oakland 3. Goliath, meet David.
Two innings later, in the bottom of the sixth, David justice leads off the inning again, and this time draws a walk from Wells. Minutes later he crosses the plate, the score is 5-4 and the bases are loaded with two outs. The A’s leadoff hitter, Jeremy Giambi, steps into the box. The one talent every fan and manager in the game associated with a leadoff hitter was the talent Jeremy Giambi most obviously lacked. “I’m the only manager in baseball,” A’s manager Art Howe complained, “who has to pinch-run for his leadoff man.” Sticking the ice wagon in the leadoff slot had been another quixotic front office ploy. What Jeremy did have was a truly phenomenal ability to wear pitchers out, and get himself on base. In the first regard he was actually his brother’s superior. He draws a walk from Mike Stanton and ties the game at 5-5.
Inside the video room, for the first time, we can hear the crowd. Fifty-five thousand fans are beside themselves. The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.
In the top of the seventh, the A’s reliever Mike Magnante provides no relief. He gives up a double to Bernie Williams. Derek Jeter walks to the plate, Jason Giambi steps into the on-deck circle, and Art Howe brings in Jim Mecir. Mecir doesn’t trot, he hobbles out of the A’s bullpen. He really doesn’t look like a professional ballplayer—which is to say, I am beginning to understand, he looks like he belongs on the Oakland A’s. The Oakland A’s are baseball’s answer to the Island of Misfit Toys.
“What’s wrong with him?” I ask.
“He’s got a clubfoot,” says Paul.
I think he’s joking but he’s not. Mecir was born with two clubfeet. As a child he’d had operations to correct them but he still walked with a limp. Somehow he had turned his deformity into an advantage. His strange delivery he wasn’t able to push off the mound with his right foot put an unusually violent spin on his screwball. The pitch had proven to be ruthlessly effective against left-handed hitters.
Mecir walks Jeter. Giambi steps in. Mecir immediately attacks the hole in Giambi’s swing, the waist-high inside pitch. Screwball after screwball dives over the inside part of the plate. The first is a ball but the second is a strike and Giambi doesn’t even think of swinging at either one of them. The count is 1-1. The third pitch, Giambi takes for a ball. The odds shift dangerously toward him. Mecir defies them: another called strike on the inside corner. His fifth pitch should have been his last. It’s a thing of beauty; Giambi flinches as it passes him on the inside corner of the plate. Strike three. A cheer erupts in the video room.
The umpire calls it a ball.
It’s a terrible call, in a critical situation, bad enough to crack even Paul. “I’m sick of the fucking Yankees getting every call!” he shouts, then, looking for something to swat, settles on the wall. He leaves the video room. Even he doesn’t want to watch what happens next: you can’t give Jason Giambi four strikes and expect to live to tell about it. Giambi fouls off the next pitch and then drives the seventh pitch he sees into right field for a double, scoring two runs.
The A’s fail to score again. A few minutes after he’s done his impersonation of his boss, Paul returns to watch his team lose, wearing a mask of reason. After all, it was just one game. Nothing had happened to dissuade him that his original prediction for the A’s season (ninety-five wins and a play-off spot) was wrong. Ninety-five wins meant sixty-seven losses; this was just one of those. Or so he says.
As he does, Scott Hatteberg appears in the video room. He’s the third and final defective part assembled by the A’s front office to replace Jason Giambi. He wants to see his videotape.
Hatteberg had spent the first six years of his career as a catcher with the Boston Red Sox. He’d become a free agent at the end of the 2001 season and the Red Sox had no interest in signing him. He was, when Billy Beane signed him, a second string, washed-up catcher. And so here he was: the final piece of a messy puzzle. I watch him closely as he reviews his tape but can identify no deformity. He’s six one, 215, and the weight looks more like muscle than fat. He still has both arms, all ten fingers. He’s not obviously misshapen. His quick smile reveals a fine set of teeth. His hearing is above average, too. He overhears me ask Paul why Billy had eliminated the curious job created by Sandy Alderson: team shrink. “Some teams need psychiatrists more than others,” Hatteberg says. “In Boston we had an entire staff.”
Above-average wit, too.
“So, what’s wrong with him?” I ask, after he leaves.
“His catching career was over,” said Paul. “He got hurt and can’t throw.”
It turned
out that Scott Hatteberg had been on the Oakland A’s wish list for several years. He’d never done anything flashy or sensational. He didn’t hit an attention-getting number of home runs. He had never hit much over or under .270. He had the same dull virtues as David Justice and Jeremy Giambi: plate discipline and an ability to get on base. He, like them, was a blackjack dealer who understood never to hit on 19. The rest of baseball viewed Hatteberg as a catcher who could hit some, rather than as an efficient device for creating runs who could also catch. When he’d ruptured a nerve in his throwing elbow his catching days were finished, and so, in the eyes of most of baseball, was he. Therefore, he came cheap.
That he had lost his defensive position meant little to the Oakland A’s, who were forever looking for dirt-cheap opportunities to accept bad defense for an ability to get on base. One trick of theirs was to pounce on a player just after he’d had what appeared to be a career-threatening injury. Billy Beane had a favorite saying, which he’d borrowed from the Wall Street investor Warren Buffett: the hardest thing to find is a good investment. Hatteberg wasn’t like Jeremy Giambi, a minor leaguer they were hoping would cut it in the bigs. He wasn’t like David Justice, an aging star in rapid decline. He was a commodity that shouldn’t have existed: a big league player, in his prime, with stats that proved he had an unusual ability to create runs, and available at the new, low price of less than a million bucks a year. The only question Billy and Paul had about Scott Hatteberg was where on the baseball field to put him. Between Justice, who couldn’t play in the field every day and stay healthy, and Jeremy Giambi, who couldn’t play in the field every day and stay sane, they already had one full-time designated hitter. Hatteberg, to hit, would need to play some position in the field. Which one?
Chapter VIII
Scott Hatteberg, Pickin’ Machine
The lights on the Christmas tree were off, his daughters were in bed, his wife was asleep—and he was up, walking around. His right hand still felt like it belonged to someone else. He’d played half a season for the Red Sox with a ruptured nerve in his elbow, that he crushed each time he straightened his throwing arm. He’d finally caved, and had the nerve moved back where it was meant to be; but when the operation was over he couldn’t hold a baseball, much less throw one. He needed to reinstruct his hand how to be a part of a catcher’s body; he needed to relearn how to do a simple thing he had done his entire life, the simple thing he now did for a living.
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