The Boston Red Sox had given up on him—just last week, had traded him to the Colorado Rockies for infielder Pokey Reese. He was in his sixth year in the big leagues and eligible for arbitration and the Rockies quickly made it clear to him that they weren’t going to risk having some arbitrator say they had to pay Scott Hatteberg $1.5 million. A million and a half dollars actually wasn’t much for a guy who’d spent five years in the big leagues, but the Rockies thought it was three times what he was worth. Thinking no one else would take an interest in a catcher who couldn’t throw, they immediately granted Hatteberg his free agency. Then they proposed a deal: five hundred grand for one year. That was a 50 percent pay cut from the $950,000 he’d made in Boston the year before. Hatteberg refused. At midnight December 20, 2001, the Rockies’ rights to Scott Hatteberg expired; one minute later, at 12:01 A.M., Paul DePodesta, assistant general manager of the Oakland A’s, telephoned Hatteberg’s agent.
This was truly odd. Hatteberg hadn’t the slightest idea why the Oakland A’s were so interested in him. All he saw was that one major league baseball team treated him like a used carpet in a Moroccan garage sale, twenty-eight other teams had no interest in him whatsoever, and one team was so wildly enthusiastic about him they couldn’t wait till the morning to make him an offer. They pestered his agent on Christmas Day! When the Rockies heard that the Oakland A’s had called Hatteberg’s agent and initiated a bidding war, the team improved its offer. They wound up nearly matching Oakland’s money. So what? They wanted him just in case. Just in case something happened to some other guy. Billy Beane wanted him to play. Billy Beane wanted him to hit. Hatteberg told his agent to cut a deal with Oakland: one year with a club option for a second, with a base salary of $950,000 plus a few incentive clauses. The moment he signed it, a few days after Christmas, he had a call from Billy Beane, who said how pleased he was to have him in the lineup.
And, oh yes, he’d be playing first base.
Baseball players share with airline pilots the desire, when they aren’t working, to live in sensory deprivation chambers. In the off-season they can be found in clusters in central Florida, or the Phoenix suburbs. Hatteberg and his wife, Bitsy, had bought a house on a golf course just south of Tacoma, Washington. It wasn’t their dream house—they’d have to wait until he finished playing ball for the place on the water. It was a real estate antidote to professional baseball. It would hold its value and could be quickly and tearlessly sold. When he was on the road, he knew that his girls were safe. Here a barking dog counted as crime.
Late at night, the dogs knew not to bark. Puttering around, surrounded by walls of silence, trying and failing to get comfortable with what Billy Beane had just said, he came across relics of his career. Old catcher’s mitts, and old bats with his name branded into the barrel. Pictures of him at Washington State, where for three years he’d been the catcher. A framed jersey he’d worn as the catcher for Team USA in the 1990 Goodwill Games. Another he’d worn as the catcher for the Boston Red Sox. Catcher. He was a catcher. He’d been a catcher since he was ten years old. Two weeks ago he’d turned thirty-two. Twenty-two years behind the plate.
His living-room window looked out onto a blue-green fairway freshly carved out of a blameless Washington forest. Most guys golfed in the off-season; he preferred fly-fishing. The moisture on the fairway glistened in the artificial light. This time of year it was dark nearly half the time, and when it wasn’t dark it was raining.
First base!
Billy Beane had promised not to tell the press that he’d hired Scott Hatteberg to replace Jason Giambi. He couldn’t replace Giambi. Two guys couldn’t do it…. First base!
Scott Hatteberg realized that he had to do something. He was going nuts. He thought of the pair of asphalt tennis courts down the road, built as a sop to the few prisoners of this gated community who didn’t play golf. A few days after Christmas he strapped his daughters into their car seats, alongside his wife, his batting tee, a bucket of old baseballs, and a brand-new first baseman’s mitt. The girls he dropped in the sandbox beside the courts, Bitsy he asked to hit grounders at him off the batting tee. Mrs. Scott Hatteberg listed herself at five foot one, 100 pounds. She wasn’t built to hit in the big leagues. She didn’t even look capable of grounding out to first base.
Bitsy had noticed something about her husband. Even though he’d been in the big leagues for five years, and had been the starting catcher for the Boston Red Sox, he had never really thought of himself as a big league ballplayer. The other players volunteered their autographs to fans before games. He never did, not because he didn’t care to, but because he was worried they wouldn’t know who he was. He doesn’t admit this; she senses it’s true all the same. And she doesn’t particularly like it. It isn’t that she wants baseball fans to know who her husband is. She wants him to know that they know who he is. And so, from the end of December to the start of spring training, in the drizzling rain, with her daughters wailing that they want to go home, she whacks big league ground balls at her husband.
* * *
Ron Washington was the infield coach for the Oakland A’s. He’d actually played with Billy Beane when Billy was with the Minnesota Twins, but that isn’t why he was the infield coach. He was the infield coach because he had a gift for making players want to be better than they were—though he would never allow himself such a pretentious thought. Wash’s job was to take the mess Billy Beane sent him during spring training and make sure that it didn’t embarrass anyone by opening day. What Billy Beane sent him—well, Wash had some stories to tell. He was the one infield coach in baseball who could be certain that his general manager wouldn’t be wasting any money on fielding ability. When you asked Wash what it was like to be the infield coach for a team that would have started a blind man if he had a talent for getting on base, he’d grimace and say, “I seen some shit. I can tell you that.” There were times that Wash thought the players Billy sent him shouldn’t even bother to bring their gloves; they should just take their bats with them into the field, and hit the ball back to the pitcher.
Wash had about six weeks to turn Scott Hatteberg into the Oakland A’s starting first baseman. He took Hatty out onto the Arizona practice field, fed him grounders, and tried to teach him footwork. Reflecting on those grim times Wash would say, months later, “You could see he shouldn’t be out there. He was on his heels. He didn’t know where to go, what to do, how to do it. In the back of his mind he was saying, ‘I don’t want nothin’ to happen in my area.’ He’d do all the things that cause a fan in the stands to say, ‘That kid is horseshit.’ And what do he know? What do that fan know? He don’t know nuthin’! But he’d be right. He’d be right about Hatty. That kid was horseshit.”
Wash didn’t ever say to Scott Hatteberg, or even give him the slightest non-verbal hint, what obscenities might cross the mind of the typical fan watching him play first base. The first thing Hatty needed was a feeling of confidence, even if he had no right to the feeling. But in the big meetings at the end of spring training, when the A’s front office and his fellow coaches asked Wash whether Hatty was ready to be a big league first baseman, he’d said, “You can run him out there every three or four days but don’t you go thinking you can put him out there every day.”
From the first day of spring training Hatty experienced life at first base as a series of panic attacks. “There’s this thing about first base,” he says. “You can’t drop balls: any of them.” It was nerve-wracking, in part because he had no idea what to do, but also because the stakes seemed so high. “I assumed if I was horrible at first, they’d release me,” he said. He was horrible, but they didn’t release him. Come opening day there was a temporary spot available for him in the lineup: designated hitter. The A’s regular right fielder, Jermaine Dye, was taking longer than expected to recover from the leg he’d broken in a play-off game the previous year. That put David Justice in right field, and Jeremy Giambi in left, and opened up the DH slot for Hatteberg. To fill the h
ole at first base Billy Beane had traded for Carlos Pena, a sensational young minor leaguer who appeared ready to make a splash in the big leagues. “Everyone said that Carlos was going to be the next Alex Rodriguez,” said Hatteberg, “so once he arrived, I assumed I wouldn’t be playing first base.” When Dye came back, he further assumed, he’d be back on the bench.
That never happened. What happened instead is that, after starting out well enough, the team went into a tailspin. When the Yankees had come to town in late April the Oakland A’s had been 11-8. Three weeks later they were four games under .500 and falling fast. In mid-May they’d gone into Toronto and been swept by the Blue Jays. The Blue Jays. Hatteberg thought he had seen it all with the Red Sox, but what happened immediately after the A’s were swept by the Blue Jays was unique in his big league experience.
Like the other players, Scott Hatteberg sensed the Oakland A’s were managed oddly, by big league standards. The team, even when it was on the field, appeared to be run not by the field manager but by the front office. And the front office were apparently pissed off. In what amounted to a purge, Billy Beane sent down to the minors the team’s starting first baseman Carlos Pena, starting second baseman Frankie Menechino, starting pitcher Eric Hiljus, and right-handed setup man Jeff Tam. Jeremy Giambi, the starting left fielder, he traded to the Phillies for a bench player named John Mabry. In a matter of hours the A’s front office had jettisoned three of their starting eight, including one guy everyone had tagged as Rookie of the Year (Pena) and another guy everyone thought was the front office’s pet (Giambi). It was Scott Hatteberg’s first real experience of Billy Beane. His first thought: Oh my God, there is nothing this guy won’t do. Once again the team found itself without an everyday first baseman. By default, the job fell to him.
His performance, at the outset, lacked elegance. He labored over the most rudimentary task: getting into position to receive throws from other infielders. “It looks effortless when guys do it,” he said, “but it’s not. Trust me.” At first base the game seemed faster than it ever had to him as a catcher. A ball would be grounded sharply to short or third and the throw would be on him before he was ready. Where was his back foot? Where was the bag? Was anyone laughing yet? Simple pop flies he’d lose in the air and they would drop ten yards away from him in the Coliseum’s vast foul territory. “On a lot of the pop-ups I missed it wouldn’t even look like an error,” he said, “because I’d never get anywhere near the ball.”
And then something happened: the more he went out to play first base, the more comfortable he felt there. By late June he could say, with a smile, that “the difference between spring training and now is that when a ground ball comes at me now, my blood pressure doesn’t go through the roof.” A large part of the change was due to Wash. Wash got inside your head because—well, because you wanted Wash inside your head. Every play Hatty made, including throws he took from other infielders, he came back to the dugout and discussed with Wash. His coach was creating an alternative scale on which Hatty could judge his performance. He might be an absolute D but on Wash’s curve he felt like a B, and rising. “He knew that what looked like a routine play wasn’t a routine play for me,” said Hatty. Wash was helping him to fool himself, to make him feel better than he was, until he actually became better than he was. At the Coliseum it was a long way from the A’s dugout to first base, but every time Hatty picked a throw out of the dirt—a play most first basemen made with their eyes closed—he’d hear Wash shout from the dugout:
“Pickin’ Machine!”
He’d look over and see Wash with his fighting face on:
“Pickin’ Machine!”
Hatty sensed that he was naturally more athletic than most guys management hid at first base, and he was right. He began to relax. He began to want the ball to be hit to him. He began to feel comfortable. He began to feel himself. One of the things he had always enjoyed as a catcher was the chance to talk to the other teams’ players. First base was a far richer social opportunity. First base made catching feeling like a bad dinner party—what with the ump hanging on your shoulder and all the fans and cameras staring at you. At first base you could really talk. Posted on the bulletin board of the Oakland A’s clubhouse was a memo, signed by Bob Watson, from Major League Baseball:
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 “aboveaverage” 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.*
Despite hitting in a pitcher’s park, Hatteberg would finish the 2002 season tied—with A’s teammate Ray Durham—for thirteenth in the American League in on-base percentage. Behind him, in addition to the rest of the Oakland A’s, were a lot of multimillionaires you might not expect to find there: Derek Jeter, Johnny Damon, Nomar Garciaparra.
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.
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br /> 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.
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