Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

This chapter explains how Billy Beane tried to keep the Oakland A’s competitive against teams that had far more money to spend on players. The inequality among teams in Major League Baseball was much greater than that within professional football or basketball, and in 1999, baseball commissioner Bud Selig created a blue-ribbon committee to investigate it. Overall, it concluded that the inequality had a harmful effect on baseball, but one member, Paul Volcker, wondered how the Oakland A’s could win so many games with their small budget. Billy Beane was brought in to testify, and he told them what they wanted to hear, going along with the idea that his club was just lucky, and that luck would soon run out.

In private, Beane didn’t believe this. He knew the A’s were exploiting inefficiencies in the game that other teams ignored. Indeed, the A’s went on to improve their record in both 2000 and 2001. In 2000, they had come close to defeating the Yankees in the playoffs. However, they faced a challenge in 2001 after the Yankees signed the A’s star player, Jason Giambi, to a $120 million contract when he became a free agent. How to replace Giambi and two other top players who left the A’s became a primary concern.

One player who left was Jason Isringhausen, a closing pitcher. To the A’s, this loss was “a happy consequence of a money machine known as ‘Selling the Closer’” (125). Unlike other teams, they felt that closers could be made from average pitchers relatively easily. Baseball insiders relied on the main closers’ statistic of saves. Beane and DePodesta, however, didn’t see much value in this, and they picked up cheap pitchers for closers and traded them when their stock rose based on their saves. Isringhausen had netted the A’s both Jeremy Brown and a new pitcher in the 2002 draft.

Another top player to leave the team was center fielder Johnny Damon, who left two holes to fill. Besides his fielding skills, he was the A’s leadoff hitter. DePodesta estimated that Damon’s offensive production could be made up by others. Not long after DePodesta had graduated from Harvard University, he had taken all the statistics from the 20th century for every baseball team and run them through a computer program, looking for those that most closely correlated with winning. One was on-base percentage. Damon’s on-base percentage for his last year with the A’s was .324, and DePodesta was confident others could accomplish that. DePodesta relied on a technique that had been pioneered by Wall Street in the 1980s: derivatives. In the financial world, new markets had been created by options and futures—really just pieces of stocks and bonds that had been divided up. In theory, the pieces put back together should be the same price as the original stock or bond. If they weren’t, it signaled an inefficiency that traders took advantage of to make money. The A’s did a similar thing with players: traded in “pieces.”

This same idea was used in the 1990s by a company called AVM Systems. Its owners analyzed ten years’ worth of games to get an average of what happens every time a ball was put into play. By dividing up the baseball field into a grid, they could determine the average outcome for every location a ball was hit to. Likewise, every play was divided up into its constituent elements. DePodesta used AVM’s method to devise his own system for the A’s. This allowed them to calculate every event’s impact on the team’s likelihood of scoring runs and be able to credit or debit each player for his actions. Damon’s defensive play could thus be assigned a number for how many runs he prevented the other team from scoring. Replacing this would be expensive based on the market, as the league place too high a value on defensive skills. To the A’s, however, it was also unnecessary, as it would simply be easier to make up the difference on offense by scoring more runs.

In Chapter 7, Lewis discusses how the A’s attempted to fill the hole left when their best player Jason Giambi left for the Yankees. He does this by describing a game early in 2002 when Giambi’s Yankees were in town to play the A’s. Lewis explains that Beane rarely watched his team’s games. Normally, he would work out in the weight room or drive around, only occasionally stopping into the video room to talk to Paul DePodesta. Thus, DePodesta was the one who guided Lewis through the game.

Already early in the first inning, Yankees were on base at third and first when Jason Giambi steps to the plate. DePodesta explains that Giambi was a master at controlling the strike zone. There was one small sliver inside the zone that was Giambi’s “hole”—a place he didn’t swing at because he couldn’t hit it well. However, that was just a few inches away from the sweet spot where Giambi would knock the ball out of the park. Pitching to him was clearly tricky. On the second pitch, he hits a single that drives the man on third to home.

When the A’s come to bat, DePodesta watches a special video from a camera trained perfectly on the strike zone; that’s all he’s interested in. He tells Lewis that they have analyzed all the team’s hitters and come up with a percentage representing how often each swung at a ball outside the strike zone. They use this to help them drill into the players how important it is not to swing and just try to get walked. This works to a limited degree; Beane is convinced it can’t really be taught.

During this time, outfielder David Justice comes in to check on the video of his time at bat. Justice was hired as one of the pieces of the puzzle to make up for Giambi’s lost offense. He’s the rare exception on the team, as he looks the part of the chiseled ball player the old scouts love, but he’s 36 years old. The previous year he appeared to lose a step and the rest of the league sees him as washed up. That’s the only reason the A’s can now afford him. They saw value in him because he drew a lot of walks and were trying to get another year or two of his good on-base percentage.

By the third inning, the Yankees were leading 5-1. Miguel Tejada hits a home run with another player on base, and the Yankees’ lead is cut to two. A couple of innings later, Justice scores, and the second player hired to make up for Jason Giambi comes to bat: Jeremy Giambi, Jason’s younger brother. Jeremy is not the player Jason is but, like Justice, has a commendable resistance to swinging and a solid on-base percentage. He gets walked, driving in a run, and the game is tied.

In the seventh inning, the Yankees go up again and hang on to win the game. Afterward, Scott Hatteberg enters the video room to see tape of himself. Hatteberg was a catcher who got injured and could no longer throw; like most of his teammates, his stock in the league had fallen so the A’s could afford him. He was the third player hired to replace Jason Giambi’s offense: “He had the same dull virtues as David Justice and Jeremy Giambi: plate discipline and an ability to get on base” (160). The only question left was what position he would play.

This chapter is about catcher Scott Hatteberg, who became a first baseman on the Oakland A’s, and why he was so valuable to his new team. The Boston Red Sox had traded Hatteberg when surgery for a ruptured nerve left him in need of serious rehabilitation. His new team, the Colorado Rockies, gave him free agency since they thought no one else would want him, and offered him only half his old salary. The A’s gave him a better offer, and he signed with them for the 2002 season.

The A’s staff was interested in Hatteberg’s hitting ability, but for him to be in the lineup he had to play a defensive position. Since he could no longer catch, they moved him to first base, replacing Jason Giambi. Hatteberg was nervous about the position change, let alone following in the footsteps of the famous first baseman. The A’s infield coach, Ron Washington, helped him transition until he became an adequate fielder in the summer of 2002, encouraging him by calling him a “pickin’ machine” when he made a good play at first base.

The team’s real interest in Hatteberg, though, was his hitting. He had always been a discerning, thoughtful hitter who was in no hurry to swing. Even if he felt he could hit a pitch, he wouldn’t swing if it wasn’t the right pitch for him. That is, if he thought he might pop up a fly ball or hit a grounder that would be easily fielded, he’d wait and take a strike. He wanted the pitch that was in his zone—one he could actually do something with. This he had patterned after his hero, former Yankee Don Mattingly, who was also patient. As a result, Hatteberg’s on-base percentage was well above the league average, and he helped wear down opposing pitchers from the high number of pitches he took.

Lewis explains that Hatteberg had always been a patient hitter even when teams tried to break him of the habit. On the Red Sox, he was often criticized for not swinging more. The hitting coach was Jim Rice, who had been a big slugger in his playing days and who used his own style as a template for everyone, calling out Hatteberg time and again for his more thoughtful approach. To the A’s, however, Hatteberg was just what they were looking for, and their treatment of him was the opposite of Boston’s. Hatteberg even kept notes of his record against opposing pitchers and watch tape of them to look for patterns, so he fit right in with Beane’s team. By the end of 2002, DePodesta had calculated that if a team were composed entirely of Hattebergs, his hitting statistics would have produced nearly 950 runs. The powerhouse Yankees only had 897 runs that year, leading Lewis to conclude, “Nine Scott Hattebergs are, by some measure, the best offense in baseball” (187).