The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Travis Sawchik and Ben Lindbergh

  Cover design by Ann Kirchner

  Cover image © Iasha/Shutterstock.com; Ostill/Shutterstock.com; SkillUp/Shutterstock.com

  Cover copyright © 2019 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Basic Books

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

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  First Edition: June 2019

  Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Basic Books name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

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  Editorial production by Christine Marra, Marrathon Production Services. www.marrathoneditorial.org

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019934700

  ISBN 978-1-5416-9894-9 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-5416-9895-6 (ebook)

  E3-20190511-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Powering Up

  1 Saviormetrics

  2 A Natural Maniac, an Unnatural Athlete

  3 Making Mules into Racehorses

  4 First Principles

  5 A Bottom-Up Revolution

  6 The 10,000-Pitch Rule

  7 The Conduit

  8 Perfect Pitch

  9 We’re All Astronauts

  10 SpinGate

  11 Amateur Ball

  12 The All-Star Player-Coach

  13 Performance-Enhancing Data

  14 Just Be Better

  15 Soft Factors

  16 If You Build Them, They Will Come

  17 No Ceiling

  Epilogue: The Residue of Design

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Authors

  Also by Travis Sawchik

  Praise for The MVP Machine

  Glossary

  Notes

  Index

  TO MY PARENTS, FOR MAKING ME A PROSPECT

  —BEN LINDBERGH

  FOR ALL THOSE WHO DIDN’T MAKE THE CUT

  —TRAVIS SAWCHIK

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  PROLOGUE

  POWERING UP

  The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.… Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  —ARTHUR C. CLARKE, “HAZARDS OF PROPHECY”

  Trevor Bauer steps onto a makeshift pitching mound at Driveline Baseball in Kent, Washington, a suburb south of Seattle. The throwing platform consists of a pair of black, rubberized weight-room mats covering a sloped plywood structure that mimics the shape and height of an actual mound. It’s January 3, 2018, three months before Opening Day.

  The Driveline campus, where inquisitive and often desperate ballplayer pilgrims gather to get better, consists of three buildings strewn about a drab industrial park that also serves as the site of a sewage disposal service, a glassblowing business, and a hydraulics company. Driveline’s R&D building, where Bauer spends much of his offseason, is a warehouse of a place, carpeted wall-to-wall with Kelly-green artificial turf. The main entrance is a roll-up garage door, usually left open to a vista of neighboring business units’ beige, vertically corrugated metal facades and an asphalt parking lot where a collection of modest cars rests. Opposite the door and along the far wall of the facility, occupying nearly the entire length of it, is the bullpen-like pitching area where Bauer is to begin throwing. The home plate he’s aiming for has a backdrop of black nylon netting to protect the nearby employees and desktop computers from ricochets.

  At the front of the mound is a wooden board, to which cling three small tracking devices used for biomechanical evaluations. Sawdust from the recently assembled, jury-rigged contraption has spilled onto the front of the mound. So much at Driveline is improvised because what was needed was either nonexistent or cost prohibitive. But this unpolished place has become Bauer’s lab. Every off-season he tries to get better at something, focusing his efforts on gaining a new skill. His goal this winter is to create a much-needed additional pitch.

  In his first three full seasons with the Cleveland Indians, 2014–2016, the right-hander was a roughly league-average starter, a useful player but far from the star he thought he could be. Then, at the end of May 2017, Bauer regressed. Hitters started crushing his fastball, giving him the worst earned run average in the majors (6.00) among qualified starters. There were calls for him to be sent to the Cleveland bullpen. His postgame press conferences grew testier and shorter; after one mid-May start, he ripped off and slammed down the television mic attached to his undershirt. Thanks to an increased reliance on his best pitch, a curveball, and greater use of his slider-like cutter, he was able to turn his season around and posted a strong second half. But he knew he could not be successful long term with the curve as his lone elite pitch, and the cutter variant he was throwing was uncomfortable and hard to command.

  Bauer believed the lack of a lateral breaking ball—a pitch that moved more east–west than north–south—was holding him back. He’d turn twenty-seven later that month, an age at which most players, particularly pitchers, have already reached their prime. But coupled with his fastball and his 12 o’clock-to-6 o’clock, vertically diving curveball, a dependable pitch that moved side to side could flummox hitters and elevate him from inconsistent to elite. He prescribed himself a new pitch: a slider.

  In a navy-blue, Indians-issued compression T-shirt and red shorts, Bauer moves to a table behind the indoor mound, where he’s positioned two cameras. One is his personal iPhone, which he employs to log and label each of his pitches. The other is an unusual-looking camera, a Carolina-blue colored cube with a protruding circular lens. That high-tech gadget, an Edgertronic SC1 manufactured by the San Jose company Sanstreak, is focused only on his grip of the ball and the initial flight of the pitch. Under tightly grouped pairs of fluorescent lights, Bauer goes to work on his great project of 2018.

  Clean-shaven, with his hair closely cropped, Bauer looks into the iPhone lens and speaks.

  “Normal slider arm slot, full spike,” he says.

  He looks down at his right hand, which is gripping a ball. The familiar horseshoe of red stitching makes contact with his skin in an unfamiliar way, running along his right thumb and middle finger. He digs his index finger into the white leather cover just inside his middle finger. He steps on the pitching rubber and then launches into his throwing motion and releases the pitch. As the ball travels, it seems to fall off an invisible table, moving more north–south than east–west. It bounces well before the plate. A speed of 71.7 mph registers on the electronic radar-reading board, which sits on the carpet just behind the left-handed batter’s box.

  During the season, television cameras and
pitch-tracking systems capture the movement of all of Bauer’s pitches from major-league mounds. But those technologies can’t tell him what the little blue box behind the mound at Driveline can: exactly how the ball is coming out of his hand. At hundreds of high-def frames per second, the Edgertronic shows with perfect clarity how his right arm moves and his fingers impart spin to the ball as it’s released. Examining the video between sets of pitches, Bauer sees the ball first lose contact with his thumb and then separate from his middle finger. His spiked index finger, its fingertip and nail raised vertically and jabbed into the surface, touch the ball last before it flies, subtly altering the axis of its spin. If he times this sequence just right, he’ll create the perfect spin axis and produce the pitch movement he wants.

  Bauer checks his grip and his wrist position, looks toward the cameras, and speaks again. “Normal slider arm slot, half spike, pitch number two.”

  Again, the pitch dives too vertically, but less vertically than with the full-spike slider grip. Bauer subtly adjusts his fingers. Working in concert with the Edgertronic video at Driveline is a Rapsodo radar and optical tracking unit, a portable system that measures velocity, spin, and spin axis. Under an array of electronic eyes, Bauer extends his right arm to the camera once again: “Normal arm slot, no spike.”

  He sets into a ready position and makes his move down the mound. This time the pitch moves more laterally, breaking in toward an imaginary left-handed batter. The offering is closer to what he’s seeking: a pitch whose shape and movement would fit between his fastball and curveball.

  Bauer throws his second no-spike slider, releasing it with a grunt. This one is his best pitch of the morning. It moves sharply and laterally at 73 mph and, with a thud, smacks into the rubber pad attached to the L-screen, roughly where a catcher would squat. Next, he tries a half spike with a drop-down angle. The pitch has more vertical break and looks closer to his curveball: an adjustment in the wrong direction.

  The cluster of expended baseballs widens around the home-plate area. After about fifty throws, Bauer collects the balls in a bucket. Then he begins again.

  1

  SAVIORMETRICS

  Welcome to the machine

  Where have you been?

  It’s all right, we know where you’ve been

  You’ve been in the pipeline, filling in time

  Provided with toys and Scouting for Boys

  —PINK FLOYD, “Welcome to the Machine”

  In the early and late hours of October 27, 2018, the baseball world (or at least the part that was awake) focused its attention on a group of high-performing players that no one had thought much of a few years before.

  Shortly after midnight in Los Angeles—seven hours and twenty minutes after the first pitch of World Series Game 3 and four innings after the fourteenth-inning stretch—the Dodgers’ Max Muncy drove a fly ball over the fence in left-center in the bottom of the eighteenth to beat the Boston Red Sox in the longest postseason game ever played. In one way, Muncy was an obvious candidate to end the ordeal with one swing: during the regular season, he hit a home run every 11.3 at-bats, the best rate of any hitter who played at least fifty games. Considering his history before that, though, Muncy’s hero status was astonishing.

  In limited playing time with the Oakland Athletics in 2016, Muncy was one of the worst hitters in baseball. The A’s released him the following spring, and he sat on the sidelines for almost a month until the Dodgers handed him a minor-league contract. While he was waiting (and pondering a future outside sports), he returned to his high-school batting cage and revamped his approach at the plate, lowering his stance, shifting his hands on the bat handle, and learning to take more aggressive swings. He hit well in 2017 at Triple-A, but the back of his uniform still said “Muncy,” so he stayed in the minors in 2018 until the injury-depleted Dodgers, desperate for a healthy hitter, called him up in mid-April. He homered in his first start and raked for the rest of the year, slashing .263/.391/.582 to finish the season as the second-best batter in the National League. Muncy, a marginal player in no demand, entered 2018 with a career record in the red and, at age twenty-eight, became the most valuable full-season player on a pennant-winning team.

  The pitcher who gave up the walk-off winner after unexpectedly being pressed into service for six-plus innings in that extra-long game was Red Sox swingman Nathan Eovaldi, another twenty-eight-year-old who was released after the 2016 season, setting up his own dramatic turnaround. Eovaldi sat out 2017 after tearing his ulnar collateral ligament, but even before the injury, the righty had been a below-average run preventer for three consecutive seasons, despite possessing one of the game’s fastest fastballs. When he resurfaced after Tommy John surgery, Eovaldi boasted not only a new ligament but also a new look, featuring fewer (and higher) four-seam fastballs, more cutters, and less indication of which one was coming. The modifications made all the difference: in 2018, he posted the highest strikeout rate and lowest walk rate of his career, which prompted Boston to acquire him at the trade deadline. After the series, he qualified for free agency, and the Red Sox re-signed him to a four-year $68 million deal, banking on the altered Eovaldi being better than the original.

  With the Dodgers’ bullpen depleted after a parade of nine pitchers got them through Game 3, the team turned to an unlikely left-handed savior in Game 4, which began less than seventeen hours later. A few months away from his thirty-ninth birthday, with pouches under his eyes and a goatee graying at the edges, Rich Hill was the oldest player on either roster and a product of perhaps the most improbable path to the series. From 2008 to 2015, Hill was released three times and changed teams ten times, pitching a total of 182 below-average big-league innings, mostly in relief, amid injuries and minor-league exiles. At the end of that span, the Red Sox signed him out of independent ball, and one conversation with Boston’s Brian Bannister—a former fringy major leaguer turned analytical coach—convinced him to trust his underutilized curveball, a special, high-spin pitch that immediately made him one of baseball’s best inning-per-inning arms. Of the 190 pitchers who amassed at least seventy-five innings in 2018, only 11 threw slower fastballs, on average, than Hill, but Bannister’s former protégé allowed only one hit over 6 1/3 innings against his old team, baffling Boston to such a degree that his removal from the game, and the Dodgers’ subsequent defeat, prompted the President to send a second-guessing tweet.

  Playing behind Hill were third baseman Justin Turner and left fielder Chris Taylor, co-MVPs of the 2017 National League Championship Series. Turner was an itinerant twenty-eight-year-old utility type with a below-average bat in the winter of 2013–2014, when he changed his stroke and his future with the help of a nearly unknown swing whisperer named Doug Latta, who transformed a nondescript industrial-park unit in suburban Los Angeles into a factory for line drives. Latta helped Turner tap into power no one knew he had, and over his following five seasons for the Dodgers, this reject of the Mets and Orioles organizations was one of the fifteen best hitters in baseball at an age when players typically decline. Before his own breakout, Taylor’s slap-hitting, low-leverage stroke had produced only one homer in almost three hundred at-bats in the big leagues. Then a second suburban Los Angeles swing instructor took a sad swing and made it better. In 2017, Taylor hit twenty-one homers.

  Boston’s cleanup hitter in Game 4, J.D. Martinez, was another face of the fly-ball revolution who rejected a swing designed for singles the same winter Turner did. Martinez’s team at the time, the Houston Astros, released the twenty-six-year-old the next spring, not knowing what they had. He went on to top Turner, rating as one of the five best hitters in baseball over the following five years. After signing a five-year free-agent contract with the Red Sox in 2018, Martinez became the first player to win two Silver Slugger Awards (outfield and designated hitter) in the same season, doubling up on an honor bestowed annually on the best offensive player at each position.

  Some standout players took less circuitous paths to the series. Red
Sox right fielder Mookie Betts, for one, made the majors at twenty-one and excelled immediately. But even elite players have room for improvement. In 2018, Betts secretly tweaked his swing and learned from his teammate Martinez. He then vaulted toward the top of virtually every offensive leaderboard, outpacing all other players in both batting average and slugging percentage and winning a well-deserved MVP award. In Game 5, both Betts and Martinez hit home runs off Clayton Kershaw as Boston beat LA to take the Series 4–1.

  If there was one theme to October—other than really long games—it was the presence of players like these, who embodied a movement that’s transforming (and transcending) the sport. It wasn’t just the last two teams standing whose rosters were studded with stories of deliberate, dramatic development. The full playoff field featured many more. Inside a rented retail space in Harlem that he turned into a high-tech pitching lab, Colorado Rockies reliever Adam Ottavino built a new pitch from scratch and gained command of an old one. Atlanta Braves catcher Tyler Flowers studied data to make himself baseball’s best pitch-framer, capable of stealing extra strikes by receiving borderline pitches smoothly. The team Boston toppled in the American League Championship Series, the defending-champion Astros, bounced back from their big whiff with Martinez by becoming the kings of acquiring underperforming pitchers—including Collin McHugh, Charlie Morton, Justin Verlander, Gerrit Cole, and Ryan Pressly—and implementing a few fixes to help them reach greater heights.

  No individual player has pushed the movement forward more than the innovative and controversy-prone Trevor Bauer, who has proclaimed himself “the foremost expert on pitch design” and “one of the most scientific players in MLB.” Those aren’t empty boasts. Bauer has attacked tradition, unafraid of the friction it created, and embraced every idea and piece of technology he thought might make him better. In the winter of 2017–2018, he designed a new and nasty pitch in a nondescript Seattle facility that’s become a hub for bleeding-edge ballplayers, Driveline Baseball. The addition to his arsenal made him an AL Cy Young Award contender.