The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  PECOTA and its successors, both public and private, brought a new level of accuracy and rigor to baseball prognostication by counteracting the cognitive biases that steer humans wrong. A projection system doesn’t fall for a player because it saw him have a hot home stand or smack a game-winning hit. Nor does it write him off because it happened to catch him on a day when he went 0-for-4 with four strikeouts or hit into hard luck. Although projection systems are smart, they’ve traditionally lacked imagination. Public projections are based largely on a player’s past performance, weighted by recency and adjusted for his competition, ballpark, age, and other factors. PECOTA assigns greater odds of a breakout to particular players, based on their builds, ages, skill sets, or comparable players from the past, but only up to a point; it will never predict great things for a player who’s only been bad before.

  On the whole, that reluctance to expect unprecedented performance serves such systems well, insulating them from fans’ willingness to persuade themselves that every hot streak reflects a permanent improvement flowing from a new stance, a new swing, a new grip on a pitch, or some other magical mechanical tweak. Sometimes those tweaks are irrelevant; sometimes they’re real but tough to sustain. At other times, though, a player who appears to be a changed man actually is one. And the first team to find him—or to make more like him—will leap closer to first place. Every team now knows which players are projected to be good. But the best teams are discovering ways for players to accomplish what they aren’t projected to do.

  “There are real stories out there of guys who in another era would have just flamed out as minor leaguers and were able to change their profile to turn themselves into big leaguers,” Forst says. As Andy McKay puts it, “All bets are off.”

  Player development has inspired fewer titles in the boundless baseball library than any other vital aspect of the game. It’s an arduous, opaque process that unfolds far from view, on back fields, in bullpens and batting cages, and in seemingly low-stakes games that until recently most fans had no way to watch. As far as many fans are concerned, players disappear after draft day, encased in cocoons from which some emerge as beautiful baseball butterflies, while most wither away, forever forgotten or, if they’re particularly talented, lamented for failing to molt.

  But there’s magic in the moments that propel polished players to major-league mounds and batter’s boxes, even if they often occur off camera. Scouting stories supply the thrill of love at first swing, and books in the Moneyball mold chronicle the moments when the wins come fast and furious and the champagne pops. Development sits somewhere in between, but without it, many of the scouting discoveries would be wasted, and many of the wins wouldn’t come. “For all of the unceasing talk of money in baseball, of salaries, of taxes, of revenues shared and unshared, the only path to success is through player development,” wrote Baseball Prospectus cofounder Joe Sheehan in October 2018.

  In November 2015, Russell Carleton published a piece on the BP website that was part plea and part clarion call, titled “I Want to Write about Player Development.” He acknowledged that it wouldn’t be easy: below the majors, there’s less publicly available data, less knowledge of what players are working on, and less importance attached to wins and losses. But prying open baseball’s last black box and settling its final frontier would be worth the work. “Everyone’s always looking around for the #NewMoneyball and, frankly, it’s staring right at them,” Carleton wrote. “Young, cost-controlled players return value—on average—at a dollar-per-win rate that’s about half what a team would pay on the free-agent market. And that’s just the average. If a team is any good at player development, it can assemble a roster of young, cost-controlled players and ride that wave for a long time. If a team could nail down player development, they’d have a bit of an edge, wouldn’t you say?”

  We would, and we will.

  “I don’t think people realize that if you’re a Moneyball team right now, you’re getting your ass handed to you,” says one quant for an MLB club. “When you hear the smart teams saying they use analytics now, they’re not saying they’re doing Moneyball. They’re saying they’re doing the thing that comes after.” This new phase is dedicated to making players better. It’s Betterball. And it’s taking over. As Mariners GM Jerry Dipoto remarks, “We’re moving at a hyperpace compared to the prehistoric crawl of the saber revolution.”

  Minnesota Twins chief baseball officer Derek Falvey is another of the architects trying to build a team that embodies this movement. “We talk about what’s the next frontier,” he says. “Analytics. OK. [Player] selection? We have models. Don’t get me wrong, we need to improve those selection models. But I think development, if we can find ways to do that better than the other twenty-nine clubs, that’s where we have a chance to make an impact.”

  In ballparks and seemingly modest independent facilities across the country, we’re witnessing the fruits of an incipient revolution in player development—one with the potential to upend the sport’s competitive landscape. Teams have a stronger grasp than ever on what makes players valuable. Now they’re zeroing in on how to turn nonprospects into prospects, middling major leaguers into MVP candidates and, less dramatically but on an even more widespread scale, good big leaguers into better big leaguers. And it’s not just teams: curious and data-savvy players are now empowered to improve themselves, sometimes acting in concert with the outside instructors who started the movement. Moneyball began above the field level, in executives’ offices and number-crunchers’ cubicles. Its successor and supplanter started far from MLB’s bright lights.

  2

  A NATURAL MANIAC, AN UNNATURAL ATHLETE

  No bird soars in a calm.

  —WILBUR WRIGHT

  John Boyd worked as a tactical instructor at Nellis Air Force Base in the Nevada Desert, like a proto-Viper from Top Gun. For five years in the 1950s, Boyd flew multiple times a day against fighter pilots training in F-100 Super Sabres. He observed, recorded, and analyzed the positions of his plane and opponents during mock combat engagements. He had a standing bet that in forty seconds or less, he could defeat anyone in the skies. The former fighter pilot from the Korean War reportedly never lost. During his hours in the cockpit, Boyd studied the most efficient way to gain an advantage. He knew that when turning, a plane would either slow down or lose altitude because it lost energy. “Boyd concluded that maneuvering for position was basically an energy problem,” wrote aircraft designer Harry Hillaker. “Winning required the proper management of energy available at the conditions existing at any point during a combat engagement.”1

  Boyd found that a plane’s top speed was not nearly as important as how quickly it could maneuver and climb. Prior to Boyd, there was little science to piloting. It was seen as an art. Then Boyd wrote the book: Aerial Attack Study. He applied physics to dogfighting. He changed how planes were built and how pilots fly. He played a key role in the development of the F-16, one of the most successful fighter jets in history. He was also impossible.

  Author Morgan Housel, a former Wall Street Journal columnist and a partner at the Collaborative Fund, wrote about Boyd in a blog post on the fund’s website in August 2018. He described Boyd as rude, impatient, and disobedient, writing, “He talked back to superiors to the astonishment of his peers.” His behavior in meetings could be crude and unseemly. “This brilliant young officer is an original thinker,” one review of Boyd read, “[but] he is an impatient man who does not respond well to close supervision. He is extremely intolerant of those who attempt to impede his program.”

  Housel used Boyd as an example of the personality and obsession of eccentric genius. He compared Boyd’s behavior to that of Tesla founder Elon Musk. Housel described them as “natural maniacs,” writing, “A problem happens when you think someone is brilliantly different but not well-behaved. When in fact they’re not well-behaved because they’re brilliantly different.”

  In the summer of 2018, Trevor Bauer retweeted the blog entry. Housel ha
d come as close as anyone to understanding him.

  The most public case in which Bauer believed he had been misunderstood occurred in October 2016. The Indians were in the playoffs, and Bauer was supposed to start Game 3 of the American League Championship Series. He took the mound in Toronto with black stitches sewed into his right pinky finger, which was caked with dried blood. He couldn’t keep it bandaged because MLB rules prohibit pitchers from applying foreign substances to their pitching hands. After his first few pitches, fresh blood streamed from Bauer’s finger. The stitches hadn’t held. Bauer was pulled from a postseason start because of a first in baseball injury history: a drone accident.

  Days earlier, when Bauer had plugged in his drone to charge its battery, the device malfunctioned. Its propellers started to whirl, slicing open his pinky. Some saw flying drones in the midst of the playoffs as an irresponsible act. But building drones wasn’t just a hobby for Bauer. His construction projects were a way to give himself a break from baseball for an hour or two a day. He was obsessed with a different engineering effort: building himself into the best pitcher possible. What some didn’t understand about Bauer was that few, if any, professional baseball players were as driven to become better.

  The collection of curious Indians officials traveled as other hopefuls had, along Honea Egypt Road, a two-lane path of pavement in rural Montgomery, Texas (population 621), fifty-five miles north of Houston. They slowed as they approached a white, split three-rail fence, a common cattle enclosure, which marked the perimeter of the sprawling property. Then the caravan turned onto the gravel driveway. It had arrived at the Texas Baseball Ranch.

  The complex, resting in the middle of grazing country, seemed an unlikely talent incubator. There were no immaculate fields or training centers. Instead, much of the work took place inside a simple, steel-arched edifice, which looked like a cheap hangar for a small plane or a giant tin can cut in half and stuck, sideways, in the ground. The facility lacked all imaginable frills, including air conditioning, even in in the oppressive heat and humidity of midsummer Texas. The office was housed in a shed-like building. There was an overgrown field at the back of the property alongside patches of AstroTurf, improvised areas for drill work. It was hard to imagine a setting further removed from the baseball establishment.

  These humble surroundings suited Bauer fine; he was put off by ostentatious training facilities. As an amateur, his ball cap had been well-worn in high school and faded light blue in college at UCLA, drenched in sun and sweat. As he sat behind an elevated table for a postgame press conference at the College World Series in 2010, his hat was several shades lighter than those of the teammates to either side. He was asked about the contrast.

  “I don’t like hats that stick up in the corners,” Bauer said. “They make you look like a conductor.” The back of the room broke into laughter. Bauer smiled. “So when I find a hat that fits and the corners stay down, I stick with it.”

  After college, when Bauer was entertaining offers from agencies prior to the draft, he was courted by the sports division of the massive talent agency CAA. When he arrived at their fourteen-story, glass-and-steel building in Los Angeles, luxury cars lined a valet parking lane. There were reps in expensive suits. The building had its own movie theater. Those bells and whistles made Bauer uncomfortable, so he passed on CAA and chose the Wasserman agency, whose reps greeted him wearing jeans. “Good information can come from any environment, any look,” Bauer says. “A lot of times I am more comfortable in lesser-looking environments. It seems to suit the idea that it’s all about the information and the work and the ideas.”

  In the rental car arriving at the Texas Baseball Ranch in the winter of 2012–2013 were Indians president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti, manager Terry Francona, and codirector of baseball operations Derek Falvey. They were working to revamp their player-development practices, and they came in search of ideas. But the primary reason for their visit was to learn more about the subversive, iconoclastic Bauer, whom they had just traded for earlier in December, eighteen months after the Arizona Diamondbacks had drafted him third overall. Trading such a high draft pick in such a short time was highly unusual. In fact, prior to Bauer, the only top-three pick ever dealt so soon after the draft was 1973’s second selection, Phillies catcher John Stearns, who was moved eight days faster than Bauer because he was blocked by big-league backstop Bob Boone.

  That winter, Bauer had temporarily taken up residence at the ranch, as had become his off-season routine. He was the first major leaguer to do so.

  For three days in Montgomery, Texas, the Indians officials trailed Bauer, who remembers them asking questions about his routines: “Hey, why are you doing this? Walk us through your thinking.” They took Bauer to lunch. Francona and Antonetti took the rental car, and Bauer offered Falvey a ride in his sports car. As they drove to their lunch destination, they made an immediate connection. “We’re pitching nerds,” Falvey says. “From there, I got to see his workouts. I got to see what he was doing. Better development. At the core of it, that is what Trevor is trying to do.” It was the beginning of a productive relationship and what Falvey describes today as a friendship.

  Bauer says his entire career has been a triumph of development over the limits of his natural ability.

  “I wasn’t a natural-born athlete,” Bauer told a Sports Illustrated reporter in August 2011. “I’m not that strong. I’m not fast. I’m not explosive. I can’t jump.” So how was he selected third overall in the major-league draft? “I was made.”

  I was made.

  If that was true—if Bauer was made, and in a way that turned conventional baseball training and thinking on its head—then his career could have dramatic ramifications for beliefs about learning and skill development. Nearly six years after being traded, Bauer is an elite among the elite. Yet in the midst of his Cy Young Award chase in 2018, he insists again that he’s a poor natural athlete. He believes more than ever that he’s a successful baseball construction project, an engineering feat.

  “My sixty-yard times are ridiculously slow. Power output? How much weight I can lift? A lot of that can be training, but the speed at which I can move [the weight].… It’s not powerful. I think that’s a lot of what athletics is. You look at football. What makes a guy a good athlete? He’s strong, powerful, he can run fast, very quickly change direction. Basketball? Can he jump? Is he quick? Does he have good hand-eye coordination?”

  He pauses.

  “Well,” he concedes, “maybe I have good hand-eye coordination.” (He was caught catching batting-practice (BP) fly balls behind his back in 2018.) “But if you look at all those sports and pool the attributes and ask, ‘What makes someone a good athlete?’, I am not good at them.”

  In college, after every home start he made at UCLA, his father, Warren Bauer, took Trevor back across the 405 Freeway to have dinner at a Denny’s in Westwood Village. Trevor always ordered the Lumberjack Slam, an infusion of grease and carbs. Asked what natural gifts, if any, his son possessed, Warren doesn’t hesitate. He reaches for his smartphone and pulls up a YouTube video, a TED Talk presented by Angela Lee Duckworth.

  Duckworth had left a management-consulting job to teach seventh graders math in New York City schools. She soon observed that IQ alone was not a reliable indicator of the difference between her best and worst students. She became convinced every one of her students could master the material if they worked “hard and long enough.” Her experience led her to believe that educators must better understand learning from motivational and psychological perspectives.

  Duckworth then left teaching to study psychology. She examined the performance of children and adults in challenging settings, always exploring the same questions: Who is successful, and why? She tried to predict which West Point cadets would stick in the military. She forecasted which contestants would advance furthest in the National Spelling Bee. She administered a questionnaire to Chicago high-school students and analyzed the responses of the ones who
graduated. One characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. It wasn’t IQ. “It was grit,” she told the TED Talk audience. “Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in and day out. Not just for the week or month, but for years. And working really hard to make that future a reality.” If Trevor possessed any rare attribute, Warren thinks, he had grit.

  To Duckworth, who had spent much of her professional career studying it, the most surprising thing about grit “is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it.” What she did know is that natural talent did not make someone “gritty.” If anything, her data showed that grit was inversely tied to measures of talent. “The best idea I’ve heard about teaching grit in kids is something called growth mindset,” Duckworth said.2

  Growth mindset is a characteristic defined by Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, whose research suggests that the way we think about our abilities is a key to shaping talent. Dweck defined a fixed mindset as one that assumes that a skill, ability, or attribute cannot be improved or changed in a significant way. Cultural critic Maria Popova writes that with a fixed mindset, “avoiding failure at all costs becomes a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled,” whereas a growth mindset regards failure not as evidence of stupidity or lack of ability but as a “heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities.”

  If there is any case study in grit and growth mindset in professional baseball, it’s Bauer. Back in the fall of 2012, the Indians wanted to learn how Bauer had made himself into an elite amateur pitcher and a promising professional pitcher. But they also wanted to understand why the Diamondbacks were so eager to part ways with their third overall pick. Bauer had a reputation, and Cleveland had heard the complaints: a bad teammate, a loner, stubborn, difficult, and uncoachable. Although Bauer acknowledges that he brought some of that on himself, he thinks much of the labeling was unfair. But once the labels adhered, few bothered to question their legitimacy.