The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  Bauer dominated, and Savage left him alone.

  Savage used to show up early to the facility when UCLA played midweek games, and he often found Bauer doing odd drills like flipping a car tire or engaged in resistance work with ropes and bands. A maintenance worker told Warren that Savage would look at Bauer, smile, and walk to his office. Bauer quickly ascended to stardom at UCLA. In 2011, he became the school’s first winner of the Golden Spikes Award, given annually to the best amateur player in the country. He was determined to chase down the Pac-10 career strikeout record set by Tim Lincecum, a number—491—he had written down and pinned to his bedroom wall back in Santa Clarita.

  In high school and college, Bauer was obsessed with Lincecum, the diminutive former San Francisco Giants ace, who won back-to-back Cy Young Awards in 2008 and 2009. Lincecum was one of the smallest pitchers in the National League, and likely the lightest. The idea that a pitcher with a skateboarder’s hair and body—all of five foot eleven and 170 pounds—could win multiple Cy Young Awards with an unconventional delivery fascinated Bauer, who sought out MLB.com highlight reels of Lincecum striking out an outrageous number of batters. Bauer also found video from multiple angles of Lincecum in college at the University of Washington, striking out eighteen batters against UCLA.

  “He was sitting 99 mph in the ninth, most electric shit ever,” Bauer says. “I still have that video burned in my head. I watched it so many times. I memorized how he moved.”

  Lincecum moved unlike any other pitcher. The normal stride length for a pitcher is about 80 percent of his height. Lincecum’s stride length was 130 percent, which allowed him to create more energy. Bauer had to create speed and energy in his throwing motion to make up for his lack of mass. He and his father saw it as a simple physics problem, Ek = ½mv2: kinetic energy is proportional to the mass of the object and its velocity squared. Bauer stood six feet and weighed 165 pounds as a college freshman, 170 as a sophomore, and 175 as a junior. The faster and more efficient (or direct) his path to the plate, the more he could make up for his frame. The next determinant of throwing velocity was how efficiently a pitcher could transfer energy up the kinetic chain, from his plant leg to his throwing arm.

  “In order for one segment to accelerate most efficiently, the prior segment has to stop completely,” Bauer says. “Any slowing of movement of the previous segment diminishes energy transfer to the second.”

  Lincecum was nicknamed “The Freak” due to his velocity-to-size ratio but also because of his athleticism. Bauer wasn’t the athlete Lincecum was. He made himself into a star and made his way into the Pac-10 record books. Bauer fell just short of Lincecum’s Pac-10 strikeout record, finishing with 460. But he did top Lincecum’s single-season mark of 199, set over 125 innings in 2006. Bauer struck out 203 batters in 136 2/3 innings in 2011, when he went 13–2 with a 1.25 ERA.

  Still, the team’s best player didn’t always mesh well in the locker room. “I can’t tell you I know Bauer,” former UCLA teammate Cody Decker told USA Today. “I spoke with Bauer one time, and I said, ‘I’ll never do that again. I’m good. I got my fill for a lifetime.’”

  And despite his success, Bauer did not pitch on Fridays, the day typically reserved for the best pitcher on a college staff. Gerrit Cole pitched on Fridays. Cole was different from Bauer in almost every way. At six foot four, 230 pounds, he was the archetype of a right-handed pitcher. But while Cole was bigger and threw harder, Bauer outperformed him in almost every measurable category. They were polar opposites in personality and interests, and at UCLA they formed a rivalry that has followed them both to the big leagues.

  Before the 2011 draft, Sports Illustrated reported that some amateur-scouting directors were put off by Bauer’s attitude. They didn’t like that he played Hacky Sack before games and listened to his iPod while warming up in the bullpen, and they didn’t like his faded blue hat. That a six-foot, 175-pound pitcher could be viewed as a first-rounder at all was a tectonic change attributable to one pitcher: Lincecum. “I owe a lot to Lincecum,” Bauer says. “He’s the only reason I went as high as I did in the draft. He kind of broke that barrier down.”

  The 2011 draft began on Monday, June 6, at 4 p.m. Pacific time. It was a poorly held secret that Bauer’s teammate, Cole, was going to be the first overall pick. The Pittsburgh Pirates preferred his size and top-end velocity to Bauer’s production. The Mariners, who held the second overall pick, had long been connected to the best available college position player, Rice third baseman Anthony Rendon. But the Mariners were growing more and more leery of Rendon’s lengthy injury history. Ninety minutes before the start of the draft, Bauer’s agent, Joel Wolfe, received a phone call: it was the Mariners, who claimed they were going to take Bauer second overall. They wanted to know his signing demands. Wolfe called his client.

  “Hey, would you rather go to the Mariners at two or the Diamondbacks at three?” Wolfe asked.

  Wolfe and Bauer had wanted to meet with all of the clubs drafting in the top ten. Some teams agreed to meet with Bauer; others did not. “They thought they were interviewing us,” Wolfe says. “We were interviewing them.” Bauer was willing to sacrifice dollars to land with a club that would be open to his training regimen.

  The Mariners hadn’t met with Bauer. Bauer preferred the Diamondbacks, whose vice president of scouting and player development, Jerry Dipoto, had gotten to know Bauer as well as any major-league executive in the predraft process.

  “I felt like I developed a good relationship with him. I saw things through his eyes,” Dipoto recalls. “It’s almost impossible to say that he hasn’t blazed a bit of a trail, because in 2011 as a draft eligible, there were so many rolling eyes and raised brows just watching his pregame routines.… He was the first guy that routinely got out there before a game and went through exhaustive long toss… and using the [shoulder tube] in the bullpen, things that you just hadn’t seen before then that now, frankly, from high schools and colleges to the pro game, it’s far more common.”

  Arizona promised Bauer he could continue his unorthodox training practices.

  Wolfe called the Mariners back and gave them an absurd asking price: $20 million. (Cole, the top pick, would sign for $8 million.) The Mariners declined and hung up. Bauer would not be going second overall. A little less than two hours later, the Mariners selected University of Virginia pitcher Danny Hultzen, whose career would be sidetracked by severe shoulder injuries. The Diamondbacks took Bauer third. “This is a chance for us to really explore what pitchers are capable of doing,” Dipoto said to Sports Illustrated after the draft.

  Bauer signed for $7.3 million on July 25. He debuted in High-A and advanced to Double-A, striking out 40 percent of the batters he faced in his first partial pro season. But at the end of October, Dipoto was hired by the Los Angeles Angels to be their general manager. The Diamondbacks had lost their only conduit between Bauer, general manager Kevin Towers, and the coaching and development staffs. For Bauer, this is where a lack of scouting and familiarity doomed the relationship and why human intelligence gathering will always have a role. “I’m certain that to some extent my leaving affected the communication with and around Trevor,” Dipoto says.

  The fit with the Diamondbacks was a disaster. Teammates found Bauer aloof, conceited. It’s true that he didn’t speak much or try to engage, he says, but only because he often felt he didn’t fit in and couldn’t find common ground in the clubhouse. For instance, Bauer says, he didn’t feel he could offer anything valuable to a conversation about hunting.

  To make matters worse, Bauer’s approach was antithetical to the team’s traditional practices. Early on, things went well enough. Bauer pitched his way quickly to the majors. He debuted on June 28, 2012, a little more than a year after being drafted, allowing two runs over four innings at Turner Field in Atlanta. But after his second major-league start, this time at home in Phoenix against the Padres, a crowd of reporters gathered around Bauer, voice recorders extended and cameras taping, as the rookie talked abo
ut the number of shake-offs and disagreements about pitch calls that he’d had with veteran catcher Miguel Montero. Bauer explained that he needed to do a better job of conveying his approach to pitching to Montero. The same pack of journalists then flocked to Montero and relayed Bauer’s comments.

  “What?” Montero said to reporters. “He’s going to tell me how to do my job?’’

  After the season, Bauer was traded. Derrick Hall, the Diamondbacks’ president, justified the trade to USA Today by throwing Bauer under the bus, saying, “Trevor just had a really tough year with his teammates.” Unnamed Diamondbacks sources quoted in the story described Bauer as a “loner.”

  The following season, Montero remarked, “When you get a guy like that and he thinks he’s got everything figured out, it’s just tough to convince him to get on the same page with you.… Since day one in spring training, I caught him, and he killed me because he threw about one hundred pitches the first day. The next time he threw I saw him doing the same thing. He never wanted to listen.”

  Falvey says, “Despite what maybe the view is of Trevor, he doesn’t think he has all the answers. He wants to dig to find more answers.”

  A few weeks after the initial visit, a contingent of Indians officials returned to the outskirts of Houston and invited Bauer to dinner at his go-to spot, Saltgrass Steakhouse. They wanted to learn more about this player the Diamondbacks couldn’t handle. They wanted to learn how to coach him.

  At dinner they listened to Bauer’s expectations and outlined their own. They assured him he would be permitted to maintain his routine, but he would have to be in the clubhouse, follow team guidelines, and be a good teammate. If he wanted to throw longer distances and use his own brand of mechanics, the Indians would let him. This was a clean slate.

  The Indians saw a chance to acquire an undervalued pitcher, of course. But Bauer suspected that they had other motivations.

  Cleveland had begun to reconsider many of its development practices. Although the team had begun, for example, to implement a weighted-ball program, Falvey says it wasn’t “robust.” If Bauer was successful, he could be an agent of change. He could give the organization a firsthand look at how to build better baseball players.

  “They needed a poster child,” Bauer says.

  After the Indians left, Bauer kept prepping for the next season. Wolforth regularly brought in speakers for his coaching clinics, and Bauer was intrigued by one of the presenters, who spoke about data collection and technology, including high-speed cameras similar to the one Bauer owned. There wasn’t a lot of technology at the ranch, and there weren’t many attempts to rigorously study skill improvement. After the talk, Bauer approached and said he had a problem. When he tried to record high-speed video of his delivery, frames would skip.

  “Oh, you have the wrong memory card,” the speaker said. “Your memory card is too slow. It should be that simple.”

  They exchanged cell numbers. Bauer texted a few days later to thank him and let him know that the problem was solved. The presenter’s name would come to be as associated with overturning tradition in baseball as Bauer’s: Kyle Boddy. Together, Bauer and Boddy would bring change just as seismic as the first revolution in player development almost a century earlier.

  3

  MAKING MULES INTO RACEHORSES

  Can you take me high enough

  to fly me over yesterday?

  Can you take me high enough

  It’s never over

  Yesterday’s just a memory

  —DAMN YANKEES, “High Enough”

  For several decades before Bauer arrived at the Texas Baseball Ranch, most major-league teams were set in their ways when it came to development, either hostile or indifferent to alternative ideas. But before that—for roughly the first fifty years of Major League Baseball—teams didn’t develop players. It’s not that they didn’t develop them well; it’s that they played almost no role at all in instructing them before they got to the game’s highest level. Instead, they acquired or purchased them premade.

  Well into the twentieth century, the minor leagues remained mostly unaffiliated with the majors. Each minor league and member team operated as an independent entity without a “parent club” to pay its expenses and reap the rewards by promoting the most appealing players. Before major-league teams could call up promising players from Triple-A, as they do today, they acquired talent by trading for or purchasing players from other big-league teams or minor-league teams, drafting players from the highest minor leagues who hadn’t already been auctioned off, or scouring the country for big-league-ready amateurs who had somehow eluded the network of other minor- and major-league teams that were trying to find them.

  Because players might pass through the payrolls of any number of autonomous organizations as they climbed the minor-league ladder, player development was—as Armour and Levitt put it in their 2015 book In Pursuit of Pennants—a “much more haphazard and less efficiently regulated” process than it is today.1 That system was, in today’s tech parlance, ripe for disruption, and the primary disruptor would be Branch Rickey, the baseball executive now best known (and deservedly celebrated) for signing and promoting Jackie Robinson, the first black player in the big leagues since the nineteenth century. Rickey, who’d briefly been a big leaguer before he made his name in management, was Bill James, Billy Beane, and Billy Graham rolled into one cigar-smoking, bushy-browed, bowtie-wearing athlete-intellectual. Decades before he and Robinson broke the color barrier—in Rickey’s case, both to right a glaring wrong and to tap a rich source of intentionally overlooked talent—Rickey, then a St. Louis Cardinals executive, revolutionized baseball by pioneering a method for stockpiling players and standardizing their development: the farm system.

  Rickey, who realized that trying to go dollar-for-dollar with wealthier clubs was a losing proposition, wired prized scout Charley Barrett, “Pack up and come home—we’ll develop our own players.” Starting in late 1919, Rickey and Cardinals president Sam Breadon began building a Cardinals-owned and -operated network of minor-league teams. In a pattern that repeats itself across centuries, baseball’s old guard belittled a boundary-breaking concept. “It’s the stupidest idea in baseball,” legendary Giants manager John McGraw said. “What Rickey is trying to do can’t be done.”2 It could. Frequent tryouts, Barrett’s scouting, and Rickey’s relationships with college coaches—along with his creative, quasi-legal approaches to retaining the rights to minor leaguers—fostered the first player-development machine, a factory for big leaguers.

  When roster rules relaxed in response to the Great Depression, the Cardinals upped their total from 3 farm teams in 1931 to 11 in 1932. They expanded further from there, inspiring copycat clubs (including the Yankees) that belatedly realized Rickey had stolen a march on the rest of the sport. As a writer for the Sporting News noted in 1937, the industry was rapidly “Rickeyized”: in 1920 there had been 3 affiliated farm teams, but by 1939 there were 168.3 The Cardinals’ count peaked at 32 in 1940, not counting a number of “working agreements” with teams the club didn’t own directly, which reportedly brought the total number of players at its beck and call to almost 800. As Armour and Levitt noted, in the first ten years of the relaxed roster rules, some teams averaged fewer than 3 farm teams per year, while the Cardinals averaged more than 20.

  Rickey later opined, “The farm system is the only vehicle that a poor club has available to it to use to mount into respectability competitively.”4 The Cardinals, whose strategy was predicated on Rickey’s player-development principle that “out of quantity comes quality,” quickly managed much more than respectability. From 1922, when Rickey’s first farm-system product debuted, through 1942, when Rickey decamped for the Dodgers, the Cardinals won more games than any team but the Yankees, claiming six pennants. After his departure, the club Rickey had constructed won three more pennants and two titles in four years and wouldn’t suffer a losing season until 1954. By then, the Rickey-built Dodgers were a perennial powerhouse,
and Rickey himself had moved on to the Pirates, where he was collecting the core of a club that would win the World Series in 1960.

  At that point, nearly every minor-league team was beholden to a big-league organization, completing what Armour and Levitt labeled “the most significant changes to the nature of team-building and talent acquisition during the first half of the twentieth century.”5 Rickey had been both the driver and the biggest beneficiary of those changes, but his contributions to development didn’t end there. Although he believed in buying players in bulk to stock his “chain store” system, Rickey recognized that the recipe for developing players wasn’t as simple as “sign and let simmer for several seasons.” A well-seasoned player requires some stirring.

  Rickey’s rivals believed players could improve only by playing in games, but he subscribed to the importance of practicing specific skills. During his four years as head baseball coach at the University of Michigan, Rickey, who years later invented the batting helmet, had designed the batting cage, which he conceived to help catchers like him, who had less time to hit because they were busy keeping balls from sailing away whenever their teammates swung through practice pitches. He also invented the sliding pit—a dirt patch where runners could perfect their approach to the base—and a system of strings that gave pitchers a primitive form of feedback as they aimed for the edges of the strike zone, helping them hone their command. Rickey brought these innovations to his inaugural big-league camp, and they were still staples of his teams’ training regimes decades later, tangible by-products of his belief that “sweat remained the best solvent” for almost any player’s ills.

  One of Rickey’s star pupils was the irascible but unbeatable second baseman Rogers Hornsby, who broke into the big leagues under Rickey in 1915. Rickey associate Rex Bowen later recounted that Rickey had helped Hornsby improve at the plate; as a young hitter, Hornsby had a tendency to pull balls foul down the third-base line, which Rickey corrected by forcing Hornsby to hit every ball to the right side of the pitcher every morning for ten days in a row, taking so many swings that Bowen said he “almost broke his thumb on a bat, working so hard to improve.”6