Maguire’s study, Anders Ericsson wrote, in Peak, “is perhaps the most dramatic evidence we have that the human brain grows and changes in response to training.” Bauer, who believes he was made into a major-league pitcher, has always understood that his skills could grow. He is obsessed with skill acquisition. If you ask him about myelin, a substance in the brain, he’ll correct your pronunciation (mīln) before explaining that myelin is a fatty tissue that forms insulating sheaths around nerve fibers in the brain that increase the speed at which impulses are conducted. Myelin is the brain’s bandwidth. The more a person practices a certain act, the more myelin is created along that particular pathway, enabling the brain to send faster, more efficient signals. The power of myelin means that talent is not fixed.
“I have to go beyond 100 percent of what I can currently do,” Bauer says. “I have to find a way to increase my skill set and maximize it.”
In 1993, Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University, published a study in which he reported the “estimated accumulated hours of practice” among various types of musicians, from novices to experts.2 His findings suggested that people could change their performance levels more than was commonly assumed. The study, which revealed that expert musicians had logged many more hours of practice than amateurs and weren’t simply more “gifted,” reached only a small audience until the popular author Malcolm Gladwell stumbled across it and used it to coin what he called the 10,000-hour rule of practice, a concept he introduced in his bestselling 2008 book Outliers. Ericsson would later clarify that more important than the amount of time one practiced was the quality of the training. Gladwell, he wrote, “didn’t distinguish between the deliberate practice that musicians in our study did and any sort of activity that might be labeled ‘practice.’” Just practicing an instrument for ten thousand hours doesn’t mean you’ll master it. The accumulation of deliberate practice—focused work with intent—is the key to quicker achievement of expertise.
When it came to gaining expertise, Ericsson didn’t believe in shortcuts. Bauer, on the other hand, felt he had to find quicker routes to acquire new skills and maximize his career. He needed to find a more efficient way to train. Even Bauer didn’t have the ability to deliberately practice for ten thousand hours in one off-season. Moreover, he knew that Father Time catches up with and erodes all athletes’ abilities. He was twenty-seven. By his early thirties, he’d be in decline from his physical peak.
If Bauer wanted to achieve his lofty ambitions, he’d have to expand his pitching repertoire. But adding a new slider in one off-season—a pitch he could confidently throw in high-pressure situations to the best hitters on the planet—would be no easy task.
To quickly develop his slider, he needed “more feedback in the loop,” he says, a more efficient way to acquire the kind of subconscious mastery and command (more myelin) over a pitch that is required to succeed on the mound. Pitchers call this feel. “It feels good coming out of my hand,” Bauer explains. “So when you start struggling with it, you try this and you try that. You try to get that feel back.… If you’re lucky, it’s a monthlong process, if you happen to find it quickly. Sometimes it’s a year. Sometimes it never comes back. That massively changes your career trajectory.”
Until recently, much of the physics at work when a professional pitcher hurls a baseball were mysterious. The hand of an MLB pitcher has an angular velocity of thousands of degrees per second, too fast for the human eye or even a regular high-definition digital camera to capture clearly. Thus, the exact manner in which a pitcher’s grip imparts spin to a ball has been unknowable. Over the history of the sport, most pitchers have pursued new pitches through a process of trial and error. Countless pitchers have wasted countless hours in the floundering pursuit of feel. Finding a shortcut—a more efficient way to gain skill, to practice, to see—would be a massive competitive advantage.
“How can I shorten the learning curve for all these new skills?” Bauer says. “That’s the holy grail.”
Bauer’s Excalibur in this quest was the Edgertronic camera, which he calls “the most powerful tool in all of baseball.”
Trevor and Warren were always looking for new ideas and technology that could help Trevor be better. They read about a high-speed camera, Sanstreak’s Edgertronic SC1, whose resolution and speed represented a leap in affordability and effectiveness compared to rival devices. At $5,500, the SC1 wasn’t cheap, but it was much more affordable than any similarly capable camera. In the winter of 2014–2015, Bauer and his father purchased one.
“We said, ‘We are never going to know if it’s useful until we have it, so let’s get it and see what we see,’” Trevor says. “Then we filmed with it for the first time, and we’re like, ‘That’s it. That’s the ticket.’”
Part of what makes the Edgertronic different is its shutter. Most digital cameras, like the one in your smartphone, employ what is known as a rolling shutter, in which each row of pixels is captured at a different moment from the rows above and below. For video capture of stationary or slowly moving objects, a rolling shutter will not produce any noticeable negative effects. But when shooting fast-moving objects—like a pitcher’s hand throwing a ball—a rolling shutter will produce an imperfection known as the jello effect, a blurring and stretching of objects. The jello effect is unacceptable in scientific research, including the embryonic field of pitch design.
The Edgertronic camera employs a global shutter, which captures every pixel at the exact same moment in every frame and at an extremely high frame-per-second rate, eliminating the jello effect. The Edgertronic also captures more light than many comparable high-speed, global-shutter cameras, enabling greater resolution. Sanstreak CEO Michael Matter named the Edgertronic after Harold Edgerton, or “Papa Flash,” an innovator in the world of high-speed photography whose work published in Life magazine fascinated him as a child. “I’ve always been good at getting things to work faster than people thought possible,” Matter says.
Matter knew there would be scientific and research applications for his product. When the first commercial version was released in 2013, he saw the camera show up in the footnotes of papers in a wide variety of fields. Rocket scientists used his high-speed camera to film exhaust and examine how mixtures were burning. A biomechanist in Riverside, California, used the Edgertronic to study kangaroo rats, which have unusually quick reflexes. In ultraslow, undistorted footage from an Edgertronic available on YouTube, a kangaroo rat narrowly avoids the jaws of a darting rattlesnake, leaping at perhaps ten times the quickness and speed of the snake. Matter never imagined which industry would become his biggest client: Major League Baseball.
That market opened with one order placed by one pitcher: Trevor Bauer. Many more orders followed; by the spring of 2018, the Astros had bought seventy-five cameras, outfitting every stadium in their system with a number of hard-mounted Edgertronic cameras in addition to equipping evaluators with portable units. (Boddy suspects the next-closest club was the Dodgers, with six.) Matter expected at least fifteen MLB teams to have purchased at least one camera by the start of 2019 and for baseball to represent more than half of his business.
After Bauer purchased his first Edgertronic, Warren began experimenting with it early in 2015 at Jim Wagner’s ThrowZone Academy in Santa Clarita, a warehouse-like structure with a corrugated metal skin and artificial turf. He was astounded by its resolution and speed. To this point, high-speed cameras were only capable of illuminating larger body movements. But Warren conceived a new application: He could use the Edgertronic to see how the grip interacted with the ball as a pitch was thrown. The cameras the Bauers had previously employed offered video that was “too grainy to see the fingertips,” Trevor says. Now Warren could see how the grip imparted spin and also the pitch’s precise spin axis.
“You know how hard it is to keep your eyes on a hummingbird? How quickly it shifts?” says Trevor. “With the right slow-motion camera, you can see everything. The hummingbird can have a tatt
oo on its wing that tells you exactly how he uses his wing to fly, to create lift.… You don’t even have to try and figure out how a hummingbird flies because he’s just telling you.”
The camera helped Warren win a long-standing argument he’d had with his son. Trevor believed pitchers decided when to release pitches, but Warren didn’t believe this was a conscious action. The camera confirmed his suspicion. It showed that pitchers don’t release the ball by moving their fingers. Rather, the hand accelerates the ball linearly, forcing the fingers to extend or open. This led to a key finding that would shape Trevor’s future approach to pitch design: grips were best thought of as escape routes for the ball.
That winter, Bauer developed his first pitch with the camera, a two-seam fastball he called the Laminar Express. This was a reference to the principles of laminar flow, a property that can influence the movement of a thrown baseball or any sphere. If undisturbed, layers of air tend to move in parallel, or in a laminar fashion. But if, say, a spinning sphere is smooth on one side and rough on the other, the air it passes through will be less disturbed, or laminar, on one side and turbulent on the other. The ball will dart toward, or seemingly be pulled toward, the side with more turbulent air. This is why pitchers will sometimes try to scuff one side of the ball, even though it’s illegal.
In the 1990s, Hall-of-Fame right-handed pitcher Greg Maddux perfected the comeback, two-seam fastball, which would start inside off the plate to a left-handed batter and then move into the zone. He wasn’t scuffing the ball; rather, he was harnessing laminar flow, although he wasn’t aware of it. No one had knowingly applied the laminar effect to design a pitch until Boddy stumbled upon a 2012 video by University of Sydney physics professor Rod Cross, who explained how laminar principles could be employed in cricket and baseball to create ball movement. Cross had been alerted to the laminar effect in baseball when a Freddy Garcia split-finger fastball broke the wrong way on its path to the plate during an April 30, 2011, game at Yankee Stadium. In demonstrating the effect with a Styrofoam ball in a YouTube video, Cross described it as “a little bit of magic.” 3 Boddy immediately understood the significance of the science. “This,” he believed, “is the most important video on pitching.”
At Driveline in the winter of 2015–2016, Boddy used the video to help Bauer design a spin axis that would maintain a smooth spot at the front of the ball—uninterrupted by seams in its rotation—throughout its flight to the plate. Using the Edgertronic to provide constant feedback as he experimented with different grips, Bauer built a reasonable facsimile of Maddux’s comeback two-seamer. It was a remarkably short period in which to acquire a skill that would be effective at the highest level of sports. Boddy believes that such rapid pitch acquisition will become the new norm. “Unbeknownst to me, multiple hitting coaches saw that video and then saw us develop the two-seam fastball and were like, ‘That is why hitters could be fucked for basically the next ten years if they’re finding out new ways to move the baseball,’” Boddy says. “And that’s true.”
Not only can new technology like the Edgertronic allow pitchers to quickly learn new pitches, it can also help improve the ones they already throw. As Bauer worked on developing a two-seamer in 2015–2016, he decided to examine all his pitches with the Edgertronic to better understand their underlying characteristics and determine whether he could improve upon them. Existing pitch-tracking technology measured how the pitch moved and how fast it traveled after it left the hand, but it revealed little beyond that. Each time he changed grips during that first winter with the Edgertronic, Bauer imported the high-speed video into Adobe Photoshop and used the software to count the revolutions of the ball. (Today, this function is widely available through Rapsodo, a tracking device that identifies spin axis and differentiates between spin type, unlike the radar-based TrackMan system.) Bauer was thrilled to see that by just spiking his curveball grip—raising his right index finger at the knuckle and digging its tip into the surface—he had added 250 rpm of spin, which meant more movement. “It’s a huge, huge deal,” he says. And in the winter of 2017–2018, he trained the camera on his nascent slider.
While the Edgertronic is a powerful tool that offers a shortcut to expertise, designing a new pitch begins with first principles. There’s a wide array of pitch labels—fastball, changeup, slider, and so forth. But what is a pitch? It’s a combination of velocity, spin rate, and a spin axis. Creating a pitch is not magic; it’s physics. Boiling pitches down to their underlying properties, as Bauer had done with his Laminar Express, unlocks the power of pitch creation. Designing pitches from scratch begins with understanding the spin that governs how a baseball moves.
There are two types of spin that affect a ball: transverse spin and gyroscopic spin. The spin type is determined by the spin axis of the ball, which in turn is determined by the pitcher’s grip. Transverse spin makes a pitch move, a slider swerve. That’s because transverse spin is sensitive to the Magnus effect.
In 1852, German physicist H. Gustav Magnus was perplexed about why artillery shells shot out of smooth-bore cannons often curved in unpredictable ways. He discovered a shell would deviate from a straight path because of pressure differences around the object that increase with the rate of its spin. As a baseball (or any sphere or cylinder) travels, it drags a thin layer of air with it, causing a difference in pressure on each side of the ball. The ball moves toward the area of lower pressure. The faster the spin, the greater the pressure differential, and the greater the movement. A curveball breaks downward because its topspin creates a downward Magnus effect. A fastball with a high spin rate appears to rise—even though it really just falls less than a lower-spin pitch—because its backspin produces a Magnus effect that pushes the ball up, opposing gravity.
A football thrown in a spiral or a bullet shot out of a rifled barrel demonstrates gyroscopic spin. Objects with gyroscopic spin are immune to the Magnus effect, and thus they travel straight. (It was the advent of rifled muskets—those with grooved barrels to impart gyroscopic stabilization—in the mid-nineteenth century that made the American Civil War so deadly, as increased accuracy and range overpowered outdated tactics.)
In a projectile moving with gyro spin, the spin axis is in line with the movement of the object rather than perpendicular to it. But the vast majority of pitches spin on a slightly tilted axis. In other words, the majority of pitches have an element of each type of spin: in the jargon of a pitch designer, they do not have 100 percent spin efficiency. Bauer knew his future—and the future of pitching in general—was tied to understanding and enlisting the power of physics to design and refine pitches.
We saw Bauer’s pitch-design process in action during the winter before the 2018 season, when he worked to add a slider to his arsenal of pitches. It began in mid-October 2017. The Indians had just been eliminated by the Yankees in the division series, and Bauer flew home to Los Angeles. In his childhood bedroom in a colonial-style home in Santa Clarita, he and his father spent six hours formulating the concept of the pitch.
What Bauer wanted that off-season wasn’t just any slider, but the perfect slider: a pitch with zero vertical movement aside from the effect of gravity, but one that darted laterally away from right-handed batters and toward lefties. He hoped to attain ten inches of horizontal movement or break—an elite level. (In 2017, the Dodgers’ Yu Darvish led baseball with an average of nine inches.) Break like that required a specific spin axis, one with its poles oriented nearly north and south on the ball. The perfect slider would also be disguised to look like his fastball but would appear to break at the last moment, with a different shape and speed from his curveball and a direction opposite that of his two-seamer and changeup. There was also a compounding benefit to adding another pitch: it was another variable that would make it exponentially more difficult for the batter to anticipate or identify what was coming.
Bauer placed push pins into two baseballs to simulate the spin axis and visualize how to produce it with his grip. The objective sounded sim
ple, but because of the biomechanics of the hand and wrist, creating a north–south spin axis was much more difficult than an east–west one, like that of a four-seam fastball. With a laptop open, Warren looked at old Edgertronic footage of Bauer throwing a slider with his thumb up on the side of the ball, wondering, how does it come off the hand? How do we adjust the grip?
Trevor and Warren looked at slow-motion video of sliders whose movement Trevor wanted to emulate, like those of teammates Corey Kluber and Mike Clevinger. He and Warren captured their slider grips via the Edgertronic, which they occasionally set up in Progressive Field or spring training stadiums.
Having conceptualized the pitch, father and son made their way to Wagner’s facility, the ThrowZone. For six hours after ThrowZone had closed for the night, Bauer experimented with different grips, the Edgertronic camera and pitch-tracking technology recording every pitch. Even in that first session, the slider showed hints of promise, occasionally darting more horizontally than vertically. On December 4, Bauer traveled to Seattle, where he had purchased a number of condos—many he rented out and one that he inhabited in the winter—enabling him to embed himself at Driveline, his off-season headquarters.
Almost since the beginning, Driveline has been associated with velocity training. But Boddy is interested in researching and improving all areas of pitching and baseball performance. Although the pulldown, max-intent throws and the radar-reading boards scattered around the facility speak to the importance of speed, pitch design became a greater focus after the 2015 season, when Warren introduced Boddy to the Edgertronic camera.
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