The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  Initially, Warren had refused to show Boddy any Edgertronic video, treating it as something of a proprietary secret. Boddy continued to challenge Warren: “Let’s see what film you’ve got.” Finally, Warren acquiesced. He and Trevor flew to Driveline, carrying the camera in a special hardened case to protect it in transit.

  At Boddy’s facility, Warren filmed Weathers, by now a Driveline regular. They sat down to watch the footage. When Warren pressed play on his laptop, Boddy saw every aspect of Weathers’s delivery at several thousand frames per second, including the ball coming off his hand in unprecedented detail. Boddy had never seen anything like it. The only two people in baseball who had were Warren and Trevor.

  Boddy dropped his head into his arms, which were resting on the table. He was not on the cutting edge of pitch design. He stood up and went to his computer. Five minutes later, he returned. “I bought one,” he said. Although he wasn’t awash in cash at the time, it had taken just one throw to convince him that the camera was a game changer. “That meeting changed the entire landscape of professional baseball,” Trevor says.

  Along with tracking technology like Rapsodo, the camera represented the Rosetta stone of pitch design, a language that Bauer and Boddy believed was the future of baseball. “The next thing is, how do you develop individual pitches?” Boddy said at the time. “And I guarantee you no team’s been doing that. Not the Astros. Not the Indians.”

  Bauer and Boddy were.

  Not all of Bauer’s pitch-design experiments succeeded. Many fizzled, and even those that did work were preceded by a multitude of microfailures before the big breakthrough. During the previous winter of 2016–2017, Bauer had tried to develop another pitch, a split-changeup, in much the same manner. But there were two differences that time.

  One problem was that development began later in the off-season. Bauer threw only fifteen innings of live batting practice with the split-change at Driveline that winter. When he set out to design his slider in the winter of 2017–2018, he threw forty innings of live batting practice with the slider, along with more pitch-design sessions.

  The other factor was that Mickey Callaway was no longer the pitching coach in Cleveland. Callaway was often against Bauer expanding and experimenting with his pitch arsenal. The relationship between pitcher and pitching coach had grown combative, fueled by differences in philosophies and approaches to pitching.

  “My Overlord was not happy with it,” Bauer says of Callaway. “Mickey always wanted me to shrink my arsenal.… Ultimately, I did what I wanted to do, but it was always with fear or expectations of backlash.”

  By the spring of 2018, Callaway had been hired as the manager of the Mets and replaced as pitching coach by Carl Willis, whom Bauer suspected would be less overbearing. Bauer’s intention was to show up to spring training with a new, polished pitch, not a work in progress. He was always working, always throwing, maintaining his velocity. On one pulldown throw that off-season, he set a new facility record by hurling a three-ounce ball 116.9 mph, which was greeted by oohs and aahs.

  In live at-bats throughout the winter, Bauer had thrown only fastballs and sliders. He knew that by limiting himself to two pitches, he was turning amateurs or minor leaguers into “fringe big leaguers” because they could rule out his other offerings. “They were teeing off on him,” Boddy says. But Bauer wanted to fixate on the fastball and slider because he was trying to make them look as similar as possible for as long as possible on their paths to the plate.

  After at-bats, Bauer would ask for feedback on the movement of the pitch. In this laboratory of data and cameras and pitch-tracking technology, players’ opinions were still valued. The hitters told him his slider still looked too much like his curveball, not breaking laterally enough.

  Bauer could have trained in Los Angeles or elsewhere. But the Driveline culture was important. The other athletes there pushed him, which was crucial for skill development. Driveline had created a culture of urgency, born of motivated (and/or desperate) athletes clawing for a way into professional or college baseball. Boddy turned away clients he didn’t think fit. One day in the winter of 2016–2017, Bauer complained to Weathers about their weight-room workouts.

  “You think this is fun?” said Weathers in response, while adding weights to a bar. “I’d rather be home with my wife. You’re being a bitch.”

  The surest way to anger Bauer is to call him a bitch. He stormed out of the gym. Whenever someone called Bauer a bitch, he thought back to Lone Survivor, the book by former US Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, who suffered multiple gunshot wounds and a broken leg in a Taliban ambush in the mountains of Afghanistan. If Luttrell could survive that, Bauer could finish a workout.

  When he reentered the gym, he was surprised to find Weathers taking weights off the bar.

  “What are you doing?” Bauer said.

  “Oh, I banged it,” Weathers answered. He had quit for the day.

  Recalling this incident, Bauer broke out into laughter. Weathers went home, but Bauer had been spurred to finish his workout.

  By late January 2018, Boddy asked Bauer when he would expand his pitch mix. He was nearly done with his live at-bats and had still limited himself to just the two pitches. The hitters, knowing the quality of the curveball, asked, then demanded, then challenged Bauer to throw it.

  “You don’t want that. That’s not gonna be good for anyone,” Bauer said again and again.

  The demands continued. “Come on! On your last day, throw all your pitches!” the hitters beseeched him. Bauer relented. “All right, all five? I’m gonna throw five innings against you guys,” he said. A cheer went up.

  A number of pro hitters stepped in against Bauer, including independent leaguer Don Comstock and Marlins minor leaguer Gunner Pollman. They flinched. They whiffed. They left the cage in awe. Bauer faced the minimum fifteen batters in his five fake innings. He struck out thirteen of them. Boddy watched and laughed.

  “It was ridiculous, ’cause they’re just not gonna be able to hit a big leaguer with five pitches,” Boddy says. “The first time he threw a curveball, it was fucking like, ‘oh!’”

  Although a January session against low-level hitters wasn’t an accurate reflection of what Bauer would face in the big leagues, it was the first hint he got of the power of his expanded arsenal, which included his new slider, his Myelin Express.

  While the camera helped create a shortcut to skill acquisition, there was no substitute for deliberate practice. There’s no official record of Bauer’s winter workload, but he guesses that he threw more pitches that off-season than any other pitcher in professional baseball. (He did record his workload at Driveline during the 2018–2019 offseason: 8,820 throws made, and $3,000 lost in training bets against hitters.) And it was intense, focused practice.

  “[Bauer] yells at himself all the time. It’s terrifying and funny,” Boddy says. “I’ll be in [the office at Driveline], he’ll just throw a pitch and be like, ‘Fuck!’ Like, ‘What the fuck, dude? What are you talking about? Your strike percentage is good today.’… He’s like, ‘[I’m] not focused.’”

  Bauer confirms. “If I am not focused about everything in the moment, if you take away my training time or cause a distraction, I get super pissed off.”

  Bauer is an extreme example of single-sport specialization at a time when many front-office executives blame specialization for the rise in pitcher injuries. ASMI and other organizations recommend that pitchers take an extended break from throwing in the off-season. But Bauer never stops throwing. And conventional training wisdom might be wrong: March is the month with the most reported injuries that lead to Tommy John surgery, which could be because pitchers have a hard time handling the 0-to-60 stress of spring work after throwing only lightly in the winter. Sixty percent of Tommy John surgeries occur from January to May, according to researcher Jon Roegele.

  The idea that “specialization is dangerous or bad” strikes Boddy as paradoxical, considering that the more a person deliberately practices a
task or skill, the more adept he gets. “Kids should do lots of things, because no one knows what they want to do when they’re thirteen.… I like it from that point of view,” Boddy says. “But increasingly it made no sense from a specialization standpoint because the single largest growing sect of players in the majors [is] Dominican Republic players. All they do is play baseball. Their injury rates are not [higher].”

  “People are reversing causation,” he continues. “‘Everyone in the big leagues played multiple sports, therefore playing multiple sports leads to being a big leaguer.’ No, everyone in the big leagues played multiple sports because they’re the best athletes in the world. When you’re fourteen and you run like Carl Crawford, you play every sport because you fucking dominate all of them. And the coaches are greedy. Whereas by the time Trevor is thirteen or fourteen, he knows he’s not going to be a pro unless he does something. He recognized that early.”

  Bauer learned intent and worth ethic during his youth. He didn’t often play catch with his dad. Rather, he threw balls as far and hard as he could. He taught himself velocity. Now he was determined to teach himself a slider.

  “You cannot name a pitcher in the big leagues, or probably from Double-A and up, who is a worse athlete than Trevor,” Boddy says. “There is probably not a single person. He doesn’t belong in professional baseball. And that is an unbelievable story.”

  Boddy can say this objectively because he’s tested a wide range of professional players in his lab. He notes that Bauer has pathetic jumping and running ability. “His vertical is probably two standard deviations under a standard [pro] athlete and probably a standard deviation under an average man,” Boddy said. “He can barely jump twenty inches.” He has a slow arm and low testosterone. “He has a bad bod,” Boddy says. “It leads people to believe that he doesn’t lift weights, but that’s not true. He deadlifts 540 pounds and he benches 100-pound dumbbells. It just doesn’t matter because he has no testosterone so his body doesn’t change.”

  In discussing the most recent The Body Issue of ESPN: The Magazine, someone joked with Bauer that he wouldn’t have the guts to put his unaesthetic body on display for the world.

  “I’ve been telling everyone in the clubhouse in 2019 I’m going to be in The Body Issue,” Bauer says. “They are like, bullshit! They just laugh at me. Next year when I get a life-size picture of my ass, I will slap it [up] in the weight room so I can tell you, ‘I told you so.’”

  Boddy says Bauer’s poor athleticism helps him in one regard: His slower arm speed places less stress on his elbow and shoulder. He can and needs to endure a great volume of work.

  Bauer is “at least one standard deviation away and probably two” from a typical pro pitcher in arm speed measured in angular velocity, Boddy says, adding, “He’s the most efficient 95–97 [mph] pitcher in the big leagues. He expends the least amount of arm stress to get the greatest amount of velocity.”

  Bauer would seem to be an embodiment of the 10,000-hour rule, living proof that anyone can become an expert if they practice the right way and practice enough. But Boddy rejects this suggestion. “No strategy matters at all in skill development unless it’s your passion,” he says. “If you tell someone all you have to do is ten thousand hours of work, deep practice—I think that is all correct, but we are starting very much with a symptom of the thing. And the thing is Trevor is obsessed with competing. When other people say that they want to win the Cy Young Award and think that anything short of that is a failure, they think it sounds good in the media. When he says it, he actually means it. That’s the stupid shit he thinks. That’s a very dumb goal to have. But because of it, he’s been able to achieve some of those things, like being drafted in the first round and winning the Golden Spikes. Those were very dumb goals, too.” Dumb as in unrealistic—but for Bauer, they weren’t.

  Bauer’s example proves that everyone can get better with focused, deliberate practice. But not every pitcher can or should try to be Bauer from a throwing-volume standpoint.

  “Trevor being the poster boy for ‘No such thing as overuse’ is something I think he fears and I fear very much,” Boddy says. “He was throwing every day to the fence without his father. He threw weighted balls at a young age. I know Trevor does not think that is the right thing to do for everyone.… The Trevor Bauer story is the one every nerd in America who can’t throw over 55 [mph] at the county fair should read. It is not the one that Zack Greinke at twelve should read, the nerds that are young that have a good arm. They should stay away from that story.… What Trevor’s biggest weakness is, he’s turned into a strength. He’s not that athletically gifted, but he’s nearly unbreakable when it comes to volume. That’s a blessing and a curse.”

  Boddy adds that the idea that Bauer is some sort of eccentric genius is also off base.

  “He’s actually not that intelligent when it comes to analyzing stuff,” Boddy says. “To me, intelligence is picking up skills quickly. He’s really shitty at [that]. But he’s really good at brute-forcing things.… He doesn’t belong in the big leagues, but he’s there because he’s delusional. I wish that was the story that could go out there, but it’s not that popular. It sends kids a different message rather than ‘You can do anything.’” The message, Boddy suggests, is that achieving lofty ambitions requires maniacal obsession. “To me, that is true skill acquisition. He gets the most out of who he is.”

  Like his confounding idol Elon Musk, Bauer is obsessed with work and often expresses what seem to be far-fetched, unreachable aspirations. Musk wants to go to Mars and build a Hyperloop; Bauer wants to win three Cy Young Awards. “There are ten three-time Cy Young winners,” he says, rattling off names and numbers. “Seven are in the Hall of Fame, two are still playing [Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer]. One is Roger Clemens [who was tarnished by a connection to steroids].… If I want to win three Cy Youngs—I’m twenty-seven, but at thirty-three my window will be closing. My skill will be in decline.

  “I have no idea what drives me, to be honest. I’ve spent ten to fifteen years trying to figure out why I want to be elite. Is it personal achievement? Is it to throw a middle finger up in everyone’s face? Is it to be right? I don’t know, exactly. I don’t know. It all comes back to I want to be the best, period.”

  The clock is ticking. There is no time to waste in achieving those goals. When Bauer left Seattle in early February for the Indians’ spring training facilities in Goodyear, Arizona, he had the foundation of a new slider. While he had not perfected the pitch, he felt he was close. He told reporters at the start of spring training that he thought he was as close as he had ever been to maximizing his ability. But those were just words. All that mattered was the way he would pitch.

  7

  THE CONDUIT

  You don’t take a photograph. You make it.

  —ANSEL ADAMS

  “He’s got two pitches!” a livid-looking Chris Sale screamed in the Red Sox dugout during Game 4 of the 2018 World Series, dissing the Dodgers’ starter, Rich Hill. Already on their heels after their eighteen-inning Game 3 loss to Los Angeles early that morning, the Sox had just fallen behind by four in the bottom of the sixth inning and were three innings away from losing their lead in the series.

  Boston subsequently came back to tie the game on two homers and won in the ninth, setting up a series victory the next night. “Chris Sale’s shouts rally Red Sox to brink of title,” the Associated Press’s headline said. Maybe—but they came back against the bullpen, not against Mr. Two Pitches.

  What Sale shouted was true. The thirty-eight-year-old Hill threw 92 pitches in Game 4, 53 of them four-seam fastballs and 39 curveballs. Hill had no need for a third pitch. He left with a 4–0 lead after allowing one hit and three walks over 6 1/3 innings, with seven strikeouts.

  Oddly enough, the man largely responsible for Hill’s mastery was wearing a Red Sox uniform: Brian Bannister.

  Bannister, Boston’s vice president of pitching development and assistant pitching coach, watched the game
unfold from the clubhouse because MLB rules limit teams to seven coaches in the dugout. “As a baseball fan I can enjoy it and hate it simultaneously,” Bannister texted us right around the time that Sale was expressing his slightly less nuanced emotions nearby. “Cheer for the human being and root against the different name on the front of the jersey.”

  The Red Sox hired Bannister, a former major-league pitcher who retired in 2011, as a pro scout and analyst in January 2015. That August, he and Hill crossed paths. Hill, who was then thirty-five, had started the season in the bullpen for the Nationals’ Triple-A affiliate, but the Nats released him in June. It was the third time a big-league team had cut him loose in a sixteen-month span; even the Red Sox, for whom he’d pitched in Triple-A and (sporadically) the majors from 2010 to 2012, had released him the previous March. So Hill sought the last refuge of the unwanted journeyman: the independent leagues. In July, he joined the Atlantic League’s Long Island Ducks, making two impressive starts before the Red Sox signed him for the third time and sent him back to Triple-A Pawtucket on August 14.

  On the same day, Red Sox manager John Farrell announced that he was taking a leave of absence to undergo treatment for lymphoma, which activated a coaching carousel. Triple-A pitching coach Bob Kipper was called up to the big leagues, and a lower-level coach was requisitioned to take his place. During the brief window before that replacement arrived, Bannister was dispatched to Pawtucket. He had spent his first season with the Sox scouting, submitting written recommendations for ways that the organization could improve its pitching development, and wishing he weren’t so far from the field. Here was a chance for him to be hands-on and make a difference directly. He had one man in mind.

  Hill, a native of Milton, Massachusetts, had already made his first start with Pawtucket on August 15. He’d held the Phillies’ affiliate scoreless for 6 1/3 innings, but he hadn’t dominated, walking three and striking out two. Bannister, who’s a year younger than Hill, met with Hill for about an hour and a half on back-to-back days, laying out a roadmap to reinvention. “I took one of my ideas that I’d always been wanting to test out on somebody and pitched that idea to him,” Bannister says. Bannister could tell from TrackMan that Hill had a potent curveball that was hard to distinguish from his high-80s to low-90s fastball. “When I pulled up his numbers, it was just incredible how talented he was with the ability to spin the ball,” Bannister says. If Hill varied how he used his curve, he could throw it much more often.