The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  Weeks earlier, Hill had been out of affiliated ball, and now he was talking to a team official who was making comparisons to Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, and Sale in explaining how Hill’s curve came out of his hand. Eight years, five teams, one shoulder surgery, and one elbow surgery removed from his only one-hundred-inning season in the majors, Hill was willing to listen. “He just opened my eyes up to the creative side of pitching,” Hill says. “Being creative with my curveball. Changing the shape of it. That was really the first time that I had heard anything about that.”

  Bannister explained that Hill could vary the pitch’s speed, spin, and location, throwing it higher to make it look like his fastball. Hill heard him and thought, “OK, I can throw my curveball more than what I had been told throughout my career.” He dropped his two-seam fastball from his repertoire and put the new pitching plan into place. In his next four Triple-A starts, he struck out twenty-seven and walked six.

  On September 8, the Red Sox made their last round of expanded-roster additions. Hill was one of them. Five days later, he made his first big-league start since July 2009. It went well: he held the Rays to one hit and no runs over seven innings, striking out ten. The next time out, he struck out ten Blue Jays, and the game after that, he struck out ten Orioles in a two-hit, complete-game shutout. Only six other pitchers all year had struck out ten batters or more in three consecutive starts, and Hill had done it in his first three starts after a six-year hiatus. He finished the season by holding the Yankees to two runs over six innings, with six more strikeouts.

  Throwing curves 39 percent of the time—second-most among starters with at least twenty innings pitched on the season—Hill had taken on every other team in the AL East and emerged with a 1.55 ERA and a 34 percent strikeout rate. Among the ninety starters who threw at least ten innings between Hill’s comeback and the end of the season, only four struck out more batters, and only NL Cy Young winner Jake Arrieta allowed a lower opponent batting average than his .141 or a lower WHIP (walks plus hits per inning pitched) than his 0.66. “It was one of the most amazing [four]-game runs I had ever seen in my life,” Bannister told us the following year.

  To that point, all of Hill’s guaranteed major-league contracts combined totaled $3.9 million. Less than three months after meeting Bannister, he topped that with one signature, inking a one-year $6 million deal with the A’s. The Six Million Dollar Man jokes were almost too easy to make.

  With the A’s—and the Dodgers, who traded for him mid-season—Hill continued to deal in 2016, producing a 2.12 ERA. That year, he threw curves 47 percent of the time, the highest rate on record for any pitcher with at least one hundred innings pitched. Despite his age, that season earned him a three-year, $48 million deal from the Dodgers. Repeated problems with blisters ate into his innings totals, but among pitchers with at least four hundred innings pitched from 2015 to 2018, Hill’s 29.3 percent strikeout rate ranked fifth in the majors, and his 2.98 ERA ranked sixth, between Arrieta and two-time Cy Young winner Corey Kluber.

  Even prior to his work with Hill, Bannister had believed that careers could be saved with the right type of intervention. “It always fascinated me that with a few changes or giving the guy the right mental approach, the right physical approach, the right pitch mix, the development of a new pitch, you can completely change his projection or his future ceiling,” Bannister said in 2016. Prior to 2015, though, that kind of conversion was only theoretical. Hill’s incredible career turnaround was both a proof of concept and a galvanizing force. “He just did something that I’d never seen before, and that got me excited,” Bannister said. “It also was exciting because it was kind of like the lightbulb going on, like, hey, this stuff can work.”

  A lot of lightbulbs went on around baseball after Hill’s ice-breaking, trend-setting run. “You see a lot of guys now, since that time, using their breaking ball a lot more,” Hill says. “It used to be… you were labeled as soft if you didn’t throw your fastball. [Now] it’s like, ‘No, your job is to get hitters out. I don’t care how you do it.’”

  Players are taking it further every year. In 2017, the Astros’ Lance McCullers Jr. slightly surpassed Hill’s record curveball rate. From 2008 to 2017, five 100-inning pitchers threw sliders at least 40 percent of the time; in 2018 alone, six did. One of them, Diamondbacks starter Patrick Corbin, upped his slider use into that range at the team’s recommendation, after years of getting good results with the pitch but still throwing it only about a quarter of the time. He had a career year at twenty-nine and landed a six-year, $140 million contract with the Nationals in December. “Philosophies have changed over the years,” says Diamondbacks pitching strategist Dan Haren, a pitching contemporary of Bannister and Hill. “Really, it’s about how many times a pitcher can throw his best pitch in a game.”

  This growing trend toward breaking balls is reflected in league-wide rates. In 2010, pitchers threw 75 percent more sinkers than sliders. In 2018, for the first time on record, they threw more sliders than sinkers. “To me it’s a very simple concept,” Bannister says. “It’s harder to hit something that’s traveling along a curved path than a straight path.”

  In 2018, batters whiffed on 36 percent of the swings they took against sliders and only 14 percent of the swings they took against sinkers. When they made contact, they produced a .263 wOBA on sliders and a .351 wOBA on sinkers. The difference persists across counts. “I think every team will push for performance in the direction of what’s working,” Bannister says. “It’s very tough to be a sinkerballer right now.” In light of the stats, that seems obvious, but the combination of Bannister and Hill helped snap pitchers out of their anti-breaking-ball bias.

  It’s dizzying to think, as Hill has, of how many things had to happen for his resurrection to occur. First, he had to sign with the team that had recently hired Bannister. Then Bannister had to be at Pawtucket because of Farrell’s illness. Then Hill had to get called up in September, which likely only happened because Red Sox pitcher Steven Wright had suffered a concussion in August when he was hit on the back of the neck while running sprints during batting practice. And, of course, technology that could track Hill’s spin had to be available, both so that Bannister could recognize his hidden potential and so other teams could be confident that his four-start success wasn’t a small-sample fluke. “If we push it back maybe even [to 2013], maybe people don’t look at those numbers because they’re not out there,” Hill says, adding, “It’s giving guys chances, [compared to] before where scouts were pretty closed-minded… they were just like, ‘What does the radar gun say?’”

  There’s another compelling case for promoting so-called secondary stuff. Recent research has shown that contrary to long-held beliefs about breaking balls inflicting the most stress on pitchers’ arms, fastballs actually do the most damage. “When you see there’s not a spike in injuries with guys throwing more secondary pitches—and in fact it might even be the opposite—it opens up this whole world of opportunities that was never there before, because people were afraid,” Bannister says. The unfounded bias against breaking balls, he adds, “prevented thousands of pitchers from pitching at a higher level.” One wonders how many Hill-like soft tossers fell by the wayside before teams had the tools to find them and the willingness to let them work in the ways that would benefit them the most. Without those things, Hill says, “you’ll never know the potential of the player.”

  Technology, and the right interpreter, arrived just in time to make Hill a poster boy for this period. Now Bannister and a growing number of fellow athlete-stathead hybrids are making it their mission to ensure that no more players will have to wait until they’re thirty-five to tap into their talents—or worse, never unlock them at all.

  In his 2018 book Quantitative Hitting, investment analyst turned swing mechanic D. K. Willardson pointed out an intellectual divide that’s stunted progress in player development even since the game got smart about stats. “The analytical side focused on the data has steered clear of
mechanics, while the ‘traditional’ coaching and player-development side has steered clear of the data,” he wrote. “The result is fertile and untrodden turf in the middle of the two polarized camps.”1

  In theory, the teams that tread on that turf first should derive a real advantage. “The challenge,” Willardson continued, “is that there is no career path and, consequently, no available talent pool that encompasses experience on both sides—data analysis and mechanics. It is clear, however, that value will not be maximized without those two sides thinking together.” The right message existed, but the messengers were missing.

  A farm system is essentially a school for players, and as technology and statistics suffuse the sport, even the big-league level is increasingly looking like a continuing-education course. If decades of ineffective attempts at top-down, data-driven school reform have taught educators any lesson that baseball teams can learn, it’s that communication and cultural awareness are overlooked keys.

  The late Seymour Sarason, Yale professor and father of the field of community psychology, unwittingly anticipated the problems impeding player development in one of his seminal studies of school reform, the 1971 book The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change. The conundrum, Sarason explained, is that “the agents of change from outside the school culture are too frequently ignorant of the culture in which the change is to be embedded, or if they are part of the culture, they are themselves victims of that very fact.” On one side of the process, the outsiders evince a “too frequent tendency to underestimate the complexity of the school system as a social system, and how this adversely affects what one hopes to accomplish.” Meanwhile, many members of the insider group “do not seek change or react enthusiastically to it.” That mutual ignorance polarizes relationships. In baseball, that polarization produced the not entirely untruthful stereotypes of backward baseball men and arrogant numbers nerds who never played the game. The only thing the two camps had in common was that both thought they had the answers and resented interference from the other.2

  Until very recently, most players, on the subject of stats, sounded similar in tone to 1930s ace and Hall of Famer Dizzy Dean, who said, “I hate statistics. What I got to know, I keep in my head.” Nonathlete analysts had plenty to teach them. Yet in their haste to tip sacred cows, sabermetric reformers were sometimes overzealous in dismissing received wisdom.

  In his 1914 manual How to Play Baseball, John McGraw wrote about “shaping the ball” by subtly pulling pitches toward the plate to get borderline calls, yet sabermetricians ninety years later denied pitch-framing existed and scoffed at managers who chose defense over offense at the catching position. The importance of all forms of fielding, the merits of makeup and clubhouse chemistry, the existence of the hot hand: all were staples of baseball wisdom until statheads looked askance at them. In all cases, later research—based on better data or a grudging acceptance that existing stats were too imprecise to settle every question—rescued the original concepts, at least to a certain extent. Statheads once mocked people who praised pint-sized infielder David Eckstein’s “heart” and “grit,” but Eckstein was a five-foot-six nineteenth-rounder who fashioned a ten-year career during which he was worth more than all but 13 of the 1,224 players selected the same year. Grit, a quality that new schoolers now see as a secret to successful practice, probably was why Eckstein got good.

  Add drastic changes in established player performance to the list. Statheads once dismissed any drastic uptick in an established player’s performance as a small-sample fluke and another reminder of Voros’s law, which sabermetrician Voros McCracken laid down in 2000: “Anyone can hit just about anything in 60 at-bats.”3 In September 2014, months after the Astros undervalued J.D. Martinez, Baseball Prospectus cofounder Joe Sheehan tweeted, “Narratives about mechanics aside, J.D. Martinez is the same player he was before, plus some power. Can’t be a #5 hitter in a real lineup.”

  Four years later, Sheehan issued a mea culpa in his newsletter. “I was, not long ago, prone to dismissing talk of how this player had tweaked his stance or his swing or his position on the rubber.… Now, though, I’m less certain.” Sheehan acknowledged the potentially transformative power of revamped pitches and swings. “I’ve long been an advocate for the use of statistics in the evaluation of baseball players,” he continued, “but I simply missed how this new category of information would render a lot of my priors moot.”

  As Sheehan’s reversal revealed, the complex interplay of unseen forces at the field level can make big data seem simple by comparison. Statheads had to learn to listen too. More information, or better data, usually isn’t enough to change minds because people are so attached to their beliefs that rebuttals actually make them dig in deeper—the so-called backfire effect. But MIT political scientist Adam Berinsky, who has studied the spread of misinformation, found that partisan subjects with preconceived positions believe one type of messenger to be particularly credible: the unlikely source.

  Among athletes, the unlikely source is the stathead who’s spent time in uniform, satisfying Sarason’s condition that the ideal go-between be embedded in the community, “rendering some kind of service within the schools, requiring that in some way they become part of the school.” These rare birds of baseball, fluent in front office and dipped in dugout wisdom, are “perfect conduits to get a message from high theoretical guys down to guys who are just used to grinding it out on the baseball field,” San Diego Padres manager Andy Green said in 2017. “Unless that message gets translated where a guy speaks both languages, it usually ends up falling on deaf ears. It can be the perfect game plan laid out by the front office, but if it doesn’t run through one of those conduits, it tends to, one, not be understood, or two, not be implemented at all or maybe even spurned altogether.”4

  When Hill heard he’d been approaching pitching wrong, it mattered to him that the message came from someone who had walked in his cleats. For the Red Sox, signing Hill was just a prelude to the really smart part. “The effects on contracts and free-agent signings are a very small part of what makes a new-school front office smart,” says Mike Fast. “It’s the [conduit] stuff that’s huge. And the technologies that undergird that work.”

  The last mile is a term used by engineers to describe the disproportionate difficulty of delivering network services—broadband Internet, for instance—to an end user. It’s relatively easy to build a network that travels three thousand miles from coast to coast, but the final leg, into houses and offices, is where bottlenecks occur. Baseball’s last mile is the divide between the front office and the dugout, which stops stats from flowing to the people who can put them to use. Bannister became a conduit who could cross that divide in 2015, but he began preparing for the role long before baseball knew it needed him.

  Bannister belongs to a family of pitchers. His father, Floyd, was the first-overall pick in the 1976 draft and pitched for fifteen years in the majors. Floyd’s brother-in-law was a second-round pick a year earlier and topped out at Triple-A. Brian is the eldest of three brothers, one of whom pitched at Stanford and the other of whom, like Brian, was drafted out of USC, although he never advanced beyond Rookie ball. They grew up in Scottsdale, where Floyd settled after attending Arizona State.

  Floyd’s career lasted until Brian was eleven, and he pitched with a lot of legends who succeeded in distinct ways: Tom Seaver, celebrated for his perfect mechanics and pinpoint command; Steve Carlton, renowned for his unorthodox training routines and devastating slider; Gaylord Perry, practitioner of the spitball; Nolan Ryan, pure power personified. Brian asked questions and absorbed baseball knowledge. He wanted to know why pitches moved and what made each pitcher’s delivery different.

  Although Floyd lasted a long time in the league, his career park-adjusted ERA was exactly average, which was seen as underwhelming for a first-overall pick. Perhaps people overestimated the predictability of prospects: Floyd’s 26.6 career WAR tops the 22.3 average for first picks from 1965 to 2003. But he wa
s known for his fastball and urged to “establish it” by most of his pitching coaches, and now he wishes he’d made more use of his above-average breaking balls. “I should have thrown a lot more [curveballs], and I probably would have had a much more successful career,” he says.

  Floyd, who grew up working on cars, liked to design things in his head and bring them into being with his hands. Brian inherited his father’s mechanical mind. “He liked to create things,” Floyd says. “He would spend hours in the playroom working on Legos or Lincoln Logs or Construx. It seemed like his goal a lot of times was to use up every piece. It was amazing what he would create. He would sit there for hours.” Later, he graduated to SimCity.

  When Brian was about ten, Floyd bought a new piece of software: Photoshop. Brian became enthralled. He could faithfully sketch what he saw, and he was quick with numbers; he missed only one math question on his SAT. Eventually, he gravitated to photography, which like pitching allowed him to fuse his artistic and scientific sides.

  In 2002, a year before Brian graduated from USC, he proposed that he and his father start a photography studio in a building Floyd had bought as an investment. Floyd labored to turn the space into a nine-thousand-square-foot professional facility, Loft 19, which he still operates in Brian’s absence, renting out equipment and doing photoshoots and video shoots. “When we built the studio, [Brian] would sit out there on the computer and just study different photographers that he liked, and he would get online and see exactly how they set up their lighting,” Floyd says.