The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  On April 1, his slider averaged 6.7 inches of horizontal movement. In his second start on April 7 versus the Royals, the horizontal movement fell to 6.2 inches, and then to 4.5 inches on April 12 at Detroit. He wanted 10 inches. Although he was pitching relatively well, he was also facing some of the weakest teams in baseball. In terms of performance against extra-divisional opponents, the 2018 AL Central was the second-weakest division of all time, and Bauer didn’t have to face its best team. On April 20 at Baltimore, the horizontal movement averaged 5.1 inches. He also wanted the slider to have zero inches of vertical depth to keep it on the same plane as his fastball for as long as possible, creating deception. Instead it was breaking 3 to 4 inches. The slider was behaving like a less effective version of his curveball.

  The Indians did not travel with their Edgertronic camera, Bauer says, and its use at home was sporadic. There were occasions when the camera wasn’t used because a Fox Sports TV camera occupied the camera well behind the plate. “The TV guys were down there,” Bauer recalls the club explaining. “I don’t give half a fuck,” he responded. “Tell the TV guys to get out of there.”

  The Indians’ video personnel also lacked familiarity with the device, and as a result, some bullpen sessions were not recorded properly. It was all maddening to Bauer.

  There was another potential use of the camera that the Indians weren’t fully exploiting, although the Astros—and Bauer before them—had done so previously: intelligence gathering. Bauer didn’t just want to study himself; he also wanted to study the other best pitchers in baseball. The ironic thing about criticism from past teammates like Miguel Montero was that Bauer didn’t believe he had all the answers. He was always searching for better information and practices. On his own team, Corey Kluber and Clevinger had two of the best sliders in baseball. As Bauer designed his slider in the winter, he had studied their grips, which he had filmed the previous season. And on April 13, there was another pitcher he wanted to study: Toronto’s Marcus Stroman.

  Stroman and Bauer had long admired each other from a distance. Prior to being selected in the first round of the 2012 draft, Stroman called Bauer a “pioneer to the pitching world” on Twitter. Stroman said he used to watch tape of Bauer’s UCLA starts in his Duke dorm room. Bauer cited Stroman as his favorite non-Cleveland player to watch.

  Now Bauer wanted his elite slider.

  Leading up to that start on a frigid April evening, Bauer hounded the video staff and its coordinator, the white-haired and studious-looking Bob Chester, to make sure they got Edgertronic footage of Stroman. But in the first inning, as Clevinger pitched for the Indians, neither Chester nor the camera was in the camera well behind home plate. If this start wasn’t filmed, Bauer would be livid. Between innings, Chester and the Edgertronic appeared in the camera well. As Stroman started pitching, Chester attached the camera to a tripod directly behind home plate. He then left the area. But the camera view was obstructed. This was Bauer’s one chance to get a look at Stroman and his slider on the Edgertronic. The first inning was over, and there was no usable footage. But Chester, realizing the error, returned in the second inning and repositioned the camera more to the left of the plate, allowing for an unobstructed view of Stroman. It was perhaps the most important repositioning of a high-speed camera in the brief history of pitch design.

  After the game, Bauer immediately dove into the video: eleven minutes and fifty-one seconds’ worth of Stroman throwing pitches, a global shutter capturing every detail in thousands of frames per second. In May, he shared the video with Travis and motioned to Stroman’s right hand.

  “You see his thumb?” Bauer said. “It slips really early.”

  That was the key. As Stroman’s upper body rotated and his right hand came through to throw, his thumb lost contact with the ball first, with his index and middle fingers still in contact before release. The middle finger was on the far side of the ball, the index finger behind the ball. Bauer paused the video.

  “His middle finger never gets to the front of the ball. It just kind of brushes the side of it,” Bauer said. “Then you can only see his pointer finger appear once there is separation between the ball and his hand.… The pointer finger pushes the ball [to Stroman’s left], which puts more of a sidespin component on the ball. When I saw this video I was like, I have to find a way to get my thumb to slip earlier while my hand is still behind the ball.”

  Two days later, Bauer threw his bullpen indoors, in something of a concrete bunker in the depths of Progressive Field. He commandeered the Edgertronic and filmed the session. One of his first throws resulted in a nearly perfect gyroball, a pitch immune to the Magnus effect; not what he wanted. His index and middle fingers wrapped too much around the ball. His thumb was still in the way. To get his thumb to leave the ball earlier, he tried tucking it under the ball. This would push the axis up, he hoped, creating more sidespin and resulting in more lateral movement. One of his first attempts resulted in a pitch that got away from him; had a right-handed batter been in the box, it would have hit him in the helmet. He adjusted, applying more pressure with his index and middle fingers on the far side of the ball, running along the wide part of the figure-eight seam. Progress. The axis tilted up slightly, but not enough.

  Bauer took his experiment to the mound over the following four starts at Baltimore on April 20 (5.1 inches of horizontal movement), against the Cubs at Wrigley Field on April 25 (4.8), at home against the Rangers on April 30 (5.4), and at Yankee Stadium on May 5 (4.4). It still wasn’t working.

  A day before his May 11 start at home against Kansas City, Bauer discovered something while lobbing balls back toward the infield during batting practice. Instead of gripping the “horseshoe” part of the seam with his middle finger as he had since the winter—and as most pitchers do when throwing a slider—he tried throwing one with a two-seam fastball grip, only tucking his thumb like Stroman. He spread his index and middle fingers over a narrower stretch of parallel seams and tucked his thumb and locked his wrist as he always did.

  “I was like, holy shit,” Bauer recalls. “I could definitely see that the axis was different. I’m throwing the ball toward the collection bucket. I just flipped a couple. I saw a left-handed turn.… I said, ‘I’m going to try that tomorrow.’”

  The grip allowed his thumb to get out of the way, to create a pitch with a more vertical axis. His index finger made the last contact with the ball, just brushing it, to create an element of sidespin. He had the gyrospin and sidespin mix he was seeking. He knew he couldn’t get a perfect north–south axis. He was hoping to create an axis pointed toward him at about 60 degrees.

  Most pitchers don’t experiment in games. They save experimentation for bullpens. But Bauer doesn’t mind failing before thousands. That’s one benefit of having a low threshold. You don’t care what anyone thinks if you are doing what you believe is right. If Bauer listened to his pitching coach and was always agreeable, he argues, he would not have a career. “And people wonder why I have the reputation of not listening to coaches,” he says.

  On May 11, Bauer used the new grip for two innings, the second and third. His slider began to dart horizontally. As he examined the data after the game, he saw that one slider had moved eight inches. He was thrilled, at least until he learned that only one inning had been captured on the Edgertronic. While the pitch moved like he desired, he couldn’t control it.

  “I switched back [during the game] because I had no idea where it was going,” he says. “I was in self-preservation mode. I switched back to my old grip, which was more comfortable, but it didn’t have the profile.”

  The start was a disaster: he allowed five runs and eleven hits in 4 2/3 innings. But it may have been his most important start of the season. The grip had given him the movement he wanted.

  The Indians next traveled to Detroit, where Bauer threw his bullpen. He felt he was able to replicate the grip and axis. Those watching the bullpen session had their doubts that it was an improvement. “In my head I was t
hrowing a freaking party,” Bauer says. “I went with it exclusively, and the movement profile was drastically different.”

  With greater confidence in his new slider grip, Bauer took the mound on an afternoon getaway day at Comerica Park in Detroit. The stands at the home of the rebuilding Tigers were mostly empty.

  With two outs in the first inning, Bauer faced a 2–2 count against Nick Castellanos. Bauer threw a slider with the new grip. Behind the plate, catcher Roberto Pérez held his glove outside and just below the strike zone. The pitch appeared to make a left-handed turn as it neared the plate, darting into Pérez’s glove. Castellanos swung and missed. In the second inning, Bauer threw another two-strike slider to the Tigers’ John Hicks. Again, the slider appeared to be headed for the center of the plate before breaking to the left. Hicks also swung and missed.

  One reason Bauer had longed for a slider was to pair it with his two-seam fastball, the Laminar Express. Because they both have little vertical movement, the two pitches could share the same path, or tunnel, for much of their journeys toward the plate but break horizontally in opposite directions too late for batters to adjust. To start the fourth inning, Bauer threw a 95 mph, two-strike two-seamer to the right-handed-hitting Pete Kozma. The pitch’s axis allowed for a smooth spot to develop near the nose of the ball. As it neared the plate, the turbulent air on its backside compelled it to break back toward the plate and catch the outside part of the strike zone. Kozma gave up on the pitch, thinking it was outside. Instead, he stared at strike three.

  With two outs in the seventh, Bauer again faced Hicks. On a 2–2 count, Bauer threw an excellent slider. It held its plane, masquerading as a fastball bound for the outside corner before darting away. Hicks whiffed to end the inning. Bauer looked businesslike as he walked off the mound, as if he had done this before. But he hadn’t, and inside his head he was celebrating. It was arguably the finest start of Bauer’s career: eight innings, four hits allowed, no runs, no walks, and ten strikeouts. All ten of the Ks had come via whiffs on sliders or batters looking at his comeback two-seamer. That day, Bauer threw his new slider sixteen times and induced eight swings-and-misses: an outstanding 50 percent whiff rate, the best of all his pitches in the outing. The pitch had an average horizontal movement of 8.6 inches, nearly what he wanted and roughly double where it had been in the previous six starts. The slider also averaged 0.3 inches of vertical movement relative to gravity. It was nearly perfect.

  Through his first nine starts, Bauer owned a 2.59 ERA and a 2.82 FIP. He had struck out sixty-seven batters in fifty-nine innings and allowed just forty-five hits, and only in his last outing had his pitches felt fully operational. He was as close as he’d ever been to becoming what he thought he could be.

  9

  WE’RE ALL ASTRONAUTS

  Pilots devoutly believed that it was necessary to fly out to the edge with regularity in order to maintain proficiency or ‘decision-making ability.’ On one level it was a logical enough equivalent to an athlete’s concern with staying in shape; but on another it had to do with the mysteries of the right stuff and the ineffable joys of showing the world, and yourself, that you had it.

  —TOM WOLFE, The Right Stuff

  Ryan Pressly was at best the fifth-most-famous of the six major leaguers traded on July 27, 2018, the day he joined the Astros and his trajectory changed. An eleventh-round Red Sox draftee in 2007, Pressly scuffled on the farm as a starter before finally being moved to the bullpen in 2012. He pitched a bit better in relief but not well enough for Boston to add him to its 40-man roster. That left him exposed to the Rule 5 draft, an annual farm-system flea market in which players who’ve been stuck with one organization for several years can be rescued by another. The Twins took Pressly, and he made the majors in 2013, pitching well enough to stay there but not well enough to stand out. From 2013 to 2017, the first five seasons of Pressly’s career, MLB relievers recorded a collective 3.80 ERA. Over the same span, Pressly’s ERA was 3.81.

  Pressly’s 2017 season had started so disastrously (nineteen runs in eighteen innings) that he’d actually been demoted to Triple-A. His first half of 2018 was much stronger, and through July 26, he trailed the major-league leader in appearances by a single game. But no one was expecting second-half heroics from a twenty-nine-year-old, generic right-hander with a respectable but not otherworldly 3.40 ERA on the year.

  Although the trade was disorienting for Pressly, there were benefits to being uprooted. The Dallas native was returning to Texas. He was also upgrading from a 1.2 percent chance to qualify for the postseason to a 99.9 percent chance, according to FanGraphs’ playoff odds. He flew from Boston to Houston and arrived at Minute Maid Park in time for the following day’s Lone Star Series game against the Rangers.

  No more than fifteen minutes after he finished unpacking in the clubhouse, Pressly was summoned into a meeting. In attendance were Astros pitching coach Brent Strom, bullpen coach Doug White, and multiple analysts from the front office. The Astros, Pressly learned, had a plan for him to be better, and the analysts launched into the details. “They sat me down and they put up all these x, y charts and all this other stuff,” Pressly says. “It almost sounded like they were speaking in a different language. I just raised my hand and said, ‘Guys, just tell me what to throw and not to throw.’” They told him his two-seam fastball to lefties was ineffective but that they loved his curve and hoped he’d throw it more. They also suggested he elevate his four-seam fastball and throw his slider slightly more to make his fastball more effective.

  The newest Astro was open to input. With the Twins, he had wondered, “Why is it not clicking for me?” Now someone was offering answers. And it wasn’t just anyone; it was the Astros, who had won the World Series the year before and had a history of acquiring and improving much more accomplished pitchers, including former Tigers ace Justin Verlander, the best AL pitcher of his era. “I was just curious to see if this works,” Pressly says. “Let’s buy in. Obviously, you have a Hall of Fame guy over there,” he says, referring to Verlander. “He’s [having] the best year of his career, and he’s thirty-five. It’s like, maybe I should pay attention over here.”

  That night, Pressly got into the game in the seventh inning, and the first batter he faced was Rangers second baseman Rougned Odor. Pressly threw six pitches, following the Astros’ recipe: four four-seamers (three of them high), one curve, and one slider. Odor pulled pitch number six, the slider, over the right-field fence for a home run. “I’m like, OK, this is bullshit. You guys are lying to me,” Pressly remembers thinking. “But at the same time, just give it some time.”

  Pressly stuck to the blueprint. With the Twins from 2017 to 2018, Pressly had thrown his sinker 13 percent of the time against lefties. Only once in that span had a southpaw swung at it and missed. With the Astros, he threw the sinker to lefties less than 1 percent of the time. With the Twins in 2018, Pressly had thrown the curve 24 percent of the time. As an Astro, he threw it 39 percent of the time. With Houston, he also elevated his four-seamer and threw his slider slightly more often. “In baseball in general, there’s a sort of macho [feeling] of, I’ve gotta throw my fastball, I’ve gotta throw it inside if I’m gonna be a man,” says Mike Fast, the Astros’ research and development director when they traded for Pressly. “And that turns into, I’m gonna throw my fastball even if it’s not my best pitch. The Astros have not, for a while now, had any hesitation about just, ‘Throw your best pitches.’” The 2017 and 2018 Astros threw curveballs and sliders more than 34 percent of the time, the highest rates on record; in their 2017 pennant-clinching performance in ALCS Game 7, Charlie Morton and Lance McCullers threw sixty-five curves in 108 pitches, the highest single-game rate.

  Pressly remembers one moment that drove home how well the new formula was working. On August 31 in Houston, he entered in the eighth inning and faced the best player of the decade, Angels center fielder and two-time MVP Mike Trout. Pressly started Trout off with a fastball inside. Then he threw back-to-back sliders
, one for a foul and one for a ball. On the 2–1 count, he threw a curve that appeared to defy physics, starting inside and breaking over the outside corner, where it was framed for a strike. And on 2–2, he went back to the slider, throwing it slightly higher than the curve and freezing Trout for strike three. Trout didn’t argue: As he stood at the plate and removed his elbow protector, he nodded slowly several times, acknowledging how thoroughly he’d been beaten.

  “[Astros pitcher] Collin McHugh came up to me after the game and goes, ‘I have never seen Mike Trout do that before,’” Pressly says. “He didn’t know what was coming. That’s an unreal hitter up there, and to get a guy to do that, it’s kind of, OK, this might be working.”

  It wasn’t working only against Trout. Among the 130 major-league relievers with at least twenty innings pitched from July 28 on, Pressly ranked fourth in ERA (0.77), third in FIP (1.49), third in OBP (on-base percentage) allowed (.179), fifth in strikeout rate minus walk rate (34.5 percent), and fifth in wOBA allowed (.171). He also ranked eighth in ground-ball rate (60.4 percent) and first in soft-contact rate (31.3 percent). “He lit the league on fire,” Astros catcher Max Stassi says.

  Pressly led the Astros with twenty-six regular-season appearances after being acquired, and only Héctor Rondón, who served as the club’s closer for most of the season, had a higher average leverage index—a measure of the importance of the situations when he entered the game—during Pressly’s time with the team. He also pitched in five of the Astros’ eight postseason games, allowing one run and striking out seven batters in five innings. With one trade and one meeting, Pressly had become one of baseball’s best relievers.

  “If you had told me all of that last off-season, I probably would have laughed you out of the room,” he says.

  Pressly cost the Astros their tenth- and fifteenth-ranked prospects, as assessed by MLB.com—not nothing at the time, but a steal for what turned out to be an elite late-inning arm under team control through 2019. “He fits how we like to pitch,” Astros manager A.J. Hinch said when the trade was made. One way in which Pressly fits the Astros’ profile: he possesses almost unparalleled spin. The Astros led the majors in overall average spin rate in 2018, besting the second-place Indians. Of the 134 pitchers who threw at least 150 curveballs in 2018, no one had a higher spin rate than Pressly’s 3,225 rpm. (The league average was 2,493.) Pressly’s slider and four-seamer are also among the fastest-spinning pitches of their type. In fact, of the 506 pitchers with at least four hundred pitches of any type thrown in 2018, Pressly’s average spin rate across all of his offerings was the highest.