Pressly still doesn’t know how he spins pitches so fast, but after the Astros helped him optimize his mix, that high-spin, three-pitch approach made him almost unhittable. It’s rare and unfair for a reliever to throw multiple breaking balls so well and so often. In 2018, two hundred fifty pitchers threw at least thirty innings out of the bullpen. Only Pressly threw both a curve and a slider at least a quarter of the time each. Thanks to its spin, Pressly’s curve had the second-biggest side-to-side break of any AL pitcher who threw the pitch at least two hundred times, trailing only his Houston teammate Morton, who threw the second-spinniest curve behind Pressly. Pressly’s slider, meanwhile, was by one definition the majors’ most unhittable pitch: by locating it lower and throwing it more often on two-strike counts, he transformed it into a weapon that induced a whiff roughly a third of the time he threw it—the highest rate of any pitch thrown two hundred times in 2018. It almost seems like an afterthought that Pressly’s four-seamer averaged nearly 97 mph, topping out just shy of 100.
Excising the sinker from his repertoire and throwing each of his remaining pitches between 29 and 39 percent of the time helped Pressly keep hitters guessing and, often, flailing. Houston hitters who had faced Pressly told him his high-spin fastball up in the zone looked like it was rising, and his breaking balls looked like his fastball, usually until it was too late. “They were like, ‘Dude, your pitches look the exact same and then they just go different ways on all of them. It’s like we can’t sit on anything,’” Pressly says.
Pressly had always possessed high spin, and if all the Astros had done was move more quickly than other teams to collect pitchers who’d exhibited that ability elsewhere, their strategy wouldn’t be fundamentally different from the Moneyball Athletics’ embrace of OBP. But spin alone didn’t make Pressly so hard to hit; what helped him reach what he describes as “a whole ’nother level” were the adjustments he made at Houston’s behest. For Pressly, being traded to Houston was akin to Harry Potter arriving at Hogwarts. For the first time, he was fully aware of and encouraged to use his powers, and he finally felt like himself.
Pressly learned from watching his new teammates more than from anything they said. “If guys are pitching up in the zone and throwing curveballs off fastballs up in the zone, you can clearly see it,” Pressly says, adding, “It starts to click—I have that same exact stuff. So if they’re having success…” The montage of fruitless swings Pressly admired from the pen was a better sales pitch than any analyst’s graph. “It’s just the Astros’ philosophy,” he says. “They just have a different kind of mindset over there.”
Mindset is a psychological concept that’s already earned its own TED Talk. As noted earlier, Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck turned “mindset” into a business buzzword when she codified an attitudinal difference that could help explain the separation between high and low achievers. “Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset,” she wrote. “They tend to achieve more than those with a more fixed mindset (those who believe their talents are innate gifts).”1 The Astros value a growth mindset in their players, and more than anyone else, they also embody it as a franchise. They’re baseball’s best proof that even elite performers possess untapped talents.
From 2009 to 2014, the Astros won 382 games, MLB’s fewest by 47. Splitting that six-season sample in two reveals a difference in degrees of despair. From 2009 to 2011, they won only the fourth-fewest games, posting a bad-but-not-abysmal .424 combined winning percentage. From 2012 to 2014, though, they won 24 fewer games than any other team, managing only a .362 winning percentage. The first of those three-year chunks came under owner Drayton McLane and GM Ed Wade. The second came under new owner Jim Crane—a billionaire businessman who made his fortune in shipping and logistics—and former Cardinals executive Jeff Luhnow, whom Crane hired as GM in December 2011.
The outgoing administration had allowed the Astros to grow old, leaving Luhnow with little talent in the majors and a fallow farm system. In 2011, the Astros finished 56–106, easily the worst record in the majors, and Baseball America rated their minor-league system twenty-sixth. As constituted, the Astros were neither competitive nor promising, so Luhnow decided to do something drastic: strip the roster down to the studs and accept a lot of losses in order to stockpile prospects. Although the players on the field would do their best from game to game, the front office would, in the short term, essentially not try to win.
For the first few years of Luhnow’s tenure, the Astros were unwatchable. And unwatched: from 2013 to 2014, Astros games sporadically drew 0.0 ratings, indicating that no Nielsen household was masochistic enough to tune in. By Opening Day 2013, Luhnow had slashed the team’s payroll to $26.1 million, the lowest figure any team had committed to its active roster in five years. That season, the club bottomed out at fifty-one wins. In those years, the Astros’ most memorable, emblematic on-field moment was an extra-innings, run-scoring, Keystone Kops sequence in a game against the Nationals in August 2012, which featured two throwing errors and a collision between two Astros fielders, all precipitated by a bunt. That came toward the tail end of a 4–34 stretch for the team, a run of ineptitude unsurpassed in a sample of that length since 1916.
Many teams had rebuilt and been bad before, but few, if any, had intentionally taken the strategy to such an extreme. Luhnow and Crane passed the MLB equivalent of the marshmallow test (another product of the Stanford psychology department), rejecting short-term satisfaction in favor of long-term gain. That forbearance led to Little League–looking plays, the worst record over a three-year stretch of any team since the expansion ’60s Mets, and a fifteen-game losing streak to end the 2013 season. But it also paid dividends via top draft picks, prospects gained through veteran trades, and money allocated to amateur signings and saved for future seasons. The Astros’ uncompromising rebuild was a manifestation of a relentless, stay-the-course conviction that sometimes makes them hard to root for as well as tough to beat. That same mentality would give them the will to take on the last bastion of hidebound baseball thinking and construct an unprecedented player-development machine, although that wouldn’t come without human costs.
Precisely as planned, the Astros emerged from their years in the wilderness with one of the game’s richest arrays of talent. In 2015, the Astros won a wild card, returning to the playoffs for the first time in a decade. In 2017, they won the first World Series in franchise history and boasted Baseball America’s third-ranked farm system. In roughly six years, the Astros had transformed from the worst team in baseball with one of the worst farm systems to the best team in baseball with one of the best farm systems.
From 2015 to 2018, the Astros won 374 games, the most in the AL. From 2017 to 2018, they won 204, the most in the majors. Even though the 2018 squad won “only” 103 regular-season games, it was, by some measures, one of the most dominant teams in decades. The 2018 Astros boasted the third-highest run differential (+263) since 1954, trailing only the 1998 Yankees and the 2001 Mariners, two of the three winningest regular-season teams of all time. They also posted a .679 Pythagorean winning percentage—an estimate of what a team’s record “should” have been based on its runs scored and allowed and the league-wide run environment—which was the second-highest since World War II. Although they lost to the Red Sox in five ALCS games, they actually outhit Boston in the series.
Alex Bregman, the fruit of one of the high draft picks the Astros had gained by being so bad, was the best player on that 2018 team. Shortstop Carlos Correa, the No. 1 pick from 2012, was the second-best player on the 2016–2017 teams and the third-best player in 2015. The other three of the four best players on the 2015 team that ended the Astros’ dark days—José Altuve, George Springer, and Dallas Keuchel—were additions that predated the Luhnow regime. Focusing on that core makes what the Astros accomplished seem simple: inherit a few future stars, lose a lot, and reap the rewards. But neither holdover
prospects—who once weren’t seen as rising stars—nor lofty draft picks were a renewable resource. Rather than rely on them, the Astros implemented a model for finding and developing players that would be self-sustaining, outlasting both the leavings of Luhnow’s predecessors and the immediate payoff of top picks that was bound to disappear as soon as the team got good again.
As a result, the Astros are dominating the minors even more than the majors. In 2018, four years removed from the franchise’s last No. 1 pick, Astros pitchers led their league in strikeout rate at six successive levels, from MLB down to short-season A-ball. (At the seventh level, Rookie ball, their rank sank all the way to second.) At those top five minor-league levels combined, Astros pitchers struck out 26.5 percent of the batters they faced. The gap between them and the second-place Yankees (2.4 percentage points) was as big as the gap between the Yankees and the nineteenth-place Cubs. And it’s not as if Houston had veteran arms on the farm inflating the stats: weighted by playing time, the average age of those minor-league pitchers above Rookie ball, 22.9, was the third-lowest of any organization and the lowest of any AL organization. Astros hitters above Rookie ball, meanwhile, were eighth-youngest in age, second in walk-to-strikeout ratio, and—despite not playing in any notably offense-friendly parks—fourth in home-run rate, behind three organizations with at least one bandbox or team at altitude apiece. And as for wins—well, Astros minor-league teams led all organizations in combined winning percentage above Rookie ball (.585), short-season A-ball (.587), full-season A-ball (.589), and High-A (.592).
The way they did that is telling, too. According to TrackMan data obtained from another team, Astros hitters led the minors in pull percentage and the percentage of balls hit in the air, while also recording the seventh-highest rate of balls hit 95 mph or harder. Despite that power-centric approach, they chased balls at the third-lowest rate and maintained an above-average contact rate. On the pitching side, Astros minor leaguers led all teams in fastball velocity, breaking-ball spin rate, off-speed-pitch percentage, percentage of four-seam fastballs thrown in the upper third of the zone, and whiffs per swing, in addition to inducing pop-ups more often than all but two other teams. Name a data-driven developmental trend in today’s game, and the Astros aren’t just at or near the forefront of it at the big-league level, but they’re also grooming the current roster’s replacements from Triple-A down to the Dominican Summer League.
In August 2012, a few days after the bumbling bunt play, Luhnow wrote a letter to Astros season-ticket holders. “In order to compete consistently, the Astros must develop and maintain a world-class scouting operation and farm system,” the letter said. “Through the scouting and player development function, we will be able to produce and keep winning players. Teams that excel in these areas tend to win championships in baseball.” Five years later, the Astros won the World Series, proving him right. And by then, the Astros’ scouting and player-development process looked like no other team’s had before.
Like most teams that have embraced novel methods of player development, the Astros aren’t led by lifelong baseball men. Luhnow was a McKinsey consultant before Cardinals owner Bill Dewitt Jr. hired him as a scouting executive to help the Cards catch up to the sabermetric movement. Sig Mejdal, a Moneyball disciple Luhnow hired to head up the team’s newly formed analytics department in 2005, was a former part-time blackjack dealer who went on to collect a long list of degrees and work as an engineer for Lockheed Martin and NASA. Mejdal’s amateur-player projections, which were based on painstakingly assembled college stats, helped the Cardinals draft more major leaguers over the next several seasons than any other club, many of them late-round finds.
Although Luhnow oversaw St. Louis’s player-development process, he and Mejdal intervened less in that area than they did on the draft side. “There was much less effort and energy put into player development than we later did in Houston,” Mejdal says. “We were much more observers than participants.”
When Luhnow left for Houston, he brought Mejdal with him as the Astros’ director of decision sciences. (Another thing the Astros do differently: job titles.) Mejdal recreated and deployed his draft model, expecting to unearth underappreciated players at the same rate he had in St. Louis. But it soon became clear that other clubs had caught on. Suddenly, the players Mejdal’s model liked were being snapped up earlier than they had been before. Potential draftees the Astros thought would fall to the fifth round were hearing their names called in the second or third, and sleepers who might once have been available from rounds 10 to 15 were off the board by then. “In hindsight, I was naïve,” Mejdal says. “I thought that our advantage in the draft was going to remain there for quite a few more years, but I think the steepness of the innovation adoption curve hit me.… The processes that probably only a few teams were doing in 2005 to 2010 are more table stakes now.”
With the Astros’ edge in the draft shrinking, the front office refocused its efforts on an area where the frontier wasn’t so settled. “Organizations that embody a growth mindset encourage appropriate risk-taking, knowing that some risks won’t work out,” Dweck wrote. The Astros were one of those organizations. “Working for Jeff, there is always a culture of innovation and searching for the next thing that could perhaps improve us,” Mejdal says. “There’s no problem with bad ideas and false alarms. And so that culture probably led us to focus on player development.”
The Astros’ string of spectacular successes in data-driven player development started in earnest in 2013, propelled in part by the 2012 hiring of Mike Fast as a front-office analyst. Fast, a tech engineer with a physics degree, started producing baseball analysis on his personal blog in 2007, then climbed the hierarchy of sabermetric sites. His pioneering PITCHf/x analyses soon drew the attention of teams, and the Astros spirited him out of the public sphere not long after Baseball Prospectus published his most influential article, a September 2011 piece that conclusively demonstrated the impact of pitch-framing.
Fast had first gotten a taste of the potential for tech-aided player development in 2008, when he wrote a three-part series at the baseball analysis website Stat Speak breaking down comments Brian Bannister had made about his efforts to suppress his BABIP. Bannister left a long comment on the third post, praising Fast’s work, then emailed Fast to ask how he could allow fewer home runs. Fast spent twenty-seven hours studying data and producing a fifteen-page PDF file featuring almost fifty charts. At the end of the document, he made a few recommendations but also acknowledged the limitations of his work. “I believe the most effective method would combine the various tools, such as the pitcher’s own insight, traditional scouting and video tools, and the query power of PITCHf/x trajectory information, into a tighter feedback loop,” Fast’s report concluded. He was describing a process that wouldn’t work without direct access to a team. Four years later, he had that.
Once on the inside, Fast began to collaborate with coaches and players, funneling his insights to the field. “When I came there and saw our player-development goals, I was like, oh my word. This is stuff you can’t work on,” Fast says. “It was stuff like, ‘Improve your command.’ How’s a pitcher supposed to go into the off-season and improve his command? He needs a drill. He needs to know how to measure if he’s getting better.” Branch Rickey had understood this, forbidding his managers from criticizing a player’s mistakes without telling him how to correct them. “It isn’t enough to tell a youngster that he strikes out too much—he knows that as well as the manager,” Rickey’s comrade Fresco Thompson wrote. “What he must be told is how to reduce his number of strikeouts.”
As it had in the case of Craig Wright and Jim Sundberg, the first breakthrough came with a catcher: Jason Castro, the Astros’ first-round pick from 2008. Castro made the majors to stay in 2012 and hit well enough to earn a plurality of the playing time at the position. But he was severely limited on defense, costing the Astros runs in every way a catcher could, particularly with his subpar pitch-framing.
Fast’s previous research made that flaw a logical place to start, and in the spring of 2013, he, Castro, and Astros coach Dan Radison met every morning to review video and refine Castro’s technique in ways that would help him improve his performance on pitches the stats suggested he wasn’t presenting properly. That tighter feedback loop paid dividends: according to Baseball Prospectus, Castro’s framing performance improved from well below-average in 2012 to average and then well above-average in 2013 and 2014, respectively. After costing the Astros twenty-four runs on defense in his first two partial major-league seasons—which had made him a subreplacement-level player—Castro saved them forty-one runs over the next four years. Although Castro later left via free agency, he first passed along what he’d learned to an understudy, Stassi. In Stassi’s early years in the organization, he didn’t rate as a standout receiver, but encounters with Castro convinced him to refine his framing craft. “He was the first one to teach me,” Stassi says. “He really understood.” In 2018, Stassi led all AL catchers with fourteen framing runs saved despite starting only sixty-four games.
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