The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  Like most teams, the Astros have eliminated in-person advance scouting, using Statcast and video instead. More recently and radically, though, the Astros have virtually eliminated any form of in-person scouting of professional players, even in the minors. One scout the Astros recently let go mentions a directory of pro scouts that’s circulated around the industry. On the Astros’ page for 2018, he says, “It just says Astros, and it has a picture of [Special Assistant] Kevin [Goldstein] at the top. One photo.” In his new job with another team, the scout says, “I wore my [World Series] ring a lot to the big-league park. Each night, people would say, ‘Can I see that? I haven’t seen an Astros scout all year.’”

  In August 2017, when the Astros informed eight scouts that they would not be brought back, Luhnow called the cut a “reconfiguring,” telling MLB.com, “the overall number of people in the scouting departments [is] going to be roughly the same, if not increased” and characterizing the news as “normal” and something “that happens every year.” As one of the scouts let go at that time says, “It rubbed us the wrong way when he said that.” In 2009, the Astros employed 55 scouts, above the MLB average of 41.5. As of spring 2016, they still had 52, although the MLB average had climbed by close to 10. By early 2019, multiple waves of layoffs had trimmed that total to fewer than 20, less than half the size of MLB’s next-smallest scouting staff. The Astros didn’t have to fire everyone they deemed dispensable; following the first culls, some scouts read the writing on the wall and left or retired of their own accord. “It’s very calculating, and none of it happens by chance or coincidence,” another former Astros employee says. “They’re very cerebral and Machiavellian.”

  Even before the mass layoffs, one scout says, “Any kind of gut feel or any type of subjective portion took a huge back seat to the numbers.” Often, the stats determined where a scout would be sent. “You wouldn’t scout a guy who didn’t have a good stat score,” one former amateur scout says. “They weren’t going to take him.” The scout recalls one incident from his first year with the Astros that hammered that home. “I got laughed at, like literally laughed in my face, because I turned in a fifth-year senior catcher who could catch bullpens,” he says. “Maybe if somebody went down, there’s value in a guy who can catch, right? It doesn’t have to be a big leaguer, but there is organizational value. So I turned that guy in… and they just laughed at me. ‘This guy’s got a minus fifty stat score.’”

  Unfortunately for scouts, the human eye just isn’t as perceptive as a high-speed camera or a device that measures spin, and experience matters only so much. When the Astros acquired Morton, Cole, and Pressly, it wasn’t because they’d sent scouts to see them; instead, they’d sought the opinion of their scouting analysis group, a compact crew in Houston that studies athletes from afar. “I think their vision for scouting is gonna be maybe having only a couple scouts and a lot of video guys running around,” another ex-Astros scout says. “And a bunch of tech people in their scouting analysis group and their front office that can just crunch numbers, crunch data, crunch the video.”

  One might think scouts could save themselves by being more open-minded and reaching across the analytical aisle, but the Astros’ ultrasecretive front office tended to keep them in the dark. One former scout says, “They’d be like, ‘When you can, put this little Blast [sensor] on the guys’ bats, because we think we’re pretty good at identifying what is important.’ They didn’t say what it was. And I was like, ‘What is it? What are we looking for? Why am I putting this on?’… I was trying to learn, [but] I didn’t really get any direction.”

  Some adaptable scouts tried to indicate their openness, to no avail. “I’m actually really into the tech aspect of what the Astros do and was proactive in trying to incorporate that into my work,” another scout says. “I’m not like a lot of the other scouts that are sensitive to being told what player to see via a model. I know that stuff works.” He asked to be exposed to TrackMan and trained on Edgertronic, but his willingness to learn didn’t save his job. It’s cheaper to send a cameraman or a video intern to tape someone than to send a scout, and if anything, the Astros prefer that their remaining scouts abstain from technology so as not to be biased by the data.

  There are still analog-only locations where scouts are essential, but those schools and international markets are dwindling by the year. For a time, the Astros tried to disguise their gear and preserve their video advantage by placing strips of tape over the Edgertronic logos when they dispatched personnel to film players. They dropped that counterintelligence tactic when the company protested, but even so, many teams’ scouts still film on their phones, giving the Astros an edge. “You see the Astros using the Edgertronic cameras in the international market a lot,” Brian Bannister says. “You’ll have twenty scouts standing behind a backstop, and you’ll have one guy with a pole with a high-speed camera on it, and you know which team he’s with without even looking at his bag tag.”

  In the days leading up to the 2019 draft, the Astros will hold a series of amateur workouts across the country. At each one, six to eight Edgertronics will capture every movement, and TrackMan will be trained on the field. Why send scouts to the kids if the kids will come to the cameras? Although the expansion of international scouting raised the average team’s scout count to 54.6 in spring 2019, up from 41.5 in spring 2009, other teams are starting to follow the Astros’ lead and make their own pro-scouting subtractions, and the MLB Scouting Bureau—a league-operated entity founded in the 1970s to supplement teams’s internal efforts—was shuttered in 2018.

  Some technological blind spots persist: stats still don’t do a great job of judging pitchers’ deception, and they can’t judge mental makeup, although scouts’ efforts in that area are always imprecise. The Astros know they may miss a player here or there who slips through the statistical net, but they think they’ll make up for the few who get away by more efficiently targeting the players whom they can confidently project and develop, with no annoyingly fallible humans to muddy their analytical outlook. Even most of the scouts who’ve lost their jobs with the club see some wisdom in the Astros’ restructuring—and that’s what concerns them. “It’s hard to argue because they’ve been so good,” one scout admits, continuing, “If it goes well, then scouts in general should be worried because you aren’t going to need them anymore.” Still, he says, “I think over a longer term that will come back to bite them a little bit.” So far, so good for the Astros; so far, so bad for the scouts.

  The death spiral of old-school scouting is closing a chasm that until now was endemic to teams. Historically, the scouting department signed players, and the PD department did its best with what it was given. In the draft room, one former farm director says, “you’d have the scouting director arguing with the farm director or vice versa.” That changed at the predraft meetings in Houston in 2017, when the Astros introduced a different, development-centric model of draft prep, unbeknownst to the scouts.

  “It was such a surreal thing,” one Astros source says. “A huge group would sit in the draft room… during the day. The scouts would talk. The front-office people would mostly stay quiet.” The team was at home, so at the end of the day, the scouts were excused to watch the game. After they left, though, the meetings went on. Putila and assistant GM Mike Elias had analyzed the Edgertronic video that the team had harvested from amateur games, and a few other front-office members had scrutinized the available college TrackMan data. As the smaller group reviewed each pitcher, a member of the R&D department would explain how the stats said his offerings graded out, and Putila would weigh in on what could and couldn’t be fixed on the farm. “The scouts would come back the next day, and the whole draft board would look different, and nobody would know why,” the source says.

  In 2018, that prep work fell to the scouting analysts, who were well versed in the Astros’ PD process. The traditional scouts’ influence continued to decline. “Player development and scouting are two different entities across
baseball, but the Astros don’t view it like that,” a former Astros staffer says. If the Astros can’t improve a player, they won’t take him in the first place.

  The Astros’ powers of player development are relative. Only 13.6 percent of all players who entered the minors in any organization from 2006 to 2008 ended up making the majors. Like any team’s, Houston’s record is marred by mistakes, and even in the Astros’ case, many more minor leaguers miss than hit. They’re just currently the leaders at a predominantly losing game.

  Much as they try to keep a low profile, the Astros can’t conceal their results: every other team can tune into their games and dissect their TrackMan data. But most of the developmental process still happens outside the spotlight. And just as players have a hard time improving if all they’re told is a desired outcome, teams have a hard time aping the Astros just from watching them win. “I think there’s an interest in the league of, ‘What the hell, how are they doing this?’” Mejdal says. Luhnow isn’t interested in answering their questions, or ours. The GM declined to be interviewed, saying, “You say it yourself, that PD is now the game’s greatest source of innovation and the big leagues’ most closely contested battleground. Why would any team willingly choose to talk about the things they do that may be considered proprietary or innovative?”

  The Astros found out firsthand how hard it is to keep secrets in baseball when Luhnow and Mejdal’s former Cardinals colleague Chris Correa was prosecuted for repeatedly hacking into Houston’s database, dubbed Ground Control, over an extended period that began in 2013. Correa went to prison for his intrusion, but there are plenty of perfectly legal ways to learn about competing teams. “One thing I’ve heard from other teams is that when [the Astros] send our minor-league players somewhere else in a trade, the first thing that’s always remarked about in an organization is that these guys know what their goals are and what they’re working on,” Fast says. Players talk—not just to each other, but to pesky reporters, too.

  Even though NDAs bar analysts and coaches from taking team property with them, they can’t forget what they know. That presents a problem, because although the Astros have modernized player development by breaking down barriers between baseball worlds, they aren’t indivisible. The pursuit of a championship acted as a unifying force, but in the wake of the 2017 title, even some nonscout Astros sources grew disgruntled, believing that Luhnow was becoming too cost conscious and overly reliant on numbers—criticisms that external sources once lodged during the Astros’ no-holds-barred rebuild.

  Front-office members have clashed over a series of subjects, including how much information to share with scouts, how many scouts to employ, and whether to trade for reliever Roberto Osuna, whose 2018 acquisition in the midst of a domestic-violence suspension—followed by Luhnow’s convoluted attempt to square the swap with a supposed “zero-tolerance policy related to abuse of any kind”—caused a public backlash. According to multiple sources, most or all of the front office was strongly opposed to that trade, but Luhnow—who had earlier been talked out of drafting Oregon State pitcher and convicted child molester Luke Heimlich, who has trained at Driveline—rammed it through regardless, with Crane’s support. The same pursuit of inefficiencies that prompted the GM and owner to strip-mine the roster and revamp player development convinced them to cross a line that many of their own recruits considered morally reprehensible. “They don’t give a shit, to be honest, what people think about them,” one former Astros staffer says, adding, “Jeff’s gonna do what he wants to do.” Houston has a low threshold, too.

  Even if public opinion is a secondary concern, internal discord could derail the Astros’ efforts. “I do feel like things on a human level have, sadly, gone downhill since the World Series,” says another source, who felt “disgusted” by Luhnow’s public justifications of the Osuna trade. The constant turnover and clandestine nature of the Astros’ operations also seem to have taken a toll on morale; as one Astros source says, “Slack accounts being deactivated is how anyone knows who’s leaving. Nothing gets announced.”

  It would take a lot to puncture the pipeline Houston has in place. “Throughout the minor-league system, there’s so much consistency from top to bottom that you can’t try to copy it,” Steinhorn says. “You won’t be able to do it.” Nonetheless, other teams are trying to. And many of them will have help from former Astros employees.

  Several Astros Slack accounts went silent late in 2018. The Orioles hired Elias as their new GM. Fast opted to leave the Astros rather than renew his contract at the end of October. After fielding overtures from sixteen teams, he joined the Atlanta Braves, reuniting him with another recent Astros émigré, former scouting analyst Ronit Shah. Mejdal and assistant pitching coordinator Chris Holt joined Elias in Baltimore. Minor league field coordinator Josh Bonifay took a job as the Phillies’ farm director, replacing an outgoing director of player development who reportedly resisted a data-driven approach. Ryan Hallahan, the team’s senior technical architect and the person primarily responsible for building Ground Control, left his full-time role to pursue nonbaseball work. Every member of the original analytics team that occupied the Astros’ “Nerd Cave” in 2012 has departed. “Approximately 20 percent of the [off-season] openings for senior-level talent across all areas of baseball operations were filled with Astros employees,” Luhnow told writer Richard Justice in February 2019. “Jeff says that happens to all successful organizations, but I don’t buy that,” one ex-Astros employee says, adding, “People look for reasons to stay if it’s a good place to stay.”

  The coaching exodus has happened even faster. After 2017, the Giants hired Astros assistant hitting coach Alonzo Powell as their primary hitting coach, the Phillies hired Astros scout and scouting supervisor Chris Young as their assistant pitching coach (now pitching coach), and the Red Sox hired Astros bench coach Alex Cora and bullpen coach Craig Bjornson (whose contract Houston hadn’t renewed) as their new manager and bullpen coach, respectively. In Boston, Cora beat the Astros at their own game, using starters in relief in the playoffs and emphasizing air balls and a blend of power and contact, as he’d learned to do in Houston. Another flurry of departures and promotions came after 2018: the Yankees hired Astros minor-league hitting coach Dillon Lawson and elevated him to hitting coordinator, and four other minor-league managers or coaches left or were let go. The Rays hired Astros Triple-A manager Rodney Linares as their MLB third-base coach; the Cardinals hired assistant hitting coach Jeff Albert as their hitting coach; the Blue Jays hired hitting coach Dave Hudgens as their bench coach; and the Angels hired bullpen coach Doug White as their pitching coach. Strom and third-base coach Gary Pettis are the only remnants of Hinch’s staff from 2014.

  “One of our advantages has been not being afraid to be the first to try (and probably fail) to implement new methods,” Putila says. At a time when so much can be measured, it’s fair to wonder how many more new methods are out there and whether the Astros—or any team—can keep planting flags so fast. But those who’ve been at baseball’s bleeding edge don’t foresee a slower pace. “I realized after a few years in Houston that I kept thinking, well, now that we have got TrackMan digested and understood, things will slow down,” Fast says. “And then, OK, now that we have Blast Motion digested and understood, things will slow down. Now that we have Statcast—etc., etc. The pace keeps increasing. The tilt keeps getting bigger.” And the old methods of development are falling further and further behind.

  University of Missouri pitching coach Fred Corral remembers attending an arm-care meeting at an ABCA (American Baseball Coaches Association) convention in Nashville in the 1980s. During the meeting, longtime Miami-Dade coach Charlie Greene stood up and spoke, full of remorse for the obsolete developmental practices he’d once espoused. “I’m sorry, because we taught all wrong, and the things that we’re teaching right now are so much better than what we taught back in the day,” Corral recalls Greene saying. Corral continues, “I couldn’t take it anymore because I respec
t him and care for him a lot. I interrupted him and said, ‘There’s no reason to apologize because you were the astronaut who took Apollo 1 up to the moon.… We’re all astronauts, and there’s nothing wrong in that.’” Appropriately, the Astros have been baseball’s most adventurous astronauts for the past several seasons. And if a player doesn’t have the right stuff when he gets to Houston, he may well when he leaves.

  10

  SPINGATE

  I reckon I tried everything on the old apple but salt and pepper and chocolate sauce topping.… I’d always have grease in at least two places in case the umpires would ask me to wipe one off. I never wanted to be caught out there with anything, though. It wouldn’t be professional.

  —GAYLORD PERRY, Hall of Fame pitcher and spitball enthusiast

  Bauer began his pregame routine in preparation for his May 27 start against the Houston Astros as he typically did, unleashing high-arcing throws that traveled three hundred feet, nearly from foul pole to foul pole on the sun-soaked Progressive Field outfield grass. Then he worked back toward his throwing partner, eventually shrinking the distance to near sixty feet, with pulldown throws that must have terrified those on the receiving end. Bauer, the player who epitomized the idea of growth mindset, was preparing to pitch against the team that, more than any other, incorporated the strategies he espoused into its organizational fabric. In many ways, Bauer respected the Astros. He thought they were the game’s model organization. But in 2018, the Astros loathed Bauer.

  Bauer eventually made his way to warm up on the mound in the home bullpen at Progressive Field, where both bullpens are tiered behind the right-center-field wall. Warming in the visiting pen, parallel to and situated above Bauer, was his former college teammate, Gerrit Cole. It was one of the more awkward pregame throwing sessions in baseball history. Cole and Bauer threw alongside each other, but neither acknowledged the other. There had never been much of a relationship between the two, even as they pitched UCLA to the 2010 College World Series, and weeks earlier their relationship had become embroiled in controversy. An already compelling matchup between two of the top pitchers of early 2018 had grown more intriguing.