The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  “Ten minutes in, and we’re in a better place,” Latta says when we review the tape. “Now your body’s working a little differently. Looks more athletic, felt easier, but results are stronger.… You’ve got more extension through the ball.”

  We go through this process—hit, review, revise—multiple times. I’m getting a form of feedback from Latta and from my own perception of how hard I’m hitting the ball, but as a new disciple of deliberate practice, I lament that my progress isn’t being quantified. I tentatively ask Latta how much he thinks my launch angles and exit velocities have increased in this single session, which sets off another Socratic exchange.

  LATTA: When you started hitting the right way, how many balls did you hit in the air?

  ME: More.

  LATTA: A lot more. How well did you hit the balls in the air?

  ME: Much better.

  LATTA: OK. Did I tell you to hit the ball in the air?

  ME: No.

  LATTA: Did I try to force you to hit the ball to the top of the cage? No? Then what happened? What was the miracle?

  I consider saying “balance,” but instead I mumble something about making more natural motions. Latta says he doesn’t want me to reduce what we did to a number; better numbers are the by-products of better body movement. “If I have a good swing and I can square up a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball, what am I going to have?” he asks. I know this one. “Higher exit velocity,” I say. “Higher exit velocity,” Latta echoes, satisfied.

  “I did nothing more today than just try to get your body in line with what it’s designed to do,” Latta says. Maybe my mostly sedentary pursuits are more my choice than my destiny. “Believe me,” he adds, “for a writer, you weren’t that bad.” That’s all I’ve ever wanted to hear.

  It’s not too painful for me to confront my physical failings, because I never wanted to (or thought I could) be a big leaguer. Andy McKay wasn’t one either, but building big leaguers is his job. To do that, the Mariners’ director of player development has wholeheartedly embraced the latest tools. “[The Mariners] are our biggest powerhouse user in baseball right now,” says Vermilyea, who notes that the M’s have eight K-Vest systems—one for Seattle, one for each farm team, and a mobile unit.

  In 2008, when McKay managed the La Crosse Loggers of the Northwoods League, a collegiate summer circuit, he insisted that his players show up at the park by 1 p.m. for 7 p.m. home games. That extra time, a rarity in a laid-back league where “It’s just summer ball” was a frequent refrain, would be allotted to deliberate practice of player-specified skills. “If a second baseman wants to work on his double-play turn, you do it right for fifteen minutes per day and the results after three or four days would astound you,” he said at the time. McKay’s mindset hasn’t changed, but his ability to put that time to good use has. “In terms of evaluating, is this player getting better, we’ve never had the ability to say, ‘Yes, it’s absolutely better’ or ‘No, it’s not,’ the way we can now,” he says.

  McKay estimates that the Mariners have had seven or eight “key breakthroughs” on the pitching side, and just as many (if not more) on the offensive side, that were “completely the result” of their utilization of technology like K-Vest, Blast, and Rapsodo. “If all of these tools and technologies help one player help you win one game in the big leagues that wouldn’t have otherwise have done it, then it’s absolutely worth it,” he says. Although the details are different, in McKay’s mind the impulse to measure every aspect of player performance is similar in spirit to the way any evaluator would assess, say, a forty-yard dash. “They would never just watch the guy run and go, ‘That’s really fast’ or ‘They’re kind of slow,’” he says. “They would take a stopwatch. Well, we now have a stopwatch for all of these other parts of the game.”

  Just because a team can identify a problem doesn’t mean that a player can correct it. But the odds are better than they would be if the issue went undiagnosed—or worse, misdiagnosed. Some players look good being bad, and others look bad being good, but objective measures, McKay says, are “separating the efficiency from the style.” The tools tell him the difference, and he tells players, who can’t dismiss the message as merely one man’s opinion. “It’s not my opinion, it’s hard data, which I think everybody appreciates,” McKay says.

  “Everybody” is a slight exaggeration. But McKay doesn’t mind dissenting opinions. “I would have no problems debating anybody who wanted to stand up and tell me how their naked eye and twenty years of experience would be more valuable than getting real data points that told the truth,” he says. “No other business in the world would be run like that. It was perfectly acceptable when we didn’t have the tools, but now we do.” It’s true. I’ve tried them. And unfortunately for my ego, they definitely told the truth.

  12

  THE ALL-STAR PLAYER-COACH

  You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.

  —JIM BOUTON, former pitcher and author of Ball Four

  On the evening of Sunday, July 8, 2018, at his Westlake, Ohio, apartment, Trevor Bauer learned he’d been named to the American League All-Star team.

  He led the majors in pitching WAR (5.2), and his 2.24 ERA was second only to Chris Sale’s (2.23). His first-half ERA was the lowest by an Indians pitcher at the break since Tom Candiotti’s in 1991. He’d allowed just six home runs in 136 first-half innings and had struck out 175 batters. Although Bauer was not pleased to have made the team as an injury replacement for the Astros’ Justin Verlander, which he took as a slight, he had crossed off an item on his personal achievement list: he had made himself an All-Star. He had greater aspirations, though. He was now squarely in contention for a Cy Young Award.

  On July 10, a week before the All-Star Game, he returned to the mound as the Indians hosted the Cincinnati Reds at Progressive Field. There was a game within the game. One of the sport’s most cerebral pitchers (Bauer) would match up against its most cerebral hitter, the Reds’ star first baseman Joey Votto.

  “They are pretty much the same guy,” Indians catcher Roberto Pérez said.

  In the first inning, Bauer began Votto with this sequence: four-seam fastball (ball), four-seam fastball (called strike), changeup (ball), four-seam fastball (called strike), two-seam fastball (foul), and a big-bending curveball that broke from Votto’s belt to his heels that he fouled off to stay alive. Votto stepped out of the box and broke into a grin. He and Bauer had briefly spoken at a UFC match they had attended the previous winter. Each respected how the other approached the game. Votto was one of the most difficult players to strike out, and now he had seen most of Bauer’s pitches. With two strikes, Votto choked up on his bat dramatically, as he always did. Votto didn’t care that few players choked up so dramatically. He didn’t care about looking silly. Like Bauer, he wanted to be the best he could be. Bauer shook off Pérez once. Pérez put down two fingers for a curveball. Bauer shook him off. Pérez put down three fingers for a slider. Bauer again shook him off. Pérez then gave a three-finger sign but moved it to his left thigh. It was a combination of pitch type and location Bauer had rarely thrown: a comeback slider.

  “He was fouling off great pitches,” Pérez said. “I didn’t know what to call. [Bauer] just shook until I got to the backdoor slider.”

  The pitch began in the right-handed batter’s box and broke back over the plate. Votto looked at it for strike three. The inning was over. Bauer had executed a perfect pitch. As Bauer walked off the mound he looked back toward Votto, and Bauer pointed at his own cap. Votto didn’t see him.

  “I was like, gotcha,” Bauer said of his motion toward Votto. “That’s the second [comeback slider] I’ve thrown this year.… It’s just a matter of avoiding what he happens to be looking for at that moment in that count. You can’t do one thing to him and be successful. He has hot zones and cold zones, whatever, but you go [to a cold zone] repeatedly, and he’s obviously going to figure it
out. There are people that have a cold zone that just can’t hit it. Like with [Reds outfielder Scott] Schebler, I can tell him a curveball is coming, he is not going to hit it, which is basically what I did for three at-bats. But with Votto, if the report says he doesn’t hit curveballs and you throw him three consecutive curveballs, he’s going to whack the third one.”

  After this episode, Rob Friedman, who creates pitching GIFs on social media, made a GIF of Bauer shaking off calls and superimposed it over a bobblehead figure on Twitter—the world’s first bobblehead that shakes its head side to side. It isn’t easy to catch Bauer, whom Pérez has worked with since 2013.

  Before every Bauer start, Indians pitching coach Carl Willis brings him the scouting data the front office has harvested on that night’s opponent, along with his own insights. They go over the intel several hours before first pitch. The catcher is usually part of the meeting. But if Pérez isn’t around, they usually don’t bother to find him.

  “Where’s Roberto?” Bauer says Willis will ask.

  “Well, it doesn’t really matter, Carl, because I’m going to throw what I want to throw anyways,” Bauer says.

  “Yeah, I know,” Willis says.

  “Just tell me and I’ll shake off,” Bauer says.

  Says Pérez: “There’s not a plan. He knows how to attack guys, and I follow him.… He knows a lot about the game. We go through the scouting report, but he knows what he wants to do.… It would be nice not to be shaken off. I think any catcher would like that. But I am used to him. It’s his game, man. I am back there suggesting signs.… He knows how to attack guys.”

  For Pérez, it’s not personal. And Bauer says it’s not a one-way relationship. He values Pérez’s ability to get a closer read on hitters’ swings, as well as his opinion on how pitches are playing.

  “It’s gotta be really hard to call pitches for me,” Bauer says. “You can call the right pitch, and a lot of times I will say no to it because I have some other thought.… My idea on pitch sequencing is centered around the fact that I don’t want to do the same thing too often.… You work based upon the hitter’s timing.”

  Bauer’s start against the Reds was one of the best of his career. He threw eight shutout innings and struck out twelve, allowing seven baserunners. He also had his best slider of the year: it averaged 10.2 inches of horizontal run and 0.6 inches of vertical movement. He had built exactly what he wanted. In July, the pitch averaged 9 inches of horizontal movement. (Clevinger led the majors on the season with 9.6 inches of horizontal slider movement.)

  Bauer finished the start with a 2.23 ERA. He’d developed a new, elite pitch. His slider’s whiff-per-swing rate of 41.4 percent ranked eighteenth among all sliders in 2018, and its run value per one hundred pitches ranked third in all of baseball at 2.8 runs above average, trailing only the sliders of Blake Snell and Miles Mikolas. His velocity was at a career-high level, averaging 95.4 mph. His command had never been better. But the start was also something of a high-water mark.

  On Sunday, July 15, he joined four other teammates on a charter flight from Burke Lakefront Airport to Washington, D.C., for the All-Star Game. Bauer’s All-Star experience was mixed. He mostly kept to himself in Washington. He didn’t talk to many people. But he was invited onto the set of MLB Network a day before the game to talk about his pitch grips. On live TV, he measured his hand size against that of Pedro Martínez, one of his childhood idols. Martínez’s hand engulfed his. Asked on the broadcast if he knew his WAR, Bauer quipped, “Of course.” In the visiting AL clubhouse, he was given a cold shoulder by the Astros contingent, still angry over his accusations earlier in the season. He made a point of saying hello to Bregman when Bregman was around his Astros teammates. There was only awkward silence. Having pitched on the Sunday before the game, Bauer wasn’t eligible to appear in the exhibition. He flew out after the game, ready to get back and begin the stretch run of a Cy Young chase.

  Bauer not only changed his performance on the mound in 2018—improving from perhaps the worst pitcher in the majors at the end of May 2017 to an All-Star—but he altered his reputation as a teammate. Bauer wasn’t only adding value through his own pitching ability; he was adding value to some of his clubhouse peers. He was particularly interested in assisting with one area: command and control.

  In late July, Indians pitcher Josh Tomlin sought out Bauer in the trainer’s room in the depths of Progressive Field. Over the previous few years, Tomlin had possessed the best command on the staff. He had walked no more than 1.2 batters per nine innings, or 3.2 percent of all batters faced, in every season since 2014. But in the summer of 2018, he was off. He had walked 2.5 batters per nine innings in June, a 6.7 percent overall walk rate, and he had been missing badly within the strike zone all season. He had to be ultrafine to survive in the majors with his sub-90 mph fastball. Tomlin had been placed on the injured list on July 10 with a hamstring pull, but he knew he was soon expected to rejoin the team. He needed help, and quickly. He sought out Bauer, who was receiving a routine treatment. He had come to Bauer with questions before, but this time was different. Bauer recalls Tomlin saying he had no idea what was going on with his command, which, Bauer says, “created an opening.”

  “All you’ve been focused on the last two weeks is worrying about your mechanics,” Bauer told him. “You’ve gotten all robotic: leg lift is this, etc. You’re thinking everything inside. You’re internal. You need to go play shortstop.”

  Tomlin did a double take. What?

  Bauer was interested in all aspects of sport science, including psychology. He was particularly interested in finding better ways to train and improve the mental aspects of command because it was the part of the craft he felt was most confounding to master.

  “If you took a normal person, nonathlete, and you gave him a big leaguer’s physical ability for a day and put him on a mound for a game, it wouldn’t matter what big leaguer’s ability he had,” Bauer says. “The mental side of it would crush him.”

  Bauer was interested in Robert Nideffer’s “Theory of Attentional and Personal Style” as it related to athletic performance. In 1976, Nideffer had published and theorized something of a Punnett square of performance mindsets. He found that at any one time, an athlete’s focus is determined by two dimensions: width (broad or narrow focus) and direction (internal or external focus). There were four possible mindsets: narrow-internal, broad-internal, narrow-external, broad-external. An internal focus meant an athlete was consciously thinking about their movement, which is detrimental to pitching. A broad focus meant the athlete was aware of much of their surroundings. What Bauer was after was a narrow-external focus. Narrow-external shifts one’s attention outside oneself and upon a specific task. That was ideal for pitching or, say, shooting in basketball or sinking a putt in golf.

  After his treatment, Bauer and Tomlin went out to throw on the field in an empty, pregame Progressive Field. Tomlin had two days until his next start. Bauer had him throw long toss with different weighted balls. He then had Tomlin make each of his throws coming out of some athletic movement.

  “Trust me, don’t worry where the balls go today,” Bauer recalls telling Tomlin.

  Bauer had Tomlin throw fastballs and curveballs after pretending he was turning a double play as a shortstop, with the quick footwork required to pivot and throw taking his mind off mechanics.

  “Just getting him to do something else to get him out of his head,” Bauer says. “It cleared everything up.”

  Tomlin was sharp in his following rehab start at Double-A Akron, throwing three perfect innings. His walk rate in the second half of the season after rejoining the Indians was 0.84 walks per 9, or 2.1 percent.

  Not every Bauer intervention worked, but he would help teammates and friends in the pitching field who approached him for advice. Tomlin had perhaps a very mild case of what is known as the “yips,” the mysterious plight of athletes who lose the ability to do something—like throw a pitch or strike a golf ball accurately—they had a
ccomplished thousands of times before. Bauer had experimented with more radical remedies to attempt to free players of more severe psychological blocks adversely affecting command.

  Some pitchers with the yips recover their ability to throw the ball where they want, while others, like Steve Blass or Rick Ankiel, never regain their former command. At Driveline two winters earlier, Bauer had helped create a sort of sensory-deprivation bullpen to help his friend Cody Buckel, who was struggling through a career-threatening case of the yips.

  Bauer and Buckel had met when they were thirteen and bonded over their big-league goals. “He’s almost my mentor,” Buckel said about Bauer in 2012. Buckel was the Rangers’ second-round draft pick in 2010. As a teenager in 2011, he dominated in A-ball, and Baseball America credited him with the best control in the Rangers’ system. The next year he was named the organization’s minor-league pitcher of the year, and in the spring of 2013, the twenty-year-old Buckel earned an invitation to big-league camp. In his first exhibition outing against big leaguers, he walked five hitters and recorded only one out. In his second outing, he got two outs before being pulled. Rather than relaxing when he opened his minor-league season, he seemed to heap more pressure upon himself. Through May 1, he’d allowed a 20.25 ERA. Most disconcertingly, he’d walked twenty-eight of the sixty-six batters he’d faced.

  “You just begin to see it piling up, piling up, and then pretty soon it’s overwhelming,” Buckel says. “I don’t want to say appears, but it’s just kind of there.… It’s overtaking you.”

  He’d go on to meet with the Rangers’ team psychologists and minor-league rehab coordinator Keith Comstock, who’d overcome his own case of the yips. He’d try Bauer-inspired practices like differential bullpens and tossing Plyo balls. Nothing worked.