The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  Bauer named this particular drone Monkey Business because of the amount of time it spends stuck in trees. He’s lost two drones in this park. He offered rewards on Twitter but never received a response. There’s been an important evolution in his drone designs over time: the frame is essentially upside down. What would normally be the bottom plate is now turned up, which allows him to attach and charge its battery without the risk of slicing off a finger. It’s an unusual place for a power source, and it might negatively affect performance by disrupting air flow. Managing these trade-offs isn’t too different from the theory of pitch design.

  The drone is fitted with a camera. Bauer has a couple of goggle-like headsets that link to the video feed, giving the flier the feeling of being airborne. The drones’ four propellers begin to spin, emitting a sound like a high-pitched weed whacker. The drone begins its journey through trees, through a gazebo, and over a curious dog and a couple on an evening walk. It clips a tree branch, but it stays in flight.

  Bauer’s device is highly maneuverable. Its course is dizzying. Trees. Open lawn. Then, roof shingles. The video abruptly goes black.

  “That happens a lot,” Bauer says.

  Monkey Business has crashed into the roof of the gazebo. Bauer walks about a hundred yards to the crash site. Some debris, a yellow plug, rests on the roof. He finds the body of the drone and investigates it.

  “Uh-oh,” he says. “This one is done for the day.” He speaks in a dispassionate way, even though significant repairs are required. He points to a shredded cable.

  “This is a fairly typical flight session,” Bauer says. “You got to see a good representation of what it is. Generally, you do more fixing than actual flying.”

  A lot like pitching, at least the science-based branch Bauer practices. Bauer walks back to his pickup. He’s limping along, his right foot encased in a walking boot. The drone, his hobby, is a way to get his mind off the reality that his season might be over.

  When Bauer took the mound August 11, 2018, in Chicago, he was hoping to create separation in the Cy Young race. Cole had faded after a dominant first half, and Bauer’s primary competition at the time, Sale, had already made one trip to the injured list with a balky shoulder; he’d make another on August 18 that would ultimately end his Cy Young chase. Bauer’s statistics were strong. He led the AL in pitcher WAR (5.7), just ahead of Sale (5.6), and with a 2.25 ERA he trailed only Sale (2.04) and Blake Snell (2.18), who was creeping up on the Cy Young radar.

  For the first six innings, Bauer dominated the White Sox. His command was the sharpest it had been in the second half. He didn’t walk a batter, and he struck out eight, allowing just two hits and one run. He was rolling. Bauer threw one hundred pitches in those first six innings, the twenty-fifth consecutive start in which he’d crossed the century mark. The streak tied knuckleball pitcher Tom Candiotti for the longest in club history since pitch counts began to be tracked in 1988.

  Bauer, who’d never been placed on the injured list, felt impervious to arm- and shoulder-related injuries because of the efficiency of his throwing motion. More innings would give him an edge in the Cy Young race, so he wanted as much work as possible. He’d even been pushing the club to start him once every four days. This wasn’t just a short-term ploy. Bauer plans to enter free agency after the 2020 season, and intends to market himself as a pitcher who can throw every four days and exceed 250 innings in a season. He wants to sign only one-year deals.

  Francona permitted him to go out for the seventh inning, holding a 3–1 lead.

  Bauer’s second pitch of the inning was an elevated 94 mph fastball. As he readied to deliver it, Chicago play-by-play commentator Jason Benetti told his TV audience that Bauer “will be in the discussion for the Cy Young Award.” Bauer dealt. José Abreu swung, and a line drive left his bat at 92.3 mph, striking Bauer’s right ankle, which floated just above the mound about fifty-five feet away. Bauer crumpled to the ground. Though he left the game under his own power, an MRI would later reveal a small fracture of his right fibula. The doctors said he would miss four to six weeks. There were fewer than six weeks left in the season. For the first time in his career, Bauer was headed to the IL. And to make the situation more frustrating, he was headed there thanks to a fluke injury that was not related to his pitching mechanics or training. He had transformed himself from an average pitcher into an elite one, but no amount of training could prevent the injury that threatened to cost him his best chance yet at a Cy Young Award.

  Bauer’s initial depression was short-lived. While still in a “constant state of being pissed-off,” he channeled his energy into thinking about how to beat the doctors’ timetable. Within days of the injury, Bauer began doing modified long-toss drills from his knees to try to keep his upper body and mechanics in shape while he rehabbed his lower body.

  Immediately after the diagnosis, the Indians’ team medical staff had placed him on Forteo, an injection drug that promotes new bone formation and is typically used to treat severe osteoporosis. “There’s a ton of research that shows it quickens fracture healing,” Bauer says. The Indians also placed him on a topical blood thinner, but his skin became irritated, so he quit applying it. While his ankle was swollen and painful, he avoided anti-inflammatory drugs, as they were thought to possibly slow healing.

  But the team was already beginning to frustrate Bauer with its approach to his rehab. Less than two weeks after his initial MRI, he desperately wanted to be reimaged to see how the bone was healing. The medical staff decided to wait. Bauer also called outside medical professionals he trusts, including his physical therapist John Meyer, his sports chiropractor Curt Rindal, and Los Angeles Angels strength coach Lee Fiocchi, who promotes innovative theories and exercises and had helped Bauer clear up forearm discomfort earlier in the season.

  After those calls in mid-August, he ordered a laser.

  Cold laser, or low-level laser therapy, is a treatment that employs specific light wavelengths to accelerate healing of tissue damage. Bauer learned that employing the laser in conjunction with a bone stimulator, which sends low levels of electromagnetic energy to the fracture, might allow the two devices to “play off each other” and help mend his fracture. It was more of an experiment than a sure thing. He began to use them in tandem every night. Inspired by Bauer’s willingness to experiment, Michael Baumann, a writer for the website The Ringer, took the opportunity to create some satire on Twitter. What could go wrong?

  “Trevor Bauer says that the doctors’ timeline for his return is based on outdated mainstream medicine and he’s begun a course of blood transfusions and colloidal silver to rid his body of CIA nanites. He anticipates missing two starts, three tops,” Baumann wrote.

  On MLB Network, an anchor reported and read aloud Baumann’s tweet as if it were actual news. Bauer was furious. The misinterpreted tweet made him appear ridiculous.

  What was true was that Bauer, who considered using a soldering iron to seal the wound on his finger during the 2016 postseason, would use any legal means to accelerate his return to the pitching mound. And as Sale was sidelined and Cole and Verlander failed to pull away, hope began to creep back in. If he could make three more starts, maybe he could keep pace with the Cy Young field. The team thought a late-September return was likely, but Bauer targeted September 10.

  At lunch at First Watch, a café close to his apartment, on September 4, Bauer told his server he needed to modify his usual order. He’s a regular there. He asked for four eggs scrambled, a cup and a half of fruit, and a quarter cup of walnuts.

  “That’s what I get to eat today,” Bauer said.

  As the waitress took his order, she noted Bauer’s expression and said, “I’ve been doing quinoa on and off for a year. That’s my exact face when I go out to eat.”

  Bauer laughed. “I just want a bowl of pasta sometimes,” he said.

  Bauer’s brief optimism hadn’t lasted long. His rehab had stalled, and his September 10 target now looked unlikely, if not impossible. One i
ssue was his weight, which was decreasing quickly. He’d lost almost 10 pounds. Most of the missing mass was muscle, as he fell to 196 pounds, which would cost him velocity.

  “I lost thirteen pounds in a month [in 2014],” Bauer says. “I went from sitting 96.5 to 93.”

  The club’s strength staff assured him when he started lifting again at full capacity the muscle would come back, but he had to do lighter weight-room work to reduce the stress on his ankle. Bauer was frustrated. He thought the Indians were too conservative with his rehab, and he suspected his team-mandated diet was accelerating his atrophy. He hounded the training staff.

  “It would be dishonest to say there is not some fault on my end on how I phrase things,” Bauer said. “I can be abrasive: this needs to change; fix it. But a lot of times when I ask [amicably], nothing changes.”

  Bauer had a food scale, and he’d been measuring almost everything he put into his body. He eventually wore a heart-rate monitoring device for an entire day and estimated that he had a nearly 1,400-calorie deficit. He needed more calories, and he needed to lift more weight. His diet plan was eventually adjusted. Bauer also decided he was going to resume working out at full capacity to regain the muscle he’d lost.

  The other problem was the range of motion, or lack thereof, in his ankle. Any stress on the ankle was still painful, which had curtailed an attempted bullpen session on August 28. He was sent in for another exam. A Cleveland Clinic doctor said Bauer was suffering from ankle impingement, meaning a swollen joint capsule was restricting his mobility. Bauer’s ability to bend his ankle was far from his baseline. In spring training, he had rotated his ankle joint, or moved his foot upward, by 12.5 centimeters in each ankle. On September 1, he was at 8 centimeters in his right ankle and 12 in his left. The Indians decided against the cortisone shot, preferring an anti-inflammatory drug used for patients suffering from gout. “I need to come in at 12,” Bauer said. “That’s normal for me.” He was told that might be impossible.

  On September 3, with no change in his ankle mobility, he visited another doctor, who stuck a needle in his ankle, drained out seven cubic centimeters of fluid, and gave him a cortisone shot. The ankle’s flexibility began to improve.

  By September 18, his weight was inching up, and the Indians were ready to see him in simulated game action. On a late afternoon at Progressive Field, Bob Chester set up the Edgertronic camera. Many of the Indians’ front-office officials gathered at the dugout railing. A number of position players were enlisted to hit. Bauer buzzed through them with little issue. His slider seemed to have retained most of its movement profile. His fastball velocity was down, but still in the low-to-mid 90s. There was little hard contact. Between simulated innings, Chester brought a laptop over to show Indians officials the Edgertronic video. Indians star José Ramírez had come out to the dugout to watch but was not participating. During a break in the action, Ramírez chirped at Bauer.

  “Lot of talk, no action,” Bauer responded, smirking. “Want to see if you can hit it?” After the throwing session, he decreed that he was “close.”

  On September 21, Bauer returned to the mound against Boston and Chris Sale, another pitcher working his way back from injury. Despite their extended absences, they had remained first and second on the FanGraphs WAR leaderboard through September 11, a testament to how far ahead of the pack they had been. But Bauer had suffered too many setbacks and missed his original, optimistic return date by eleven days. He’d made himself a major leaguer. He’d designed a devastating slider. He’d transformed himself into an ace. At every impasse, he’d found a way to beat his body’s limitations and defy the odds. But Bauer couldn’t make himself heal faster than the doctors had predicted. Even he had limitations.

  Bauer’s first pitch in thirty-one days was an elevated 94 mph fastball that Tzu-Wei Lin swung through for a strike. In the second, he got Steve Pearce to swing and miss at a sharp-breaking slider. But he also hung a slider to Brock Holt, who slashed it into right field for a single in the second on Bauer’s thirty-fourth and final pitch of the night. Before the end of the season, he made two more appearances, each lasting four frames. He allowed two runs over his 9 1/3 innings in September, striking out seven against one walk. His fastball velocity was 93.2 mph, down 1.4 mph from its preinjury average after May 1.

  “I’m down mass,” Bauer said. “I need to maintain a high level of training specificity to keep my velo. I’m not in peak form.”

  He had made it back, but he knew he was out of the Cy Young chase. And that wasn’t the worst of it. On September 26, Francona summoned Bauer to his office and told him he was not going to be used as a starter until possibly Game 4 against the Astros, whom the Indians would face in the American League Division Series. Bauer would begin the series in the bullpen, and the Indians would be without their best starter. The baseball gods can be cruel.

  15

  SOFT FACTORS

  Rogers Hornsby, my manager, called me a “talking pile of pigshit.” That was when my parents came from Michigan to see me play the game! Did I cry? No! No! Do you know why? Because there’s no crying in baseball. There’s no crying in baseball. No crying!

  —JIMMY DUGAN, A League of Their Own

  When catcher-turned-conduit John Baker was in Triple-A, his manager, he says, acted like an “evil stepfather.” If the pitcher walked the leadoff man, Baker would be fined $100. If he failed to catch a ball cleanly, the manager would yell that he didn’t want to catch the ball. “One time I’d had enough,” Baker remembers. “I was in his office, and I’m like, ‘Who can I talk to to be better at this?’ And he’s like, ‘Nobody. You gotta figure it out yourself.’”

  Baker is now a coordinator of the Cubs’ Mental Skills Program. Players come to him asking the same question he once asked his minor-league manager. And when they do, he says, “We don’t say that anymore.”

  Baker isn’t some wizened relic recalling ancient history. Drafted by the Moneyball A’s, he’s in his late thirties, younger than some active major leaguers. He reached Triple-A in the mid-2000s. Yet attitudes have evolved even over the course of his career. “The overwhelming paradigm that was pushed by the oldest generations of baseball was you need to be a tough, gunslinging, beer-swilling, slump-buster-finding asshole of a cowboy to be a good baseball player,” Baker says. “And what we’re realizing now [is] that that’s not necessarily a paradigm for anything… other than ruining a marriage and being unhappy.” Over the last several years, Baker continues, a new paradigm has appeared. “People are much more open to the softer side of things,” he says. “They understand better that it’s not necessarily about mental toughness or confidence as much as it is about self-compassion and mindfulness and being in the present moment so that you can execute the techniques that you’ve practiced.”

  In 2018, emboldened by the new paradigm, the Cubs’ players adopted a practice that once would have been as unthinkable as technology tracking every pitch. “Starting in spring training, they were getting together as a position-players group, and they were talking about all of the times where they feel shitty on the baseball field,” Baker says. “From [Anthony] Rizzo to [Kris] Bryant to the lowest guy in the minor leagues, they were opening up and expressing to each other, showing that they’re actually real people that are vulnerable. That was a massive turning point for us because it gave people the freedom to not feel like they had to be perfect.”

  A funny thing has happened in baseball as the sport has embraced every quantifiable edge: teams and players have also grown more receptive to innovation in areas that in theory should confer advantages but aren’t communicable in degrees, revolutions per minute, or miles per hour. Each advance in technology leaves fewer aspects of the sport that can’t be captured and expressed statistically, but it also opens minds and makes the pursuit of any remaining uncharted territory more intense. “You think about things like spin rate and exit velocity and how they’re changing how we view baseball—well, those things are effective because they have s
cience behind them,” Baker says. “And that opens the door to other things that have science behind them. Things like mindfulness or meditation practice, or what I’m trained in now, which is mindfulness-based attention training.” As Jerry Dipoto explains, “Player development has become a more holistic endeavor.”

  Soft science came to baseball on March 2, 1950, when a Manhattan psychologist named David F. Tracy began working for the St. Louis Browns, whose athletic trainer had convinced owner Bill Dewitt Jr. that if psychology could improve other businesses, it could also benefit baseball teams. Tracy, who wrote in rather glowing terms about his contributions to the Browns in his 1951 book The Psychologist at Bat, offered optional psychology classes twice a day in spring training to accommodate split-squad practices. As Professors Mary J. MacCracken and Alan S. Kornspan recounted in a 2003 article about Tracy, “To help the athletes improve performance, Tracy’s classes consisted of teaching hypnosis, autosuggestion, relaxation, and confidence-building techniques.”1 Believing that the Browns were suffering from stage fright, “Tracy based much of his work [on] changing negative thoughts to positive thoughts. For example, he taught the Browns pitchers to step off the mound and take three deep breaths when they were feeling nervous.”