The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  Teams are recruiting internationally because domestic sports science research has tended to be academic, conducted by professors who get funding for research. “While the research is good, it’s not meant for application,” says Patrick Cherveny, the former innovation specialist for Callaway Golf and director of sports science for Blast Motion, who joined the Indians as a sports science analyst in November 2018. Overseas, he explains, sports-science work is “much more focused on talent-identification programs, and then that is directly related to player development.”

  That’s partly a product of a disparity in the size of the talent pools. The large population of the United States creates a cornucopia of athletic talent, which leads to less emphasis on maximizing individual development. In places where the population is significantly lower, Cherveny says, “They actually focus a lot more on identifying talent [and] developing that talent so that they can get on the medal stand.… Sports performance programs are [operated by] the national governing body in these overseas countries because they just have limited athletes in their pool, and so they’re trying to optimize that.”

  The unusual nature of baseball injuries is another reason why the sport has been behind in this field. In soccer, rugby, football, basketball, and hockey, “a lot of [the] injuries are soft-tissue-based,” Cherveny says. “That is a little bit easier to control now with wearable technology because you’re really monitoring the true workload, the acceleration [and] deceleration.” As some players’ waistlines would indicate, baseball is much less aerobic-based, which means players’ bodies break in different ways. “Baseball is still dominated by shoulder and elbow injuries, especially on the throwing side,” Cherveny says.

  “We know that velocity does predict success,” says the Mariners’ Andy McKay. “It also predicts injury. So there’s a yin and yang going on there that I don’t have the answer to.” There’s ample incentive to find one: according to Baseball Injury Consultants, MLB players lost a cumulative 36,876 days to injury (including day-to-day ailments) in 2018, the highest total on record dating back to 2002. The website Spotrac estimates that teams spent more than $745 million on the 34,126 days players spent on the IL alone. Many of the most costly injuries involve pitchers’ arms.

  To prevent pitcher injuries, “you have to be able to get into areas where teams don’t have data yet,” Bannister says. “That’s usually biomechanical information.” In Boston’s case, KinaTrax is one such source; several other teams are clients of a rival markerless-motion-capture company, Simi Reality Motion Systems. KinaTrax president Steven Cadavid, an expert in computer vision and machine learning, developed some of his techniques by tracking the interactions of infants and mothers in order to detect early indicators of autism. Later, he applied his learning to baseball. “There are definite differences that we can pick up between pre- and postinjury data and that can be used by the teams,” Cadavid says, citing an example of one pitcher who returned to action too soon (and pitched poorly) even though his KinaTrax readings from a bullpen session prior to his premature comeback showed that he was still hampered by his injury. “Trade decisions are being made with the KinaTrax data,” Cadavid says.

  It’s inarguable that the player-development revolution’s breakthroughs have helped hundreds of players, with countless more to come. What’s still uncertain is whether other players may be burned by those same discoveries.

  There’s little downside to devices that directly aid in recovery. Many of the Mariners, whose team traveled an MLB-high 40,783 miles during the 2018 season, wore the Firefly, an FDA-approved band that the user wraps around the leg beneath the knee. The device electronically stimulates the peroneal nerve, promoting circulation, reducing muscle soreness, and preventing swelling during travel. Some teams routinely use ultrasound machines to image muscles and stimulate muscle recovery, and others employ a tech cocktail to accelerate the rehab process.

  In 2015, Marcus Stroman tore his ACL in March and was believed to be done for the year. Instead, he returned in time to make four starts in September for the playoff-bound Blue Jays, thanks to a trio of wearables: Catapult to measure his exertion and physiological strain, Polar to monitor his heart rate, and Omegawave to measure his heart-rate variability and other indicators of overwork. Those devices allowed support staff to push him hard enough to get better but not hard enough to cause setbacks. His timeline was determined by the data, rather than an athlete’s, trainer’s, or doctor’s intuitions or expectations about typical recoveries, which may be misleading. “I’m in the best shape of my life,” Stroman told Ben at the time, parroting a time-honored baseball cliché. “I know people say that, but I can prove it with numbers.”

  The data gets dicier when it follows players off the field, or when there’s potential for information provided in confidence to adversely affect earning power or playing time.

  The 2017–2021 collective bargaining agreement (CBA) established a Joint Committee on Wearable Technology, a five-member panel composed of representatives from the league and the Players Association, to regulate the use of wearable devices at the major-league level. Through 2018, the committee approved four devices—the Catapult sensor, the Zephyr Bioharness, the Motus biomechanics sleeve, and the Whoop heart-rate monitor—for in-game use, with four other bat sensors from Blast and Diamond Kinetics approved for on-field activity outside of games (and in-game use in the minors). An attachment to the CBA specifies that the use of wearable tech is “wholly voluntary” and prohibits teams from intimating otherwise. It also limits information access to certain team personnel and mandates that the data be kept confidential, be made available to the player upon request, be deleted upon the player’s request, and not be used for commercial purposes. However, it doesn’t seem to provide for any penalty in the event of a violation.

  In the minors, meanwhile, teams can compel players to participate. “In the major leagues, I am like a menu of things to try, and it’s up to [the players] to come to me, tell me what they want to do, and then I’ll help them build that into their routine,” Baker says. “Whereas in the minor leagues it’s the opposite. I can come in and say, ‘This is what you have to do; this is what we are going to do.’ Like, ‘We are going to run this study. You have to sit with me for twelve minutes a day over the next six weeks. You’re not allowed to do anything else.’”

  In the minors, the Cubs and other teams have issued Whoop straps and Readibands, which players wear even while they sleep, allowing teams to assess their rest habits and levels of fatigue. “If we find out that somebody hasn’t been eating or this person’s weight is going down, that information will come to the mental skills program, and we’ll be tasked, sometimes, to go investigate what’s going on,” Baker says. “We’re kind of the boots on the ground, and we are allowed to ask the tough questions to people.”

  That type of intervention can be beneficial to team and player alike; some players may not realize that their sleep quality is low or that it’s impairing their performance. Astros pitcher Josh James went from a lethargic, low-ceiling thirty-fourth-rounder to a promising major leaguer after his roommate told him he snored and he visited a sleep specialist, who diagnosed him with sleep apnea and equipped him with a CPAP machine. There may be more minor leaguers like him.

  But by its very nature, off-the-field monitoring is intrusive. Alan Milstein, a bioethics and sports law lawyer and litigator and an adjunct professor at Temple University Law School, sees it as a serious “privacy problem,” stating, “I don’t believe just because you’re a professional athlete, that you should be treated differently.… These athletes are adults, and they have the right to make choices about their lifestyle when they’re off the field without the ownership essentially criticizing them.” In Milstein’s mind, we’re bound for a rebellion akin to the “medical mutiny” from Apollo 13, when the entire crew removes the biometric sensors feeding info to flight controllers, led by Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), who declares, “I’m sick and tired of the entire Western world knowin
g how my kidneys are functioning.”

  Baker and his colleagues participate in regular conference calls with other player-development personnel, and at times, they’ll learn that a player is having trouble with a mechanical adjustment that will help him in the long run. “That’ll result in a text message or a phone call from one of us, and then somebody is showing up on site to make sure that they understand the purpose behind why they’re practicing,” Baker says.

  In the course of conversation, though, mental-skills staff may learn sensitive information. Maybe a player is a party animal or has a drug or drinking problem. Confiding in a professional can help, but players are still taking a risk by opening up to a team employee. “Our players know that when they talk to me, not everything goes back to the organization,” Baker says. “I’m not there to rat them out.… They trust us, because we don’t get on the phone and call Theo [Epstein] and immediately go, ‘So-and-so is doing this!’”

  Baker sees his role as one of player advocacy and support, divorced from purely performance-driven decisions. Yet he also says, “Strength and conditioning, athletic training, neuroscience, nutrition, mental skills—we all have an open relationship where we communicate about the players.” Maybe Baker, a former player, wouldn’t divulge information that’s supposed to be secret, but perhaps someone else would, especially if a sensor suggests a problem is present and a pennant race or many millions of dollars may depend on a player producing. By the time a player makes the majors and is protected by the CBA, teams will have learned a lot about him.

  “The whole theory of this stuff is that we’re going to help you be a better player,” Milstein says. Jerry Dipoto, a former major leaguer, makes that argument. “It’s good for both the player and the club,” he says. “The club gets the best version of that player, and the player maximizes his value.… Players have been quoted as saying that this is information they’re just gathering to hold me down. It’s quite the opposite, actually.” Yet Milstein isn’t swayed. “It’s just as possible that when the data comes in, they realize that the player has physical problems or problems off the field, and then it might be better to go elsewhere,” he says. “There’s no guarantee and there’s no express promise that the information that is going to be used will be used only for the betterment of the individual player.”

  In the dystopian, darkest-timeline vision of the post-Moneyball era, teams could screen players for predispositions to certain conditions. That scenario may seem far-fetched: the 2008 Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act prevents employers from compelling DNA testing or basing employment decisions on DNA information. In 2009, though, MLB admitted to asking some Dominican prospects to undergo DNA testing as a means of detecting identity fraud. Milstein warns that the union or individual players could someday decide to surrender DNA data voluntarily. “[If] it crosses over the DNA line, everybody should watch out,” Milstein says. By then, though, some of the flaws that testing turns up may be fixable. And in a world with gene-editing technology, humanity will soon confront questions about being better that extend just a bit beyond baseball.

  16

  IF YOU BUILD THEM, THEY WILL COME

  There are three types of baseball players: Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen, and those who wonder what happened.

  —TOMMY LASORDA

  In November 2017, a strange construction project began on St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, between West 124th and 125th Streets. Rockies pitcher Adam Ottavino had taken control of a vacant, narrow storefront flanked by a Dollar Tree and a Chuck E. Cheese. A delivery truck was parked before the entrance. Its trailer contained a portable pitching mound Ottavino had purchased, along with a roll of AstroTurf. Once they were set up inside, so many curious onlookers peered in that Ottavino covered the windows with black paper.

  The space was a creative solution to a problem. Ottavino, a Brooklyn native, lived in the city with his wife and two-year-old daughter. In previous off-seasons, he had traveled to Long Island to throw, but with a young daughter, the commute was becoming a burden. To compound the problem, his throwing partner of previous winters, the Mets’ Steven Matz, had moved to Nashville. Ottavino knew that another Met, Matt Harvey, was one of the few professional pitchers who also lived in Manhattan. Ottavino asked Harvey if he was interested in looking for a place to throw with him. Harvey declined.

  “At that point, I was kind of screwed,” Ottavino said the following May. “I didn’t know what to do.”

  This wasn’t just any off-season. Ottavino’s career was in jeopardy: he had been left off of the Rockies’ Wild Card roster that October and was coming off the worst year of his career. He had walked 6.5 batters per nine innings, second worst in the majors among pitchers who had thrown at least fifty frames. He was thirty-two years old, and he was entering the final year of his contract. He needed a place to throw. He needed a place to improve. He needed a place to experiment.

  Ottavino’s father-in-law, who’s involved in real estate, offered a suggestion. He had an unoccupied property in Harlem a block from a subway stop. Ottavino could use the space that winter to create his own indoor bullpen. There would be a price: a signed bat from his All-Star teammate Nolan Arenado. That was quite a discount; the last tenant, a Nine West shoe store, had paid $22,000 per month.

  “Not very many people knew what was going on,” Ottavino said. “Just the security guy, Thomas, and my father-in-law, and the people in his office.”

  Unlike other Manhattan training facilities, Ottavino’s new workshop featured a Rapsodo unit and an Edgertronic camera. One of the lessons of talent development is that it doesn’t take much space, or an ostentatious facility, to get better. The storefront was about eighty feet deep, just enough to accommodate a pitch. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was all he needed to turn his career around.

  Rockies coach Jerry Weinstein, the winner of Baseball America’s 2018 Tony Gwynn Lifetime Achievement Award and a proponent of player adaptability long before it came to be called “growth mindset,” says, “There isn’t anything that we can’t develop.”

  Weinstein has been in the business since the 1960s and was among the first to try radar guns, weighted balls, and overload/underload bat training. The seventy-five-year-old, whom Kyle Boddy has dubbed “the godfather of baseball,” regards fear of the unknown as an opening to exploit. “The man with the information wins,” he says. “The information is king.”

  When development began to be overhauled, the people with the information were independent instructors and front-office analysts. But as the movement blossoms, those people are players. “The best lessons are self-taught,” Weinstein says. “I tell [players] my job is to eliminate my job. My job is to teach them how to develop themselves.” That’s among the most exciting facets of modern development: Rather than allow themselves to be sorted and weeded out, players are empowering themselves by seizing the means of production.

  In the midst of his struggles in 2017, Ottavino had begun looking for answers. After reading about Trevor Bauer’s work at Driveline and seeing Boddy proselytize on Twitter, he wanted to learn more about pitch design. Most professional pitchers had at least heard of Driveline by then, but Ottavino says there was still considerable suspicion about what was going on there. In October, he traveled to Seattle to investigate for himself.

  “The rap on Driveline was kind of negative around the game… and that kind of attracted me more,” Ottavino says. “They don’t really care what other people are thinking. They’re doing something that they think is working.… And, honestly, seeing a guy like Trevor commit to going there year-round is such a stamp of approval, even without knowing him, just because of the type of pitcher he is.”

  The team at Driveline decided not to alter Ottavino’s delivery. He was throwing in the mid-90s, and he had already addressed alignment issues in his crossfire motion on his own. What they did discuss were ways to improve his command. Like Josh Tomlin, Ottavino had gotten “internal.” He needed to be “external.”


  Matt Daniels explained the merits of differential training with weighted balls. Ottavino would bring that command program back to his mini Driveline in Harlem. He also bought a pitching pad, a rubberized strike-zone-like target to throw toward. It included colored and numbered regions. As he went into his delivery, a training partner—when he had one—would call out a number or colored zone to target.

  Ottavino also brought back something else: pitch-design science. Although Bauer had embraced that effort early, few other established major leaguers had followed his lead by late 2017, so it remained to be seen whether Bauer’s process was replicable. “Ottavino is really the first significant test of that,” Daniels said.

  Ottavino arrived in Seattle with one of the best breaking balls in the game. It’s classified as a slider, but Daniels said it’s really a sideways curveball due to Ottavino’s low arm slot. The sweeping, Wiffle-like breaker boasts remarkable horizontal movement. But in 2017, opponents had stopped swinging at the pitch, partly because only 43 percent of his pitches were thrown within the confines of the strike zone and partly because it was so hard to hit that opponents learned to lay off.

  Opponents swung at his slider at a 38.1 percent rate in 2016, but that rate fell to 28.2 percent in 2017. Only Dellin Betances induced a lower overall swing rate (34.6 percent) than Ottavino’s 35 percent, which had fallen from a 42.2 percent mark in 2016.

  The idea at Driveline was to create another pitch to complement his slider in a similar tunnel but stay more often in the strike zone, falling between his fastball and slider in movement and velocity. Daniels was a point man on the project.

  When Ottavino first arrived, he was shown video of cutter-slider hybrids, breaking pitches that would have similar vertical movement to his slider (very little) but less horizontal movement. Emulating one would give him a third, distinct movement profile. Ottavino went to the mound of the R&D building and began to throw.