The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  “We looked at [Luis] Severino and [Rockies teammate] Jon Gray, and initially that’s what we tried to do,” Ottavino said. “But I had a really hard time throwing that pitch as hard as I wanted to. Basically, you try to impart true bullet [or gyro] spin on the pitch, but still throw it in the upper 80s, low 90s.”

  Using Edgertronic and Rapsodo, Ottavino and Daniels tinkered with different grips and settled on something of a hybrid gyro-cutter-slider. Daniels said they were looking for “15 percent spin efficiency” on the Rapsodo, or 15 percent transverse spin/85 percent gyro spin.

  “We marked down when the spin efficiency was in the range we wanted, and when it wasn’t,” Ottavino said. “Then we would go to the video. I could see what the difference was in my finger pressure when the spin was right. We kept adjusting the grip. And pretty much in one day we were like, OK, we think this is it.”

  One day: the magic of deliberate practice coupled with the Edgertronic and Rapsodo.

  The hybrid cutter had another key characteristic: it tunneled well with his two-seamer. He dropped his four-seam usage from 30 percent in 2017 to 5 percent in 2018. “I started alternating between my two-seam and [the cutter] to try to see if I could throw them comfortably out of the same slot and how they would look next to each other, and that was pretty much it. We just practiced it for a few days, and then I went home.”

  Ottavino hadn’t just learned how to create a new pitch. He had learned how to optimize practice.

  For several days a week over a four-month period in Harlem, Ottavino threw his new cutter and his two-seamer and slider, monitoring all of them with his own Rapsodo and Edgertronic. He threw weighted balls and aimed at the pitching pad. Sometimes he found a catcher to meet him at his tiny lab. Sometimes he just threw a five-gallon bucket of balls into a net by himself. The cutter, which he would throw 10.1 percent of the time in 2018, was an important addition, but more than that, he welcomed the improved feel and command. He reported to spring training in Arizona with his weighted balls and Edgertronic camera. He was the only Rockies pitcher using either. The righty felt more prepared than ever. Still, seeing was believing, and the Rockies’ staff hadn’t seen the new Ottavino yet.

  “I did get called into the office to basically tell them what I’ve learned and why I think it’s gonna make me better,” Ottavino says. “As long as you have a good reason, they can’t really argue with it.”

  Even so, the Rockies were skeptical about the camera. “Is this gonna put more things in your head?” asked Rockies manager Bud Black and his staff.

  The self-effacing Ottavino had a reputation as an intelligent player but also as a “thinker,” which can be a dangerous label in a major-league clubhouse.

  “When a person who’s perceived as intelligent or a thinker struggles, they think you’re overthinking,” said Ottavino, describing an issue also plaguing Bauer. “That was part of what I was hearing [in 2017] is, ‘Oh, you’re just overthinking things.’”

  Ottavino countered that the Edgertronic would make him think less, narrowing his focus. “I’m gonna think either way,” Ottavino told the coaches, “but this makes me know what to think about.”

  The Rockies staff had fewer doubts when he began to throw. On the backfield bullpens at the Salt River complex in Arizona, a handful of pitching mounds run parallel to each other. On a quiet February morning, Ottavino climbed one of them and demonstrated his new pitch with several coaches behind him, observing with arms folded. The last time they’d seen Ottavino throw, he had been a mess. Then he showed them his cutter. It tracked on a straight line for most of its journey before breaking subtly near the plate. Soon he took his remade self into simulated games.

  “I pretty much dominated everybody in my live BPs, and coaches were excited about it. All of a sudden I was making a lot of pitches that I wanted to make,” Ottavino said.

  This was a different-looking guy. The new Ottavino was a dude. After getting hit in his first Cactus League outing, he threw six perfect innings in a row. The last thing he needed to prove was that it could carry over to regular-season action.

  The Rockies and Ottavino opened the season on March 29 at Arizona. His first batter of 2018 was Diamondbacks star Paul Goldschmidt. He started Goldschmidt with a sweeping slider. It buckled Goldschmidt’s knees and broke back over the plate for a strike. Everyone had seen that pitch before. They hadn’t seen what followed. Ottavino next threw his very first gyro-spin-cutter-slider hybrid. Goldschmidt watched the tight-breaking, 88 mph pitch cut through the zone for strike two. Ottavino took a deep breath, returned to the rubber, and threw a 94 mph two-seamer that started outside. Laminar flow propelled it back over the plate for a called third strike. Goldschmidt walked back to the dugout without protest. Jake Lamb followed by waving at a darting two-seamer for a strikeout. After walking Daniel Descalso, Ottavino quickly regained his command and struck out Alex Avila swinging on another sharp-breaking two-seamer.

  “I was like, I had it,” Ottavino said on a June afternoon. “And then I did it again the next night, and right away I was just very locked in.”

  Ottavino faced fifty-five batters in April. He struck out thirty of them. He allowed four hits, four walks, and one run in sixteen innings. No reliever was more dominant. It wasn’t a fluke: in May, he faced forty-four batters and allowed just four hits and two runs.

  Ottavino posted a 1.62 ERA in the first half, and he finished the season tied for the sixth-highest WAR by a reliever. His K-BB rate improved from 9.9 percent in 2017 to 24.6 in 2018, the third-biggest increase in the game, and he lowered his walk rate by 4.4 percentage points, the ninth-greatest decrease.

  In 2018, Ottavino’s cutter had 3.8 inches of horizontal movement, which ranked fourth among relievers. It also had 3.9 inches of vertical movement. It was a weird pitch; few moved like it, but it worked. Ottavino threw the newly created pitch 129 times in 2018, and it generated whiffs on 50 percent of swings, a staggering mark that was tops among all pitches labeled as cutters. The pitch had the horizontal movement of a lesser-breaking slider, but it moved in the opposite direction and had the same sink as his two-seamer. Ottavino’s slider moved like it always had, averaging 9.5 inches of horizontal movement, which ranked fifth among all pitchers. But because it was paired with a new pitch and improved command, batters were back to swinging at a 41.1 percent rate and whiffing on 36.8 percent of those swings.

  In the Rockies clubhouse in June, Ottavino showed teammate Chad Bettis the Edgertronic. Bettis handled the cube-shaped device with curiosity.

  “Bettis is using my camera tomorrow in his bullpen,” Ottavino said. “[Tyler] Anderson and Gray want to go [to Driveline] this coming off-season. Things are just heading in that direction. I think the biggest thing is, it’s not going to be—it shouldn’t be—taboo.”

  On the strength of his 2018 campaign, Ottavino signed a three-year $27 million contract with the Yankees in January 2019. If his father-in-law’s lot isn’t available in future years, perhaps he can use Yankee Stadium.

  On the night of September 2, 2018, at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, Cubs shortstop Addison Russell pinch hit for Kyle Schwarber with two outs in the top of the eighth. Phillies pitcher Austin Davis, a rookie left-hander who’d entered the game at the start of that inning, reached into his back pocket and pulled out a lineup card, on which he had written information about how to handle each hitter.

  Third-base umpire and crew chief “Cowboy” Joe West, a sixty-five-year-old in his record forty-first year of MLB service, saw Davis do it. He ambled over to the mound and held out his hand as if he’d caught the pitcher passing notes in study hall. Davis surrendered the card, and West stuck it into his own back pocket and waddled away despite Davis’s objections. Gabe Kapler came out to argue as well, but West stuck to his interpretation: Davis, he said, had violated rule 6.02(c)(7), which states that “the pitcher shall not have on his person, or in his possession, any foreign substance.” West could confiscate the card, but he couldn’t make Davis forget wha
t he’d already read. Russell struck out swinging.

  It was, in a sense, a clash between baseball’s old ways of thinking—or not thinking—and its new ways. West broke into the big leagues in 1976, a time when the only advantages at pitchers’ disposal were ways to doctor the ball. Although some pitchers still seek that same edge, the new breed of ballplayer benefits more from information than sticky substances. West was labeling information “foreign”—which, in fairness to him, it was for most players until very recently.

  Davis, who made his MLB debut in late June, says he first consulted a card on July 14 in Miami. It’s become common for outfielders to carry positioning cards and even for catchers—who have to work with more pitchers per game and per season than ever before—to wear wristbands that remind them about the proper approach for each pitcher and opponent. But Davis is believed to be the first pitcher ever to consult a card on the mound, and the idea was his own.

  The twenty-five-year-old former twelfth-rounder is a typically open-minded modern player. Over the winter, he works with former first-rounder Luke Hagerty—a Driveline adherent who launched a tech-propelled comeback attempt in 2019, at age thirty-seven, after a battle with the yips and a thirteen-year absence from affiliated ball—at a facility in Scottsdale, where he uses Rapsodo to fine-tune his grips. Carrying cards into games is an extension of the same desire to perfect his pitches. With the card, he says, “I can throw with full conviction, no second-guessing in the back of my mind.… And then from the coaching-staff side, they know that I’m throwing what I know to be true based off what the analytics are. There’s so much information now, why would you not take advantage of it?”

  Before every game in which he’s available to pitch, Davis grabs a spare lineup card and jots down notes about strengths and weaknesses from the Phillies’ advance scouting reports, which he says are “super digestible” by the time they’re presented to the players. For him, having a few words for each hitter to remind him between batters of how he wants to pitch—particularly when he’s in the midst of a multi-inning outing or facing an unscheduled hitter—functions as a psychological “security blanket.”

  In the thick of the action, some kinds of thinking can be counterproductive, but like Ottavino with the Edgertronic, Davis regards his cards as a means of cutting down on distractions. In 2016, Red Sox pitcher Rick Porcello started writing down scouting reports on lineup cards because it helped him retain the information; previously, he told the Boston Herald, he “would kind of get mixed up when I was out there.” But Porcello still left his cards in the dugout when he was on the mound. Davis went one step further. “Why waste the mental energy to try and memorize all this stuff and understand every single hitter that you could possibly face… when you could just have it on a card in your back pocket?” he asks. Some pitchers would worry about being perceived as “bush league” by not being off-book in games, but as Davis says Kapler told him, “To do something or not to do something based off what the optics would be is not a good reason to do it.”

  In early August, Davis disregarded what his card told him to do against the Diamondbacks’ A.J. Pollock, and Pollock crushed a ball that would have been over the fence had Phillies right fielder Nick Williams not leaped and brought it back. That close call, Davis says, was a reminder that if you’re not using all of the information available, “you’re putting yourself at risk to get hit hard.” Later that month, Brian Bannister’s former clubhouse co-conspirator Zack Greinke followed in Davis’s footsteps and peeked at a card of his own, which Davis—who finished the season with a 3.68 FIP and more than a strikeout per inning—saw as a sign that his own reasoning was sound.

  After West’s encounter with Davis in September, MLB spoke to its senior umpire and told him the rookie was right. Davis’s cards were officially legal. Cowboy Joe called the Phillies’ clubhouse to apologize. Information wasn’t foreign after all.

  Via traveling analysts, conduits, and inquisitive coaches, forward-thinking teams have focused on, as Astros outfielder Tony Kemp says, “taking the information and really utilizing it on the field.” But that effort is relatively recent, and some teams are still lagging behind. In at least one case, a star player on a late-adopting team went outside the organization in search of statistical support.

  In early 2011, a writer for a statistically oriented website got an e-mail through the site’s contact form. The message came from one of the best hitters in baseball, who suggested an article on a topic of interest to him. The writer also found the topic intriguing, so he produced a post. The player liked it, and the two stayed in touch.

  Eventually, the player asked the writer to help him come up with contract comparables for an upcoming negotiation; although he had an agent, he wanted to consult with someone who wouldn’t stand to benefit from his signing a deal. “I helped him with his contract, and after that, he was like, ‘Why don’t you actually do some regular stuff for me?’” the writer recalls. In 2013, the writer became a part-time, secret, statistical consultant to the analytically inclined star. “From what I understand, like 90 percent of his teammates would go out on a Friday night, go to the clubs, and he’d be texting me about his chase rate,” the writer says. “This was an obsession for him.”

  The player asked the writer to sign an NDA, not wanting it to be known to his team that he was seeking this sort of assistance. “He was very concerned up front [that] they would not be happy that he was getting outside advice that might conflict with what they were going to tell him, and he didn’t want to come off as uncoachable,” the writer says. Although plenty of hitters see personal swing coaches, a personal stathead was something new. The player didn’t want to ruffle any feathers in the front office or clubhouse, but he wanted to be better, and he didn’t trust his team to deliver the data he craved.

  “Most of it was based around game prep,” the writer says. “Eighty percent of what we did was figuring out what the context of that specific day’s opponents was going to be for him.” The team’s scouting reports were standard fare: what the pitcher threw and how hard and how often he threw it. The player wanted to know more: how often hitters swung against certain pitches, what happened when they did, and what the umpire’s and catcher’s strike zones looked like. Prior to his work with the player, the writer had viewed slumps as largely random. But helping the hitter analyze how pitchers were attacking him and how he could counter gave him a glimpse at a cat-and-mouse contest most outsiders don’t see. “There’s definitely some element of, ‘OK, pitchers have figured out how to do this one thing to me, I have got to figure out how to respond to that thing to make them pitch me differently,’” he says.

  In addition to sending scouting reports, the writer provided analysis of the player’s performance via a set of statistical markers that captured his process rather than his results: chase rate, ground-ball rate, pull rate, hard-hit rate. “All he really cared about was, am I squaring up the ball, am I not swinging and missing, and am I swinging at strikes,” the writer says. The writer sent the hitter a weekly report on his performance in those metrics over the previous week, along with his rolling and seasonal averages. “He thought that helped because it basically allowed him to get away from, ‘I went 3-for-19 this week, I need to make some adjustments,’” the writer says. “That was probably the most impactful thing for him, just getting him to stop tinkering.”

  Studying the combination of catcher and umpire was a big advantage, too. In given games, the hitter could disregard certain spots, confident that pitches up and in or low and away wouldn’t be called strikes. “I would watch him take a pitch we had talked about pregame, like, ‘This pitch is just an auto-take today,’ no chance of this getting called even though it was in the zone,” the writer says. “And he would take a 3–1 fastball on the inner half and just drop his bat and start walking up to first, and the pitcher’s having a meltdown on the mound, and he would just smirk because he was like, ‘Yeah, you didn’t know that pitch wasn’t going to be a strike toda
y, but I knew.’… He knew the day’s strike zone better than any pitcher in the world.”

  When a call did go against him, the hitter would want to check the umpire’s work. “Pretty regularly he would come in the dugout between at-bats, like, ‘Hey, I want to see the [strike-zone] map,’” the writer says. So the writer arranged for him to be able to access a live site where he could check pitch locations during games, as well as pitch types and other information.

  After Statcast came out, the player and his stathead assistant found a use for that data too. In one post-Statcast season, the player rated poorly as a fielder according to most defensive metrics, which displeased him. “He was like, I get that I’m getting older, but I do not want to be an embarrassing defensive player,” the writer says. The writer called in a few favors and obtained Statcast information that allowed him to recommend changes to the player’s positioning that would help him hack his stats. “We basically fixed his defense in an off-season,” the writer says.

  Aside from that defensive overhaul, the writer says he was never sure how much his work was helping the hitter, who had been successful before their first interaction. A few years into their professional relationship, though, the writer changed jobs and had to stop helping the hitter. And although it may have been a coincidence, the hitter had a down year without him. “He felt like it was a real loss for him to not have this [information],” the writer says. The writer suspects that the thought of not being prepared may have hurt the hitter as much as the absence of information itself. When he walked to the plate, the writer says, the perfectionist player wanted to be thinking, “I did literally absolutely everything I could have done to try and make myself as good as possible today.” And if his team wasn’t helping him think that, he’d find someone who would.