“I always prefer, especially in the postseason, if you can take away a pitch that is a weak-contact, weak-exit-velo pitch and replace it with a higher-swing-and-miss pitch,” Bannister says. Years after he helped Hill, Bannister still sometimes sounds like a broken record when he gives feedback after games, frequently repeating, “He didn’t throw his best pitch enough.” This time, an important pitcher took the tip to heart.
In Price’s ALCS-sealing, six-inning gem at Minute Maid Park, he subtracted from the weak-contact column, using his low-whiff cutter—which he had thrown almost 30 percent of the time during the regular season—a little more than 10 percent of the time. Price threw the changeup (by far his highest-whiff offering) on 43 percent of his pitches in Game 5, a career record, and in each of his two World Series starts—both of which were dominant—the lefty threw the cutter less than 7 percent of the time, his lowest usage rates in any game since the first half of 2015. That tweak made him a hero.
According to the historical stats and analysis site The Baseball Gauge, the playoff pitching performances of Kelly, Hembree, Barnes, bullpen Porcello, and postcutter Price collectively increased Boston’s probability of winning the World Series by 37.1 percent. The Red Sox won 108 games during the regular season, but they won the World Series in part by being willing to deviate from full-season patterns when the data told them to. It takes a little luck to win in October, but luck, according to Branch Rickey, is the residue of design. For the Red Sox, luck was the residue of pitch design. Bannister still hasn’t thrown a pitch in the playoffs, but he has helped determine the playoff pitches that other pitchers threw. Fittingly, he abandoned his usual midgame station in the clubhouse to join the rest of the team for the final few minutes of the clincher, MLB bylaws about coach counts in the dugout be damned.
“I’ve never been in the dugout [as a coach] except for the ninth inning of Game 5,” Bannister says. “[I] wasn’t going to miss that moment.” Nor should he have. He helped make it happen.
Weeks before the Red Sox dogpiled at Dodger Stadium, the Indians returned home for Game 3 of the best-of-five ALDS, playing to save their season. Kluber had been rocked in Game 1. In Game 2, the bullpen, including Bauer, had allowed an early lead to slip away. On October 8, Mike Clevinger took the mound in Game 3 with the season on the line and shut the Astros down, striking out nine and allowing one run over five innings. In the bottom of the fifth, Francisco Lindor slammed a Dallas Keuchel pitch over the left-field wall and off a digital clock on the facade of the elevated walkway to a parking garage. The crowd was euphoric. The Indians led 2–1, clinging to a shred of hope against a formidable Astros team. Francona gave the ball to Bauer, his third relief appearance in the series.
Bauer’s fastball was back, averaging 95 mph in the series, but he still hadn’t really rounded into form following his long layoff. He allowed a leadoff single to Tony Kemp, who advanced to third on an errant Bauer pickoff throw. George Springer reached on an infield single. Alex Bregman bounced a weak grounder back to Bauer, who tried to start a double play but threw the ball into center field. González followed with a double to score two and gave the Astros a 4–2 lead. Although Houston hadn’t hit him hard, it was an ugly inning. The afternoon shadows grew long as the minutes remaining in Cleveland’s playoff life grew short. The game, and the Indians’ season, ended in an 11–3 rout.
The Astros celebrated on the Progressive Field grass. The Indians retreated to a somber postgame clubhouse. Bauer answered a pack of reporters’ questions promptly and departed. The rest of the team would soon disperse, and many would take a break from the game, resting their bodies and minds. Not Bauer. The next night, he had dinner with Boddy in Cleveland. Then he went back to work.
Days after the season ended, Bauer began his off-season routine of having his elbow and shoulder imaged at Stanford and his delivery mapped. Bauer’s archive of images of his delivery and his arm’s interior is likely unrivaled by any other pitcher in professional baseball.
“He goes and gets his biomechanics captured every year from the same exact person even though there are better methods, including ours. It’s not a point of precision, it’s a point of his history,” Boddy says.
Bauer assembles all the information, and he and outside experts evaluate what adjustments he might need to make to his training regimen or delivery. After his imaging and mapping in November 2018, he made another trip, to Nashville, where he met with Caleb Cotham at The Bledsoe Agency and helped design an off-season development plan for Neil Ramírez.
Bauer remains a complicated teammate. After helping Ramírez—good teammate!—he sent a tweet on November 29 that gave the opposite impression to some who saw it, writing, “Plot twist, I was better than Kluber this year.” He added in a separate, clarifying tweet that “Klubes was outstanding but so was I.” He said he wasn’t trashing a teammate. A number of statistics said Bauer was correct about being better than Kluber in 2018. Yet Kluber was a finalist for the Cy Young Award, and Bauer was not. (Tampa Bay’s Blake Snell won the award, while Bauer finished sixth.) Few players would wade into the waters of social media to rank performances within a clubhouse. As he saw it, he was just setting the record straight for posterity.
MLB Network invited Bauer on air to talk about his social-media missives and another big story line: reports that the Indians were shopping him. Bauer obliged. During the live remote interview, he said that if the Indians were to trade him, they ought to do so after the 2019 season. He’d have more “surplus value” in 2019, he reasoned. Bauer was unwilling to discuss an extension. He wants to be the first player to go through the arbitration process for a fourth time in the winter of 2019–2020, and it’s unlikely the Indians would want to pay the salary he’d command, which could exceed $20 million.
Bauer won his second consecutive arbitration case against the club in February 2019 and was awarded a $13 million salary for the forthcoming season. Arbitration hearings typically feature arguments based solely upon on-field performance, but Bauer accused the lawyers arguing the case for the club of “character assassination” in the final ten minutes of their presentation before the arbitrator, which included mentioning Bauer’s “69 Days of Giving” charity effort from 2018, in which he gave away $420.69 a day to sixty-eight different charities over the course of sixty-nine days. “They didn’t mention it was a charitable campaign, just mentioned the name,” Bauer told USA Today. What else did they say? “Basically, that I’m a terrible human being.”1
Bauer had created more controversy on social media in January when he engaged in a two-day-long, back-and-forth Twitter skirmish with a college student. Bauer responded to the young woman after she levied a pair of insults. She soon faced an avalanche of responses from Bauer and some of his 134,000 followers. The woman said she felt harassed. After facing criticism for recklessness and insensitivity, Bauer tweeted, “I often defend myself against internet trolling” but resolved to “wield the responsibility of my public platform more responsibly in the future.”
Most pitchers start ramping up their velocity in February, the month they report to spring training, but Bauer had begun crow-hopping and max-efforting 105-plus mph throws into netting in the main Driveline facility in November. He was testing everything he had, including his latest project: building a better changeup.
The one area Bauer struggled to attack in 2018 was low and away to left-handed hitters. Although Bauer’s changeup missed bats at an above-average rate, yielding one of the ten lowest batting averages and slugging percentages of any starter who threw the pitch at least one hundred times in 2018, it lacked the horizontal or vertical movement he wanted, and he had trouble locating it consistently. On the same mound in the Driveline R&D building where he commenced his slider project, he began again, with the Edgertronic and Rapsodo watching and measuring. Bauer wanted a pitch shape that would move in the same tunnel as his slider but break in the opposite direction. He and Driveline pitch-design guru Eric Jagers (who’d be hired by the Phillies in Marc
h) used a black marker to draw a stripe on the balls Bauer was throwing, making the spin axis easier to track. On some throws, the black stripe looked like a tilted equator. Progress.
Bauer and the Driveline staff made video overlays to compare his pitches’ movement. A green loop overlaid on the video represented the tunnel that he wanted the pitches to travel within for as long as possible. Bauer’s slider, four-seam fastball, and changeup all inhabited the loop for about half the journey to the plate. Then the slider broke off to the left and the changeup faded down and away.
Bauer began throwing live at-bats earlier than he had the previous off-season. A player peanut gallery gathered around the cage as he threw to a motley crew of hitters and HitTrax quantified the results. Bauer grunted as he threw his entire arsenal of pitches, which often resulted in whiffs from overmatched hitters, drawing laughs from the audience.
Bauer believes he will be even better in 2019, but he has fears. He’ll be twenty-eight in 2019, statistically already at or even past the typical player’s physical peak, though he’d like to challenge that notion. (His velocity increased in 2018, when the standard aging trajectory would say it should have declined.) He hasn’t yet won the first of the three Cy Youngs he covets. He worries about what will happen when more talented pitchers, like the Dodgers’ Walker Buehler or even Adam Ottavino, start to adopt his practices. “[Bauer] thinks there’s a road-map issue,” Boddy says. “I have done this additional work to prove I can do this.… And everyone will start doing it.” Other pitchers’ ceilings will be higher than Bauer’s.
“His fears are not stupid,” Boddy says. But Boddy comforts him with this: few, if any, pitchers are willing to work as hard, to put in the necessary deliberate practice. “I was like, ‘Can you name a single major or minor leaguer that works as many hours as you in the off-season?’” Boddy says.
Bauer couldn’t.
“Well, it doesn’t matter then, does it?” Boddy told him. “You haven’t fixed the problem that us humans have, which is that we don’t like to work very hard. If you fix that problem, you’re in line to make billions of dollars doing something else.”
Just as most players are behind Bauer, most (likely all) teams are trailing the Astros, even though Sanstreak sold out three months’ stock of Edgertronic cameras in one day in January as other clubs belatedly got on board. As Boddy tweeted in February 2019, “Most teams are still in denial and use technology because they feel they have to. They’re still way behind actual integration.” We’re still in the early stages of this movement, perhaps just the end of its beginning.
This era of development depends on adopting and integrating technology and data to spur players to new heights. But each transformation starts with something innately human: a desire to be better. Only the curious and the driven will excel in the future of enlightened athletics. Only the paranoid will survive.
Boddy is built for that world, but he says he doesn’t want to work in a major-league front office. He seemingly doesn’t need to. His company, which employs more than thirty people, has become a brand: the third building of the Driveline campus is a warehouse whose slow-to-illuminate fluorescent lights reveal wooden crates stacked to the ceiling. The crates contain weighted balls, wrist weights, and other Driveline products, all manufactured in China and shipped over by boat. At the 2018 Winter Meetings, Boddy offered MLB teams ninety-minute meetings to explain the latest innovations at Driveline, and he filled all of the available slots. He also hosted curious media members for an event in Driveline’s Mandalay Bay hotel suite, which was soon so packed that the crowd spilled into the bedrooms.
In the fall of 2018, the Puget Sound Business Journal recognized Driveline as Seattle’s second-fastest-growing minority-owned business. The magazine pegged Driveline’s revenue in 2017 at $3.12 million, an increase of 374 percent from 2015. But there is one job Boddy would leave for, a position in which he would morph from the ultimate outsider to the ultimate insider: MLB pitching coach.
On October 30, the Angels anointed ex-Astros bullpen coach Doug White as their new pitching coach. White, who never played professionally, got into the game by opening his own facility in Southern California. The news touched off a Twitter exchange between Boddy and Bauer.
BODDY: Christ sakes they let anyone become a big league pitching coach these days. (Congrats, Doug!)
BAUER: I guess there’s hope for you after all Kyle. Big if true.
BODDY: Pitching coach of the Phillies, 2023, here we come.
BAUER: C’mon man don’t be pulling an Elon Musk and delaying the timeline ok? I want my model three and that looks like you in Oakley’s in a Phillies uniform in 2021 ok?
Maybe one day the game’s two ultimate outsiders would both be in uniform. Until then, though, they had a changeup to perfect. In early January 2019, Bauer stepped back onto the mound in the R&D building at Driveline and threw another five-gallon bucket’s worth of balls. Opening Day was approaching, and Bauer had to be better.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BEN LINDBERGH: Many industry insiders have little incentive to speak frankly about baseball’s final frontier. We’re grateful to those who talked to us anyway, in some cases because they cared deeply about sharing knowledge that might help players improve. Without them this book would’ve been a lot shorter.
Thanks to Sam Miller, Steve Goldman, Zach Kram, and Rob Neyer for early reads and recommendations; to Craig and Cathy Wright for research help and hospitality; to Richard Puerzer for graciously sharing his archive of clippings; to Paul Kuo for wrangling clients; to Rob Arthur, Mitchel Lichtman, Rob McQuown, and Daren Willman for statistical assistance; to the writers whose work informed ours, including R.J. Anderson, Mark Armour, Russell Carleton, J.J. Cooper, David Laurila, Joe Lemire, Dan Levitt, Lee Lowenfish, Eno Sarris, Jeff Sullivan, and Tom Verducci; and to Bill Simmons, Sean Fennessey, Mallory Rubin, and Justin Sayles at The Ringer for letting me moonlight again. On the home front, love and gratitude to my wife, Jessie Barbour, and to my tiny writing companion, Grumkin, for their patience and support.
Our reporting was the product of a great many recorded conversations conducted in a terrifyingly short time. Those interviews would’ve been worthless without the army of helpers who pitched in to transcribe them: Gavin Whitehead, David Seeger, Jared Beaumont, Chris Baber, Lee Sigman, Kenny Kelly, Michael Carver, Alex Bazeley, Bobby Wagner, Scott Holcombe, Keith Petit, Luke Lillard, Mitch McConeghey, Roland Smith, Troy Carter, Mohamed Hammad, Andrew Calagna, Aria Gerson, Hector Lozada, Jason Marbach, Joe Corkery, John Stookey, Jordan Epstein, Mark Neuenschwander, Matthew Fong, Ricky Gaona, Zach Brady, Aaron Wolfe, Bern Samko, Bradley Beale, Colby Wilson, Eric Oliver, Eric Peters, Greg Vince, Jeremiah Nelson, John Gilbert, Jorma Vaughn, Joseph Bunyan, Kazuto Yamazaki, Michael Hattery, Michelle Lenhart, Mitchell Krall, Molly McCullough, Robert Frey, Samuel Ujdak, Tim Moore, and Andrew Berkheimer.
One of the hardest things about this project was keeping track of the whereabouts of everyone we interviewed, seemingly half of whom changed jobs while we were writing, as teams doubled down on data-driven development. Another challenge was knowing when it would be overkill to include yet another example of a player transforming himself. Thanks to all of the self-improving players we talked to but couldn’t do justice to in the text, among them Jarod Bayless, Sean Boyle, Tony Cingrani, Tyler Flowers, Bryce Montes De Oca, Michael Plassmeyer, David Speer, Kohl Stewart, Ross Stripling, and Matt Tracy. The ranks of progressive players like them are swelling by the season.
Thanks to our agent, Sydelle Kramer, for enduring our (OK, mostly my) many e-mails, and to our editor, Jeff Alexander, for helping us make the book both briefer and better. And thanks, of course, to Travis, for being a patient, dependable, and cooperative coauthor. The best thing about cowriting a book is not needing to write a whole book. The next-best thing is having a partner with whom to split the stress.
TRAVIS SAWCHIK: To report this story, we conducted scores of interviews and traveled all over the country to get behi
nd the curtain: from spring training camps in Arizona, to business parks in LA and Seattle, to a sleepy town in Montana, in addition to plenty of trips to Crocker Park in Westlake, Ohio. This book was only made possible because there were enough key figures involved in this revolution willing to explain their talent-creating, ceiling-raising magic. As a reporter, you hope to learn as much as you can about a subject and share it with an audience. I learned so much about a game I thought I knew well. We will always be indebted to the people you have read about in the preceding pages. It is my hope they feel we did justice to their stories and to the idea that we can all be better.
I owe a debt of thanks to our wonderful agent Sydelle Kramer, who brought Ben and me together to work on this book. Sydelle was incredibly patient in helping us from the book’s proposal stage to our manuscript deadline. Our editor Jeff Alexander was something of a miracle-working personal trainer in getting the text in shape. I am grateful that Basic Books believed, as we did, that this is an important story. And I am also grateful that Nate Silver and David Appelman allowed me to hold day jobs while writing this book over the course of 2018–2019.
I couldn’t ask for a better partner on this project than Ben. What I believe you most want in a coauthor is someone who cares deeply about the project. Ben’s tireless work on this book in addition to his day job and podcast was something to behold. I believe because we reported and wrote this together, the end result is better than it would have been had we worked alone.
My wife, Rebecca, was a patient sounding board throughout the writing process. Without her support, this task would have been exponentially more difficult. I’m indebted to my mom and dad for developing me into, hopefully, at least a fringe-average author. And I will always be grateful that Duke Maas gave me a chance to write about baseball as a newspaperman. Duke passed away early in 2019. Thank you, Duke. What I know to be true is that reporting and writing a book are anything but solitary endeavors.
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