The MVP Machine: How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players

by Ben Lindbergh

“It was stuff like, ‘Improve your command.’ How’s a pitcher supposed to go into the off-season and improve his command? He needs a drill. He needs to know how to measure if he’s getting better.” Branch Rickey had understood this, forbidding his managers from criticizing a player’s mistakes without telling him how to correct them. “It isn’t enough to tell a youngster that he strikes out too much—he knows that as well as the manager,” Rickey’s comrade Fresco Thompson wrote. “What he must be told is how to reduce his number of strikeouts.”

Like the rest of PD departments, MLB staffs are expanding: at the start of 2019, the thirty teams listed a combined eighty major-league coaches other than the previously standard six (bench coach, hitting and pitching coaches, first- and third-base coaches, and bullpen coach), including twenty-five assistant hitting coaches, six assistant pitching coaches, and several dedicated catching and/or quality control coaches. (Some teams, including the Dodgers, White Sox, and Angels—who’ve hired several cutting-edge coaches who’d gained attention on Twitter—employ three hitting coaches.)

The Astros were replacing Rickey’s developmental maxim, “Out of quantity comes quality,” with one of their own: “Out of quantification comes quality.”

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.

In 2014, then Rays manager Joe Maddon noted that the rise of tracking technology was disproportionately helping teams prevent runs instead of score them. “The hitter’s at a total disadvantage right now,” Maddon said. “And there’s no advantages on the horizon. I don’t see it. That’s why it’s going to take a lot of creative thinking.… Right now, offense is going south, and it’s going to continue going south based on pitching and defense. Everything—data, video, all the information—benefits them over offense.” Offense actually increased in three consecutive seasons after Maddon made those comments, but that was largely attributable to changes in the ball that spurred the surge in homers.

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.

According to a 2018 report by the Aspen Institute, only 34 percent of children from families earning less than $25,000 played a team sport in 2017, compared to 69 percent from homes earning more than $100,000.

For good or ill, the youth baseball experience worldwide is about to be more information-rich than ever. If anything, though, objective measurements provide fuel for competitiveness and a new way to hook kids on an old game. The same people who say stats suck the joy out of following baseball may also say that launch angles and spin rates suck the joy out of playing it, but just as there’s nothing joyless about understanding the sport in a different and deeper way, there’s nothing joyless about being better at it.

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.