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

by Ben Lindbergh

These new peaks in performance aren’t just the product of better technology. They’re a manifestation of a new philosophy of human potential. Increasingly, teams and players are adopting a growth mindset that rejects long-held beliefs about innate physical talent. One of the only innate qualities may be how hard players are willing to work. Scouts have historically graded players based on five physical tools, but in an era of optimization, a player’s approach to practice is a once-unsung sixth tool that affects the other five.

Not until 1988—the same year that the influential James published the twelfth and last of his annual Baseball Abstracts—had baseball’s data collectors even noted the outcome of every MLB pitch. Less than thirty years later, a system that once would have seemed like a sci-fi figment was capturing the process that produced every outcome on the field at forty thousand frames per second.

In April 2016, a study Ben coauthored for FiveThirtyEight, a website that specializes in statistical analysis, charted the rapid increase in analysts employed by teams over time. By then, more than five full-time front-office members per franchise, on average, were working in research and technological development (a figure that’s still swelling, topping 7.5 per team by spring 2018). Every team in the majors employed at least one analyst, and every team but the parsimonious Miami Marlins employed more than one. Although the study found that the early adopting data-centric teams had reaped rewards worth as many as several wins (and tens of millions of dollars) per season from mining baseball’s big data before their competitors could, those benefits have shrunk as the front-office brain race has intensified. As baseball analyst Phil Birnbaum once observed, “You gain more by not being stupid than you do by being smart.”

Every team now knows which players are projected to be good. But the best teams are discovering ways for players to accomplish what they aren’t projected to do.

“For all of the unceasing talk of money in baseball, of salaries, of taxes, of revenues shared and unshared, the only path to success is through player development,” wrote Baseball Prospectus cofounder Joe Sheehan in October 2018.

One characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. It wasn’t IQ. “It was grit,” she told the TED Talk audience. “Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in and day out. Not just for the week or month, but for years. And working really hard to make that future a reality.”

It’s not that he won’t listen, Bauer says, it’s that he rejects bad advice. He explains that he’s very coachable if someone is presenting useful information and can explain its logic. He just doesn’t automatically acquiesce to authority. More often, he questions it. He wants to know the logic or science behind any practice or drill he’s being asked to do. This is part of the Bauer DNA.

There are three basic ways to improve velocity: get stronger, adopt more efficient mechanics, or create more mobility.

In his freshman season at Hart High, Bauer hit 76 mph. After visiting the Houston facility several times after his freshman year and during and after his sophomore year, he hit 94 mph in a tournament in the December before his junior season began. Coaches from UCLA and Stanford were there to see the radar readings. “Sixteen months of being down there completely changed me,” Bauer says. The ranch is where Bauer learned how to acquire velocity. It’s where he and his father were exposed to the power of high-speed video. He learned to exchange endurance training, like running the warning track, for explosive drill work that mimicked the act of throwing. He also learned concepts like pitch tunneling, a theory that the longer different types of pitches could share the same release point and path to home plate, disguising their true nature, the more effective they would be.

Bauer believes in warming up to throw, not throwing to warm up, and the tube activates muscles in the shoulder, forearm, and upper chest, increasing blood flow to those regions.

Before major-league teams could call up promising players from Triple-A, as they do today, they acquired talent by trading for or purchasing players from other big-league teams or minor-league teams, drafting players from the highest minor leagues who hadn’t already been auctioned off, or scouring the country for big-league-ready amateurs who had somehow eluded the network of other minor- and major-league teams that were trying to find them.

Rickey, who realized that trying to go dollar-for-dollar with wealthier clubs was a losing proposition, wired prized scout Charley Barrett, “Pack up and come home—we’ll develop our own players.” Starting in late 1919, Rickey and Cardinals president Sam Breadon began building a Cardinals-owned and -operated network of minor-league teams. In a pattern that repeats itself across centuries, baseball’s old guard belittled a boundary-breaking concept. “It’s the stupidest idea in baseball,” legendary Giants manager John McGraw said. “What Rickey is trying to do can’t be done.”

During his four years as head baseball coach at the University of Michigan, Rickey, who years later invented the batting helmet, had designed the batting cage, which he conceived to help catchers like him, who had less time to hit because they were busy keeping balls from sailing away whenever their teammates swung through practice pitches. He also invented the sliding pit—a dirt patch where runners could perfect their approach to the base—and a system of strings that gave pitchers a primitive form of feedback as they aimed for the edges of the strike zone, helping them hone their command.

Analysis performed for us by Baseball Prospectus writer Rob Arthur reveals that between 1920 and 1960, upgrading from zero affiliates to one or more was worth about 2.25 wins per year. Going from a below-average to an above-average number of affiliates was worth an astounding 7.7 wins per year, albeit with diminishing returns after reaching twice the typical team’s farm-club count. Overall, adding one farm team was worth about 11 wins, on average, to a parent club over the following five years. Establishing a minor-league system, and extracting the youth it yielded, was for years the best (and most economical) way to win.

Starting with a camp in Kansas City in June 1970, the Royals conducted 126 tryouts in a year across the United States and Canada, screening 7,682 candidates, from whom they selected 42 athletes from twenty-six states to make up the academy’s inaugural class. To house the top tryout talents, Kauffman had commissioned a campus on a 121-acre plot of land on the outskirts of Sarasota, Florida. The campus featured five baseball diamonds—all boasting the same dimensions as the field in Kansas City’s under-construction Kauffman Stadium—plus a fifty-room dormitory for players and various administrative and recreational facilities. Kauffman’s chosen few would study and train at the academy for a minimum of ten months, making a monthly salary and receiving free room and board, health and life insurance, and a roundtrip ticket home for the holidays.

Academy members spent at least twenty-five hours a week on practice fields or in games against local pro and collegiate clubs. Players attended classes three mornings a week at a neighboring junior college, and once they completed their terms at the academy, they were eligible for four-year scholarships to a college of their choice. Those expenses added up: the academy cost $1.5 million to build and $600,000 annually to operate.

The academy was the first baseball program to feature a mandatory stretching program or to use a swimming pool for injury rehab, and it embraced diet planning and strength training at a time when such practices were still heretical. The academy also focused on the prospects’ mental approach, teaching them techniques to center their concentration on specific aspects of instruction until they became instinctive.

The Royals Academy pointed toward a future where relatively little would be left to chance and all players would receive personalized, scientific instruction. In the academy era, the Royals were the first franchise to assign a coach other than the manager to each minor-league team in its system, and even though the original Royals Academy closed, the academy model spread beyond the borders of the country that birthed it.

Boddy’s theory on why the children of major leaguers succeed at such a high rate is not so much genetics—which doesn’t hurt—but because they’ve emulated more effective throwing and movement patterns. If you play catch, lightly, at low intent, kids learn the wrong motion, he says.

The data confirmed that air balls were better than grounders: with every 10 degree increment from minus 30 degrees to 30 degrees (where zero is a level line drive), the league-wide wOBA on contact in 2018 increased, easily surpassing the all-angles average of .315. (The average home run left the bat at a vertical angle of 28.2 degrees.) –30 to –20: .050 –20 to –10: .188 –10 to 0: .245 0 to 10: .462 10 to 20: .712 20 to 30: .731

“You still talk to coaches, ‘Oh, you want a line drive right up the middle. Right off the back of the L-screen,’” Martinez told Travis in 2017. “OK, well that’s a fucking single.” Martinez began to question why his best swing would result in a “fucking single.”

Myelin is the brain’s bandwidth. The more a person practices a certain act, the more myelin is created along that particular pathway, enabling the brain to send faster, more efficient signals. The power of myelin means that talent is not fixed.

Just practicing an instrument for ten thousand hours doesn’t mean you’ll master it. The accumulation of deliberate practice—focused work with intent—is the key to quicker achievement of expertise.

Many more orders followed; by the spring of 2018, the Astros had bought seventy-five cameras, outfitting every stadium in their system with a number of hard-mounted Edgertronic cameras in addition to equipping evaluators with portable units. (Boddy suspects the next-closest club was the Dodgers, with six.)

Trevor believed pitchers decided when to release pitches, but Warren didn’t believe this was a conscious action. The camera confirmed his suspicion. It showed that pitchers don’t release the ball by moving their fingers. Rather, the hand accelerates the ball linearly, forcing the fingers to extend or open. This led to a key finding that would shape Trevor’s future approach to pitch design: grips were best thought of as escape routes for the ball.

Creating a pitch is not magic; it’s physics. Boiling pitches down to their underlying properties, as Bauer had done with his Laminar Express, unlocks the power of pitch creation. Designing pitches from scratch begins with understanding the spin that governs how a baseball moves.

As a baseball (or any sphere or cylinder) travels, it drags a thin layer of air with it, causing a difference in pressure on each side of the ball. The ball moves toward the area of lower pressure. The faster the spin, the greater the pressure differential, and the greater the movement. A curveball breaks downward because its topspin creates a downward Magnus effect. A fastball with a high spin rate appears to rise—even though it really just falls less than a lower-spin pitch—because its backspin produces a Magnus effect that pushes the ball up, opposing gravity.

“He’s actually not that intelligent when it comes to analyzing stuff,” Boddy says. “To me, intelligence is picking up skills quickly. He’s really shitty at [that]. But he’s really good at brute-forcing things.… He doesn’t belong in the big leagues, but he’s there because he’s delusional. I wish that was the story that could go out there, but it’s not that popular. It sends kids a different message rather than ‘You can do anything.’” The message, Boddy suggests, is that achieving lofty ambitions requires maniacal obsession. “To me, that is true skill acquisition. He gets the most out of who he is.”

Recent research has shown that contrary to long-held beliefs about breaking balls inflicting the most stress on pitchers’ arms, fastballs actually do the most damage.

More information, or better data, usually isn’t enough to change minds because people are so attached to their beliefs that rebuttals actually make them dig in deeper—the so-called backfire effect.

Baseball’s last mile is the divide between the front office and the dugout, which stops stats from flowing to the people who can put them to use.

Bannister makes a medical analogy to describe how the front office and field staff function. The analysts upstairs are the radiologists who dissect the data and relay it to the surgeons (coaches), who operate on the patients (players). Bannister, who’s inhabited all three roles, likens altering players without using technology to performing surgery without ordering an MRI.

“When I got called up [by the Cubs], [Manager] Lou Piniella had no idea who I was,” Fuld recalls. “He was like, ‘Can you play left field?’ [I thought], ‘Sure, but why don’t you know this?’”

“It turns out the quickest way to acquire a new skill is to force yourself to do that skill with a constantly changing environment, implement, or activity,” Bauer says. “If you can vary one of those [elements] every single time, with the same goal, then your body acquires that skill a lot more quickly.”

The Astros led the majors in overall average spin rate in 2018, besting the second-place Indians.

The Astros’ uncompromising rebuild was a manifestation of a relentless, stay-the-course conviction that sometimes makes them hard to root for as well as tough to beat. That same mentality would give them the will to take on the last bastion of hidebound baseball thinking and construct an unprecedented player-development machine, although that wouldn’t come without human costs.

According to counts culled from team media guides, the pre-Luhnow Astros employed an exactly average-sized 51-member player-development staff in the spring of 2011, including all coaches, managers, and front-office executives devoted to player development. By the spring of 2015, that headcount climbed to 78, mirroring the rapid growth in PD departments around the game. Between the springs of 2011 and 2018, the average size of the staffs assigned to player development by MLB teams increased by 51 percent, from an average of 51 in 2011 to an average of 77 in 2018. (The deep-pocketed Yankees led all teams in 2018 with 102 PD personnel.) Those totals have kept climbing since.

It’s no coincidence, then, that progressive teams tend to target young, inexperienced managers. That’s partly because recently retired managers may be better at relating to young players and because front offices want to dictate in-game tactics like batting orders and bullpen moves, which longer-tenured managers may consider their domain. But the Astros source says it’s also because one way to ensure the front office can appoint its handpicked coaches “is to hire a manager who doesn’t have a lot of coaching buddies—isn’t part of the whole coaching favor-trading network, doesn’t owe a bunch of coaches for getting to this point, and will just let the front office name the coaches they want.”

In 2009, the Astros employed 55 scouts, above the MLB average of 41.5. As of spring 2016, they still had 52, although the MLB average had climbed by close to 10. By early 2019, multiple waves of layoffs had trimmed that total to fewer than 20, less than half the size of MLB’s next-smallest scouting staff.

From 2015 to 2018, the Astros ranked third in rpm/mph gains as a staff (+0.90), trailing only two fellow analytical powerhouses, the Yankees (+1.47) and Dodgers (+1.12).

My hand/bat speed is only 1,344 degrees per second, below the typical pro range of 1,500 to 2,230. (Mariners hitting adviser Edgar Martínez, a newly elected Hall of Famer, clears 3,000 even in his fifties.)

“Most really good pitching mound visits have nothing to do with pitching,” he says. “If you are going out there to talk about pitching, you might as well take him out of the game.… Mechanical [adjustments] are taking them out of the mindset they need to compete out there.”

“When I try and cover the whole plate, that’s when I get in trouble,” Lindor says. “I can cover the whole plate if I want to. I can put the ball in play anytime I want. That’s not going to do any good for me or the team.” If you’re hitting the ball out in front of the plate, the angle of the bat will yield a hit to the pull side. With the Indians and the data advocating that approach, Lindor and Ramírez began lifting the ball to their pull sides.

The first phase of the fly-ball revolution was getting balls off the ground. Both Lindor and Ramírez did that, increasing their average launch angles (and home-run totals) by the year. But the second, and arguably more important, phase was pulling those balls in the air. And in the teammates’ mutual evolutions, they made no trade-off at all in swing-and-miss, which one would expect to be a detrimental side effect of trying to lift more balls in the air.

Because the players whose adjustments pay off get to stay in the majors and in the public eye, Hassan says, “There’s a huge survivorship bias.” We’re much more likely to talk about those guys than we are the ones who never turn into impact players or never make the majors at all, provided the latter aren’t well known enough to be busts like Mark Appel.

A 2018 study by MLBAM senior database architect of stats Tom Tango showed that “hitters are more likely to maintain their launch angle if it was followed by an increase in performance,” noting that hitters who slump tend to revert to what was working before.

It’s easy to be seduced by the successes without factoring in the flops. It’s also easy to oversimplify what should be an individualized process. “There is no one way to hit,” Yelich said in October 2018. Nor is there one way to develop players.

Although women are still severely underrepresented in virtually every facet of baseball operations—a Mariners scout, Amanda Hopkins, became the first full-time female scout since the 1950s when the team hired her in 2015—player development is among the most demographically lopsided areas, even though minor- or major-league playing experience is no longer a prerequisite for employment. According to a list provided by MLB in November 2018, Manning was at that time one of only three women working in nonadministrative roles in a major-league team’s player-development department, and the only one ranking higher than the coordinator level.

MLB spent millions successfully lobbying Congress to pass the laughably named Save America’s Pastime Act in 2018. That legislation exempted minor-league players—who aren’t unionized—from protection under the Fair Labor Standards Act by classifying them as seasonal workers. As long as they make at least $1,160 a month, minor leaguers aren’t entitled to overtime and don’t get paid during spring training or the off-season.

Not only have MLB players not stopped improving, but they’re improving at one of the most rapid rates in history. If there is a ceiling, we haven’t come close to it yet.