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

by Ben Lindbergh

If we lump together all players (both pitchers and position players) twenty-five and younger and thirty-five and older, we find that the “old” group accounted for the lowest percentage of league-wide WAR since the nineteenth century in 2017 and barely rebounded in 2018. The “young” group’s share, meanwhile, was close to a thirty-five-year high. The difference between the two proportions was at its widest since 1974.

Hitters craft their swings to take advantage of the fat part of the pitch-trajectory bell curve: most pitches come in on a roughly 6 degree downward plane, so most hitters swing up at the same angle to maximize their margin of error and exit velocity. Pitchers on enlightened teams, in turn, are trying to work away from that hitting sweet spot, throwing 8 degree breaking balls down and 4 degree fastballs up—ideally disguised so that hitters can’t tell the difference.

Bannister expects more players to take a cue from PGA pros (and Bauer) and purchase their own sensors, trackers, and cameras to continue their training year-round. Although that could lead to more mastery and greater technological literacy, it may also exacerbate another growing problem with the sport. At the lower levels, baseball is becoming a more expensive undertaking and potentially a more discriminatory one. 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. Between 2011 and 2017, the participation rates in households earning at least $75,000 increased, while the participation rates in lower-earning households decreased. Organized sports are often an unsupportable expense.

Although it’s a sign of progress that nonplayers are no longer excluded from the team-running ranks, front offices have swung so far in the other direction that they’ve merely traded one type of homogeneity for another, morphing into a slightly younger and far nerdier brand of old boys’ club. GMs are exclusively male, overwhelmingly white, and increasingly Ivy League educated. That lack of demographic diversity is likely leading to a lack of diversity of thought.

Outside of sports, though, there are no such constraints. We can be better without making something else in the world worse. Each of us individually, and all of us collectively, could be Justin Turner before changing his swing, Rich Hill before fully embracing his curveball, Trevor Bauer before redesigning his slider. Maybe humanity is about to break out. As James said, “We haven’t done anything yet to compare with potentially what we could do.”

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive. —ANDY GROVE, former Intel CEO and semiconductor pioneer

Relievers who throw a lot of sliders, Bannister says, tend to release them with their hands slightly turned to the side, as if they’re throwing a football. That hand position imparts extra spin to the slider compared to holding the hand more square to home plate, which adds extra hop to the fastball. When the season started, Kelly and Hembree had their hands at an angle and threw spin-efficient sliders with less hop on their heaters, but they both began to suffer from the same affliction. “As the year went on, for whatever reason, their hand[s] [were] getting more and more square on their fastball[s], and they were getting more and more carry on their four-seamer[s], and we started to see them lose their sliders,” Bannister says.

It takes a little luck to win in October, but luck, according to Branch Rickey, is the residue of design.