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

by Ben Lindbergh

Maybe there’s no such thing as an absolute ceiling, or the ceiling is high enough that no one knows where it is.

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.

“For a long time, baseball players were almost viewed as a box of chocolates,” he says. “They came in endless varieties, and you were just trying to find the best ones. As we started to be able to collect information on players and learn at a rapidly growing pace, we started to realize that the reason the best players are the best players is that they got closer to perfection with the way their bodies moved, as far as executing a certain pitch or taking a certain swing.”

But the best teams are discovering ways for players to accomplish what they aren’t projected to do.

“natural maniacs,” writing, “A problem happens when you think someone is brilliantly different but not well-behaved. When in fact they’re not well-behaved because they’re brilliantly different.”

“I’m not that strong. I’m not fast. I’m not explosive. I can’t jump.” So how was he selected third overall in the major-league draft? “I was made.”

“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.” If Trevor possessed any rare attribute, Warren thinks, he had grit.

with a fixed mindset, “avoiding failure at all costs becomes a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled,” whereas a growth mindset regards failure not as evidence of stupidity or lack of ability but as a “heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities.”

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.

For Warren, his son’s activity was a great science experiment. They began to learn about pitching together, examining and questioning everything from the ground up, like engineers.

He was so obsessed with baseball that as an elementary-school student he insisted on wearing his jersey pants to school. Bauer’s mother warned him he’d probably be mocked. He wore them anyway, and her prediction came true. He kept wearing them.

He generally keeps to himself, and he walks to the field and training areas with purpose. He’s stubborn, impatient, and fixated on training and information gathering. When he sets a goal, he’s determined to reach it.

The faster and more efficient (or direct) his path to the plate, the more he could make up for his frame.

“Contrary to what coaches often assume, he argued, players in the major leagues have not reached the performance limits of their bodies,”

“A great hitter isn’t born, he’s made. He’s made out of practice, fault correction, and confidence.”

Why is the minor-league system set up the way it is? Why does every coaching staff and player-development staff feature the same titles, the same backgrounds, and approximately the same size? Why is there so little data and so much “feel” involved in player development?

But he didn’t believe the coursework was preparing students to excel in the real world. He knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur; he just didn’t know how to be one.

‘Why the fuck don’t you guys understand the game of baseball?

“a straight driveline towards the target,” with no twisting of the pitcher’s hips toward second base.

This is a common problem for innovators. To test something completely new requires the construction of new diagnostic instruments.

We had to go and discover everything ourselves.

Pinned above Boddy’s office bathroom toilet today is a sign that says, “Being rigorous is like being pregnant: You can’t be a little bit pregnant.”

You can’t be risk-averse all the time, because the largest risk in athletics is opportunity risk in the form of Father Time and aging kicking your ass, unrelenting and unstoppable. You have to maximize output, and often that means taking outsized risks. Period.

Boddy wants to employ outliers;

“We don’t need much space to get better.” The same goes for any hotbed of talent development: all that’s required are ideas, information, passion, and reps. Lots and lots of reps.

“You look at Ruth, Mantle, all these hitters back in the day, they all leg kick or toe tap. They all gain a ton of ground. Their strides are huge.… It’s the theory that whatever starts in motion, stays in motion.… Isaac Newton is my favorite hitting coach. The whole old-school mentality of swinging down, chopping down on the ball? It’s bullshit.” Turner slammed the table with a fist in frustration. How many coaches had let down how many players?

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.

Ideas that had begun outside the game were trickling up into the professional ranks.

Other guys have good years and they won’t make the change. He was like, ‘Dude, I have to figure this out. I don’t have it figured out.’”

“Being on the right attack angle [and] trying to match the plane to the pitch is something I really want to get better at,”

Deliberate practice takes place out of one’s comfort zone and requires a student to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities. Thus it demands near-maximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable.

“is perhaps the most dramatic evidence we have that the human brain grows and changes in response to training.”

The study, which revealed that expert musicians had logged many more hours of practice than amateurs and weren’t simply more “gifted,” reached only a small audience until the popular author Malcolm Gladwell stumbled across it and used it to coin what he called the 10,000-hour rule of practice, a concept he introduced in his bestselling 2008 book Outliers.

deliberate practice—focused work with intent

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.

But what is a pitch? It’s a combination of velocity, spin rate, and a spin axis. Creating a pitch is not magic; it’s physics.

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.

Driveline had created a culture of urgency, born of motivated (and/or desperate) athletes clawing for a way into professional or college baseball.

“You cannot name a pitcher in the big leagues, or probably from Double-A and up, who is a worse athlete than Trevor,” Boddy says. “There is probably not a single person. He doesn’t belong in professional baseball. And that is an unbelievable story.”

No strategy matters at all in skill development unless it’s your passion,

“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 believe coaching baseball players is the same thing,” Bannister says. “Half of it’s art, it’s experience, it’s creativity, and then half of it is just knowing the pure science and knowing the data you’re working with and being able to manipulate it in the direction that will benefit the player the most.”

Bannister’s breakthroughs are a testament to one constant in the story of player development: human beings’ ability to be wrong about things they think they understand.

What’s a perfectionist? Someone who puts the responsibility of mastering the task at hand ahead of all social considerations, who would rather be right than liked.

“Your threshold is the number of people who have to do something before you join in.” If you have a low threshold score, Gladwell added, “you’re someone who doesn’t need the support or the approval or the company of others to do what you think is right.”

“[Bauer] is willing to experiment. Fail. Learn from it. That cycle is real and beneficial. Lot of guys are afraid to do that because they don’t want to look bad. He doesn’t have that fear. He is not afraid.”

“Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset,”

“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.”

“Out of quantification comes quality.”

“Unfortunately, there’s a tendency that people would rather lose conventionally and not be questioned.”