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

by Ben Lindbergh

better numbers are the by-products of better body movement.

Bauer was interested in all aspects of sport science, including psychology. He was particularly interested in finding better ways to train and improve the mental aspects of command because it was the part of the craft he felt was most confounding to master.

Bauer was interested in Robert Nideffer’s “Theory of Attentional and Personal Style” as it related to athletic performance.

People fear what they don’t understand.

The combination of “the intellectual component of critical thinking and problem solving, alongside the physical preparation and the competition, is one of those things that’s really unique to sports,” he says.

Spin is a separate quality: some pitchers throw hard but straight, while others (like Hill) throw soft with spin. “Spin and the ability to shape pitches has a lot to do with both the range of motion of your individual joints and, really, the elasticity of connective tissue,” Bannister says. Some players’ ligaments and tendons are stiffer and less responsive, whereas others store a higher amount of potential energy in the milliseconds prior to performing a movement.

“They understand better that it’s not necessarily about mental toughness or confidence as much as it is about self-compassion and mindfulness and being in the present moment so that you can execute the techniques that you’ve practiced.”

Soft science came to baseball on March 2, 1950, when a Manhattan psychologist named David F. Tracy began working for the St. Louis Browns, whose athletic trainer had convinced owner Bill Dewitt Jr. that if psychology could improve other businesses, it could also benefit baseball teams.

Harvey Dorfman (author of The Mental Game of Baseball) and Ken Ravizza (author of Heads-Up Baseball),

‘So, that happened. Now what am I going to do about it?’”

No matter how much Gonzalez lightens those loads, most of her students won’t make the majors. But the life lessons they learn in her program—and a growing number of similar programs with other teams, which she has helped promote—will prepare them for their next careers.

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. “As far as I know, there aren’t any other women with a role this baseball-intensive at the decision-making director level,” Manning said.

Overseas, he explains, sports-science work is “much more focused on talent-identification programs, and then that is directly related to player development.”

baseball is much less aerobic-based, which means players’ bodies break in different ways.

“I don’t believe just because you’re a professional athlete, that you should be treated differently.… These athletes are adults, and they have the right to make choices about their lifestyle when they’re off the field without the ownership essentially criticizing them.”

There are three types of baseball players: Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen, and those who wonder what happened. —TOMMY LASORDA

“I tell [players] my job is to eliminate my job. My job is to teach them how to develop themselves.”

In addition to sending scouting reports, the writer provided analysis of the player’s performance via a set of statistical markers that captured his process rather than his results: chase rate, ground-ball rate, pull rate, hard-hit rate.

Baseball, wrote star outfielder Andrew McCutchen in a 2015 piece for the Players’ Tribune, “used to be a way out for poor kids. Now it’s a sport that increasingly freezes out kids whose parents don’t have the income to finance the travel baseball circuit.”

In 2015, Bill James said, “My view on the world is we have an ocean of ignorance and a small island of knowledge.” He wasn’t speaking specifically about baseball, but the observation applies, even to one of the most obsessively chronicled and comprehensively quantified human hobbies. “I feel like, yeah, our island is one hundred times bigger than it used to be,” Fast says. “But does that make the ocean that much smaller?”

No matter how good teams get at developing players, the average team will finish at .500, the average player will be worth no more than before, and the team that wins the World Series will still start out 0–0 the next spring.