That collaborative experience, and their shared obsession with being better at baseball, didn’t stop the two from frequently clashing until Hornsby was traded after the 1926 season. The year before that, Hornsby had taken over as player-manager, replacing Rickey in the latter role. One of Hornsby’s first acts was to discontinue the pregame meetings Rickey had held with the team and remove the chalkboards he had used to illustrate his lessons. “It’s base hits that win ballgames, not smart ideas,” the best second baseman of his time asserted.
That’s true on a literal level, but players must approach their potential before they can begin banging out hits, and ideas can power that process. With the Cardinals and Dodgers, Rickey implemented even more measures to cultivate what he called “the pleasing skills of the finished athlete.”7 No longer were Rickey’s scouts looking for players who could be fitted for major-league uniforms immediately; now they were after the best bets long term, and those prospects would have to be handed off to trustees who would tutor the players until they were ready to, as Rickey put it, “ripen into money.”8
Rickey’s assembly line reached its fullest fruition in the late 1940s, when Dodgertown opened in Vero Beach, Florida. The massive spring training complex, constructed on the site of a former naval base, represented, in the words of Rickey biographer Lee Lowenfish, “a permanent baseball college campus where all the players could be trained by a faculty of superlative teachers.” The facility’s unprecedented size allowed the team to disseminate the same instruction to the hundreds of players who would soon spend their seasons under Dodgers control, from Brooklyn down to Class D. There, the players learned how Rickey preferred they play, listening to his lectures and doing drills they could take to their respective full-season assignments.
“We are in accord on what and how we teach, so that when a player leaves Dodgertown and reports to one of our managers, he can be assured that nothing contrary to what he has learned at Dodgertown will be taught,” wrote Rickey acolyte and longtime Dodger-developer Fresco Thompson in his memoir Every Diamond Doesn’t Sparkle. Surveying the array of batting cages, pitching machines, string setups, and sliding pits, Thompson joked, “Maybe next season we’ll have mechanical batters and we’ll be able to dispense entirely with the ballplayers.”9
Although Rickey was baseball’s bellwether, other teams that recognized and responded to the trend toward more minor-league affiliates reaped rich rewards at the major-league level. 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.
But bargains that good never last. By 1960, only one team had fewer than seven affiliates, and only one had more than twelve. The gap between the biggest and smallest systems had shrunk, and the pace of player development’s evolution slowed. Even so, the decades between Rickey’s innovations and the advent of modern player development brought four transitional, out-of-the-box experiments, three of which were prescient failures and one of which was a prescient success. The failures came first.
Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley, who took over the team upon the death of his gum-magnate father, William, in 1932, inherited a hugely successful family business. He proved a skilled steward, leaving the company on even sounder financial footing thanks to innovative measures like factory automation, radio and TV advertising, and a partnership with the army during World War II. At times, Wrigley attempted to extend his data-driven gum-making/marketing approach to baseball, with considerably less success.
In 1938, he invited the first failure by hiring Coleman R. Griffith, a groundbreaking researcher in the fledgling field of sports psychology, to consult for the Cubs on implementing a rigorous training program. As Professor Richard J. Puerzer recounted in a 2006 essay for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), Griffith’s work included “filming players, recommending improved training regimes, the documentation of player progress through charts and diagrams, and changes in batting and pitching practice in order to make the practice sessions more closely resemble game conditions.”10 The psychologist was speaking the language of advanced player development about eight decades ahead of his time.
“Contrary to what coaches often assume, he argued, players in the major leagues have not reached the performance limits of their bodies,” wrote psychology professor Christopher D. Green in a 2003 essay about Griffith. “They have reached only the limits allowed by the regimen of practice in which they are currently engaged.” In one report, Griffith complained that “the intent of the manager and most of the players was merely to regain or to recover about the same level of skill and judgment as had been attained during the previous season… but not… to acquire new skills nor to change the fundamental character of their older skills so that they would be more useful or more productive.” He also asserted that “to appeal to instinct or to heredity” to explain a player’s shortcomings was “a lazy, unimaginative and ignorant man’s way of evading the demands of his job.”11
The Cubs’ first manager in 1938, Charlie Grimm, had succeeded Hornsby as Cubs skipper and wasn’t much more open-minded than his predecessor; in his autobiography, he railed against “professors and pseudoscientists.”12 Griffith, an egghead armed with a chronoscope and slow-motion movie camera, represented a threat.
Griffith concluded that an average of only 47.8 minutes per day was being spent on practice “effective for the playing of baseball” and recommended measures such as gradually shortening the distance between the batter and fielder when playing “pepper” (a popular pregame warm-up exercise), structuring batting practice around complete at-bats, and having a hitter stand in the batter’s box during pitching practice to make the simulation more realistic. But Grimm ignored or undercut him, earning Griffith’s ire in increasingly caustic reports to Wrigley, one of which lamented that “widespread belief in ‘baseball magic’ undermined his own attempts to put the playing of the game on a more scientific footing.” Griffith’s association with the team ended in 1940, and as Green wrote, “the Cubs and the rest of Major League Baseball carried on much as they had before his arrival.”
In 1961, toward the end of a streak of sixteen nonwinning seasons, a frustrated Wrigley decided to dispense with managers, an experiment that Puerzer called in his essay “revolutionary and radical, defying all previous baseball convention.” It came to be called the “college of coaches.”
Wrigley’s gambit was inspired by Cubs catcher El Tappe’s suggestion of hiring roving specialist coaches in the minors. Like Rickey, Wrigley sought to streamline instruction, so he extended the idea to the big-league level. The new model called for eight to fourteen coaches, equal in status and salary, who would rotate throughout the Cubs’ organization, taking turns as “head coach” in the big leagues before cycling through the farm teams. The college of coaches, which Wrigley generally referred to as the “management team,” would represent “business efficiency applied to baseball.”
A Los Angeles Times writer likened Wrigley to “the scientists who are trying to put a man on the moon when they could benefit humanity a whole lot more by discovering a preventative for hangovers,” and JFK, who had ordered those scientists to aim moonward, suggested that automation might not mean the end of the workforce “since it now takes 10 men to manage the Cubs instead of one.”13 The team’s pitching was too thin to win with any number of managers, but even the system itself was a flop. Although the plan was designed to minimize discordant coaching styles, it ended up doing the opposite, and Wrigley conceded defeat in January 1963. “Each of t
he head coaches had his own individual ideas,” he said, adding that as a result, “the aim of standardization of play was not achieved.”14
Even so, Wrigley continued to rebel against orthodoxy, installing retired air force colonel Robert W. Whitlow as the team’s athletic director. Whitlow, who was supposed to oversee the entire organization and report to Wrigley directly, purchased exercise equipment, formulated workout and nutrition regimens, and proposed applying psychology to the team’s operations, but like Griffith before him, he was largely ignored and resigned after the 1964 season, prompting Wrigley to lament that “baseball people are slow to accept anyone with new ideas.”
As the Cubs’ experiment with the college and Whitlow wound down, another National League team commissioned a long-lasting but little-known study with a name as mundane as its mission was imaginative: the Research Program for Baseball. University of Delaware baseball coach Tubby Raymond approached Philadelphia Phillies owner Bob Carpenter with a bold proposal. Carpenter was a prominent patron of UD’s athletic program, and he agreed to back Raymond’s idea of testing the swing characteristics, eyesight, and mental makeups of hundreds of hitters, thereby establishing baselines that the Phillies could use to weed out weaker prospects or, more proactively, give them something to strive for.
Starting in 1963, Research Program personnel flocked to Florida each spring to collect information from hundreds of minor leaguers in a number of organizations. During the regular season, they tested major-league hitters in Philadelphia. To gather their data, they worked with a UD professor on psychological testing; a Bausch & Lomb representative on measuring visual acuity, depth perception, and pitch-tracking with a portable Ortho-Rater device; and physicists from DuPont on engineering a bat that could measure velocity, acceleration, force, and swing smoothness. “It was the only program of its kind at that time,” says Bob Hannah, who assisted with the Research Program and succeeded Raymond as UD’s baseball coach. “It was kind of a forerunner to all of the technology that you see out there today.”
One of Hannah’s duties was writing an annual report on the program’s progress. The first sentence of his first scouting report read, “The basic assumption underlying this study is that valid and reliable measuring devices and instruments can be constructed that will be useful in the selection and training of professional baseball players.”15 That’s not an assumption anyone would quibble with today, but in the ’60s it was far from accepted that sophisticated technology had any part to play in player procurement or development. The program’s futuristic, DuPont-designed bats had accelerometers embedded within the wood, and each hitter would wear a recording device that was wired to a strain gauge in the bat. When he swung, that sensor would convert the bat’s behavior into measurable electrical impulses the Research Program reps could record.
“We were taking baby steps with all of this stuff,” Hannah says. “There was no background information with which to compare the process we were using.” Over time, the program developed a profile of what high-level hitters looked like. The fastest hack ever captured was switch-hitting hit king Pete Rose’s from the right side, edging out other legends who consented to swing, like Hank Aaron.
Per the terms Carpenter had imposed, the Research Program’s data was confined to the Phillies, and Hannah says the organization never used it in any meaningful way, although a Research Program eye exam did convince Phillies slugger Dick Allen to get glasses. “We were still in an era of Major League Baseball where the old traditional rules were the things that were applied,” Hannah says. He remembers one meeting in which Raymond briefed the Phillies’ scouts on the work the Research Program was doing and the ways in which it could help them more accurately identify talent. “I think there was a lot of yawning taking place in the meeting,” Hannah says. “We weren’t making inroads in a hurry with that kind of stuff.”
The scouts persisted in trusting their own eyes, aided at most by a stopwatch. Players on the MLB bubble were even less receptive to the program’s presence. Third baseman Don Hoak, who was in his midthirties and tested poorly on the eye exam, wasn’t pleased that the program might give the Phillies another reason (besides his subpar hitting) to let him go. “He actually came in and threatened that if these tests had anything to do with him losing his job that there would be some price to pay,” Hannah says.
When the evaluators of outside talent proved stubborn, Hannah and his colleagues shifted their focus to applying the program to player development. The researchers realized that their readouts could give the team a method of tracking and encouraging its own prospects’ progress by providing objective feedback and pinpointing potential areas of improvement. “The vision scores, when coupled with results of the bat tests, enabled the researchers to make some impressively accurate predictions each spring about the offensive production of young hitters in the Philadelphia farm system,” wrote Kevin Kerrane in Dollar Sign on the Muscle, his 1984 book about scouting. 16 But predictions are pointless if no one important pays attention to them.
The Research Program continued until 1972, when Carpenter stepped down as team president. At some point after that, the products of the program’s forward-looking labor disappeared—into storage, perhaps, or possibly into a shredder. “We had a room full of pages and pages of documentation over the years,” Hannah says. “I have no idea what happened to it.”
The annals of player development contain one more illustrative outlier along the lengthy but largely uniform path from Rickey to recent times: the short-lived but brilliant Royals Academy, which combined Rickey’s centralized instruction with Wrigley’s and Hannah’s science.
Like Wrigley’s experiments, the Royals Academy was the brainchild of a businessman who tried to broaden baseball minds. In 1968, Ewing M. Kauffman bought the American League expansion franchise that would soon be christened the Royals. Kauffman, an entrepreneur who’d started the Marion Laboratories pharmaceutical company out of his basement in 1950, was, as The Sporting News put it, “armed with vast personal wealth, exceptional business acumen, and no knowledge of baseball.” The last attribute was more of an aid than a handicap; because baseball was new to him, Kauffman wouldn’t be bound by the weight of what had happened in the past.
Legendary scout Art Stewart, now in his nineties and still a Royals adviser, remembers being at the first meeting between Kauffman and his scouting staff at the old Continental Hotel in Kansas City. Kauffman, who, Stewart says, was “a brilliant man… way ahead of his time,” was looking for answers no one in baseball had heard before. “He made a statement, ‘Gentleman, how do we get talent for our major-league club and organization?’” Stewart says. “And someone got up and said, ‘We draft, we make trades, and there’s waivers and, uh, y’know, that’s the extent of it.’ And [Kauffman] said there should be more ways to develop players.”
As Stewart recalls, Kauffman told the assembled scouts he’d give the problem some thought, and at a subsequent meeting he proposed a solution: a series of tryout camps for raw athletes, in which the Royals would look for talent in “track stars, football stars, [and] basketball stars [and] see if it translates to baseball.” Kauffman made a fortune at Marion by avoiding development entirely; instead, he acquired, reformulated, and repackaged products discovered but rejected by other pharmaceutical companies. But in baseball, his Royals would be the ones making discoveries and trying to cultivate them in an athletic laboratory.
To determine which skills to target in the team’s nationwide dragnet, Kauffman hired Dr. Raymond Reilly, a research psychologist who had worked at NASA and the Office of Naval Research. Reilly tested the vision, psychomotor responses, and psychological makeups of roughly 150 professional players, mostly from within the Royals organization, and identified running speed (Rickey’s favorite tool), sharp eyesight, quick reflexes, and exceptional body balance as the most desirable physical attributes. Then the Royals set out to find potential players who possessed them, advertising tryouts in which they would consider attende
es who satisfied four criteria. To meet the minimum requirements, players had to have completed their high-school eligibility, be neither enrolled in a four-year college nor drafted by a big-league team, be younger than twenty, and be able to run sixty yards in no more than 6.9 seconds in baseball shoes.
Stewart was initially skeptical that the tryouts would turn up much talent, even though Rickey, whom he’d befriended early in his career, had told him how fruitful tryouts had been for his teams. He was soon swayed. 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.
In the afternoons, players received intensive instruction from an eight-man faculty composed of specialists in several aspects of the sport, as well as nontraditional hires, including a track coach and a trainer who developed nutrition plans and resistance exercises tailored to particular players. “In retrospect, this cadre of professionals constituted the first concerted effort to measure, evaluate, and improve both baseball players and the way that baseball is played,” wrote Puerzer in another essay for SABR.17 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 Royals hoped, as Rickey had, for a crop of players that would “ripen into money” and more than make up for the outlay.
The MVP Machine Page 6