The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  Kauffman welcomed the academy’s first class in August 1970, telling the recruits that they were “the astronauts of baseball” because they were “doing something nobody in the sport has done before.”18 (By 1970, no one was mocking scientists for trying to put men on the moon.) “Baseball’s power of growth is almost without bounds,” said Commissioner Bowie Kuhn at the academy’s dedication ceremony. “We are only beginning a new era. Obviously, if baseball is to progress, we must be prepared to grow and adapt to a world different from the world of 50 years ago.”19

  The academy’s first director, Syd Thrift, was a former Yankees farmhand who had attended a postseason camp in St. Petersburg administered by Yankees manager Casey Stengel in the fall of 1950. That camp was credited with helping Mickey Mantle and others reach the big leagues sooner than they otherwise would have, but it was a short-term program that catered only to professional players. Stengel once supposedly said, “You can’t teach these fellas anything they don’t already know,” but the academy rejected that premise. “Baseball techniques are like the weather,” Thrift said. “Everybody in the business talks about them, but very little has been done about them. We have come up with some brand-new ideas.”20

  Naturally, the academy initiative was widely disparaged, both by some elements inside the organization and by rival teams. “Most clubs thought it was a waste of time, waste of money, wouldn’t work,” Stewart says. The Royals’ experiment ruffled even more feathers when the academy sent a team to the Gulf Coast League in 1971 to compete against rookie clubs from several other organizations. Even though seven of its twenty-eight members hadn’t played baseball in high school and the others had been passed over in the amateur draft, the academy team went 40–13, winning the league championship and stealing 103 bases, nearly double the next-speediest team’s total.

  Stewart, who evaluated academy prospects, remembers hearing an opposing manager in the White Sox system berating his players after the academy team trounced them. “He got ’em all together and ranted and screamed and yelled at those kids,” Stewart says. “He said, ‘Look at them across the way, those kids beat the hell out of us 10–0, and you’re sitting here with your big bonuses and you can’t compare with those kids.’ I’ll never forget that. It proved to me and made me see how important player development was, how important repetition was, how important individual instruction was.”

  Because players lived at the academy year-round, they put more time in than most minor leaguers: thirty minutes of batting practice a day, compared to the few minutes most players would get elsewhere. But the hallmark of the academy wasn’t just more training; it was also better training. Instructors turned around pitching machines and used them for fielding practice, along with machines that could produce more unpredictable grounders that mimicked the appearance of batted balls. They used an orange, two-hundred-pound video machine to record and analyze swings, radar guns to clock pitchers, and stopwatches to turn taking leads into a science.

  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. Two ophthalmologists, Bill Harrison and Bill Lee, implemented a visualization program and conducted vision testing.

  The staff also welcomed guest speakers, including Ted Williams, perhaps the best hitter in history. Williams was a walking advertisement for academy-type training: burdened by an unhappy home life, he’d spent much of his childhood at a playground near his house. “That was as big a break as I got in my whole life,” he later recalled. “[The] chance to play baseball twelve months a year.” As a nineteen-year-old minor leaguer in 1938, he’d been tutored by a forty-one-year-old Hornsby, who helped him hit for average and power. In his 1970 book The Science of Hitting, Williams recalled that Hornsby, whom Rickey had rebuilt, taught him, “A great hitter isn’t born, he’s made. He’s made out of practice, fault correction, and confidence.”21 Williams tried to impart the same lesson to his academy audience. “He talked about not taking one hundred swings a day, but five hundred swings a day,” Stewart remembers.

  The academy’s first class graduated in December 1971, having played 241 games against varying levels of competition, winning 162. One member of that class, second baseman Frank White, became the academy’s first and best big leaguer, enjoying an eighteen-year career with the Royals. White later remembered the academy being a bit like a boot camp and said it sometimes made him feel like “a guinea pig in a grand baseball experiment,” but he credited the experience with transforming him from an unrefined athlete into a big leaguer. Thirteen other academy products eventually made the majors. From 1973, the year White debuted, through 1982, the Royals won the sixth-most games in the majors. When they won the pennant in 1980, they did so with a keystone combination of White at second and fellow academy graduate U L Washington at short.

  By then, though, the academy was long closed. The Royals ran a $1 million deficit in 1973, and with money tight, the expensive academy, with its unorthodox methods and lack of immediate major-league results, was an easy target for Royals player-development men who viewed it as a dubious, competing product. Thrift, who called his time at the academy “the most stimulating experience I have ever been a part of,” resigned as director over the lack of support from anyone in management except Kauffman. Fittingly, the assistant director when the academy closed in May 1974 was Rickey’s grandson, Branch III.

  With the exception of the Royals Academy, much of player-development history has depended on chance occurrences. In 1988, Braves pitcher Tom Glavine led the major leagues in losses. But in the spring of ’89, while standing in the outfield during batting practice, he picked up a ball that rolled toward him and happened to grip it in an unusual way, with his middle and ring fingers along the seams. He threw it into the infield, and the release felt right. He’d discovered his signature circle changeup. “If I hadn’t found that pitch, picked up the ball that way… I don’t know,” Glavine told Sports Illustrated in 1992. In 1991, he’d led the majors in wins, and twenty-five years after his pitching epiphany, he entered the Hall of Fame.22

  Some formative moments have come from teammates talking shop and sharing their craft, although not all players are open books. Twins prospect Pat Mahomes discovered as much in 1991 when he asked future Hall of Famer Jack Morris how he threw his splitter. “Get away from me, you little motherfucker,” Mahomes remembered Morris saying. “You’ll be trying to take my job next year.”23 More happily, Hall of Famer Harry Heilmann was a run-of-the-mill regular for several seasons before his Detroit Tigers teammate Ty Cobb, newly named to the position of player-manager in 1921, had him back up in the batter’s box, move his feet closer together, hold his hands farther away from his body, and crouch while waiting for the pitch. Using the new stance, Heilmann surpassed Cobb to become the most potent hitter of the next ten years not named Ruth or Hornsby.

  Cobb, by all accounts, was a hitting-instruction savant; under his tutelage, that 1921 team increased its batting average by forty-six points to .321, still a record under current scoring rules. But in many coaches’ cases, tweaks were trial-and-error and hit-or-miss. Based on hunches more than sound science, and reliant on the right instructors overlapping with the right players at the right times, baseball’s prevailing principles were applied in piecemeal fashion rather than as part of proven programs.

  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. “
It really was a forerunner of the academies that we have in Latin America to this day,” Stewart says. But for those who were there, the legacy of the Royals Academy remains one of missed opportunities for even greater gains. As a remorseful Stewart says, “Kauffman told me a year before he died… the worst mistake he’d ever made in baseball was letting them talk him out of having that baseball academy.”

  Seven years after the academy closed, Texas Rangers GM Eddie Robinson—a sixty-year-old baseball man who’d been a big leaguer and had run farm systems for a few franchises in the ’60s and ’70s—hired a twenty-nine-year-old non-baseball man named Craig R. Wright, a former aspiring teacher who had dabbled in baseball analysis as a hobby beginning in high school. Rickey (there’s that man again) had employed a statistician as early as 1913, but Wright was the first person to work for a major-league team in the position of “sabermetrician.” The term he took as his job title was then barely a year old, and for several years, the editor of the Rangers’ team media guide refused to print it. Newfangled title or not, Wright soon established himself as a trusted voice in evaluating players. For the most part, he offered input on potential transactions at the major-league level and wasn’t consulted on player-development decisions. But one report he produced on a potential trade led to what Wright says “might be one of the earliest examples of the sabermetric influence helping on player enhancement.”

  In December 1982, the Dodgers’ young catcher, Mike Scioscia, was coming off a weak offensive season, and LA was looking for a brand-name backstop. The Rangers had one: thirty-one-year-old Jim Sundberg, a six-time Gold Glover. A deal was discussed that would have sent several players to Texas, including prospect Orel Hershiser.

  Wright suspected Sundberg was overvalued. As Wright noted in his 1989 book The Diamond Appraised, catching evaluators had a tendency to “focus solely on the things that they can see: agility behind the plate, the number of passed balls, and, above all else, the catcher’s throwing ability.”24 To that point in his career, Sundberg had thrown out 43.2 percent of attempted base stealers, a robust rate compared to the MLB baseline of 34.8 percent over the same span.

  Yet according to Wright’s analysis of Sundberg’s “catcher ERA,” Rangers pitchers had consistently allowed more runs with Sundberg behind the plate than with the backup catchers. As Wright later wrote, he was aware that “there were some players, coaches, managers, and scouts who questioned [Sundberg’s] ability to call a good game,” and his painstaking statistical deep dive supported their skepticism. The resulting data identified Sundberg as “a significant detriment to [the] pitching staff,” which Wright says helped convince the team’s decision makers that despite Sundberg’s other skills, “there was a problem here. And where there’s a problem, you sometimes get a chance to fix it.”

  When the proposed trade died, the Rangers had a dilemma. “That’s when the discussion of that aspect of my report turned to what could be done to help Sundberg work more effectively with the pitchers,” Wright recalls, adding, “They decided, ‘We are going to address this in the next spring training.’”

  Although Wright’s role didn’t entail much direct interaction with players, he understood that the subject of Sundberg’s weakness had been broached with first-year bullpen and catching coach Glenn Ezell, a former minor-league catcher. Ezell remembers the matter being a “tough sell” because of Sundberg’s status and Gold Glove Awards and his own inexperience at the major-league level. “You don’t just step out of the minor leagues and say, ‘Hey! Why’d you call this? Why’d you call that? And what the hell was that pitch?’” Ezell says. However, he confirms, “There was conversation.”

  Sundberg describes game-calling as “a learning process” and acknowledges doing things differently beginning in 1983. In a 1988 interview, he said that because of critiques of his game-calling, “I changed the way I dealt with pitchers, and it’s been a change for the better.” Thirty years later, he explains that the change was increased communication, which familiarized him with each pitcher’s preferred approach. “I became more disciplined in talking to pitchers postgame… more so with pitchers who might have had a bad outing the night before,” he says. “I would stand in the outfield during BP and discuss the previous night’s game until I thought they felt encouraged. Once I started this, I never had another problem.”

  Numbers provided by Wright bear out the purported improvement. From 1977 to 1982, in a total of 1,075 matched innings—that is, equally weighting the samples of innings pitched by particular pitchers so as not to skew the results when one catcher works with more talented batterymates than another—pitchers allowed a 3.97 ERA with Sundberg behind the plate, compared to a 3.62 ERA when throwing to the Rangers’ reserves. But from 1983 through Sundberg’s last season, 1989—minus the portion of 1988 following a midseason trade, which Wright has found impairs a catcher’s work with his pitchers—pitchers recorded a 3.80 ERA with Sundberg and a 3.94 ERA with the reserves, in a total of 2,677 2/3 matched innings with the Rangers and three other teams. That’s a turnaround of roughly half a run per nine innings, with much of the difference attributable to a nearly 20 percent relative improvement in extra-base-hit rate.

  In 1983, the year of Sundberg’s game-calling conversion, the Rangers led the league in ERA for the first (and, thus far, only) time in their history. Sundberg didn’t win a Gold Glove that year or in any subsequent season, but he may have been more deserving than when he was winning every year. In a written report after the season, Wright concluded, “The major factor for the narrowing and seeming erasure of the longtime gap in catcher’s ERA between Sundberg and the reserve catchers has got to be Sunny’s own improvement.” That success stemmed from a sabermetric observation that was relayed to a player, crossing the longstanding barrier between baseball men and outside input. “The evolution of the use of the science of baseball toward enhancing player development and performance depends a great deal on that narrowing of the divide where it is most needed,” Wright says. “The success and failure of future front offices and field personnel will largely be decided along this line.”

  At the time, teams hadn’t invested in the infrastructure necessary to relay information from the front office to the field. “Today there is a big difference in the amount of instruction for the MLB players,” Sundberg says, noting that he “basically learned from my teammates throughout my career.” Colorado Rockies scouting and player-development assistant Jerry Weinstein, a progressive coaching luminary who’s taught at every level from high school to the majors over a fifty-plus-year career, says, “In the day there was a manager and a trainer and that was it.… Manager, trainer, bus driver, and a lot of times the trainer was the bus driver.”

  Most damaging of all, dugout attitudes were often hostile (or at least indifferent) to front-office input. Around 1998, Wright tried to add a service to his independent business in which he would work as a player-enhancement consultant. He sent a prospectus to a dozen clubs he considered solid leads and got no takers. The most frequent reason cited was that field staff and player-development personnel would be unlikely to cooperate enough to make Wright’s reports worthwhile.

  Because of all of those obstacles, Wright, like Billy Beane in Moneyball, didn’t see player development as the greatest area of opportunity. “As I looked at it then, I probably would have said no, that the room would have been much greater in player evaluation, because you could see what the gap was, and it was considerable,” he says. “But I think we’re definitely getting to that point now where you would reverse that.”

  In 2015, the San Diego Padres commissioned a report from Wright on the best way to advance the club’s long-term interests. “It was always the logical evolutionary path that the use of the science of baseball would begin at the upper level of the front office and slowly spread out from there,” he wrote. “As early as 1992, I have strongly advised aspiring professional sabermetricians to keep their eye on applying the scientific perspective to player enhancement and developm
ent issues.… I told them that in the lifetime of their careers I expected the wind of circumstance to turn and make such work a large part of their future.” Thanks largely to a thawing of field-level resistance and the advent of precise tracking technology, Wright argued, that future had arrived. “The explosion of information in baseball is going to push along the use of the science of baseball in player enhancement and player development,” he continued, adding, “the competitive advantage is in being at the forefront, and I assure you that the way the horses are running, this is not a time to equivocate.”

  By the time baseball was finally ready to build, a blueprint was waiting. Much of the technology that has helped power the player-development revolution got a foothold first in another rotational, ball-based sport with an aged average viewer: golf. “The golf world is way more advanced, to a microscopic level, at tweaking elite golfers,” Brian Bannister says.

  That’s partly attributable to TrackMan, the ball-tracking radar system installed not only in every MLB stadium but also in almost every minor-league stadium, many parks at the college level, and almost every major-league park in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. TrackMan, which was founded in Denmark in 2003, began by tracking golf swings and ball trajectories. Cofounder and chief technology officer Fredrik Tuxen, a radar engineer who previously worked on military technology used to track projectile weapons, says the company’s plan was to provide instant feedback for golfers at driving ranges, thereby making practice more entertaining but also ensuring that players were “not just hitting balls, but do[ing] it with a purpose.”