Almost immediately, TrackMan corrected coaching misconceptions. Golfers were typically taught that the ball would travel in the direction they swung the club, but TrackMan showed that its path is more dependent on the orientation of the club face. “We were the ones who basically said, ‘This is wrong, and by the way, here is an instrument [so] you can measure what’s going on,’” Tuxen says. TrackMan also showed that the optimal launch angle and spin rate for driving distance were 12 degrees and 2,700 rpm, respectively, which meant that golfers needed to swing with a higher attack angle than had been taught traditionally. “When I first presented this, there was huge resistance… nobody bought into this,” Tuxen says. “All the young players that come [up] now, they have that.”
After getting established in golf, the company engineered a baseball product, a challenge given the need for more sensitive measurements, the lack of consistent contact and release points, and the difficulty of setting up systems directly behind batters. By early 2008, the company was making overtures to teams, and Tuxen visited spring training with TrackMan general manager John Olshan. Appropriately, the first place where TrackMan captured data on a major-league pitcher was Dodgertown. Although the speed and movement readings were intuitive, confusion reigned when Tuxen pointed out a pitcher’s fastball spin rate. “Both the pitcher himself and [Dodgers pitching coach Rick Honeycutt] looked at me and said, ‘Is that a good spin rate?’” Tuxen recalls. “And I [said], ‘I don’t know. Don’t you guys know?’ Nope, they never had this data.”
Player development tended to be low tech, so front-office analysts were typically TrackMan’s point people with teams. “Because we came in through the analyst side, a lot of the player-development people mistrusted us at first,” Olshan says. Consequently, the system was a tough sell. “These meetings were surreal,” Olshan continues. “I’d go into a conference room at a baseball stadium, and all these guys in baseball uniforms would come in and sit around the table, and I’m presenting a PowerPoint about a missile-tracking system, and they’re looking at me like I’m completely insane.”
It was clear to the statheads upstairs that spin rate was valuable, so after its official launch in 2011, TrackMan took off quickly. “It was really remarkable, the growth,” Olshan says. “It’s five guys in this shitty office. We felt like the Wizard of Oz, like, ‘Don’t look behind the curtain.’”
The history of player development, from Rickey to Wrigley, from Hannah to Kauffman, and from Wright to today, has been one of fits and starts, of miscommunications and clashes, and of isolated experiments and belated breakthroughs, all culminating in the current revolution—one in which efforts to optimize players are no longer ahead of their time but embody it. It calls to mind a line from Bill James’s foreword to The Diamond Appraised: “It is not that we do not progress, perhaps, but that we progress like a catamaran heading into the wind, sailing at 45 degree angles to the headwind—and 90 degree angles to the course we charted just moments ago.”25 The wind has been blowing against player development since the dawn of the game. But at last the sails are starting to billow, and the boat is beginning to move.
In 2005, eight decades after Hornsby dismissed “smart ideas,” perhaps history’s best second baseman, committed curmudgeon Joe Morgan, would almost eerily echo Hornsby in an ESPN.com chat when he mused about Moneyball, “PLAYERS win games. Not theories.” But as technology permeates the sport, players have finally stopped scoffing.
Chris Fetter, a former Padres minor leaguer and the current pitching coach for the University of Michigan, is only in his early thirties, but he speaks about his player pupils as if they belong to a separate species that’s poised to surpass his own. “With the abundance of information that is out there now, FanGraphs is basically a homepage for everyone in baseball,” he says, referring to a leading website for baseball stats and analysis. “You have these kids that every time they open up Twitter they are seeing the launch angle, they are seeing the exit velo, they are seeing all these things thrown at them. There’s curiosity that is there. They want to learn.” Increasingly, so do the adults. “Player development doesn’t stop when you get to the big leagues,” says the fifty-year-old Dipoto, who forged an eight-year major-league career during a far less information-rich era. “There is a constant churn to learn.”
At long last, teams are teaching those players. But their curriculum comes from beyond the borders of professional baseball, in the unhallowed halls of the game’s player-development disrupters.
4
FIRST PRINCIPLES
I know how hard it is to know something.
—AMERICAN THEORETICAL PHYSICIST RICHARD FEYNMAN
Six months before his first meeting with Trevor Bauer, Kyle Boddy boarded a bus to downtown Seattle. It was August 15, 2012, and the Tampa Bay Rays were in town. The entirety of the team’s front office was on the West Coast trip. The small-budget Rays were always interested in new ideas as they tried to compete with the large-market Yankees and Red Sox in the American League East, and Rays assistant general manager Matt Arnold was intrigued by some of the research Boddy had published on his blog, Driveline Mechanics. The Rays were playing a Thursday afternoon game, and Boddy was to meet with several team officials afterward at the team hotel.
Baseball had already begun to accept one kind of outsider into its front offices: Ivy League grads with STEM degrees. But there were no outsiders in player development, and nearly every coaching position was occupied by an ex-player. Boddy was told time and again by people inside the game that his ideas were bullshit. If there was one team that would be willing to think differently, he figured, it would be the forward-thinking Rays, who had challenged conventional wisdom more than any team, most visibly by aggressively employing infield shifts.
Boddy badly wanted the meeting to go well because he hoped he had finally found his calling. The then twenty-nine-year-old had a groundbreaking goal: to turn scrubs into stars by helping pitchers throw harder and develop better breaking balls. More broadly, he argued, baseball’s entire minor-league and player-development structure needed to be rethought and rebuilt from scratch. Every breakthrough starts with the right question, and Boddy was always asking questions. 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?
As he traveled into town, Boddy followed the action of the game on the radio. Seattle Mariners ace Félix Hernández was in the midst of throwing the twenty-third perfect game in major-league history against the Rays. “Are you fucking kidding?” Boddy thought. Rays officials might not be in the highest of spirits as he made his pitch.
When he reached the suite, Boddy was thrilled to see that among the assembled Rays representatives was Tampa Bay general manager Andrew Friedman, regarded as one of the game’s sharpest executives. Boddy made a case to Friedman for why he knew better than anyone how to develop pitchers and how he could make a difference for the Rays. Friedman listened. Then he told Boddy that he trusted his people to tell him whether Boddy was “full of shit or not.” Boddy recalls that Friedman then asked a pointed question: “Why do you want to work in professional baseball?”
Friedman surprised Boddy with the question. He suggested Boddy would be better off trying to change the game from the outside and from the bottom up. If he tried to change player development from within, he’d have to contend with a massive bureaucracy. To support his point, Friedman asked Boddy what he thought about Tampa Bay’s pitching development. At the time, the Rays were loaded with an excellent staff of homegrown pitchers like David Price, James Shields, and Matt Moore.
“You want me to say you have good pitching,” Boddy said.
“That’s right,” Boddy remembers Friedman responding. “You think that I think that we do a good job of developing pitching.”
“That’s not knowable,” Boddy said.
Friedman conceded that he actually wasn’t sure whether the Rays were developing pitchers in an optimal manner. “What I can tell you,” Boddy recalls Friedman saying, “is we have a lot of good pitchers at the major-league level. So what do you think our pitching coaches think?” Boddy knew the informal interview was headed south. Friedman wasn’t going to disrupt his workforce based on seemingly radical concepts.
Boddy wouldn’t be working for the Rays. He would have to change the game from afar. “It wasn’t what I wanted to hear,” Boddy says. “It was very frustrating. But he was 100 percent right.”
It wouldn’t be his last encounter with Friedman. But for now, he would have to remain on the outside, where he had always been.
Boddy still speaks with the revolutionary fervor that animated him on his way to what he hoped would be a momentous meeting. “There are a whole host of things that can be done that just haven’t been done,” he says. “That’s something I’m really passionate about that will be remembered forever… if we make those changes. No one is going to remember weighted balls if that’s all we do. No one is going to remember that it was me that really popularized them. And if they do? Who cares. But everyone remembers that the Dodgers created basically what is now the minor-league system.… I’d like to be that progressive.… I want to be talked about as the next Branch Rickey.”
Becoming known as the next Branch Rickey: not the most modest aspiration for a former college dropout and Olive Garden server in search of his first job in baseball. But Boddy doesn’t set small goals, and he doesn’t subscribe to slow and steady progress. Even before he had a foothold in the sport, he envisioned an overhaul of existing structures and personnel.
“People argue change should be done incrementally, and I don’t agree,” Boddy says. “Just like with Rickey, you can’t go from having no black players to having a tenth of a black player. That’s not how it works. It’s a step function. You go from something to something else absolutely radical. I really think that’s what it’s going to require on the player-development side. From, ‘This is how we’ve done it for one hundred years’ to, ‘No it’s not. We’re not going to do that anymore.’”
Six years before his meeting with Friedman, Boddy was living at his parents’ home in Parma, Ohio. A blue-collar community that became Cleveland’s largest suburb after World War II, Parma lies in the shadows of the city’s steel mills, many of which have since ceased operation. His father was an electrician of Irish ancestry, and his mother, who stayed at home to raise children, was from a Japanese-American family. Boddy was a blend of both of them in appearance, with a shock of black hair, dark eyes, and thick eyebrows. Square and solid, he was a good athlete in high school who played multiple sports. But he was also intellectual and curious. He scored well on the SAT, but he and his family couldn’t afford for him to attend an elite out-of-state school. His father’s yearlong search for work after a layoff in a tough Northeast Ohio jobs market during Boddy’s youth shaped him in ways that he can’t quite articulate. Perhaps it’s why he would rather lead a business than work under a decision maker. But in 2006 he was unemployed after dropping out of Baldwin Wallace University.
Boddy had opted out of his senior year of high school to accrue college credits at Cuyahoga Community College. He earned a scholarship to Baldwin Wallace, which also accepted his community college credits. He studied economics and computer science and pitched for the baseball team. 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. College, Boddy worried, was preparing him to work as a “slave to Progressive Insurance.”
Though he’s always been affable and enthusiastic in his pursuits, he was also suffering from anxiety attacks and depression, a condition he’d struggled with since adolescence. He was surprised when his parents didn’t admonish him for dropping out of school, but they knew he was miserable. His mother had always suggested he try working as a server. So after dropping out of school, he began working at an Olive Garden in Parma.
“It’s one of the best things I could have done,” Boddy says. “It was hustling, in a sense. Customer service. It was the first time where I felt my output, how much I worked, impacted how much I made.”
At the Olive Garden, he brought chilled Andes mints to customers at the ends of meals. Not every server offered to grind fresh pepper on never-ending pasta bowls, but Boddy did. He was so effective that he drew the ire of his manager when, one night, four dining parties sought out the manager to compliment Boddy’s service. “He was exasperated,” Boddy says. “It goes to show how little you have to do to be above average.”
He was still dealing with depression after college, and his friends were enabling an unhealthy lifestyle. They worked “shitty” jobs and got together to complain about them and drink. The cycle repeated itself every weekend. Boddy self-medicated. “I was abusing Ambien,” he says. “I was using it to go to sleep.” He suffered side effects, including blackouts and severe amnesia.
By then, Boddy had met his future wife on LiveJournal, a social networking service. She lived in Seattle, and he wanted to move to be closer to her, but no one in his family had left the Cleveland area and doing so seemed traitorous. But early one morning, he awoke in front of his laptop after an Ambien blackout to a great surprise: he had applied for several jobs online. One of them was as a game theorist in customer service for PokerStars, an online poker cardroom. He had always loved games. Boddy played poker semiprofessionally online and often traveled to the nearest casino in Windsor, Ontario; he also played in Magic: The Gathering tournaments. “I guess my drug-induced résumé and cover letter were good enough because I got an interview,” he says. He also got the job and joined PokerStars’ anticollusion unit, working remotely. He could leave Cleveland. So in 2006, he moved to Seattle.
To satisfy his competitive drive, Boddy coached Little League Baseball. He then coached the freshman baseball team at Roosevelt High, where Boddy’s future father-in-law coached softball and had introduced him to the athletic director. He stressed the importance of on-base percentage and drawing walks, and rival coaches mocked him, calling his team’s patient approach “stupid.” Boddy was perplexed.
“Why wouldn’t this be accepted?” Boddy says. “It’s just obvious that having the most runners on base makes the most sense. That was really the start of like, ‘Why the fuck don’t you guys understand the game of baseball?’”
He went to coaching clinics in the area. He listened and asked questions. But the more questions he asked, the more answers he found unsatisfying. It was the root of his interest in player development.
The last year Boddy was with Roosevelt High, the varsity squad won only a single game in its conference, while the freshmen performed adequately. Yet after the season, Boddy received a call from the athletic director, who informed him that the school was going in a different direction with the freshman program. The varsity head coach remained in place.
Although he hadn’t openly clashed with the head coach, they weren’t close. “That was the problem,” Boddy says. “My assistant and I were not gonna play the game. We’re not baseball guys.… I was like, screw this.”
After being relieved of his baseball duties, Boddy remained interested in training and development. He had ample time to read about it. He had left PokerStars for Microsoft, where he worked a night shift four times a week from 11 p.m. to 10 a.m., “babysitting” the Xbox Live network. “Unless shit went bad, you didn’t have to do anything,” Boddy says.
Boddy used that time to think about what he perceived to be a glaring lack of knowledge, data, and objective methodology when it came to training athletes. He believed that in baseball, this was especially true for pitchers. As a kid in Cleveland, Boddy had thrown all the time, often hurling balls as far as possible. He and his peers played games in the neighborhood where they threw baseballs as hard as they could at each other, crow-hopping and unleashing off
erings from sixty feet that terrorized their targets.
Boddy has a radical suggestion for how we should teach children intent. “Don’t ever play catch with a six-year-old,” he says. “I’d put my kid by a fence, and I’d throw the shit out of the ball into the fence, like as hard as possible.” That way, Boddy says, the child will learn and mimic an adult’s max-intent mechanics. Kids copy the adults they’re around, Boddy notes. Boddy’s theory on why the children of major leaguers succeed at such a high rate is not so much genetics—which doesn’t hurt—but because they’ve emulated more effective throwing and movement patterns. If you play catch, lightly, at low intent, kids learn the wrong motion, he says. “[Then] you yell at them at age twelve when they’re not athletic,” Boddy says. “But you just spent six years teaching them how to throw like an idiot, so what do you expect?” He had always intuitively believed that max-effort throwing helped pitchers throw harder, but professional baseball was moving in the opposite direction.
In 1990, Todd Van Poppel was regarded as the best pitcher in the amateur draft. He signed a three-year, $1.2 million major-league deal with the Oakland A’s that included a $600,000 bonus. Van Poppel impressed scouts with a fastball that hit 94 mph in his first professional outing for the Southern Oregon Athletics in the Northwest League. As the top prospect in baseball in 1991, he was rushed to the majors at age nineteen and went on to record a negative career Wins Above Replacement (WAR) amid arm troubles. In 2001, No. 2 pick Mark Prior signed a major-league deal that guaranteed him $10.5 million. After a brilliant early stretch of pitching in the majors, injuries derailed his career. Was he overworked? Was he rushed? Wary of employing the next Van Poppel or Prior, teams became more cautious with their increasingly expensive investments and introduced strict pitch counts and innings limits.
The MVP Machine Page 8