The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  What Willardson wrote about there being no talent pool with experience that spans stats and mechanics is growing less true all the time. Bannister started a virtuous circle: a few stathead players became conduits, who are minting many more stathead players, some of whom will turn into conduits when their playing days are done. As conduits and data-driven coaches become expected parts of the player-development process, the days of having to persuade players to accept stats will come to a close.

  “Each new wave of players is more open to it than in the past,” Bush says. And the guys who are against it? “Honestly,” he says, “they’re weeding themselves out.”

  8

  PERFECT PITCH

  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.

  —MALCOLM GLADWELL, Revisionist History

  The sun rose above the Superstition Mountains to the east on a quiet morning in Goodyear, Arizona. Spring training days start early, with players arriving at complexes before 7 a.m. As the hour grew later, the quiet was interrupted by the thwacks of baseballs meeting gloves as pitchers tossed. In recent years, that age-old sound had been joined by the more resounding one of weighted balls thumping against pads hung from the chain-link fences around the backfields. And on this particular morning, Goodyear was also less tranquil because Trevor Bauer was pissed off.

  Bauer’s elevated voice bounced off the raised ceilings of the spacious modern clubhouse. He wanted to know what teammate Mike Clevinger had done with his weighted balls, which Bauer had loaned him. Clevinger explained he had forgotten to return them to Bauer’s locker. Bauer condemned Clevinger for getting in the way of his routine. He forbade him to use his equipment again. Some nearby teammates were laughing, amused by Bauer’s outrage.

  “He was upset about me messing with his routine, blah, blah, blah,” Clevinger says. “We had a pretty good disagreement. I had choice words I shared with him as well. We made up.… We are like brothers. I get mad at my brother and tell him to fuck off all the time. It’s no different with [Bauer].”

  Clevinger is one of those closest to Bauer in the Cleveland clubhouse. The two can often be seen during games leaning on the dugout railing, talking side by side. Yet Clevinger doesn’t dispute that Bauer can be demanding and difficult.

  “He is. That’s just him. It’s just learning to know him.… He’s vocal about his difficulties, as some might say. He’s very up front about it,” Clevinger says. “I appreciate the honesty even if I think you’re a dick or a piece of shit. If you’re honest, I appreciate that.”

  The Indians’ front office knew that working with Bauer could be challenging.

  In the February after the infamous drone accident in the 2016 playoffs, Bauer unleashed a daylong flurry of politically fueled tweets. It began when Bauer complained that Apple and Twitter “continue to flood my phone with liberal slanted anti trump articles. fair and equal reporting, no?” The tweet invited a wave of criticism, totaling hundreds of responses. Bauer sparred with some users. He wrote in one response that “almost all” of his teammates had supported Donald Trump in the November election. Indians second baseman Jason Kipnis “liked” a tweet that challenged that assertion. Tiffany Otero, the wife of Bauer’s teammate Dan Otero, was so appalled by the pro-Trump tweets that she responded with a link to a story about Otero’s grandmother defecting from Cuba.

  Bauer tells us he didn’t actually vote for Trump or, for that matter, anyone else, since he felt his vote was meaningless in the red state of Texas. At times he just enjoys trolling. In the back-and-forth that day on Twitter, Bauer went on to question the human impact on climate change and wrote that he’d never encountered a Native American offended by the Indians’ Chief Wahoo mascot. Bauer often brings a puerile brand of humor to social media, specializing in “420” and “69” jokes, but the tone on this day became uncivil. One user wished cancer upon Bauer, and Bauer suggested another critic “quit life.”

  After the episode, Bauer says, he was called into the office of baseball operations president Chris Antonetti. Indians officials had asked Bauer to be a better teammate. Bauer asked them to define what it meant to be a good teammate. To Bauer, being a good teammate wasn’t about being one of the guys; it was about sharing useful information and helping teammates get the most out of their abilities. The Indians gave him an outline of how they defined being a good teammate. The list included expectations like showing up to stretch on time and meeting workout requirements. Bauer checked off all those boxes. “Then, highlighted in bold, italicized, circled, with arrows pointing to it, was, ‘Don’t do anything that might make someone mad,’” Bauer says. The conversation with Antonetti, as Bauer recalls, focused on his Twitter account, which Bauer was asked to surrender voluntarily for the 2017 season.

  Despite his social-media missteps, Bauer had become more comfortable and accepted in the Cleveland clubhouse by the spring of 2017. With the Diamondbacks, and early in his years with Cleveland, Bauer earned a reputation as a loner. He spent much of his time in the clubhouse editing video, researching photography or drones, and keeping to himself.

  Bauer has since found a way to engage more often with teammates and in locker-room banter.

  “Would I rather be doing something else? Probably,” Bauer told Travis in 2017. “But it’s more beneficial for me to do that. Little things like that I’ve had to learn. Sometimes it’s tough because I don’t think I can truly be myself a lot of times. I joke with people that two years ago, when I kept all my feelings inside about my teammates, I was a bad teammate. Now I tell them how much I think they suck and I’m a good teammate. It’s so backward.”

  Whether or not he met the club’s expectations of being a “good teammate,” he’d become a valuable teammate in helping some of those in the clubhouse become better performers on the field. Upon joining the Indians, all Clevinger really knew about Bauer was the “dirty hat” he wore at UCLA. In his first spring in Goodyear, in 2015, he approached Bauer to discuss pitching mechanics.

  “At first I was like, this guy is out of his mind,” Clevinger says. “I saw him doing all these different drills and these weird workouts with bands and stuff and thought, ‘What’s he doing?’… But then I started watching and doing my own research and looking at all the Driveline stuff and talking to Kyle [Boddy].”

  Bauer introduced Clevinger to Boddy. Clevinger said the Indians had adopted some Texas Baseball Ranch weighted-ball programs when he arrived via trade, but he was doing “three little drills” with weighted balls while Bauer had an extensive routine. Boddy sent Clevinger PDFs on why Driveline employs weighted balls.

  “I read through that. He has proof to back it up. I’m a huge science guy. I want to see the facts. I want to see the proof. I don’t want to throw shit against the wall,” Clevinger says. “Since I’ve been up here, [Bauer] has been a huge help.”

  Clevinger took time to understand why Bauer did what he did, why he was the way he was. Bauer took the time to teach Clevinger his weighted-ball practices. Bauer helped Clevinger become “more of an athlete” in his motion, through implicit-learning-based drills.

  What Clevinger came to understand is that Bauer has a low tolerance for disrupting his routine (including missing weighted balls) and perhaps a low “threshold,” as defined by renowned sociologist Mark Granovetter. Granovetter was investigating why people do things like riot or protest when he came up with what he called the threshold model of collective behavior. Granovetter theorized that everyone has a threshold score, which is sensitive to peer pressure. Gladwell explained the theory on his Revisionist History podcast: “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.” If you have a low threshold and your high-school teammates refer to your shoulder tube as a pen
is pole, you keep using it. When it came to development, Bauer might have a threshold score of zero.

  Gladwell has observed that former NBA great Rick Barry likely had a very low threshold score. Barry was a great free-throw shooter (89.3 percent for his career). But he shot free throws underhanded, a motion derided as a “granny shot,” even though its biomechanical simplicity could lead to improved success for struggling shooters. Virtually no NBA players have adopted this iconoclastic method—including notoriously poor free-throw shooter Shaquille O’Neal (52.7 percent). Shaq once told Barry he’d rather shoot “zero percent” than shoot underhanded. Another poor free-throw shooter, Wilt Chamberlain (51.1 percent), did adopt the underhand method for one season in 1961–1962, the best free-throw-shooting season of his career (61.3 percent). But Chamberlain stopped using the approach the next season. He wrote that using the “granny shot” made him look “like a sissy.” Shaq and Wilt had higher threshold scores. Of course, those with lower thresholds are not always easy to be around. They can be perceived as arrogant, uncompromising, and unwilling to adhere to social norms. Billy Paultz was a teammate of Barry’s with the New York Nets and famously said of him, “Half of the players disliked Rick Barry. The other half hated him.”1

  Barry told Gladwell, “It’s almost incomprehensible to me that someone could have that attitude, to sacrifice their success over worrying about how somebody feels about you or says about you. It’s sad, really.”

  The low-threshold life can be a lonely existence. But as Gladwell concluded, “Rick Barry was the best basketball player he could possibly have been, and Wilt Chamberlain could never say that.” Bauer wants to be able to say he was the best pitcher he could possibly be.

  Falvey, the Indians’ former conduit to Bauer, says, “[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.”

  While Bauer is also frustratingly uncompromising, he’s willing to do something else that is perhaps underappreciated. “He’s willing to share,” Falvey says.

  In 2013 at the Texas Baseball Ranch, Dutch athletic trainer Frans Bosch delivered a guest lecture in which he referred to University of Georgia kinesiology professor Karl Newell’s theory of constraint training in motor learning. Bosch told the audience that altering one of three variables during practice improves the pace of progress. Bauer was listening closely.

  “It turns out the quickest way to acquire a new skill is to force yourself to do that skill with a constantly changing environment, implement, or activity,” Bauer says. “If you can vary one of those [elements] every single time, with the same goal, then your body acquires that skill a lot more quickly.”

  Weighted balls—and differential weighted balls that are of slightly different size and weight—are an example of an implement constraint. “You throw thirty-two bullpens a year, not including spring training, and practically all of them are wastes of time because you are not forcing your mind to be active the entire time,” Bauer says. “Your mind goes, OK, yeah, I’m throwing a bullpen. You tune out after the second or third throw, especially because most guys throw five fastballs here, three curveballs, etc. There is no skill acquisition.”

  A more effective way to learn, Bauer says, is to change the task by throwing a series of different-sized or weighted balls. Each throw feels a little different, which forces the player’s mind to be active and his body to adapt. If he struggles with command or the feel of a pitch, his next bullpen session will often include work with those nonstandard balls. The value of what Driveline calls differential command balls goes beyond velocity training. “All of a sudden, in the next outing, that pitch is back,” Bauer says. In the off-season he will further randomize practice by shooting a basketball, swinging a bat, or kicking a soccer ball between throws.

  Falvey says Bauer introduced the Indians to the concept of differential training, which has been well documented to provide benefits in a number of pursuits, including memorization and recitation. Bauer shared a research paper with the front office on the benefits of random practice (a type of differential practice) in typing.

  Baseball has traditionally employed the opposite type of training: block practice. Consider batting practice. Every day, batters take on-field BP, which consists of a coach lobbing the same types of pitches again and again at much slower speeds than they see in games.

  A 1994 study conducted by California Polytechnic State University tested random batting practice versus block batting practice.2 The study divided thirty junior college baseball players into three groups: control, blocked practice, and random practice. The hitters faced three types of pitches—curveballs (CB), fastballs (FB), and changeups (CU)—in fifteen-pitch sets. The random group’s hitters faced the three pitch types in unpredictable fashion: FB, CU, CU, CB, FB, CB, and so on. The blocked group’s list of pitches came in segmented groupings of fifteen consecutive pitches of identical type: FB, FB, FB; CU, CU, CU, CB, CB, CB, and so on. In the testing phase, the researchers found that “the random group performed significantly better than the blocked group” in quality of contact under game conditions.

  The Indians had become more open to new development practices and had expanded and changed their staff. In addition to the rise of Falvey, they hired Eric Cressey disciple Matt Blake to be their pitching coordinator in 2016. In October 2016, Cleveland hired James Harris—who had one year of experience in professional baseball and had never played the game at an organized level—to be their farm director. He had spent one year with the Pirates after coming over from the NFL and the Philadelphia Eagles, where he’d been an assistant under Chip Kelly. Kelly was on the cutting edge of player-development practices in football. Each morning a plastic cup waited at the Eagles players’ lockers. It was a urine test, part of a daily assessment that included heart-rate tests and soreness and mood surveys conducted via iPad. The Indians even brought on author and ten-thousand-hour disciple Daniel Coyle as a consultant.

  And with Mickey Callaway gone, Bauer felt he was more welcome to share his ideas and information and throw his weighted-ball bullpens. But while the Indians were among the most aggressive teams in changing their player-development practices, and while Boddy thought they were a great club for Bauer, Bauer wanted them to be even more forward thinking, quicker to implement change, and open to the ideas he shared.

  “I think he wants to advance pitching forward. He thinks about it beyond himself,” Falvey says. “I think that’s the part that’s misunderstood.”

  Bauer always wanted to push, including in the brand-new field of pitch design. But he was learning that creating a new pitch doesn’t always follow a smooth, linear path.

  On March 7, two weeks into spring training, Bauer’s slider began to run into trouble.

  During a night exhibition game against the Cubs in which he’d already allowed five runs, Bauer threw a slider to center fielder Albert Almora. The pitch did not break sharply and stayed out over the middle of the plate, and Almora smashed it for a three-run homer, the ball landing on a grassy berm where fans fought each other to retrieve it. Bauer shook his head immediately after contact, disgusted with his execution.

  Bauer was frustrated both with himself and with the Indians as the spring went along. One source of friction with the club was that it had not heavily invested in Edgertronic cameras. Bauer says the Indians had only one camera available at Goodyear, and scores of pitchers. Boddy was on hand to observe Bauer’s next start on March 12 and set up an Edgertronic in the center-field camera area to get an updated look at Bauer, but access to Edgertronic video was inconsistent, depriving Bauer of the immediate feedback loop he enjoyed at Driveline. One would think that Bauer could have used his own camera, but when he had his father come film him one spring on a complex backfield, they were later called into the “principal’s office” to talk to Indians manager Terry Francona. Some coaches were irked that Bauer was turning the c
omplex into a pitching lab.

  Bauer’s fastball was sitting at 95 mph. His curveball was breaking sharply. He completed the spring with a satisfactory pitching line, leading the team with thirty-nine strikeouts in 29 1/3 innings, although he also allowed five home runs. But as Opening Day drew closer, the slider’s movement profile was becoming less horizontal and more vertical, and he didn’t have the information he needed to reverse its decay. In his second-to-last start of the spring on March 22, he allowed a home run to San Diego’s Manuel Margot on another imperfect slider.

  There was another problem, too.

  “My delivery changed slightly,” Bauer says. “My delivery is different in the off-season compared to the regular season just because of how loose I am and how much I am throwing. Early in spring training the slider was good. As spring training was finishing, the movement profile changed. It wasn’t breaking laterally.”

  As the Indians loaded their equipment trucks at the end of March and headed north to begin the season, Bauer’s new pitch was headed in the wrong direction.

  As April went on, Bauer became increasingly frustrated with his slider. Each time he sat in front of his locker after games and pulled up the pitch’s horizontal movement on his smartphone, he noticed it declining. His off-season project was failing. Although he’d had a fine first month (2.45 ERA, 46 strikeouts and 16 walks in 40 1/3 innings), he was frustrated with the pitch’s lack of improvement and doubted he could sustain success without it.