The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  The next early victory came the following year. Altuve had been an All-Star in 2012, his first full season, but even then he’d barely been a league-average hitter. At twenty-two, he’d been named to the team mostly because someone had to represent the woeful Astros. The next season, his bat went backward. The tiny Altuve, who’d signed out of Venezuela for only $15,000 and had never appeared on top-prospect lists, had defied the odds and flummoxed scouts just by getting to the big leagues, but his five-foot-five-ish head seemed to be bumping up against a low power ceiling: through more than 1,500 MLB plate appearances, he’d slugged just .377.

  Over the 2013–2014 off-season, he worked with the team to implement a more forceful approach. “That was [hitting coach] John Mallee,” Fast says. “And it was based on data that I shared with him (from his questions) about the value of getting the ball in the air. He told Altuve to meet the ball out front and helped him retool his swing to do that.” Altuve slumped in spring training and went homerless through his first twenty-three regular-season games as he perfected the timing of a new leg kick, and at the end of April his slugging percentage still stood in the .370s. After that, though, the new swing clicked: he batted .355 and slugged .471 the rest of the way, winning a batting title, leading the majors in hits, and finishing third in doubles. He was on his way to double-digit home-run totals and a 2017 MVP award.

  As Altuve was working on his swing over the winter, the Astros were evaluating the then twenty-six-year-old Rockies swingman Collin McHugh, who to that point had allowed fifty runs in 47 1/3 MLB innings for the Mets and Rockies from 2012 to 2013. “After another disastrous season… it’s time to ask what McHugh really offers a major-league team,” Baseball Prospectus wrote in its annual guide. The Astros asked themselves that question and thought the answer was “a lot.” Unbeknownst to the public, McHugh had a high-spin curveball and a sinker he threw too much. The Astros claimed McHugh off waivers, advised him to ditch the sinker and trust the curve, and installed him in the starting rotation. The righty recorded a 2.73 ERA, struck out more than a batter per inning, and finished fourth in Rookie of the Year voting. The next year, he received down-ballot Cy Young votes.

  Within one year, the developmental trinity of Castro, Altuve, and McHugh provided powerful proofs of concept. All three went from subreplacement level—less valuable than a theoretical fringe player promoted from Triple-A—to cornerstone-type players. Even more encouraging, the tweaks affected every aspect of performance: fielding, hitting, and pitching. Based on those early returns, there was no facet of the game the Astros couldn’t optimize.

  The Astros’ developmental trend line didn’t climb continuously. Amid those early successes, the franchise suffered two spectacular failures to cultivate talent.

  J.D. Martinez made the majors alongside Altuve in 2011, and from 2011 to 2013 he outslugged the second baseman by only ten points. When he reported to spring training in 2014 claiming to have remade himself, the Astros didn’t give him an opportunity to prove it. Under manager Bo Porter, who’d be fired later that year, Martinez got only eighteen at-bats in fourteen spring games before the Astros released him.

  Granted, no other team realized what Martinez was about to become; the best he could do was land a minor-league deal with the Tigers, who sent him to Triple-A and didn’t promote him until after he’d hit ten homers in seventeen games. But the Astros had wildly underestimated a player they should have known better than anyone. “When you have arguably the best hitter in baseball and you let him go, and no other team puts him on the forty-man, it’s a wonderful anecdote of how finite our knowledge is,” Mejdal says. “The lesson is as giant as the numbers he puts up.”

  Improbably, the Astros experienced perhaps an even more infamous failure in the same season. Their prize for enduring the indignities of 2012 was the No. 1 pick in the 2013 draft, which they used on right-handed starter Mark Appel. Appel, a six-foot-five native Houstonian, had posted a 2.12 ERA with eleven strikeouts per nine innings as a senior at Stanford. But he got off to a catastrophic start the following season at High-A Lancaster, where he allowed fifty-one runs in 44 1/3 innings while also surrendering nine homers. After Appel amassed middling numbers the next year, the Astros traded him in a package for Phillies closer Ken Giles in December 2015. By then, Appel’s stock had fallen so far that he was more of a throw-in than the trade’s main attraction. His next two Triple-A seasons went no better, and he ultimately retired in 2018, joining the injury-impaired Steve Chilcott (1966) and Brien Taylor (1991) as the only No. 1 draft picks not to make the majors.

  From the front office’s perspective, Appel’s arrested development was a symptom of inefficient information transfer. “Part of the problem was that every coach and every coordinator and every special assistant in the org had their idea of what was wrong with Appel, whether it was mechanical or mental or something else,” one Astros source says. “And so in the midst of struggling at Lancaster, he was getting all sorts of conflicting advice about what was wrong with him.” The Astros were plagued by the same problem Rickey had designed Dodgertown to solve. “There would be different things said,” Appel acknowledges, adding, “It’s something that I’ve thought about because I can always sit back and look and say, ‘Man, if certain coaches didn’t say certain things…’”

  The Astros learned from both errors. Their reluctance to change their prior opinion of Martinez highlighted the need for technology that could quickly determine—and, when proactively applied, alter—a player’s true talent. As for Appel, Fast says, “That failure was a huge impetus for what happened the next spring training, which was getting a pitching-development plan, including TrackMan data, in front of every pitcher in the minors and having a front-office person present to explain it to them.”

  According to counts culled from team media guides, the pre-Luhnow Astros employed an exactly average-sized 51-member player-development staff in the spring of 2011, including all coaches, managers, and front-office executives devoted to player development. By the spring of 2015, that headcount climbed to 78, mirroring the rapid growth in PD departments around the game. Between the springs of 2011 and 2018, the average size of the staffs assigned to player development by MLB teams increased by 51 percent, from an average of 51 in 2011 to an average of 77 in 2018. (The deep-pocketed Yankees led all teams in 2018 with 102 PD personnel.) Those totals have kept climbing since.

  The Astros helped spur that expansion in the spring of 2015 by pioneering the position of development coach, a role that other clubs subsequently copied. The development coach wouldn’t replace any of the existing coaching positions. It would be an additional job designed to cope with the growing data demands facing minor-league coaches. The new kind of coach, Mejdal says, would be, “more technologically [and] quantitatively savvy than a conventional coach… someone who can throw [batting practice] and also write a SQL query.”

  The Astros couldn’t add the latter task to their regular coaches’ duties because many of them already had their hands full. “Usually a pitching coach gets to the ballpark 3 to 4 p.m., dillydally, have a throwing session,” a former Astros scout says. “Astros pitching coaches get to the ballpark at 9 to 10 a.m., they prepare video, they prepare classroom work. These guys friggin’ work. That’s the future of coaching. It took five years and 90 percent turnover to get everyone on the same page.”

  Across baseball, the coaching ranks are increasingly reflecting the emphasis teams are placing on nondogmatic development. As Mariners director of player development Andy McKay says, “Your number one tool as a coach in 2018 is not playing experience, it is a growth mindset that allows you to be curious and take advantage of all of the information that is readily available.… So while for years and years the first question asked in an interview was, ‘Where did you play?’, the question is becoming, ‘How well do you learn?’”

  This shift isn’t confined to the farm. In the past, big-league coaches tended to be buddies with the manager, who traditionally has selected his
staff. Today’s development-focused front offices are less willing to let managers make decisions that could compromise the consistency of the message the players hear from one level to the next. “Young, prospect-laden teams want to continue to develop players [in the majors], so they want the hitting and pitching coaches to actually coach the players,” an Astros source says. “It’s a radical idea, by the standards of Major League Baseball.”

  Like the rest of PD departments, MLB staffs are expanding: at the start of 2019, the thirty teams listed a combined eighty major-league coaches other than the previously standard six (bench coach, hitting and pitching coaches, first- and third-base coaches, and bullpen coach), including twenty-five assistant hitting coaches, six assistant pitching coaches, and several dedicated catching and/or quality control coaches. (Some teams, including the Dodgers, White Sox, and Angels—who’ve hired several cutting-edge coaches who’d gained attention on Twitter—employ three hitting coaches.) With the average MLB player’s salary now upward of $4.5 million, it’s only logical for teams to make much smaller investments in the right support staff to ensure that those players fulfill their potential. “You have coaches who want to be the filter—‘Oh, don’t show that to them, that might mess with their head,’” Fast says. “And then you have the coaches who are not afraid of the data and say, ‘Oh wow, this is really helpful. I’ve got a drill that’ll help the players with this.’ That latter kind of coach is really valuable.”

  It’s no coincidence, then, that progressive teams tend to target young, inexperienced managers. That’s partly because recently retired managers may be better at relating to young players and because front offices want to dictate in-game tactics like batting orders and bullpen moves, which longer-tenured managers may consider their domain. But the Astros source says it’s also because one way to ensure the front office can appoint its handpicked coaches “is to hire a manager who doesn’t have a lot of coaching buddies—isn’t part of the whole coaching favor-trading network, doesn’t owe a bunch of coaches for getting to this point, and will just let the front office name the coaches they want.”

  Pressly’s old team, the Twins, is one recent, instructive example. Minnesota’s front office knew about the power of Pressly’s curve. That Pressly didn’t make those changes until he left the Twins, baseball operations director Daniel Adler told the sports website The Athletic in October, was “a very hard lesson.”

  At the end of the 2018 season, the Twins fired sixty-two-year-old manager Paul Molitor and jettisoned most of his staff. “We just feel a change in voice and potential style with some of these younger players could be of benefit to us,” Falvey said at the press conference, noting the need to “put the best possible resources around” the team’s young talent. Weeks later, Falvey hired a rookie manager, poaching thirty-seven-year-old Rocco Baldelli from the Rays. “Not only does he understand the information and how it can impact players, but he champions it with players,” Falvey said.

  The Astros fought this battle, too. In 2014, Luhnow and then manager Bo Porter beefed about Appel being brought to Houston to throw a bullpen session for big-league pitching coach Brent Strom without Porter’s approval. Porter, who could be closed-minded and resented challenges to his authority, was appalled that Strom was reporting to the front office and not to him. Later that season, Luhnow made clear where his loyalties lay, firing Porter and retaining Strom, who had been a fixture at the Texas Baseball Ranch. And with good reason: Strom, a former major-league pitcher and, at seventy, the oldest active pitching coach in the big leagues, is exactly the kind of coach the Astros covet. “Stromy is probably one of the most underappreciated persons in the analytics movement,” Mejdal says. “He has as much experience as anybody, but he also has an insatiable curiosity and competitive desire to find something to give him, and the Astros, an advantage.”

  Dweck identified another attribute of organizations with a growth mindset: “They support collaboration across organizational boundaries rather than competition among employees or units.” In September 2014, the Astros hired a manager who wouldn’t stand in Strom’s way. The then forty-year-old A.J. Hinch, a former big-league catcher—and a Stanford psychology major—had been a farm director and manager for the Diamondbacks and then a pro scouting vice president and assistant general manager for the Padres before Luhnow invited him to return to the dugout. Having done every job, he understood that the manager is just the steward of the final leg of a long-term process of player development. “I am pretty open-minded,” says Hinch, whom the Astros extended through 2022 in the summer of 2018. “I was hired by an organization that demands it.”

  Gradually, awareness of Anders Ericsson’s research and the power of deliberate practice “permeated our system,” Mejdal says, and the front office applied that philosophy not just to players but to itself. “The player-development organization made leaps and bounds over the last three years or so,” Fast says. “Every year things got much, much better.”

  The development coaches helped. So did the Astros’ unflinching commitment to putting the people they wanted in place, no matter how high the turnover rate. Kyle Boddy consulted for Houston on pitching mechanics in 2013 and 2014 and visited the Astros’ spring training complex in Kissimmee, and the experience gave him an appreciation for Luhnow’s implacability. “His commitment level to whatever he does is at the maximum,” Boddy says. “He just goes all in when he makes decisions.”

  Boddy recalls hearing about how the pitching coaches for the Astros’ minor-league affiliates had defied Luhnow’s orders to implement long-toss training in 2012. In hopes of softening their resistance, Luhnow sent one of the skeptics, his sixty-something first-year minor-league pitching coordinator and former major leaguer Jon Matlack, to the Texas Baseball Ranch to learn more about the controversial technique. “Matlack comes back and he’s like, ‘It’s stupid. They’re gonna hurt their arms,’” Boddy says. “And Jeff’s like, ‘All right… I can believe that. What’s your report? What’s your backing behind that? What’s your reason?’ Matlack’s like, ‘It’s just dumb.’ And Jeff’s like, ‘You’re fired, just leave,’ and canned him. And canned all the pitching coaches. And one of the other people in the organization was like, ‘Did you set out to fire all the pitching coaches?’ And Jeff said, ‘No, but I’m not gonna tolerate insubordination.’”

  The Astros replaced the coaching casualties with more malleable instructors, many of them recruited from colleges. Of the fifty-three people in player development in the spring of 2012, Luhnow’s first full year with the team, only two remained in explicitly PD-related roles for the Astros six years later. Even player-development director (and later director of player personnel) Quinton McCracken, who left the team in 2017, was dropped because he wasn’t cutthroat enough for the front office’s taste, too reluctant to let go of players and coaches who didn’t deliver. “The story of a lot of people who got pushed out in that time frame is people who wouldn’t push their people to do what the front office wanted,” one Astros source says, adding, “I don’t know if anyone has ever so thoroughly turned over a front office down to the coaches and scouts.”

  Although that purge established Luhnow’s authority, it didn’t destroy the surviving staff’s ability to innovate. Russ Steinhorn was a coach at Delaware State University when Mejdal saw an item in Sports Illustrated about DSU batters shattering the all-time Division I hit-by-pitch record during the 2012 season. Steinhorn had made his players so hungry to reach base that they were willing to take 1 (or 152) for the team, an ethos that appealed to Houston’s whatever-it-takes brain trust. The Astros hired him as a minor-league hitting coach in 2013, and he served first in that role and then as a minor-league manager until October 2017, when he left to take over as the director of player development at Clemson.

  Steinhorn had the latitude to implement the practices he wanted. Anything, he says, to foster intent and continual learning and avoid an unchallenging environment where “the cream’s gonna rise to the top… but yo
u’re not gonna be able to produce mass development in players at any level because you’re basically just going through the motions.”

  An essential source of the trust and rapport between front office and farm—and, with all due respect to Altuve, Springer, and Keuchel, one of the most valuable prospects the Luhnow administration inherited—is Pete Putila, whom one former Astros employee labels “more valuable than almost anyone in that organization” and another describes as the most deserving future GM in the Astros’ executive branch. The precocious and personable Putila, who was hired as a baseball operations intern in January 2011, played a pivotal role in creating a culture of collaboration between coaches and analysts and rose rapidly to his current role as director of player development by August 2016.

  As the quality of coaching and communication improved, so did the data. Investments in wearable sensors and high-speed video allowed the Astros to assemble more pieces of the performance puzzle. “It wasn’t very long ago that even in the Astros organization it was sort of accepted that ‘Hitters hit,’” Fast says. Since then, he notes, “We’ve learned a ton about what separates good hitters and bad hitters and how we can train that.” In minor-league games, Astros pitchers began to wear harnesses made by Catapult, an Australian sports-performance-tracking company. The data the Catapult devices generated allowed the front office to make inferences about the pitchers’ movements and mechanics. The team also uses Catapult GPS trackers that attach to players’ backs beneath their jerseys to monitor how much ground they cover and how much energy they expend. In practice, Astros minor leaguers also started wearing sensors from K-Vest and 4D Motion, two wireless motion-tracking companies. And using “deep learning” techniques, the Astros could ingest high-speed-video footage and convert it into data that could help coaches and analysts classify, quantify, and correct mechanical shortcomings.