The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  Houston’s capabilities increased again in 2016 when the organization invested in Edgertronic cameras, which Putila discovered independent of Bauer and Boddy. In his penultimate piece for the Hardball Times, “A digital salute to pitch grips,” Fast had conceived a kind of pitch-grip cartography—a notation system that would allow a researcher to describe a grip based on how the ball is held in the hand, which part of each finger is touching the ball, and where on the ball each finger is touching. In the public sphere, it was hard to come by high-quality images of pitchers’ hands holding the ball, but that existing framework made diagnostics and adjustments more manageable once Fast and the front office could easily obtain images of the grips of any pitcher they pointed a camera toward. Subtle tweaks could then alter an inefficient high-spin pitch into one that channels that spin to create more movement. “It’s not ‘high-spin breaking ball equals good,’ but ‘high-spin breaking ball is the raw material, along with the delivery, to turn that into an effective weapon,’” Fast says.

  Dweck wrote that organizations with a growth mindset “are committed to the growth of every member, not just in words but in deeds, such as broadly available development and advancement opportunities.” That’s the case in the Astros system, where upon entering pro ball even the lowliest prospects receive biomechanical evaluations using the team’s suite of tools. Reggie Johnson was an undrafted free agent signed in 2016 out of tiny Hampden-Sydney College, a Division III school that hasn’t sent a player to the big leagues since 1962. As a right-handed reliever with an 88 to 90 mph fastball who’d allowed seventeen runs (seven unearned) in twenty-four innings in Rookie ball in 2016, Johnson was at the bottom of the pro-ball barrel when spring training started in 2017. Yet even he worked with TrackMan and an Edgertronic. “My first year, I was just wondering why that stuff really mattered because I felt like if you get outs, you get outs,” he says. “But after going through the system for a year and then going to spring training and seeing how the team really benefited from it [and] how players benefited from that stuff, it made more sense.”

  Although the Astros’ high-tech tools helped Johnson nearly double his 2016 strikeout-to-walk ratio in higher-level leagues, they also helped hasten his departure from pro ball. Between 2017 and 2018, the Astros downsized from nine farm teams to seven, eliminating their second DSL team and their Greeneville team in the Appalachian League, where Johnson had spent most of 2016. The resulting roster crunch forced out fringe players like him. It might seem strange that a team that holds a huge developmental advantage would want to reduce the size of its farm system, but it was precisely because of that advantage that the Astros slimmed down. “That was driven by feeling we were better at evaluating our players,” a former Astros staffer says, although he acknowledges that ownership didn’t mind the monetary savings. “We had less need to let them play a full season or two or three in order to know if they had major-league potential.” With smaller samples required to come to conclusions and less talent easily obtainable through the increasingly competitive amateur markets, the organization opted to concentrate its coaching time on more promising players. The Astros were replacing Rickey’s developmental maxim, “Out of quantity comes quality,” with one of their own: “Out of quantification comes quality.”

  The Astros’ new toys gave them PD powers they previously hadn’t possessed. Take Appel: he now believes that his loss of stuff was a symptom of undiagnosed and largely unacknowledged arm issues that took a toll when he tried to pitch through them. Shoulder and elbow problems eventually drove him into retirement, which made him rethink how long his health had been compromised. “Being able to look back, I wasn’t at the same health in pro ball that I was in college,” he says.

  One former front-office member says an injury would be consistent with what he saw from Appel: the pitcher suffered from poor fastball command, which hinted at problems with his delivery, but the team wasn’t systematically gathering data on that then. By 2017, the Astros were establishing clear, individually tailored goals for their pitchers in spring training and giving them feedback based on TrackMan data after every outing, with portable and mounted Edgertronics—seven of which the Astros have installed at Minute Maid Park, with seven more at each minor-league park in their system—available for more detailed looks. “I’m not saying we could have diagnosed an injury from that process, but we could have made a more specific diagnosis about what was being executed and what wasn’t,” the former front-office member says. Data can overcome machismo by pinpointing a problem a pitcher can’t pretend not to notice. “Saying his arm isn’t 100 percent sounds like an excuse for bad performance,” the source adds. “Saying, ‘Your arm is late getting up after stride-foot contact,’ and working on drills for that specific thing and not having them help, can give him an avenue to say, ‘I can’t do that because X hurts.’”

  Advancing technology also altered the Astros’ conception of what was possible on the offensive side. In late 2013, the year before Springer made his MLB debut, his strikeout rate topped 27 percent between Double-A and Triple-A. If he whiffed that much in the minors, he might swing and miss more often in the majors, limiting his offensive ceiling. But that was outmoded thinking. In the post-Moneyball era, Springer’s strikeout rate wasn’t set in stone. The Astros could help him make more contact.

  Only seven hitters who made as many major-league plate appearances as Springer from 2014 to 2016 recorded higher strikeout rates than his 26 percent. During that period, the Astros featured Springer-esque strikeout rates up and down the order: the team led the AL and ranked second in the majors in strikeout rate in 2014 and 2015, and its K rate climbed again in 2016. But even though the stigma surrounding strikeouts had decreased as teams realized that Ks weren’t worse than other outs and often correlated with walks and homers, the Astros thought they could do better. What they’d learned would allow them to have their walks and homers and keep their contact, too.

  Armed with Blast sensors and high-speed video, the Astros had set out to determine analytically what works at the plate. Belatedly, they realized that someone had beaten them to that territory: Charley Lau, an influential hitting coach who conducted groundbreaking video analysis at the Royals Academy and became baseball’s first coach with a six-year contract and a six-figure salary on the strength of his success with George Brett and other high-profile hitters. “A lot of what we discovered from Edgertronic cameras in 2016 was just a rediscovery of things Lau had discovered thirty-plus years earlier,” Fast says. “We ended up teaching almost exactly what Lau taught in terms of swing mechanics.” Lau, who stressed the importance of balance, weight shift, rhythm, fluidity, and finish, “got associated with hitting it on the ground, but the swing he teaches doesn’t actually do that,” Fast says.

  The Astros applied their new knowledge by acquiring hitters whose power swings didn’t preclude contact and helping them keep their bats in the zone longer. They devised an app-based scoring system to promote smart swing decisions and encourage laying off pitches away until they got to two strikes. They also reconstructed Springer along Lau’s lines. In 2017, the former frequent strikeout victim made more contact than the typical batter and also added power (ISO), culminating in a career year. “Players just don’t do what Springer has done. Not to such an extent,” wrote FanGraphs’ Jeff Sullivan, in a post titled “Baseball’s Improbable Contact Hitter.” Nor do many whole lineups look like that one did: the championship Astros finished with the major leagues’ lowest strikeout rate and highest isolated power, yielding baseball’s best offense on a per-plate-appearance basis since Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were batting back-to-back. “Everybody looks at Correa and Springer and Altuve and Bregman now and says, ‘Well sure, you can do that with elite hitters,’” Fast says. “But none of them were doing that to that extreme before we worked with them.”

  When an organization embraces modern development, the internal appetite for information tends to snowball as players pass it along. But when a team is trading
for someone it thinks could be better, it’s difficult to forecast his willingness to tinker. The odds are better with players who fear they’re running out of rope. “You try to do whatever reconnaissance you can when you’re making a trade,” Oakland’s David Forst says. “You just don’t know. We’ve certainly had guys who’ve come, and we’ve said, ‘Hey, if you do A, B, and C, it may make a difference,’ and he’s said, ‘Nah, I’m good with what I’m doing.’”

  Houston hears a “nah” from time to time, but every success makes the next sell simpler. In a 2018 article about Charlie Morton’s improvement in Houston, the Boston Globe observed that the Astros “have a way of sprinkling pixie dust on pitchers,” but there’s nothing supernatural about their track record. In November 2016, the Astros signed the free-agent spin king to a two-year, $14 million deal, despite his spotty history of health and performance and a career WAR of minus 0.5. “1st evidence of nuttiness of SP market,” tweeted national newsbreaker Jon Heyman. “Insane!” Less than one year later, as Morton mowed down the Dodgers in World Series Game 7, Heyman sent another tweet noting Morton’s “nasty stuff” and complimenting “a great free agent signing by Jeff Luhnow.” What a difference one meeting makes.

  “I had a reputation as a two-seam guy that threw a lot of sinkers and tried to get the ball on the ground,” Morton says. “And then when I got [to Houston], they told me that they wanted me to try and get swings-and-misses, which was something I’d never heard before.” As with Pressly and McHugh, the Astros asked Morton to trade sinkers for four-seamers and double down on his curve, which helped him handle lefties. He soon started throwing it more often than ever. “In retrospect, I wish I had thrown it a lot more throughout my career,” he says. Two strong seasons in Houston, which included an All-Star selection in 2018, opened Morton’s mind, ridding him of his impulse to pitch to particular spots and stay within the strike zone. “When I look in, I’m not looking at this rectangle that I need to throw to,” he says. “I’m just looking at areas where guys are aggressive.” In late 2018, a thirty-five-year-old Morton reached free agency again and more than doubled the size of his previous contract, signing with the Rays for two years and $30 million.

  In terms of career accomplishments, Justin Verlander couldn’t have been further removed from Morton when Houston traded for him seconds before the waiver deadline in August 2017. Yet the former MVP was also eager to learn. “What they’re good at is telling you what you’re good at,” Verlander says. His new employers reassured him that he had an elite four-seamer with incredible ride and informed him that he was only hurting himself when he used a different fastball. “I didn’t realize that my two-seamer was an ineffective four-seamer, basically,” he says. Verlander also used an Edgertronic to tweak his slider, and in Houston he’s thrown the pitch at career-high rates, locating it lower and getting more whiffs with it than he had in years. That altered arsenal helped him finish second in AL Cy Young voting in 2018.

  In the spring of 2018, Verlander spent hours throwing with and talking to another trade acquisition, Gerrit Cole, who would be his biggest competitor for the title of Astros ace. Cole was drinking tempranillo with his wife at a California winery a month before spring training when he learned he’d been traded to the Astros from the Pirates, the team that had drafted him over UCLA teammate Trevor Bauer in 2011. “I [drank] a whole lot more of it right after I got off the phone,” he says. At first, Cole had lived up to his promise in Pittsburgh, finishing fourth in NL Cy Young voting in 2015, but at twenty-seven, his career seemed to have stagnated. Like Morton, he was a fastball-curveball beast miscast as the type of pitch-to-contact sinkerballer the Pirates prefer. The Astros wanted to free him from Pittsburgh’s pitching template, which had helped suppress his powers, turning him into a league-average pitcher in 2017. “Individualized development and individualized attention is one of the most powerful things you can have as an organization,” Hinch says. “It’s not one-size-fits-all in this game.”

  When he reported to spring training, the Astros pulled him into a conference room for an hourlong, personalized pitching pitch. Seated at the head of the table, Cole listened as the brain trust told him they’d been watching and trying to trade for him for almost two years. They laid out what they liked and what they thought could be better. “You don’t scare the player by telling them there’s this massive overhaul,” Hinch says. “Certainly not Gerrit Cole.” Every recommendation was backed up by video, heat maps, and clear explanations. Houston’s presentation had the intended effect: Cole describes his reaction as “mind blown” and says, “I’d never experienced any meeting like that, at all.”

  By now, the next part is predictable: Cole threw more four-seamers and fewer sinkers and recorded a career-high rate of curveballs en route to his second All-Star season and top-five Cy Young finish. Among regular starters, only Chris Sale, Verlander, and Max Scherzer had higher strikeout rates. The Astros, Cole says, “highlighted the fact that my curveball’s my best pitch for me, which took six years for someone to finally tell me.” He’d always had a top-of-the-rotation toolbox, but until the trade, he says, “I was just sometimes pulling out the wrong tools.”

  The Astros’ collection of post-trade true believers supports Dweck’s contention that “when entire companies embrace a growth mindset, their employees report feeling far more empowered and committed.” We’re a long way from April 2013, when Astros pitcher Bud Norris said, “I understand they have a philosophy, but we are unfortunately the test dummies for it.” Today’s Astros are willing participants in the front office’s experiments, and the resulting team no longer looks like a car crash.

  Tyler White, a thirty-third-round pick from 2013 who’s used Blast to blossom into an above-average big leaguer, has been an Astro long enough to watch the organization go from a laughingstock to a leader and his friends in other organizations become curious and envious about “what [the Astros] are teaching, what they’re doing to make us as good as we possibly can be as players.” White takes pride in playing for the team that’s making the most of data-driven development. “We’ve been the ones that have taken off with it,” he says. “I want it to make me better than I already am.”

  When Steinhorn says that “there’s no separateness” between the Astros’ front office and field staff and that “there’s always conversation” between the two, he’s describing a setup dramatically different from the way player development has historically worked.

  In the past, “you ha[d] these silos,” says former Padres analyst Chris Long. “Player development, those guys are working on players in completely different cities and states.… They’re part of the organization, but they’re going to be a thousand miles away from you. So the interaction was minimal.” That geographical divide produced an informational and philosophical fracture. “We had no idea what the training regimens were for the players,” Long says. “It was completely offline.… All that stuff was just completely inaccessible unless you visited [the team] or called the guys and hassled them.”

  Technology has reduced that divide. Thanks to TrackMan and rapid video transmission, the front office can monitor its minor leaguers’ performance virtually in real time. What’s more, the whole staff is accessible via the workplace-communication software Slack, and the development coaches and performance apprentices—a new position focused on strength and conditioning that the team put in place for 2019—provide plenty of points of contact. In 2017, the Astros front office went one step further than communicating with coaches: Mejdal became a coach, spending the summer in short-season A-ball with the Tri-City ValleyCats, who didn’t yet have a development coach. “A part of me going there was for the front office in general to become a bit smarter about the constraints of minor-league ball,” Mejdal says. “It’s easy for us to imagine ways of improving it, and sometimes the ideas are great. Other times they fall flat on their face, and we weren’t very good at predicting which way some of these ideas were going to go.”

  Mejdal wasn’t
confident that he could predict how this idea was going to go, either; he hadn’t worn a uniform since Little League, and while he was capable of throwing BP, even deliberately practicing his fungo-hitting skills improved them only from “godawful to really bad.” As Mejdal recalls, “There was initially an anxiety of how the players were going to perceive me.… Like, ‘Shit, we could have a real coach, but instead we have this guy from NASA. Thanks a lot, Astros.’”

  Johnson, who pitched for Tri-City, confesses to some skepticism on the part of the players, saying, “At first we were wondering what he was doing here… is he up to something?” But both Mejdal and Johnson say that Mejdal soon settled in and became almost indistinguishable from a regular staffer, coaching first base and spending time with the players at meals and on the bus. He emphasized the importance of pitching ahead in the count, worked with hitters on using swing sensors, and always had his laptop on hand to dig up data and present it to the players in a digestible way.

  Mejdal’s minor-league odyssey is symbolic of the centrality of player development to every other initiative in the post-Moneyball era. For the all-in Astros, development is everything, and everything is development. But the technology that’s powering that revolution has one clear casualty: scouts. “Traditional scouting could be dead in about five years at some clubs,” one Astros source says. In Houston, it’s already on life support.

  In Moneyball’s immediate aftermath, traditionalists feared that stats would force scouts into extinction. Over the next decade, the opposite happened: teams hired more scouts, as front offices’ appetites for information intensified and international markets bore richer fruit. Now, though, it’s looking like those gains were akin to a dying star expanding before its core collapses. If old-school scouting is extinguished, the cause of its death will be the same thing that birthed the development revolution: better data, derived from technology, that does most of a scout’s job better than a human can.