The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  “Branch Rickey was the one who taught me the strike zone, and how to lay off bad pitches,” Snider wrote, adding that Rickey “made it possible for me to become a major-league hitter.” Like a lot of power hitters, Snider never stopped striking out: from 1948 to 1961, he hit more home runs than any other player and struck out more than all but two. But he also exhibited patience, walking more often than he struck out in 1955 and leading the league in ball fours in ’56. In the seventeen seasons after Rickey made him his “personal project,” Snider struck out only 1.25 times per free pass.

  Almost seventy years later, an even younger hitter needed a similar lesson. Fortunately for him, amateur ball became the latest locus of modern development just in time for a high-tech intervention to turn his career around.

  Trey Harris was once the second-best high-school second baseman in the country, according to the amateur-scouting service Perfect Game. But Harris struggled in his first two seasons at the University of Missouri from 2015 to 2016. In 369 combined at-bats as a freshman and sophomore, Harris hit only five homers, slugging .333, and he struck out more than 2.5 times for every walk, posting an OBP barely over .300. Like his stat line, his build—listed, perhaps generously in more ways than one, at five foot ten, 215 pounds—didn’t look like that of a future professional player. The big leaguer Harris aspired to play like wasn’t a superstar: Pirates super-utility man Josh Harrison, who had a similar swing and compact frame. But even Harrison’s career would be beyond reach unless Harris started hitting.

  In the summer of 2016, after Harris’s sophomore year, Mizzou hired a new head coach, Missouri native Steve Bieser. Bieser had a brief big-league look in the late ’90s as a pinch-hitter and outfielder for the Mets and Pirates, and he played professionally for thirteen seasons. His first job after retiring as a player was as a high-school head coach and math teacher, a dual role in which he won two state championships while also instructing students in algebra and geometry.

  When Bieser arrived, in the midst of Missouri alum Max Scherzer’s second Cy Young Award–winning season, the program had a reputation for specializing in developing pitchers. One of the first questions the administration had for Bieser, he says, was, “What are you going to do to enhance our offensive production?” Bieser had an answer: he was going to get a TrackMan system. By the time the 2017 season started, the radar was installed. No longer would the school’s hitters have to go by gut feel in practice.

  Bieser secured funding from the school for the TrackMan hardware, but he didn’t have a full-time staffer to break down the data. Fortunately for him, his first year at Mizzou was also the first for freshman Matt Kane, a sabermetrics-obsessed economics, mathematics, and statistics triple major in search of a sports-related research opportunity. When Kane called the baseball team, hitting coach Dillon Lawson said he was looking for someone to design a TrackMan database. Kane’s programming skills, which he’d developed to indulge his own interest in baseball stats, gave him the expertise to help implement Bieser’s and Lawson’s vision of a progressive program.

  For Mizzou, becoming a developmental laboratory was a matter of survival. Prior to the 2012–2013 academic year, Missouri moved from its former athletic home, the Big 12, to the Southeastern Conference (SEC). Not only is the SEC the most cutthroat region in NCAA Division I baseball, but Mizzou is its northernmost school. “While Florida is practicing in 60 degree weather in January, we are up here getting snowed out in March,” Kane says. Snow is not only an impediment to practice, but also a recruiting handicap. “That definitely is what other schools in our conference use against us, is our weather,” Bieser says.

  Mizzou’s baseball facilities are subpar, and the program competes for attention with the Royals to the west and the Cardinals to the east. Its games average about eight hundred fans, dead last in a fourteen-team conference that also includes LSU, which draws bigger crowds than MLB’s Miami Marlins. These disadvantages force Mizzou to be smart. “Our whole goal is really just about player development,” Bieser says, adding, “We’re trying to look for those small things that maybe other people don’t do to give our guys an advantage.”

  Kane’s most crucial contribution was a way to quantify and improve plate discipline. The first rule in Ted Williams’s treatise The Science of Hitting had nothing to do with the swing: “Get a good ball to hit.” As Williams wrote, “Giving the pitcher an extra two inches around the strike zone increases the area of the strike zone 35%.” Even college pitchers can exploit an undisciplined hitter’s poor plate judgment, so Bieser believed the most powerful application of the program’s new tech would be helping hitters learn the zone.

  Williams had also promoted the power of deliberate practice. In The Science of Hitting, he recalled correcting the purposeless practice of Washington Senators first baseman Mike Epstein. “He practiced as much and as hard as anybody on our club, but he wasn’t practicing the right way,” Williams wrote. “He was having the pitcher in ordinary batting practice tell him what was coming, rather than make a game of it.” Williams modestly noted that Epstein “had better results” after he heeded Williams; in fact, after the first month of Williams’s tenure as Senators skipper in 1969, during which Epstein batted .231, Epstein posted a .990 OPS for the remainder of the season, the fifth-highest mark in the majors behind four Hall of Famers.

  Mizzou also embraced that facet of Williams’s wisdom. In their quest to optimize the team’s offensive results, Kane and Lawson—who had worked as a coach for the Astros during the 2016 minor-league season before joining Missouri—read Peak, Ericsson’s book about deliberate practice. Lawson wanted to turn plate discipline into a points system, post the leaders’ scores on a board in the clubhouse, and work with the laggards on an individual basis. With Kane’s help, the coaches could “keep track of good swings, bad swings, good watches, bad watches.”

  The metric Kane created gamified discipline, assigning negative or positive points to the hitter for each pitch, depending on the count, the pitch location, and the batter’s decision. If a hitter swung at an outside pitch on a 3–1 count, when a ball would have resulted in a walk and he should have been sitting on something more centered, he’d lose points. If he took that pitch, or swung at one that was in the zone (regardless of whether or how well he hit it), he’d gain points. Hitters could see their scores rise or fall in response to their decisions, and Lawson could monitor each player’s progress and intervene as needed. In Missouri’s first season under Bieser—and with TrackMan and Kane—the offense improved by fifteen points of OBP and forty-three points of slugging, generating 30 percent more extra-base hits and almost 70 percent more home runs despite losing the top three hitters from the 2016 squad.

  Harris, who hadn’t heard of TrackMan in his first two years at Mizzou, was the biggest beneficiary. As a sophomore, he had failed to hit his weight, batting only .213 with one homer. At that career nadir, he was willing to try something new that might make him into the hitter he still believed he could be. As his junior year began, he grew intrigued by Kane’s system, which produced a report that plotted each pitch location in red or green depending on whether the hitter’s decision on that pitch was bad or good. “My goal every game was to get in the green,” Harris says. “And then once I started noticing that I was in the green, I started noticing I was getting more hits.” The hits were welcome, but going green in game after game became an end in itself: “A big deal,” Harris says, “like a battle within the battle.”

  Harris pored over his hot and cold zones, which revealed that he was adept at distinguishing strikes from balls on the outside part of the plate but struggled to tell them apart on the inside corner. Once he’d diagnosed that problem, he could work on correcting it by paying particular attention to pitches in his problem area and looking closely at his results. “That was all because of TrackMan,” Harris says. “Being able to tell me exactly where the pitch is, what the pitch was, was really helpful for me.”

  TrackMan did for Harris what Rickey
did for Snider, without the subjectivity of having humans call out pitch locations and without requiring three other people to devote an hour a day to a single player’s practice session. In his junior year, a TrackMan-enhanced Harris struck out twenty-seven times, walked thirty-two times—more than he had in his first two seasons combined—and upped his OBP by nearly ninety points. No one on the team with more than one hundred at-bats reached base at a higher rate. And that was only half of Harris’s improvement.

  As Harris practiced his hitting on the field, an iPad connected to the TrackMan system displayed the angle and exit velocity of each batted ball, along with the estimated odds that a ball hit at that trajectory and speed in a game would turn into a hit. The team turned that into a competition, too. “We would play games with it all the time,” Harris says. “Like how many times can you get it between this degree and this degree above this launch angle, and you got points for it.” The first time Harris took TrackMan for a test drive confirmed that power wasn’t his problem. “I could hit the ball hard, but my launch angle seemed to be straight into the ground,” he says. With help from Kane and Lawson, who told him to aim for the top of the batter’s eye in center field, Harris worked on angling up his downward swing.

  Harris’s resurgence required both him and his head coach to reject their past practices. “I look back at my early coaching career and think, gosh… I was really teaching and coaching some of the swing mechanics wrong and different,” Bieser says. He believed in the “swing down, chop down on the ball to create backspin” mentality he was taught growing up, and he taught it to his players. Harris had heard it too. But TrackMan told him that on balls between 15 and 25 degrees, the league batted roughly .700, which sounded good to a .213 hitter. As a junior, he upped his average to .268 and slugged .508 with twelve bombs, more than double his dinger total from his first two collegiate seasons combined. Big-league teams weren’t yet convinced that his improvement was real, and Harris went undrafted in 2017. But as a senior, he launched another eleven long balls and batted .316. Suddenly, more scouts expressed interest.

  It takes a certain belief in one’s abilities to become a professional athlete—to trust that you can get good wood on an opposing pitcher’s best fastball or blow the ball by an imposing power hitter. Up to a point, that arrogance is advantageous, inoculating competitors against the doubts that might otherwise hamper their performance. But it can also convince players who need to change that they’re perfect as they are, or—if they do make a data-driven adjustment—that the numbers were a minor factor in their success. Harris has no such delusions. He credits 30 percent of his metamorphosis to his natural ability. The other 70 percent he attributes to TrackMan.

  Harris graduated from Missouri in May 2018, but his baseball graduation had to wait until June. As expected, his name wasn’t called during the first two days and ten rounds of the draft. On the third day, when he hoped it would be, his mother had to work, and his father took his sister out to eat. Harris stayed home alone, not wanting to risk losing service and missing a fateful call. Eventually, it came, and the voice on the other end told him he’d been drafted by his hometown Braves in the thirty-second round. It was later than Harris had hoped—his “bad body” label had come back to bite him—but any selection was cause for celebration, considering how inconceivable it seemed after his sophomore season. The odds are heavily against any thirty-second-round pick making the majors. Then again, the odds were also against Bieser. He was a thirty-second-round pick, too.

  Success stories like Harris have helped Missouri compete in spite of its uphill climb in the conference. Although the team hasn’t qualified for the NCAA tournament since it left the Big 12, it recorded better winning percentages in its first two seasons under Bieser than in any season since 2008. Just as important, player-development successes send a signal to potential recruits that Mizzou can help amateur athletes improve, prepare them for the data-rich environment of affiliated ball, and provide data to MLB teams that may help them get drafted.

  When potential recruits come to visit Mizzou, Bieser and his subordinates present Astros-style development plans tailored to each player, mapping out paths to pro ball. Kane confesses that he’s become an attraction on the tour; occasionally, he says, a coach will purposefully walk by his workstation with a recruit in tow. Qualities that once might have been turnoffs to jocks are now considered selling points: the presence of nerds, a laundry list of technological tools, and a promise to tinker with the way they play.

  Missouri’s story is not unique. That’s the biggest hitch in Mizzou’s plan to ride its development edge to contention: other programs with rosier records and greater resources are just as invested in modern development. UCLA was the first school to install a TrackMan system, and according to TrackMan, fifty-seven colleges (all but one in Division I) had their own systems installed by Opening Day 2019, including eleven of the fourteen teams in the SEC. It’s difficult for an underdog to triumph when the dominant dogs are using the same smart methods.

  One obstacle to even wider use is that college teams don’t typically have huge R&D departments, which limits the tech’s power as a player-enhancement asset. Some programs resemble miniature MLB baseball-operations departments, while others, says TrackMan’s Zach Day, receive the system and wonder, “OK, what are we going to do with this?” Day expects to see an “army of college students” dissecting NCAA data and subsequently getting hired by MLB teams; Kane already interns for the Pirates. About fifteen college programs and five MLB teams are using an app called PitchGrader to turn the data into an intuitive, automated tool for development; the app’s developer, Wayne Boyle, has already used it to engineer his son Sean, a right-handed pitcher, into a 2018 twenty-fifth-rounder, and in January 2019, the two independently published a coauthored book called Applied Technology in Pitching.

  At the University of North Carolina, which returned to the College World Series in 2018 for the first time in five years, stats major Micah Daley-Harris is the Matt Kane equivalent, and pitching coach Robert Woodard is the open-minded accomplice. “I have a bunch of shoulder impediments, so I came up with this herky-jerky windup that disrupted timing with hitters because I would rather win with an unconventional windup than be smooth, effortless, and clean and get beat,” Woodard says. “Unfortunately, there’s a tendency that people would rather lose conventionally and not be questioned.” Although the more talent-rich UNC has primarily applied data toward in-game tactics, it’s begun dabbling in development. “Once you bite into something that tastes good, you’re going to keep going,” Woodard says.

  At the University of Iowa, former pitching coach Desi Druschel retweeted Trevor Bauer, Kyle Boddy, and Doug Latta and shared images of his screen-strewn workspace and Hawkeyes players being put through their paces in gadget-filled settings straight out of Rocky IV. “A lot of people have seen us on social media—that’s a big deal,” Druschel told us. The school also drew attention for former assistant coach Pete Lauritson’s “Great Wall of Groundball Prevention,” a ring of screens arrayed around the infield to encourage hitters to aim up. Not long after the wall went viral, the Indians hired Lauritson as a minor-league hitting coach, and the Rays tried the same tactic in spring training.

  The honor roll of advanced development programs contains many more names: Dallas Baptist. Wake Forest. Vanderbilt. Coastal Carolina. Clemson. Michigan (where Rickey’s coaching career began). And both of 2018’s College World Series finalists, Oregon State and Arkansas—the former filled with Driveline disciples. At the amateur level, where wins matter more than they do in the minors, every team feels an urgency to make the most of its talent before the draft takes it away.

  Harris made his pro debut less than two weeks after the 2018 draft, playing center field for the Golf Coast League Braves. He started slow, got hot, and was bumped up to A-ball in time to spend the final month of the minor-league season playing close to home in Rome, Georgia. In fifty-three combined games, he hit .302 with a .409 OBP, wal
king more often than he struck out. He couldn’t check TrackMan in Florida, but his radar love was rekindled in Rome, where he reviewed his swing decisions daily. Harris hit eighteen doubles in only 189 at-bats, but he drove only one ball over the wall, which he blames on his average launch angle: 7 degrees, a little lower than he’d like. Over the off-season, he planned to trim some wasted movement from his swing and fifteen to twenty pounds from his frame with the goal of reaching High-A, hitting .280 or higher, and popping five to ten homers in 2019. If he doesn’t keep climbing, it won’t be because he hasn’t chased every chance to be better.

  Players used to come out of college not knowing much. Doug Jones, a third-round pick in 1978, didn’t pitch his first full season in the majors until 1987, when he was thirty. Jones became an All-Star closer at thirty-one and pitched into his forties, but before he broke out, he muddled through 246 minor-league games, learning through failure and gradually paring down a five-pitch mix to a trusty fastball-changeup combo. “I’ve learned that in baseball, a lot of adjustments are made on your own,” Jones told the Newark Star-Ledger in 1989. “People will tell you a lot of things, but no one really tells you how to do it. It’s something that you’ve got to develop for yourself.” The only advice Jones offered to future minor leaguers who were similarly stalled was, “Don’t give up.”

  Harris exemplifies a new type of player that’s permeating pro ball as more schools obtain sophisticated tech. “As you see more kids come from Division I college programs that have TrackMan, that have an in-house analyst… they’re coming into the pro ranks with a pretty solid knowledge of their pitch physics or what their data are saying about them,” Bannister says. “So it actually might get us part of the way toward accelerating their development.” In baseball, multiple clocks are always ticking, counting down the time until the end of a team’s contractual control, the end of a player’s prime, and the end of his career. The tools available to teams and players today are adding more productive time to the clocks.