The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  The most analytically advanced college coaching staffs are suffering from brain drain, thanks to teams poaching player-development prospects just as they do the top talents in the draft. “I’m not of the belief that the only people that [can help in] professional baseball are in professional baseball,” says the Twins’ Derek Falvey. In November 2018, Falvey’s organization—which already employed three minor-league coordinators plucked from colleges—hired Arkansas pitching coach Wes Johnson as its MLB pitching coach. Johnson was the first in recent years to make that jump, but as teams prioritize results over pro-ball pedigrees, it will become more common. In December, Russ Steinhorn left Clemson to work for the Phillies, and the Rangers came close to hiring Woodard as their minor-league pitching coordinator. (A late push by UNC convinced the coach to stay.) And in early 2019, the Cardinals convinced Coastal Carolina coordinator of video and analytics Michael McDonald to join their minor-league staff, and the Yankees hired Druschel as their manager of pitch development. The only thing preventing this poaching from happening more is that college coaches often make more money and enjoy more job security than their minor- and major-league equivalents.

  In late 2017, Lawson, who helped remake Harris, was rehired as a minor-league hitting coach for Houston. Missouri replaced him with Matt Lisle, a disciple of J.D. Martinez mentor Craig Wallenbrock. But only five months into his Mizzou tenure, Lisle was hired by the White Sox to serve as their hitting analytics instructor, a newly created position on the minor-league side. The professional plundering of the amateur coaching ranks continues.

  That raiding may soon extend to even lower levels. “It wouldn’t surprise me if they got TrackMan in high school too,” Harris says. At least two high schools, JSerra Catholic in San Juan Capistrano and IMG Academy in Bradenton, already have. Like any first mover, JSerra head coach Brett Kay has encountered criticism, in his case for extending data-driven development to a level it hadn’t penetrated previously. “A lot of people frown on it in a high-school realm,” Kay says. They say it’s too soon for kids to get so serious, or they worry that every player will adopt a robotic, cookie-cutter swing, or they fear that impressionable players will be overwhelmed by the flood of information before they’re fully formed physically. But none of that resistance stems from the team. Among the players, Kay says, “Everybody is interested and excited.” And even at the high-school level, the allure of improvement is a powerful draw. “If we can educate an eighth grader who wants to make a decision, we want to be able to help him get better,” Kay says. Some eighth graders grow up to be big leaguers. And these days, it doesn’t take long.

  Neither of us played past eighth grade, so we’re perfectly qualified to experience modern development as any other amateur would. We decide that one of us should be a technological tourist, personally sampling and subjecting himself to the latest tools, and I, Ben, take on the task. If I’m going to write about how real players are using data to detect and eradicate their weaknesses, I should at least try to catalog mine.

  It’s summer in Seattle, and I’ve arrived at the bland-looking industrial park that houses Kyle Boddy’s Driveline Baseball. It seems unlikely that a baseball laboratory is hiding here until I hear the resounding, distinctive ping of metal bat on ball. I follow the sound and soon start to hear others: a blaring stereo, the thud of dropping barbells, and occasional laughter. It’s all emanating from a single-story prefab building that bears the orange Driveline logo. On a sweltering, un-air-conditioned day, the facility is a sweat lodge where actual athletes congregate to conquer their insecurities and I’ve come to magnify mine.

  I’m here to experience the same three-part intake process that any paying player goes through on his first day at Driveline: a hitting or pitching performance evaluation, a mobility screen, and a strength test. These exams produce a picture of the player’s physical abilities and baseball skills, a baseline by which the player’s progress can be judged. In my case, of course, the workup will quantify precisely what separates someone with no postchildhood playing history from the people with professional experience or aspirations.

  My sherpa for part one is Joe Marsh, Driveline’s lead engineer. When he was nineteen, Marsh showed up at the fledgling Driveline and added 13 mph to his crow-hop throws in five months by following the facility’s MaxVelo Program. (Driveline’s official Facebook account trumpeted Marsh’s success to its followers but also appended what it described as a standard disclaimer: “Results not typical. Mostly because typical baseball athletes are a bunch of soft-bodied weak-willed complainers who don’t push themselves hard enough.”) When Driveline purchased fifteen cameras built by the motion-capture company OptiTrack, Marsh, who by then had finished school and joined the staff, established himself as the resident master of biomechanics, overseeing both a permanent motion-capture installation in Seattle and the construction of a “fully mobile biomechanics lab” that enables the company to make house calls to team clients.

  Marsh works with all of Driveline’s pro clients, which means he’s slumming it by working with me. He suggests that I warm up, an unappealing prospect on the hottest day of Seattle’s summer. Then he tells me to take my shirt off, which immediately makes me twice as anxious as I already am about performing physical feats in front of people who train athletes for a living (as well as some actual athletes; the current crowd at Driveline includes Kyle Zimmer, a formerly top-ranked Royals prospect who ran into arm trouble and is here to rehab). The act of stripping down completes an uncomfortable role reversal. One of the occupational hazards of writing about baseball is the periodic requirement to lurk fully clothed in clubhouses, surrounded by ballplayer bodies in various states of undress. Now, though, I’m finding firsthand that being a buttoned-down writer in a roomful of partially undressed athletes is infinitely easier than the inverse: being a partially undressed writer in a roomful of fully clothed athletes.

  I’m asked to strip down not to make me more nervous but because Marsh needs to place forty-seven bulbous gray markers all over my trunk and limbs. The cameras will pick up the markers and track my movements, translating each flaw into figures and forces and angles. “We basically make you into a video game and then do analysis on that,” Marsh says. Some of the markers refuse to stick to my skin, as if they’re rejecting a host who isn’t up to their standards, so Marsh sprays me with an adhesive that mostly makes them comply. Soon I’m studded with small bulbs and on my way to the same mound where Trevor Bauer blew away batters with his lab-grown breaking ball months earlier.

  Marsh asks me to face home plate and stretch out my arms in a T-pose to calibrate the system. Then he gives me the go-ahead to throw. Even if I can pass for a baseball player when I’m standing still—which isn’t saying much if you’ve seen some baseball bodies—I definitely can’t fool fifteen tracking cameras once I’m in motion. When I was a player, I spent most of my time at second base, where one’s arm doesn’t matter much. I’ve never pitched, apart from Wiffle ball. I muscle up and manage to hit 60 mph at the maximum, which in the most positive possible light means I’m about two-thirds of the way to a mediocre major-league fastball. I repeat the process a few times, and Boddy, who’s observing from the side, asks if I throw any breaking balls. I laugh.

  When the session is over, Marsh helps me hunt for and remove the markers. At the workstation where Marsh was monitoring my throws, Boddy shows me a computer-generated model with the same ineffectual motion as me. Although I felt like my urge to avoid embarrassment was making me throw as hard I could, I can see now that I definitely do not throw with intent, for three reasons: first, I’ve never needed to; second, I’m afraid of hurting myself physically; and third, I’m afraid of hurting myself psychologically if I really air it out and the radar reading is still extremely low. It’s prettier to pretend that there’s a little extra in my arm if I ever need it.

  Boddy later sends me a six-page PDF of my results, and Marsh translates the technical terms into plain language that lays out, as he says, “the s
ciencey reasons you’re not a big leaguer.” Science, evidently, has a lot to say on this subject. My maximum shoulder external rotation—a key to creating velocity—should be about 160 degrees, but it’s only 128 degrees. At foot contact, my trunk is angled 25 degrees. “The best throwers are around zero degrees, which is perpendicular to home plate—closed off,” Marsh says. “You leak open early.” I have little separation between my hips and shoulders or between my peak pelvis rotation and my peak torso rotation. “Your hips and shoulders basically rotate at the same time, rather than on a delay,” Marsh says. My lead leg block is “soft,” and without that base to brace me, the rest of my readings are slow and low; if my motion were a whip, it wouldn’t crack. When I release the ball, my trunk is angled 11 degrees backward, rather than forward toward the plate, which means that my extension is subpar; my stride length should be about 75 percent of my height, but it’s only 62 percent.

  Almost the only encouraging news—aside from Boddy reporting that I did “much better than Travis” (who says he “developed the yips in real time”)—is that my weak-sauce mechanics don’t place much strain on my arm. My elbow extension speed and shoulder internal rotation speeds are only 70 to 75 percent of a real pitcher’s, and as a result, my joints incur about 40 newton metres of pressure, compared to the typical 100. As Marsh sums me up, “You’re in worse positions and move slower than pro players, but hey, your torque values are really low, so you probably won’t get injured!” Not apart from my pride. At least Bauer and I have one thing in common: neither of us has ever had an arm injury.

  If I have a (relative) strong suit as a player, it’s hitting. When I’m playing with friends—most of whom, granted, are no more jocks than I am—I can almost always make contact. So it’s with slightly more panache, and less exposed skin, that I meet with Driveline’s lead hitting instructor, Jason Ochart. Ochart’s standard hitter evaluation process spans one week and hundreds of batted balls, but I’m not in town that long, so he hands me a thirty-three-inch, thirty-ounce bat with a Blast sensor attached to the knob.

  Because it’s attached to the bat, the sensor can’t discern anything about the movement of body or ball; instead, it provides info solely on the swing, measuring bat speed, peak hand speed, attack angle, and time to contact. (According to Driveline research, changing a hitter’s attack angle by one degree typically produces a corresponding quarter degree change in launch angle.)

  Ochart sets up a tee and atop it places a hitting Plyo, a sand-filled, weighted training ball. The ball deforms on impact, giving the hitter better feedback on quality of contact than a baseball can. Strike a hitting Plyo off center, and it spins away on an oblique course that reveals the mistake in the swing. These particular Plyos are motionless, so I manage not to mishit them. After a few swings, Ochart shows me how my Blast stats stack up to the Driveline pro averages. My average bat speed at impact, 54.4 mph, is almost 20 mph below the 74.2 mph standard. My average peak hand speed, 17.4 mph, is off by 5.7 mph; my attack angle of 7 degrees is 5 below the typical 12; and my time to contact, .22 seconds (which sounds fast), is considerably slower than the .14-second standard. “Hate to break it to you, but you have a lot of work to do if you wanna play pro baseball,” Ochart says.

  After my throwing and swinging sessions, Driveline hitting trainer Max Gordon puts me through a TPI (Titleist Performance Institute) assessment, a program designed by the golf equipment company to identify deficiencies in movement that can impede the swing and increase risk of injury. (The more often golfers get injured, the less time they spend swinging, and the fewer golf balls they buy.) Gordon makes me contort my anatomy in numerous ways to test my flexibility and balance and records the results on an app that grades me on a stoplight scale. The TPI tells me that I’m not great at rotating either my left or right lower extremities on their own or my entire lower body independent of my upper body, and it also reveals that my shoulder flexion is limited to roughly 120 degrees instead of the ideal 170.

  After Gordon is finished putting me through my paces, he passes the embarrassment baton to lead trainer Sam Briend, who subjects me to a range-of-movement screen and a strength test. Briend has me lie on a padded table, first supine and then prone, as he pushes and pulls parts of me until they can’t move any farther without something snapping. A few times, he has me push back to gauge my strength. Then it’s on to the weight rack for a round of back squats, deadlifts, and bench presses, exactly what I want to do next. Briend says I can skip this part, but Bauer’s Navy SEAL lodestar wouldn’t shy away from a little lifting, so I guzzle some water and courageously continue.

  Driveline practices velocity-based weight training, which is more concerned with the speed or explosiveness of athletes’ movements than the maximum weight they can lift. Briend runs me through a few reps of each exercise, placing more weight on the bar each time to match predetermined percentages of the optimal max lift for my height and weight. A clip attached to the end of the bar trails a wire that in turn connects to a sensor; when I complete a rep, the sensor beeps and records how quickly I completed the lift. (Two months later, Boddy will buy Briend’s high-performance department a new toy: an eighteen-camera rig from OptiTrack capable of tracking movements like weight lifting and jumping.)

  Although my lifts aren’t as fast as they should be—I’ve never tried to train for speed—Briend doesn’t detect any mismatch in the strength or rotation of my right and left elbows and shoulders, which would point to impending injury and force him to shut me down to prevent further damage (as if being “shut down” would be distinguishable from my normal daily life). But Briend unwittingly echoes Marsh and Gordon by informing me that I exhibited low overhead shoulder flexion, especially on my nondominant side. All signs point to an anterior tilt in the musculature of my upper body. “We might have some serratus issues, or some of that rotator cuff might not be functioning properly, or the [thoracic] spine might be rolled forward a little bit,” he says, making me worried about parts of my body that I’ve never even thought about before. This self-esteem-sapping knowledge won’t help me be a better writer, but for a serious hitter or pitcher, insights like this could be the secret to attaining peak performance.

  After Briend explains my results, he e-mails me a summary. The header of the document contains my name, the date of the assessment, and then three chilling words: “NOT AN ATHLETE.” I think this phrase refers to the fact that I’m a member of the media, not an actual client; it’s not a commentary on my abilities. But I now have a whole lot of data that says the statement is accurate either way.

  Three-time All-Star John Kruk once said, “I’m not an athlete. I’m a professional baseball player.” It’s getting harder for high-level players not to be both. One new tool designed to accelerate strength training is Proteus, a product of the startup Boston Biomotion, which was established in 2016 and is confusingly headquartered in Queens. The company claims that its product “fundamentally alters and improves the way athletes rehab and train.” In late 2018, the Dodgers became the first MLB team to partner with Boston Biomotion and install a Proteus system.

  I meet founder and CEO Sam Miller—and Proteus, an angular piece of equipment that looks like the large robots that build cars—at Boston Biomotion’s lab in Long Island City. Proteus waits patiently while Miller tells me how his father conceived and partially developed the product in the basement of Miller’s childhood house. He’d imagined a machine that would be capable of providing three-dimensional resistance, unlike most exercise machines, which can only move one way at a time. He eventually abandoned the idea, believing it was impossible, or at least beyond his abilities. Much later, Miller realized its time had come. “I saw a lot of other technologies come out that were really focused on [the] quantified self,” Miller explains, but few of them were focused on training and measuring strength.

  Miller recruited experts in robotics, mechatronics, and full-stack software development. The machine they made, which features a long metallic arm attached to a
rotating handle, moves on three axes, utilizing the magnetic brakes used on trains, as well as sensors and algorithms that detect the arm’s position in space, to smoothly supply the desired resistance. Its capacity for rotation makes it an obvious sidekick for athletes in baseball and golf.

  While Miller mans the screen that controls the exercise selection and resistance level, I grab the handle and start pushing and pulling Proteus’s arm in and out, up and down, and side to side—as many dimensions as advertised. Proteus is set to freestyle mode, which means I can perform any motion I want. I windmill my arm, mimic a throw, and, holding the handle with both of my hands, swing it as if it were a bat. Proteus grudgingly goes along with whatever I do, but even at a low level of resistance, it makes each movement more taxing, as if I’m moving through water without getting wet.

  Much like aquatic therapy, a staple of pitcher rehab, a workout with Proteus provides concentric-biased training. In weight lifting, the concentric phase occurs when one lifts the weight, and the eccentric phase follows when one lowers it. The latter phase does more damage to muscle fibers, which maximizes muscle growth but also increases the risk of injury and lengthens recovery. Proteus focuses on the former phase, which confers many of the explosiveness-enhancing and muscle-building benefits without the costs of eccentric training. And because the resistance is exerted in more than one plane, each rep is more capable of pumping you up. “This resistance can produce two to three times the muscle activation compared to the same exercise and the same load with a free weight or a cable machine, and do that with lower strain and mechanical stresses—so, lower load on the joints and tissues and ligaments,” Miller says.

  Proteus won’t replace deadlifts or bench presses, but it could be ideal for rehab programs and in-season work, when players are trying to stay in shape without taking themselves out of action. In Miller’s vision of baseball’s future, players will use Proteus for arm-care programs, full-body workouts, and pre- and postgame warm-ups and cooldowns. Cable machines won’t exist, free weights will be used in limited ways, and each team will employ five to ten Proteus systems. (Cha-ching.) “I think the focus of a lot of the training is going to be on moving and moving well,” he says.