The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  Prior to each exercise, Proteus’s screen asks me how I’m feeling; afterward, it asks me how hard it was. Proteus isn’t just being polite. Naturally, it’s tracking everything: when one completes a session, summary statistics appear on the screen, along with 3-D, color-coded graphics that trace the trajectory of each movement and indicate when and where the user was applying peak power. All of the stats are saved to the cloud, enabling long-term progress reports.

  As of late 2018, only four Proteus systems existed in the wild, including the Dodgers’ unit. Miller says that when he pitches Proteus to teams, he consistently hears that “nobody’s ever seen anything like this.” If the product delivers, it won’t be unfamiliar for long. Although he’s primarily marketing Proteus to teams and professional facilities until costs come down, Miller envisions a world where every gym welcomes one or more of his machines as virtual personal trainers. We could all use a helping hand, even if it’s attached to a telescoping arm.

  “Winning baseball games is quickly becoming as much a high-tech pastime as it is an art and science,” wrote Popular Mechanics in a May 1984 feature entitled “Science Goes to Bat,” which quoted rookie Mets manager Davey Johnson calling computers “a sixth coach.” Eight years later, the magazine took another hack at the same subject in a new article with a slightly tweaked title, “Technology Comes to Bat.” Some of the then cutting-edge tech documented within those pieces seems dated decades later: VHS video that allowed players to study their swings; boxy computers that could call up basic batted-ball data or batter versus pitcher stats; twin-wheel pitching machines that weren’t limited to fastballs; radar guns that could definitively establish who threw hard (in an era when 90 mph was considered speedy). Other ideas sound far-fetched for the mid-’80s, like a “revolutionary TV system” that would supposedly project a laser beam that would register when a hitter swung an electronic bat at a 3-D holographic image of a ball “thrown” by a videotaped pitcher. A few products, though, don’t sound so different from items in use today, including an experimental Diagnostic Bat that could graph the length and strength of a swing and the Quick Bat II, a bat-speed meter that used optical sensors to time the swing.

  The successors to those objects, of course, are more accurate, easier to use, more widely available, much more highly valued, and more comprehensive. One of those training tools is a biofeedback device called the K-Vest, developed by a company called K-Motion that, like TrackMan, began in golf and adapted its sensors to baseball. The K-Vest provides a different piece of the performance puzzle than ball-trackers like TrackMan or bat-trackers like Blast. “Those technologies measure results,” says K-Motion CEO and president Brian Vermilyea. “What K-Vest does is tell you, what am I doing to create that bat speed or to create that bat angle or exit velocity or whatever. It’s the input that drives results.” That makes for an appealing pitch, and at least eight big-league teams—the Astros, Red Sox, Yankees, Cardinals, Cubs, Athletics, Giants, and Mariners—were K-Vest clients in 2018, with more in active discussions.

  The K-Vest, which costs $5,500, consists of four small, lightweight, wireless inertial sensors that capture the speed, direction, and acceleration and deceleration of a hitter’s major movements. One sensor is attached to a batting glove on the hitter’s lead hand, one is strapped to the upper arm, one hangs on a harness worn around the chest, and one is clipped onto a belt-like loop at the pelvis. Readings from each sensor are recorded as colored lines on a graph that charts what each body part is up to over the course of the swing, enabling more accurate appraisals of players’ mechanics.

  Ochart, a K-Vest convert, says that some hitters excel at certain parts of the swing but squander their energy on others: their hips rotate as fast as Mike Trout’s, but the potential power they generate gets lost along the way to contact. “Being able to measure hip speed, shoulder speed, arm speed, hand speed, and bat speed and look at the relationship between all of them, you can find out exactly where a particular hitter is lacking,” Ochart says.

  Now it’s time to measure me. K-Motion 3-D performance consultant Jim Beadle, a former college baseball player and golf pro, pays me a personal visit in Manhattan with the tech in tow. Beadle gives me an indoor demo, and then we head outside. There isn’t much space to swing a baseball bat on 42nd Street, so we walk to my building’s terrace and set up facing a wall. We use tennis balls instead of baseballs to reduce the risk of smashing something, and we definitely don’t dent the façade of the building, if anyone from my condo board asks.

  Beadle helps me put on the sensors, and I take a few warm-up hacks. Then he tosses a few balls from a squat at my side, and I let loose at each one, trying not to be too mindful of the fact that every move I make is being beamed to Beadle’s phone. The sensors report my position about two hundred times per second; the one on my hand detects when I make contact, and the app dings once when it saves a swing and again when it’s ready for another. Later, he sends me the graphs and breaks down the data. The good news is that my four tracked regions reach their peak speed in the desired sequence: pelvis, then torso, then upper arm, then hand. “I like that the pelvis is reaching maximum velocity before the middle of the forward swing,” Beadle says. “I like that the pelvis then decelerates nicely and gets down to right around zero when we’re getting ready to hit contact.… That means the transfer from pelvis to torso tends to be OK.” I preen, unreasonably proud of my pelvis.

  But even though I’m reaching my max speeds in the right order, those speeds are subpar. K-Motion includes pro speed ranges for each tracked part of the body, based on data gathered from hundreds of hitters on participating teams. My hand/bat speed is only 1,344 degrees per second, below the typical pro range of 1,500 to 2,230. (Mariners hitting adviser Edgar Martínez, a newly elected Hall of Famer, clears 3,000 even in his fifties.) My torso moves 1.5 times as fast as my allegedly exemplary pelvis, and my lead arm moves 1.5 times as fast as my pelvis, but instead of extending the pattern, my hand moves 1.9 times as fast as my arm, which Beadle says indicates that I “swing the bat a little bit too much with the hands.” Speaking of my hands, a line on the graph suggests that mine start, stop, and start again as I swing; maybe I’m a trailblazer, but it’s probably not a good sign that Ochart says, “I’ve actually never seen that before.”

  As Beadle scans the rest of my results, which compare me to pro ranges in dozens of categories, I’m gratified (and surprised) to see that while my peak speeds are slow, my positioning is almost on point. There’s just one problem: my pelvis—the one part I thought I could count on—has betrayed me. For one thing, while it’s reaching its max speed at the right time, its starting position is too “straight up and down.” It should be angled forward, which would “engage the glutes, engage the core, so [I] can drive a little bit harder.” Nor is it rotating sufficiently; my torso-pelvis separation at contact is too small, just as it was when I “pitched” at Driveline. Beadle says this may mean that I have a “girdle issue” or “something wrong with the hip joints or [my] ability to tilt [my] pelvis,” which joins poor shoulder flexion on my growing list of physical faults. Now I have an excuse for not knowing how to dance.

  The K-Vest comes with a package of training routines that isolate certain deficiencies and drill them until they improve. A hitter who doesn’t move well in one way or another can follow an exercise regimen that targets a given weak point and then, once it’s stronger or more flexible, reinforce the right motion by performing it over and over again while wearing the sensor. An on-screen display reveals when the player has entered the right range, and a ding confirms it via a second sensor. “I can tell somebody if I’m giving a golf lesson, ‘Hey, I need you to be more rotated. I want you to feel like your pelvis is going underneath you at impact,’” Vermilyea says. “Well, they may not understand what I’m saying or have the same feeling or sensation I’m feeling when I’m trying to explain it. This breaks down all of those barriers.… It just shortens the learning curve for training mechanics.” I’m fee
ling more rotational already.

  I’m not the first unhip hitter to have a pelvic epiphany courtesy of K-Vest. Vermilyea gives me more confidence by mentioning an Oakland A’s player who suffered from a similar problem and broke out after correcting it. “They tweaked his pelvis by 3 degrees, and he started lighting it up in spring training after that,” he says. Later I learn his name: Eli White.

  White, who turned twenty-four midway through the 2018 season, was the Athletics’ eleventh-round pick in 2016. Entering 2018, his calling card was versatility; as a professional, he’s played five positions, including the most exclusive noncatcher spots, shortstop and center field. It’s a good time to be a budding super-utility player: as bullpens get bigger and benches get smaller, defensive subs are increasingly asked to be positional polyglots, fluent in all forms of fielding. As a consequence, 2018 was the first season in major-league history in which teams averaged at least one player per game stationed somewhere other than his full-season primary position (not counting DH and lumping the three outfield spots together). And more Ben Zobrist-esque super subs are on the way: 29 percent of minor leaguers with at least one hundred games played in 2018 spent time at more than two positions, and 13 percent, including White, spent time at more than three positions. Both of those figures are record highs dating back to at least 1984, when Baseball Prospectus’s comprehensive minor-league database begins.

  But even an aspiring super sub, like Justin Turner circa 2013, has to hit. And prior to 2018, White—a willowy six foot two, at 175 pounds—had never hit more than four home runs in any single season in the minors or in college at Clemson, where he slugged a career .379. In the spring of 2018, though, White was one of a group of A’s prospects who experimented with the K-Vest as the A’s evaluated the tech. “I guess we were just kinda like guinea pigs,” he says. White wore the vest a few times while he hit off a fastball machine, and the A’s relayed what the ensuing report revealed. “They thought that I had a little hip slide, and they could see that my hips weren’t engaging right away as my front foot was landing,” White says, adding that on inside pitches, his bat path was “coming across it a little bit instead of staying through it.”

  White and his hitting coach targeted the deficiencies the sensors had exposed. After spring training, he was bumped up from High-A to Double-A to start the season. And despite the stiffer competition—plus the additional burden of a ballpark in Midland that suppresses right-handed home-run power—he hit five long balls by the end of May, surpassing his previous single-season high. He finished with nine homers and a .450 slugging percentage, and he led all Oakland minor leaguers in hits and runs scored. White credits the data with helping him approach his power potential. “There’s always been power in there, but I think once we [were] able to clean up some of my bat-path and hip-rotation issues… that definitely helped me have a good season.”

  Before he wore the K-Vest, White wasn’t listed by MLB.com as one of Oakland’s top thirty prospects. By the end of the season, the site had upgraded him to seventeenth in the system, and he’d been invited to play in the off-season Arizona Fall League, an MLB-operated, six-team circuit that caters to the cream of the prospect crop. In December, he was traded to the Rangers, with whom he ranked twelfth. “A host of mechanical adjustments have helped White blossom offensively, as he’s now consistently in a good position to hit, with a better bat path that yields more line-drive and fly-ball contact and allows him to get to his modest raw power,” White’s MLB.com capsule said. His ETA in the majors was listed as 2019.

  The last stop on my humbling baseball walkabout brings me to the Ball Yard, Doug Latta’s Los Angeles headquarters, which is hidden behind an unassuming storefront on an aggressively unsporty street, Business Center Drive. Even though it’s a summer Saturday and Latta says he’s cleared his schedule to work with me, his small facility is still abuzz with baseball activity. A high-school student who’s recovering from a leg injury and wearing a knee brace visits, parents in tow, to take some swings; a polished-looking recent graduate who’s committed to Harvard for the fall stops by for a final hitting tune-up; and Latta’s phone rumbles repeatedly as clients text to schedule appointments or relay mechanical emergencies. Everyone wants to be the next Turner, and Latta is the oracle they call.

  Compared to K-Motion and Driveline, Latta is low-tech. Instead of fifteen high-definition cameras, he has one, standard-definition, black-and-white model that he’s been using for more than two decades. Black-and-white, he says, provides better color contrast and doesn’t strain his eyes when he spends hours dissecting swings. Nor does he think the lower resolution holds him back, as it did when Warren and Trevor Bauer were trying to study how the ball left Trevor’s fingers. “I don’t need to see what this pinky is doing,” Latta says. He advocates a hitting style that’s supported by the data, but he doesn’t inundate his hitters with angles and exit speeds. For him, hitting is all about balance.

  “Your weight should be balanced, distributed evenly on both feet and slightly forward on the balls of the feet, with the knees bent and flexible,” Ted Williams wrote in The Science of Hitting. “If you insist on resting back on your heels, find another occupation.” Williams went on to mention balance five more times in the text, a total that Latta exceeds within the first few minutes of our conversation. Latta employs the Socratic method when we talk about hitting, and I soon discover that the safest response when I’m unsure of an answer to one of his not-quite-rhetorical questions is usually something about balance or an absence thereof. A sample exchange:

  LATTA: Watch your front shoulder. Which direction is your front shoulder going?

  ME: Is it… backward?

  LATTA: Backward. Pitch going this way, your shoulders are going that way. What does that mean to me?

  ME: I guess I’m gonna be… out of balance?

  LATTA: Out of balance!

  After quizzing me for a while in a way that causes uncomfortable flashbacks to being called on in class, Latta hands me a black Louisville Slugger and has me hit in his cage for a few minutes as he feeds me balls from his seat on a bucket behind an L-screen. Then we retire to the TV to examine my swing from a side angle, sometimes pausing to study something in detail and then advance frame by frame. “Actually, not bad body movement,” Latta says, possibly buttering me up. “There’s good things in there.” But he spots plenty of problems, too. The first flaw, as the Blast sensor also suggested, is that my bat’s trajectory is too flat and, like White’s, takes too long to get to the point of contact. I’m “swinging around the ball,” which is bad because there’s no room for inefficiency against high-level pitching. Most people who hit like that, Latta says, end up “working for the post office.”

  As Latta explains, though, my issues start before my swing does. My shoulders are too tense, and I’m leaning backward slightly with my weight on my back leg, as if I’m headed uphill. “If you see a balance point, you’re behind it,” Latta says. My head is off plane, and my front foot is open, preventing me from “containing energy.” As I swing, my shoulders pull away from the pitch, my hands are loaded back behind my body, and my front foot drifts off to the side. By the time I’m actually in position for bat to meet ball, my initial misalignment has doomed me to weaker contact. “You’re at the point where it’s blind squirrel finds nut, or I’m just gonna try and force contact or block the ball, or do things because I’m no longer really in control,” my tutor tells me. That hasn’t stopped me from hitting my low-velocity friends, but against good pitching, Latta warns, I’d soon find myself in “scuffle city.”

  I’m still mulling over my inadequacies and trying to keep track of defects to fix when Latta mercifully stops listing new ones. After tearing me down, he tries to buck me up again. “Believe it or not, there’s a little athlete in you,” he says. It’s just “being choked off.”

  I may be inept, but no one can call me uncoachable. Back in the cage, I consciously loosen my shoulders and shift my weight so I’m not leaning bac
k. I bring my hands forward and watch where my front foot falls. It takes me a few tries to synthesize a new swing from Latta’s instructions, but before long I go from making a mental checklist of prepitch adjustments to adopting a different alignment naturally. It feels like I’m moving less but each motion is mattering more. My swing seems less looping and more forceful. And that’s when I realize: relative to my usual stroke, I’m raking. It’s not as if I was whiffing before—Latta isn’t throwing hard—but suddenly I’m striking everything with what seems like authority. The crack of contact is a lot louder, and the ball keeps whistling away on a line.

  I’m beaming, because no matter how many road-to-Damascus moments I’ve heard actual athletes describe, it’s euphoric to feel it myself. If I can improve so significantly in such a short time, small wonder that an actual athlete might make massive strides with a sustained effort. I try unsuccessfully to suppress my smile, because I feel silly swinging a bat while wearing a big, dumb grin. It also strikes me as silly that I’m so excited about being a bit better at hitting a ball covered in cowhide with a wooden stick, an ultimately meaningless activity that American culture collectively decided would be worth many millions of dollars when performed with a certain skill. Rational or not, though, the fulfillment is real. After years of nibbling at baseball, I’m actually “letting it eat,” ballplayer lingo for holding nothing back. I hadn’t known how hungry I was.