The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  Somebody once asked me if I ever went up to the plate trying to hit a home run. I said, “Sure, every time.”

  —MICKEY MANTLE

  Justin Turner spent most of the pregame June morning at PNC Park in Pittsburgh seated on a pleather couch in the center of the open, windowless visiting clubhouse, working through a crossword puzzle. It’s a common way to kill time in major-league locker rooms, at least among cerebral players. Athletes have a lot of downtime, and that means many hours to obsess over their successes and failures. Turner needed the distraction.

  Near the end of 2018 spring training in Arizona, A’s starting pitcher Kendall Graveman had broken Turner’s left wrist with an errant fastball. Turner missed the first five weeks of the season. Since coming back from a broken hand, Turner had struggled, batting .243 with .325 on-base and .343 slugging marks, well below his recent high standards. In his eighty plate appearances, he had homered only once. The Dodgers were expected to be one of the best teams in the National League but were just 30–30, third in the NL West as they arrived in Pittsburgh.

  Doug Latta tries to watch every Turner plate appearance, live if he can. Maintaining a successful swing requires constant attention. And Latta had noticed some problems since Turner had returned. The effects of his weakened wrist were cascading throughout his body, as other parts compensated. The imbalance would result in a groin strain later in the season. Latta and Turner worked to find a solution.

  Repairing a swing is something of an art form. Nearly every day Latta and Turner would talk or exchange ideas through text message. “It’s a constant dialogue back and forth with him,” Turner says. “Just talking about different ideas, different things to try, different things to think about to get in a better spot.”

  There were principles that remained constant amid tweaks, Turner says. He wanted to gain ground toward the pitcher, find his balance, and swing underneath his shoulders. But after going through that checklist, there was room to tinker. They experimented with different fixes, different hand placements. By early July, Turner’s hands were lower in his setup. Latta felt his hands needed more “space to work,” more room between his body and the plate.

  Turner made some improvement throughout June, hitting four homers and posting a 139 wRC+. But his struggles extended into July, when he went homerless in forty at-bats (89 wRC+). The tinkering continued. In early August, Turner debuted a conspicuous adjustment: He opened his stance dramatically, meaning his front (left) foot went from near parallel to the mound to pointing toward third base. This tweak was designed to give his hands more room and freedom to work.

  For the first half, Turner hit .258/.354/.393 with a 110 wRC+. In the second half, he was the second-best hitter in baseball, recording a 190 wRC+ and a .356 batting average, both marks trailing only those of Milwaukee’s Christian Yelich (220 wRC+, .367), the NL MVP. Turner’s line-drive rate spiked from 20 percent in the first half to 31.4 percent in the second.

  Prorating Baseball Prospectus’s WARP (Wins Above Replacement Player) over six hundred plate appearances, Turner was the most valuable player in the NL on the season (8.9 WARP per six hundred PA) and trailed only Mookie Betts (10.9) and Mike Trout (10.8) overall. To get there, Latta and Turner had gone back and forth on creating subtle adjustments.

  “I see people say, ‘Do this drill, do this and that, you’re going to get better,’” Latta says. “Does that actually translate to the cues a high-level professional hitter needs?”

  He has evidence that his method works. Latta helped turn Turner into an MVP-level player. Betts’s swing change helped him win the AL MVP Award in 2018, fueled by career bests in home runs (32), slugging (.640), and wRC+ (185). Betts dropped his ground-ball rate from 40.4 percent in 2017 to a career-low 33.9 percent in 2018 and increased his HR/FB (home run to fly ball) rate from 10.1 to 16.4 percent in converting to the Hyers-Latta philosophy.

  The fly-ball revolution is spreading, bolstered by the young and old players adopting it, the coaches (and organizations) preaching it, and the technology and feedback making it more effective for all. And the next phase of the revolution could be its most momentous.

  In 2014, then Rays manager Joe Maddon noted that the rise of tracking technology was disproportionately helping teams prevent runs instead of score them. “The hitter’s at a total disadvantage right now,” Maddon said. “And there’s no advantages on the horizon. I don’t see it. That’s why it’s going to take a lot of creative thinking.… Right now, offense is going south, and it’s going to continue going south based on pitching and defense. Everything—data, video, all the information—benefits them over offense.”

  Offense actually increased in three consecutive seasons after Maddon made those comments, but that was largely attributable to changes in the ball that spurred the surge in homers. Maddon’s observation about the imbalance of power on the analytical end still applied. “It’s easier to use information and change your game if you’re a pitcher and you have the ball in your hand,” Sam Fuld says. “It’s just easier to control the decisions that you make. Obviously, hitting is very much reactive.”

  No one knows this better than former Driveline hitting director Jason Ochart, who was hired by the Phillies as their minor-league hitting coordinator in December 2018. At Driveline, Ochart was trying to play catchup at the same place that’s helping make life harder for hitters. “It’s actually frustrating for me, because I’m right in the belly of the beast where I’m seeing all these progressive things happen on the pitching side,” Ochart said in the summer of 2018. “Then I talk to hitting people in baseball, and they’re still arguing about, like, hitting ground balls, whether it’s a good or bad batted ball. Like, guys, we’re getting crushed.”

  Ochart lamented that “we just know so little about hitting in general.” But batters are belatedly reacting, and the defense-offense imbalance is beginning to look less extreme. At Driveline, the company that upturned the training of pitchers, rethinking hitting is now arguably the greatest growth opportunity.

  Like so many new-age coaches, Ochart’s coaching career had humble origins.

  A Glendale, California, native, he was admittedly a lousy player at Glendale Community College and, after transferring, San Francisco State. Ochart, who majored in kinesiology, was interested in all aspects of sports science and biomechanics. His younger brother, Adam, played at Menlo College, a business school in the Silicon Valley town of Atherton. The program had lost a coach, and Adam asked his brother if he wanted to help out as the hitting coach. Ochart applied and got the job. Menlo College became his first laboratory.

  “I was willing to try different stuff because, A, I wasn’t very good, so there was no ego there, and, B, it was just kind of a test, something that was just fun for me,” he said. “So I was applying theories of motor learning and sports science in general.”

  In 2013, Menlo College set a program record with thirty-four wins and advanced to the NAIA national tournament. While the team had an excellent pitching staff and defense, it also out-homered opponents 32 to 6, outslugged them .415 to .305, and out-on-based them .378 to .328. The environment was ideal for experimentation. The players were lab mice without egos.

  “I was like, maybe this stuff actually, like, works,” Ochart said.

  Ochart began to post some of his unorthodox practices to Twitter. “Hitting Twitter” is a derisive term for the questionable coaching and tips that can often be found on social media and YouTube. It can be difficult to distinguish between expert instruction and wayward advice. But amid the sea of unqualified coaches are some good ideas, or at least ones worthy of exploration. Boddy was curious about what Ochart was doing with data tracking, underload/overload training with weighted bats, and discussion of launch angle before launch angle became a big thing. Boddy reached out to Ochart, and Ochart read Boddy’s 2014 book about building velocity, Hacking the Kinetic Chain.

  “It just blew my mind,” Ochart said. “Nothing in player development up to that point, in my opinio
n, was structured in a way that was as scientifically sound as his book. No one’s talking about baseball like this. Like most of the baseball books, [they’re] just, like, so bad. So I was really intrigued, and then he asked me if I had any interest in joining the team. They were thinking about going into hitting in the future. And I was, like, yeah, absolutely.”

  Ochart moved to Seattle.

  “It went from literally having a budget of, like, fifty dollars [at Menlo] and one cage at a small college with holes in it and messed-up baseballs to Kyle saying, ‘You have a company card, get whatever you want. Just track everything… I’ll check back in six months,’” Ochart said. “It was, like, whoa. So it was intimidating. I was paralyzed at first, like, God, I don’t know. Like, where do I start?”

  Staying true to the ethos of the company’s pitching program, Ochart began measuring and questioning everything. The numbers show that balls in the air to the pull side are the best outcome a hitter can hope for. Yet pulling the ball is discouraged by many coaches and has been for decades. “Most of our amateurs have a negative launch angle to their pull side, and being able to pull the ball well is a skill that is very rare and something that the best hitters in the game can do pretty well,” Ochart said. “And [pulling the ball] is also not taught. Never. I don’t know about you, but in my youth, in high school, even college baseball, no one ever practiced pulling the ball. It’s always go oppo. Practice hitting the ball oppo, practice using the whole field. The vast majority of hitters that I work with that are amateurs, they just suck at pulling the baseball.”

  But the most valuable batted ball can be taught. Latta has taught it. And there are examples of the skill being acquired elsewhere, fueling far-fetched talent transformations. Consider Francisco Lindor and José Ramírez, who in 2018 became two of the unlikeliest power hitters in baseball history.

  According to Baseball-Reference.com, there have been 462 individual seasons of thirty-eight or more homers in major-league history, produced by 178 different players. There have been only 46 such seasons by players five foot eleven or shorter, by 22 players. Lindor, who is maybe five foot eleven, and Ramírez, who probably isn’t five foot nine, are the two most recent additions to the list. More improbable yet, they are teammates.

  While Ramírez and Lindor are coy when asked about their hitting approach—Lindor insists he’s not a power hitter—Cleveland, as an organization, is challenging old-hat hitting wisdom. The club’s hitting coach, Ty Van Burkleo, was once a part of Latta’s think-tank sessions at the Ball Yard. The Indians have appointed outsiders to minor-league coaching positions. They’ve replaced coaches with pitching machines that toss balls at near-game velocity during on-field batting practice at their minor-league affiliates. In their indoor batting cages at places like Low-A Lake County, they have hitters compete against each other—complete with leaderboards—to see who can produce the best exit velocities and launch angles. It’s not just the Indians rethinking batting practice. The Astros’ Tyler White noted on social media that the Astros engaged in differential-style training at extended spring. In each batting cage, and in on-field batting practice, were a fastball machine and a breaking-ball machine. A coach would hold up pitches in each hand so the batter wasn’t sure if he would face a breaking ball or fastball.

  Lindor hit thirty-eight home runs in 2018. Ramírez hit thirty-nine. No scouting report ever projected anything more than average power for Lindor, and most foresaw even less for Ramírez, who never hit more than five home runs at a minor-league stop. (Lindor never hit more than six home runs for a farm team.) Ramírez slugged .340 as a rookie.

  “Nobody thought I could do this,” Ramírez told ESPN. “I was too small.”

  Even in 2018, neither was particularly powerful in terms of exit velocity. Ramírez ranked 166th out of 332 qualifying batters in average exit velocity of fly balls and line drives (92.4 mph). Lindor ranked 80th (94.3 mph). What they did do was begin eschewing pitches they could not drive and instead seek pitches in certain zones where they could make contact out in front of the plate. “When I try and cover the whole plate, that’s when I get in trouble,” Lindor says. “I can cover the whole plate if I want to. I can put the ball in play anytime I want. That’s not going to do any good for me or the team.”

  If you’re hitting the ball out in front of the plate, the angle of the bat will yield a hit to the pull side. With the Indians and the data advocating that approach, Lindor and Ramírez began lifting the ball to their pull sides.

  In 2018, Ramírez had the 11th-lowest ground-ball percentage to his pull side (43.7 percent). Betts was 28th (46.3 percent), and Lindor 68th (50.9 percent). The league-wide average was 58.7 percent. (Turner posted the 10th-lowest mark among qualified batters, at 43.4 percent.)

  All of those numbers represented massive steps forward. In 2017, Ramírez had recorded a 48.8 percent ground-ball rate on pulled balls, ranking 48th. Lindor ranked 94th at 52.8 percent, and Betts ranked 70th at 50 percent. And in 2016, Ramírez had posted a 57.1 percent ground-ball rate on pulled contact, ranking 132nd. Lindor ranked 246th at 64.6 percent, while Betts ranked 88th (54 percent).

  It was a remarkable transformation. These three undersized sluggers hadn’t suddenly learned how to hit the ball 450 feet. Rather, they optimized their swings, and in doing so learned to create more optimal batted balls.

  The first phase of the fly-ball revolution was getting balls off the ground. Both Lindor and Ramírez did that, increasing their average launch angles (and home-run totals) by the year.

  But the second, and arguably more important, phase was pulling those balls in the air. And in the teammates’ mutual evolutions, they made no trade-off at all in swing-and-miss, which one would expect to be a detrimental side effect of trying to lift more balls in the air.

  The MLB leaderboard in pulled home runs in 2018:

  1. Ramírez 32

  2. Lindor 27

  3. Betts 26

  In terms of total fly balls hit to the pull side, Ramírez was 2nd in baseball in 2018 (251 batted balls), undersized Astros MVP candidate Alex Bregman was 3rd (246), Lindor was 8th (226), and Betts was 18th (205). In learning to pull and lift, they’d all become MVP candidates despite standing at seventy-two inches or shorter. In 2013, following a nineteen-year-old Betts’s homerless half-season in Low-A, Baseball America had labeled him the thirty-first-best prospect in the Red Sox system alone, sniffing, “The question is whether he has a true plus tool because he’s not physical and doesn’t really impact the ball.” But in 2018, the correlation between height and Isolated Power among hitters with at least 250 plate appearances fell to its lowest point (.23) since 1954. Smart hitters don’t have to be big to go yard.

  LINDOR

  Season: 2015

  Avg. Launch Angle: 3.8

  HRs: 12

  Swinging Strike %: 8.6

  Season: 2016

  Avg. Launch Angle: 7.6

  HRs: 15

  Swinging Strike %: 7.7

  Season: 2017

  Avg. Launch Angle: 13.6

  HRs: 33

  Swinging Strike %: 6.4

  Season: 2018

  Avg. Launch Angle: 14.5

  HRs: 38

  Swinging Strike %: 7.4

  RAMÍREZ

  Season: 2015

  Avg. Launch Angle: 9.5

  HRs: 6

  Swinging Strike %: 4.2

  Season: 2016

  Avg. Launch Angle: 12.9

  HRs: 11

  Swinging Strike %: 4.9

  Season: 2017

  Avg. Launch Angle: 14.8

  HRs: 33

  Swinging Strike %: 5.4

  Season: 2018

  Avg. Launch Angle: 18.8

  HRs: 39

  Swinging Strike %: 4.7

  For Latta, teaching the optimal batted ball is an art form. It comes from his eye and years of experience. He talks incessantly about “balance” and “timing.” Latta doesn’t try to teach increased exit velocity. He never talks about launch an
gle. Yet he’s transformed careers.

  There’s also a data-based approach to optimizing the swing undertaken at places like Driveline and within professional and college clubs. In a conversation with Ochart, the words timing and balance did not appear once. It’s not that he doesn’t believe in those concepts, but unlike Latta, for whom they form the core of his belief system, Ochart’s revolves around measuring and quantifying everything. He’ll split the strike zone into nine subsections and scrutinize batted-ball performance in each one. Ochart showed us data generated by amateur hitters and diagnosed them at a glance: one had too low a launch angle, another did damage in the middle of the plate but struggled to adjust to pitches in and out. “His programming would be tinkered to try and work on that,” Ochart clinically concluded.

  Ochart measures his hitters’ hand speed and bat speed, as well as the efficiency of the relationship between the two, a homebrew stat of his own devising. “[Efficiency] is bat speed divided by hand speed,” he said. “Often, we’ll have two hitters who have the same exact hand speed, they’re able to generate the same amount of velocity with their hands, but one guy can turn that into bat speed better than the other. So that has to do with a number of things, like how well can you decelerate your hands to accelerate the barrel. Also, your grip. I’ve toyed with different grips with guys, and numbers jump up. Increasing wrist mobility with some guys is an issue. Some guys lack the ability to get into supination.”

  Some of the science jargon sounds a lot like that of the pitching world Bauer and Boddy inhabit. But the art-to-science ratio is still higher on the hitting side.

  “There’s just a basic understanding of what good pitchers do, and what things correlate to success… whereas in hitting it’s still a lot of gray area and it’s a lot of guesswork,” Ochart said. “So I think we’re really at rock bottom, and I think that hitting is in a place now where the best natural athletes are succeeding in spite of the training.”

  It’s not uncommon to hear Driveline staffers say that they can do more good for the game there than they’d be able to with one team. “I think there’s more general ability to impact the field,” says Driveline quantitative analyst Alex Caravan. “If I worked for a team, I would basically be engineering how those pitchers could get out next week’s batters, which will help that team but can only help baseball so much.”