The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  In the summer of 2018, Ochart expressed a similar sentiment. By the end of the year, however, he had joined the Phillies, though he will retain a working relationship with Driveline. Maybe he can begin to build better hitters at the pro level. They could use his help.

  “A guy like Trevor Bauer, if he wanted to become a hitter and just did traditional hitting training, he never would have made it,” Ochart says. “A guy like Trevor had to exhaust all resources and really push it to become the best version of himself because he wasn’t exactly the most gifted athlete naturally. Whereas in hitting, it’s kind of sink or swim: let’s see who makes it, who’s going to be the people at the top.”

  14

  JUST BE BETTER

  So this is how a person can come to despise himself—knowing he’s doing the wrong thing and not being able to stop.

  —DANIEL KEYES, Flowers for Algernon

  For all his powers of player development, Branch Rickey believed some flaws were unfixable.

  Take Tom Winsett. Winsett was a left-handed slugger in the Cardinals system, nicknamed Long Tom because six foot two was tall for a player in the 1930s. Winsett was a lousy left fielder, but in each of his minor-league seasons from 1934 to 1936, he batted at least .348 and slugged at least .617. In the last of those years, he slugged .731 in the American Association, launching a league-leading fifty home runs in 536 at-bats.

  Publicly, Rickey described the slugger as a “coming Babe Ruth,” intoning, “Woe unto the pitcher who throws the ball where the Winsett bat is functioning.” Yet for some strange reason, Rickey couldn’t find room for this Ruth on his roster, giving Winsett only twelve big-league at-bats in his Cardinals career.

  That reason was later revealed. In August 1936, Rickey traded the twenty-six-year-old Winsett to Brooklyn for three players and cash. Although Winsett had a “beautiful swing,” Rickey said, he “sweeps that bat in the same plane every time, no matter where the ball is pitched.” Most major-league pitchers proved capable of throwing the ball where the Winsett bat wasn’t functioning. Over parts of three seasons with the Dodgers, he batted .241 and slugged .357 with seven home runs in 465 at-bats. During his years in the majors, only one other player with at least six hundred combined MLB plate appearances struck out at a higher rate. Unable to repair Winsett’s beautiful, broken swing, Rickey had sold Brooklyn a good-looking lemon.

  Rickey had one other baseball bête noire: hitters who took too long a stride, costing them their balance and power. As a college coach, he tried placing a shot-putter’s guard rail at the front of the batter’s box so that hitters would stumble if they strode too far. Some of them wouldn’t stop stumbling, so he stopped subjecting them to sprained ankles and tried tying ropes around their ankles instead. That felt too confining. “You can’t cure an overstrider,” Rickey conceded to the New Yorker’s Robert Rice in 1950.

  Except that someone could. By 1986, outfielder Dave Gallagher, a 1980 Indians first-rounder, was in his seventh minor-league season and his third at Triple-A. His OPS was stuck in the .700s, and he blamed an excessive stride. “I was jumping at the ball, throwing my balance off,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1989. “I figured that if I could control my feet, the rest of my body would follow suit.” Gallagher didn’t know about Rickey’s rope, but he made something similar with more modern materials, including plastic chain and Velcro. The device, which he dubbed the Stride Tutor, inhibited his stride without getting in his head.

  Using the Stride Tutor during drills, Gallagher upped his Triple-A offense, and in 1988, at age twenty-eight, he got to the big leagues for good, finished fifth in AL Rookie of the Year voting, and played seven more major-league seasons. He patented the Stride Tutor and sold five thousand units in 1988, making more in sales than he made in salary. In a 2012 interview, he credited the Stride Tutor—a superior implementation of an old idea—for making his career. Maybe a K-Vest could have made Winsett’s swing more adaptable, or TrackMan training could have taught him to lay off the high pitches he tended to chase. Maybe Gallagher could have helped history’s overstriders.

  Then again, while Gallagher is a good story, most players still stall somewhere on the way to the majors. Plenty of prospects flop despite playing for teams that are well equipped to help them. That’s why one of baseball’s biggest questions is where the limits of development lie. “What everybody’s trying to diagnose,” Brian Bannister says, “is what attributes are almost set in stone and what attributes are pliable.”

  When the Red Sox released Rich Hill in March 2014, they opted to keep Craig Breslow, another slow-throwing lefty reliever who, like Hill, had pitched for the team in each of the previous two seasons. Breslow, who’s five months younger than Hill, was forced to start the season on the injured list with a shoulder strain, but his roster status was never in doubt. From 2012 to 2013, he’d tied for the sixth-lowest park-adjusted ERA in the game among relievers with at least 120 combined innings pitched, trailing only All-Star closers. From 2005, his rookie year with the Padres, through 2013, he’d tied for the eighth-lowest park-adjusted ERA out of more than three hundred pitchers who’d thrown at least four hundred innings, ranking right alongside Clayton Kershaw and single-season saves record holder Francisco Rodríguez.

  The five-foot-eleven Breslow was a twenty-sixth-round draftee who was never a top prospect, an All-Star, or a closer. The Brewers, who drafted him, released him after two years. Like Hill, he briefly landed in independent ball and then tried out with the Padres, who signed him for a one-dollar bonus. San Diego let him leave after one season, so he signed with the Red Sox. In subsequent seasons, he was selected off waivers three times and traded twice. He didn’t post sterling strikeout or walk rates, and some ERA estimators suggested that he should have allowed many more runs than he did. No one wanted to lock him up long term. Yet he kept getting outs by inducing soft contact, preventing pulled pitches, and limiting both his BABIP and his home-run rate. In his first eight big-league seasons, Breslow’s ERA never reached as high as 3.80.

  Because Breslow threw in the low 90s and didn’t miss many bats, he didn’t have much margin for error. In 2014, his long-running high-wire act stopped working. Perhaps hampered by the shoulder strain, his four-seamer speed dipped into the 80s. His walk rate climbed, his home-run rate skyrocketed, and his ERA soared to 5.96. The next year was better, but still far from his heyday. The Sox had seen enough, so in 2016, he signed with the Marlins just before spring training. They cut him in July. The Rangers picked him up, sent him to Triple-A, then released him weeks later, the day before his thirty-sixth birthday. It looked like the end of the line.

  Breslow was determined that it not be. He didn’t want to walk away. “I think there’s this assumption that because I can do other things, that I want to be doing other things,” Breslow told us in 2017. Breslow had always seemed almost too smart to be a baseball player. He’d double-majored in molecular physics and biochemistry at Yale, and despite that daunting course load—not to mention his commitments as captain of the varsity team—he’d maintained a 3.5 GPA. When he’d been between baseball gigs after Milwaukee cast him loose, he’d taken the MCAT, applied to medical schools, and been accepted by NYU. The Padres probably prevented him from becoming Dr. Breslow.

  A beat writer dubbed Breslow “the smartest man in baseball” in 2008, and the sobriquet stuck. To outside observers, baseball seemed somehow beneath Breslow, a youthful pursuit he’d one day abandon to do something serious. That wasn’t how he felt. Nothing else made his heart beat harder and his adrenaline flow faster while also engaging his brain. The combination of “the intellectual component of critical thinking and problem solving, alongside the physical preparation and the competition, is one of those things that’s really unique to sports,” he says.

  Despite his background, Breslow went years without trying to apply his scientific training to pitching. In an interview with Baseball Prospectus in 2006, a twenty-six-year-old Breslow drew a distinction between his studies and his sport. “B
iochemistry is such a specific science,” he said. “It’s so analytical and methodical, and that kind of mentality can actually hurt in baseball.” Eleven years later, looking back on the young player he’d been, Breslow said, “While I was having success, I was probably naïve and assumed that would last into perpetuity.” The thought process of a pitcher who’s sailing through a season, he added, is, “Am I risking taking myself out of this successful zone by becoming interested in things that I currently am not, or by using information that I don’t think about right now?’”1

  The first time Breslow strayed far enough from the success zone to consult advanced stats was 2011, when his ERA was over 4.00 as late as September 12. “I kept thinking to myself that my stuff was the same, my command was the same. I felt like I was striking out guys at the same clip; I was walking fewer guys,” Breslow says. “It just seemed like every time a ball got put in play, it found a hole.”

  Breslow realized he didn’t need to rely on feelings and impressions to assess his season. He could see what the stats said. To his relief, the numbers backed him up: he was pitching just as well as before, if not better, but his BABIP had spiked as a passel of singles snuck through. The apparent rough patch was just a random bout of bad luck, not an indication that Breslow’s lease on major-league life was about to expire. He could carry on as before and wait for better bounces.

  Five years later, though, the stats had nothing reassuring to show him. Even in Triple-A, Breslow was getting hit hard. Unlike in 2014, he couldn’t pin his problems on an injury, and he had to face facts: he was three years removed from his last vintage season, at an age when players don’t typically bounce back from decline. “I could no longer claim I was simply going to be better than I had been before for unknown reasons, which is kind of a nice myth to tell,” he says. “I felt like my options were: drastically overhaul my repertoire, my skill set, my mechanics, or be out of the game, at least on the playing side. And for me that was a pretty simple decision.”

  Breslow reached out to as many team talent evaluators as he could. He knew there wasn’t much interest among teams in retaining his services for 2017. His question was: Why? What was he missing, and what could he do to make himself more appealing to potential employers? Over and over, the answer came back: he had to be better against southpaws. Breslow had never been a true lefty-killer, the kind of pitcher a manager might summon with the other team’s top same-sided slugger due up in a do-or-die spot. But there was sometimes space in a big-league bullpen for a southpaw who could be counted on to come in and record a quick out or two against his own kind.

  “My limiting variable was always going to be velocity,” Breslow says. He did some weighted-ball work and considered going to Driveline to boost his sagging radar readings, but he figured even going from the high 80s to the low 90s—below average to average, which would be a big jump in a short time frame—wouldn’t be the best use of his time. “No matter what I did, no change… was going to take me from 88 mph to 98 mph,” he says.

  What Breslow did have, though, was “this incessant drive to be better today than I was yesterday.” Figuratively speaking, he adds, “That’s my fastball.” And if his literal fastball was flagging, his figurative fastball was just finding its pace.

  Breslow decided the most meaningful and manageable way for him to be more effective against fellow lefties was to create more deception against them. And the best way to do that, he believed, was to lower his arm slot from over-the-top to low-three-quarters, which would give lefties less of a look at the ball and make them more likely to whiff. If he then refined his breaking ball—which he’d barely been throwing, relying largely on four-seamers, sinkers, cutters, and changeups—he’d have the makings of a pitching profile that could catch teams’ eyes.

  With his career clock ticking, and with one winter to internalize “a new approach, a new delivery, a new repertoire,” Breslow had to find the most systematic, efficient form of feedback to accelerate his overhaul. For that, he turned to technology. Seeking something affordable and portable that could help him monitor his movement and spin, Breslow bought a $3,000 Rapsodo device and a $500 cloud account with the company to store the information from his practice pitches. He then threw a bullpen session in September 2016, using his standard delivery and repertoire to establish baselines that he could use to track his progress.

  Back in 2006, Breslow told BP, “For me to lower my arm slot—and I have tried—feels as foreign as throwing right-handed.” The first time he tried it in 2016 felt similarly unnatural; when he reviewed video of the tentative attempt, he was surprised to see that what had felt like a drastic change amounted to a two-inch drop, probably imperceptible to anyone else. Eyes on the prize of employment, he pressed on, playing limbo with an invisible bar.

  As he experimented with lower release points at Boston College and other local facilities, Breslow wore a motusTHROW, the first wearable device approved for in-game use in the majors. The small sensor, which is embedded within a compression sleeve, contains gyroscopes and accelerometers that record arm angle, speed, and stress. “As I lowered my arm angle, I actually decreased the stress on my elbow, but increased the velocity with which I could throw,” Breslow says. “And so the obvious question became, ‘Why wasn’t I throwing like this for the last thirty-five years?’” After frequent repetition, Breslow’s brain rewired itself to make the new motion feel natural. Four months into his makeover, he reported, “The idea of throwing from my old slot feels more unusual than this current one does.”

  Lowering his arm slot was only half of Breslow’s battle. Like Trevor Bauer sincerest-form-of-flattering Kluber and Stroman, Breslow looked for gold-standard pitches whose traits he could try to adopt. “When you talk about a left-on-left breaking ball, you think about Andrew Miller’s slider; when you think about a left-on-left sinker, you think about Zach Britton’s,” Breslow says. Here, too, Breslow ran into limitations. Not only could he not throw nearly as hard as Britton or Miller—his friend and former teammate—but he lacked their extension toward the plate and ability to manipulate the ball. “I’m not six foot eight, with incredibly long arms and fingers,” he says. “I can’t make my fingers longer; I can’t make them more flexible. I don’t have the levers that [Miller] has.”

  Although he couldn’t expect to replicate those best-in-class pitches, he could come closer to them. “The shape of the breaking ball, the axis that it spins at, those are things that I can attempt to mimic,” he says. His baseline readings revealed that the spin on his sinker and slider was inefficient. By changing his arm angle, grip, and finger pressure and consulting Rapsodo after each pitch to see whether he was getting warmer or colder with respect to his left-handed lodestars, he harnessed his spin to generate more movement, developing what he believed to be “the optimal breaking ball for me.”

  Breslow made his movement gains quickly. He could see them with Rapsodo, but they were also detectable with a less sensitive instrument—the human eye—by the time his regular throwing partner returned to New England after his late-October loss in the NLCS. That partner’s name: Rich Hill.

  In the past few years, the former teammates’ positions had switched: Breslow, who had made Boston’s 2014 team, was out of work, while Hill, who’d been cut in 2014, was making NLCS starts and was six weeks away from landing a lucrative deal with the Dodgers. “Rich gives everyone hope,” Breslow says. Hill gave him more hope when he told him that because of his new arm slot and movement, he’d become uncomfortable to catch. If he was hard to catch, maybe he’d be hard to hit, too.

  Discussing the contrast between baseball and chemistry in 2006, Breslow said, “The specificity of what you do in the lab is something you can’t take to the mound with you.” He continued, “On the mound you need to make adjustments… you can’t do that in the lab.”

  Breslow spent late 2016 and early 2017 in a baseball lab of his own devising, searching for the compound that would make him good again. Technology told him he’d found it
, but to make his off-season experiment more than an academic endeavor, he would have to take it to the mound.

  On January 23, 2017, representatives of roughly fifteen teams flocked to an indoor facility in Waltham, Massachusetts, where Breslow’s agent had invited them to see the results of his client’s labor. Any down-on-his luck pitcher can claim to be better, but Breslow had data and video that his agent had disseminated to document his claims. Even so, the scouts and executives wanted to see for themselves. Throwing his first high-pressure pitches in months, Breslow strutted his new stuff. His velocity still stood in the 80s, but in January, that didn’t mean much. What mattered more were the new arm angle and revamped sinker-slider combo. This was a different Breslow than the one teams knew and no longer loved, and a different Breslow could be a better one.

  Breslow’s one-man metamorphosis made him a prospect in multiple capacities. Teams wanted his mind as much as his arm. Even if he never regained his old form on the mound—or, more accurately, his old performance in a new form—he might have value as a mentor to other players in need of their own reboots, or even as a future front-office member. And in the wake of Martinez, Hill, and other out-of-nowhere player leaps, teams were taking the possibility of a Breslow bounceback seriously.

  In the days after his showcase, Breslow received ten offers. Although they were minor-league deals with invitations to spring training, not guaranteed tickets to the majors, that low-dollar Breslow bidding war was still an improvement over the previous summer, when no one was calling at all. He picked the Twins, not necessarily because they gave him the best chance to be a big leaguer again or even offered the most money, but because the team’s newly hired top baseball official, Derek Falvey, spent hours on the phone with him, discussing data-driven development over the course of several conversations. Falvey described the team’s relationship with Breslow as a “partnership,” one in which the Twins would help support the work-in-progress pitcher.