Breslow’s experiment was already a partial success: he’d made his new arm slot second nature; he could tell from Rapsodo data that his slider and sinker had moved closer to where he wanted them to be; and better yet, he had a job. “The only thing [the data] doesn’t show is whether I can get hitters out,” Breslow joked to the Minneapolis Star Tribune just before spring training. In Florida, he pitched nine games and allowed only one run, although he also walked as many batters as he struck out (seven). Breslow broke camp with the Twins and was back in the big leagues for the twelfth season.
Breslow’s MLB data from 2017 paints a picture of a very different pitcher from the one he was before. His cutter—which he lost the feel for from the lower slot—was gone, replaced by more sinkers. His slider (sometimes classified as a curve) was a staple instead of a rarity. His average release point was more than nine inches lower, falling from the thirty-seventh percentile to the fifth percentile in height among lefties with at least two hundred pitches. His sinker and changeup dropped by about four inches more than ever before, and they also added an extra couple of inches of sweeping, side-to-side break.
There was only one problem: those redesigned pitches still weren’t getting guys out. Breslow’s stats with Minnesota were worse than they had been in Boston or Miami, and on July 29, thirty games (and an IL stint for rib-cage soreness) into his trial, the Twins released him and his 5.23 ERA. On August 7, the Indians signed him and sent him to Triple-A, then promoted him in September, reuniting him with Bauer, his teammate for a brief time during Bauer’s debut year in Arizona. “I think we both approach new pursuits similarly: analytically and methodically,” Breslow says. “But obviously, he has been far more effective.”
The good news about Breslow’s season was he’d held lefties to a .580 OPS (albeit without many strikeouts). The bad news was that righties, against whom he was now extra vulnerable, had demolished him, recording a .934 OPS—and he’d faced twice as many righties as lefties.
Undeterred, Breslow signed another minor-league deal the following February, this time with Toronto. The thirty-seven-year-old started the season in Double-A, pitching at that level for the first time in a nonrehab appearance since 2005, his age-twenty-four season. He missed a month and a half with a hamstring strain, then made it to Triple-A. That’s where he spent the rest of the summer, riding buses and waiting for a call that never came.
The buses didn’t bother Breslow, who says he was too consumed with his quest to care about the low salary or the lack of big-league luxuries. What frustrated him was not knowing why his process wasn’t working. He struck out thirty batters in 28 1/3 innings, but he walked twenty-four. He allowed an .865 OPS to lefties, and his ERA finished at 5.40. Breslow spoke to Toronto’s front office regularly and monitored his TrackMan info after each outing, looking for some secret of tunneling or deception or sequencing that he might have missed. “The pitch profiles that [are] objectively measured indicate that I should have success as a left-on-left reliever,” he says. “And so when I’m not having success, what is the reason?”
One non-Toronto front-office analyst who’s analyzed Breslow’s minor-league TrackMan data from 2018 says there isn’t really much of a mystery. He agrees that Breslow made his breaking ball better, but only from a 35–40 pitch to a 45–50 pitch on the 20–80 scouting scale. “With a fastball at 88, that’s going to get hit,” he says. Losing his cutter and his hopping four-seam fastball gave Breslow fewer weapons to work with, and aging took a toll. “I think by hurting himself against [righties], he offset whatever he did to help himself against [lefties],” the analyst says. “But with the velo loss and all the walks, whatever repertoire changes he made pale in comparison to how much worse that made him.”
The analyst questions whether Breslow’s strategy of targeting lefties alone was sound. He also notes that pitchers often run into trouble when trying to talk themselves through transformations, especially without the aid of an Edgertronic, which Breslow considered investing in but ultimately opted not to. “Doing pitch design well is still a competitive advantage for teams because it’s not obvious how to do it right,” the analyst says. He suggests that trying to boost his velocity might have helped Breslow more, but even that wouldn’t necessarily have helped, because ultimately, “It’s Father Time that’s hurting him more than anything he did wrong.”
On the surface, Breslow had all the ingredients of a modern makeover success story. At minimum, he was one of the smartest men in baseball. He was well-attuned to technology, with a commendable work ethic and access to Hill himself. But the hope Hill’s example gave him may have been false. Not only did Breslow not throw hard, he didn’t have a brilliant breaking ball yearning to breathe free.
“[I] certainly have recognized both the excitement and promise and also the limitations of creating a new pitcher in a lab,” Breslow says. So have the Blue Jays. A member of Toronto’s front office acknowledges that previous tech-enabled breakouts affected the team’s belief in Breslow. “Now that there have been enough positive versions of this, you want to look at [players] with fresh eyes and try to evaluate what might be there as opposed to what was there two years ago, three years ago,” the source says. The chance of buying low on the next career rehabilitation, the source admits—coupled with the prospect of working with a player who promised to be ultrareceptive to front-office input—may have clouded the club’s thinking.
Although failing to make the majors for the first time since 2007 was disappointing, Breslow says it “didn’t really change how I feel about the process or undertaking the endeavor.” But Breslow’s path is finally diverging from the field. He’s father to young twins, and he and his wife welcomed a third child in December. As long as he lingered on the mound, he was missing moments with them. And shortly after the season, it became clear that lingering longer might not be an option. “I’ve become more of a highly sought-after postplayer than current player,” Breslow acknowledged in December. It was bittersweet, he said, but also, perhaps, the right time to turn the page. “What I’ve learned about teaching analytics, what I’ve learned about myself as a pitcher, and also what I’ve learned about trying to implement or pitch to certain data points… should help me tremendously in my next life.”
That life began quickly. In January, the Cubs hired him as director of strategic initiatives for baseball operations, a wide-ranging conduit role in which he’ll play a part in pitcher development. Breslow tried to rebuild himself to recapture an old career. Instead, he started a new one.
In an on-air discussion on MLB Network in February 2018, Reds star Joey Votto was asked to speak about the significance of launch angle. Votto, a former MVP and perennial on-base machine who’s famed for his ability to avoid pop-ups, is an authority on the subject; in 2018, he led all regular hitters by concentrating 45.9 percent of his batted balls in the launch-angle sweet spot of 8 to 32 degrees. “I think a lot of the hitters that have made the change in their hitting style from more of a line-drive, gap-to-gap approach to attempting more fly balls and benefiting from it, I don’t think we’ve told the story about how complete they are as hitters,” he said.
In other words, some of the hitters who’ve joined the elite by adopting a data-driven swing change may have benefited because their preexisting skills allowed them to make that adjustment successfully. Twins assistant director of player development Alex Hassan, a former outfielder hired as a conduit in 2018, makes a similar observation. “The point that could get overlooked here is that Chris Taylor made it to the big leagues prior to making these adjustments,” Hassan says. “So did Justin Turner, J.D. Martinez. These guys were big leaguers before they did these swing overhauls and became these household names.” They weren’t good big leaguers, but even with counterproductive approaches, they had big-league ability.
Because the players whose adjustments pay off get to stay in the majors and in the public eye, Hassan says, “There’s a huge survivorship bias.” We’re much more likely to talk about thos
e guys than we are the ones who never turn into impact players or never make the majors at all, provided the latter aren’t well known enough to be busts like Mark Appel. “Those stories aren’t as apparent because those guys, nobody knows who they are,” Hassan continues. “No one’s going to keep asking, ‘Oh, let’s go find all those guys who flamed out in Double-A, get their story.’”
Hassan would know because he basically was one of those guys. A twentieth-round Red Sox pick out of Duke in 2009, he worked his way up through the minors roughly one level per year. In 2013, his age-twenty-five season, he repeated Triple-A and didn’t get the call despite an .891 OPS. His offense that year was inflated by a high BABIP, and he hit only four homers in 210 at-bats, not ideal for a six-foot-three corner guy. Hassan had a good eye, but he decided he’d have to power up to cross the last barrier between him and the majors.
That off-season, he entrusted himself to a well-known hitting guru (he won’t say which one). Hassan, a right-handed hitter, tried to make adjustments geared toward elevating the ball to left field, including shifting his weight forward aggressively and tipping the bat à la Barry Bonds, who would point his barrel at the opposite batter’s box before starting his swing. Instead of helping, the changes fouled him up. “It just didn’t work,” he says. “I was not myself.… I was swing-and-missing in the zone a ton, which I didn’t do prior to that. And I wasn’t driving the ball.”
The same winter the remade Martinez was lighting up the Venezuelan Winter League, Hassan was stinking up the Dominican Winter League. He then took his act to Triple-A and managed only a .621 OPS through May, with one homer and an uncharacteristic 30 percent strikeout rate. Ironically, that’s when the call-up came. Hassan, who grew up twelve miles from Fenway Park with a family-built replica of the Green Monster in his backyard, was summoned as an injury replacement and singled to center in his first start. Getting the major-league monkey off his back gave him the confidence to restore his old swing, and when he returned to Triple-A, he raked the rest of the way.
Hassan never made it back to the big leagues after 2014. He retired at twenty-eight with one big-league hit on his career record. “[I] spent the rest of my career making adjustments to see if there was something I could tweak in my swing to help me,” he says. “I ultimately never really found those answers like some guys had. Those adjustments seemed to click right away for some guys.”
Hassan won’t say that the guru’s recommendations were wrong, only that he wasn’t able to follow them. It didn’t help that the process wasn’t as data driven as he would have liked, occurring as it did just before swing- and ball-trackers became ubiquitous. “More measurable outcomes would’ve helped me get a little better direction as I tried to make those adjustments,” he says. Maybe better tech would have made a power-hitting Hassan happen, but we’ll never know.
Not every hitter should hit more flies, and aiming up can backfire if the flies aren’t hit hard or lead to less contact. The hitter with the highest career fly-ball rate on record, the Padres’ all-or-nothing infielder Ryan Schimpf, batted .158 with a 35.5 percent strikeout rate in 2017, then got demoted to the minors, traded three times in four months, and released. Many of the hitters who’ve benefited from angling up were in need of a change. Those who are already mashing, meanwhile, risk an Icarus ending by trying to fly higher.
In 2016, the Orioles’ Mark Trumbo led the majors with forty-seven homers, but in 2017, his power cratered. The following January, Trumbo explained that he’d allowed himself to get “too distracted last year with a lot of different numbers, analytics, launch angles.” He resolved to get “back to getting a good pitch and squaring it up,” and he did, posting his highest average exit velocity and sweet-spot percentage (but lowest average launch angle) in 2018. A 2018 study by MLBAM senior database architect of stats Tom Tango showed that “hitters are more likely to maintain their launch angle if it was followed by an increase in performance,” noting that hitters who slump tend to revert to what was working before.
In 2018, the Brewers’ Christian Yelich won the NL MVP Award without chasing flies, even though his high ground-ball rates had identified him as a hitter who might benefit. Despite leading all non-Rockies NL hitters in homers, he hit more than half his balls on the ground, and his average launch angle was unchanged. “There has been no conscious change on my part, no buying into launch angle,” Yelich told MLB.com in October. Yet by making more subtle changes—swinging at more hittable pitches and attacking outside pitches farther in front of the plate—he raised his sweet-spot percentage and average launch angle on hard-hit balls without actually overhauling his swing.
Even when swing changes work wonders, those wonders do sometimes cease. After 2016, Yonder Alonso was a former seventh-overall pick who was about to turn thirty and who’d been a below-average offensive first baseman for more than two thousand major-league plate appearances, hitting only thirty-nine homers in seven seasons and topping out at nine in any one year. After watching other veteran hitters transform their careers and reading about fly balls at FanGraphs, Alonso decided to transfer more of his strength into his swing. “I was kind of hitting like if I weighed 150 pounds, instead of getting my 225 to 230 pounds into the ball,” he told us. He watched video, sought Votto’s advice, added a leg kick, and engaged his lower body to lift and drive the ball.
It worked. A career .387 slugger entering the season, Alonso slugged .501 with twenty-eight homers in 2017 and made the All-Star team. He raised his fly-ball rate—which had stood at 32.6 percent for his career—to 43.2 percent, and while his strikeout rate unsurprisingly spiked, trading contact for power was well worth it. FanGraphs’ Dave Cameron dubbed him “the new poster boy for the fly-ball revolution.”
After that season, Alonso signed with Cleveland. And while he continued to hit for more power than he had before 2017, other aspects of his performance slipped as he seemingly got greedy: he walked less, swung more, and chased the breaking balls below the zone that teams began to throw him more often, yielding weaker contact. In a sequence of rapid reversals, Alonso went from posting a combined 97 wRC+ from 2015 to 2016, up to 133 in 2017, and then back down to 97 again in 2018. In December, the Indians traded him to the division-rival White Sox for an unranked prospect.
It’s easy to be seduced by the successes without factoring in the flops. It’s also easy to oversimplify what should be an individualized process. “There is no one way to hit,” Yelich said in October 2018. Nor is there one way to develop players.
Optimizing development is as much about knowing a player’s weaknesses as it is knowing his strengths. Some of those weaknesses can be corrected, but not all of them. “You’re still limited by [the player’s] genetic ceiling in certain areas,” Bannister says.
On the pitching side, for instance, “some arm actions are capable of creating high fastball quality—essentially, very deceptive, high-velocity, high-swing-and-miss fastballs,” Bannister says. “Some pitchers’ arm actions can create very high-quality secondary pitches. But there are very few that can do both.” Teams pay top dollar for those talents, snapping them up in the draft or on the amateur market. If they miss out on the few, they do what they can to make the many more appealing. “I’m still to a never-ending degree trying to identify how much we can manipulate the body to have these characteristics,” Bannister says.
Velocity, Bannister believes, is primarily muscular, which means that it can be trained and improved to some extent. Even that aspect of performance, however, is subject to body composition because some muscle types are more adept at handling load versus speed; some people can lift heavy weights but can’t lift even lighter weights quickly, whereas others lift quickly but can’t lift a lot. Still, muscle is malleable beneath a certain ceiling.
Spin is a separate quality: some pitchers throw hard but straight, while others (like Hill) throw soft with spin. “Spin and the ability to shape pitches has a lot to do with both the range of motion of your individual joints and, really, the elast
icity of connective tissue,” Bannister says. Some players’ ligaments and tendons are stiffer and less responsive, whereas others store a higher amount of potential energy in the milliseconds prior to performing a movement. “They actually have connective tissue that’s really stretchy, so it’s like prestretching a rubber band,” Bannister says. “So when they go to throw, it generates a snap-back quality on top of what their muscles are doing.” Bannister cites Chris Sale, who looks like Mr. Fantastic, as an especially stretchy pitcher.
Thus, there’s an elasticity and spin ceiling, too. “It’s largely genetic and not something that can be taught or trained,” Bannister says. Maybe you can cure an overstrider, but you can’t cure an understretcher.
When Hassan was stuck in the minors, he says, he “definitely heard, ‘If you don’t like it, play better’ repeated ad nauseam.” He regards it as a message “that was so simple and obvious that it became really easy to ignore, but that was probably really honest and good.” For some players, “just be better” is actionable advice, a reminder to redouble their efforts or focus on the measures that are most likely to work. For others, though, “just be better” is an inscrutable command they can’t obey, something they hear, Boddy says, “when [they] are repeating High-A for the third time.” Everybody can be better, but in baseball, better isn’t always enough.
On the evening of August 22, Trevor Bauer drives his used Chevy Silverado pickup—140,000 miles and counting—to Clague Park, a mostly open green space in a Westlake, Ohio, neighborhood. This is where he usually flies his drones, including the infamous drone of 2016 that sliced into his right pinky finger. He finds a vacant picnic table and places the drone’s case atop it. Building and racing drones is Bauer’s escape from baseball. He prints off some of the parts from his own 3-D printer. He creates the specifications for the carbon-fiber frames and has them cut at a local shop. “I fully designed this,” he says proudly, brandishing one of two drones he’s brought to the park.
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