The MVP Machine

by Ben Lindbergh

  Thanks in part to pioneering figures like Harvey Dorfman (author of The Mental Game of Baseball) and Ken Ravizza (author of Heads-Up Baseball), sports psychologists are much more commonplace and accepted today than they were in the ’50s, when part of Tracy’s task was convincing the players he had any part to play at all. But some of the concerns are the same—and, in fact, may be made more acute by players’ awareness that eyes in the sky (and sometimes sensors on their persons) are recording everything they do. “We’re living in a shifting technological landscape where technology is taking a larger and larger role in our lives, and as a result, the rates of anxiety and depression have skyrocketed,” Baker says.

  Fortunately, just as modern teams have more tools to optimize players’ physical performance, they also have more ways to set their players’ minds at ease. The Cubs have consulted with Dr. Amishi Jha, a neuroscientist and associate professor of psychology at the University of Miami, as well as Scott Rogers, who runs the mindfulness program at the Jha Lab. The lab has worked with the military and with football players to develop a variant of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, a nonpharmacological formula to deal with depression or anxiety.

  The Cubs, who plan to conduct their own research with players in the instructional league, obtained data on Jha’s program that Baker says “shows a cognitive increase when people do it seven days a week and just a stabilization of cognitive function at something as small as three times a week, twelve minutes a day.” At the start of spring training, they present their players at all levels with a one-page summary of the scientific benefits of mindfulness practice, and they promote the regular use of free meditation apps. The resulting program is a mixture of hard science, Stoicism, and Eastern philosophy. “All the stuff that we do works great for the general population to bring them back to homeostasis,” Baker says. “But when you put those things onto the elite athlete, our vision is that it elevates them beyond what they are now.”

  The goal, Baker says, is to get players to reset and dismiss distractions before each pitch, allowing them to “play thought-free and allow all of the years of practice and training that is based on all of these scientific measures now to just express itself.” To do that, they have to “consciously and nonjudgmentally come back to this moment right now and go, ‘So, that happened. Now what am I going to do about it?’”

  Although each team implements its mental-skills program in a different fashion, Baker says he sees a lot of overlap. In contrast to tight-lipped R&D departments, mental-skills personnel across teams tend to pool their knowledge, both because the field is still new and unsettled and because, Baker adds, “there isn’t anything proprietary about meditation.” Baker’s department does surveys in the middle and at the end of the year to find out how players think their mindfulness training has affected their mental state and on-field performance, but as Baker observes, “We can’t quantify, ‘Oh, you’ve meditated for ten minutes and got two hits.’ That’s not a direct correlation.” As teams have learned lately, though, just because something can’t currently be measured doesn’t mean it won’t be one day.

  It’s a sign of progress that players are getting in the habit of saying “serenity now,” but to some extent, mindfulness addresses only the symptoms of the stress that they encounter. Teams are also tackling some—but not all—of the sources of that stress.

  In 2018, 254 of the 750 players on MLB’s Opening Day rosters were born outside the United States, and almost a third of all major-league players hailed from Spanish-speaking countries. Many of those players face an especially steep uphill climb through the minors because in addition to figuring out fastballs and breaking balls they also have to learn a second language, deal with culture shock, and adjust to the transition from sometimes poverty-stricken existences to life as professional players (though life in the minors often isn’t far from poverty). Teams are increasingly invested in easing that transition instead of asking players from Venezuela or the Dominican Republic to parachute into Peoria or Pulaski without a support system, which can impair their performance and sometimes send them packing before they’ve fulfilled their potential.

  Doris Gonzalez, the Astros’ manager of player education, has led the club’s education, acculturation, and language-development efforts since 2006, when she began teaching English to players part-time. A longtime ESL instructor, Gonzalez emigrated from Honduras at eleven and learned English as a second language herself. Because she understands the challenge of adapting to United States culture, she’s well suited to the role. Although she wasn’t a big baseball fan, she “quickly kind of fell in love with the [players] and the idea of helping them do better.” Just as quickly, they grew attached to her and began calling her “mom.”

  As soon as Gonzalez got involved in teaching the youngest Astros English, she realized that speaking skills were just a starting point. In concert with ESL classes, she now oversees a Formal Education Program, whose graduates gain a high-school diploma. She provides instruction in American culture and the differences between American culture and Latino cultures, including how to behave in various settings and situations (such as being stopped by a police officer). She also places a focus on character education and social skills, one aspect of which involves introducing players to the concepts of growth mindset and deliberate practice. The curriculum continues: history lessons (both baseball and the world), the perils of substance abuse, sex education, driver’s ed.

  Another part of her program is financial literacy. When Gonzalez started, players were throwing away their W-2 forms, not knowing what they were. Now they learn banking, taxes, and managing whatever money they make, some of which they send home to support their families. She also works to secure host families for the players in her program, who historically have been harder to place because fewer families are willing to accept players who aren’t fluent in English. Meager minor-league wages make conditions tough enough; not having a host family exacerbates the problem and places even more disproportionate demands on the players who are already handling the heaviest loads.

  No matter how much Gonzalez lightens those loads, most of her students won’t make the majors. But the life lessons they learn in her program—and a growing number of similar programs with other teams, which she has helped promote—will prepare them for their next careers. That’s the part she’s proudest of: ministering to the “thousands and thousands of Latino players that are literally dropping everything in their life to pursue a dream that they’re probably not going to reach.”

  Gonzalez’s efforts may seem far removed from swing changes and pitch design, but they work hand in hand with the Astros’ technological trendsetting. For one thing, nonnative speakers are less likely to receive the proper attention from English-speaking coaches, making it harder to implement the Astros’ development program (although teams are putting a higher priority on employing Spanish-speaking coaches). Players who are homesick, isolated, and struggling to stay afloat off the field will be in no frame of mind to study spin rates. By removing those off-the-field impediments to on-the-field development, Gonzalez is making major leaguers just as surely as the latest high-tech tools.

  Like Baker, Gonzalez acknowledges that the impact of programs like hers is difficult to quantify, but in this case, anecdotes are data. “Specific players have at moments in time told me, ‘I want my letter of release, I want to go home,’” she says. “And those players I pulled into my office and worked with on a daily basis, mentoring them, counseling them, giving them a space for them to express themselves and to practice better communication.” Some of them, Gonzalez says, are in the big leagues now, whether with the Astros or with other teams. “When I receive messages from them telling me, ‘Thank you, Mom, I want you to know that I made it to the big leagues, I want you to know that you played a big part in this,’ that right there tells me everything.”

  One of the people responsible for some of the same duties for a rival
team was Leslie Manning, the Mariners’ director of professional development and assistant director of player development. Like Gonzalez, the bilingual Manning educated players, but she also coached baseball-operations staff in effective practice and communication methods.

  Although women are still severely underrepresented in virtually every facet of baseball operations—a Mariners scout, Amanda Hopkins, became the first full-time female scout since the 1950s when the team hired her in 2015—player development is among the most demographically lopsided areas, even though minor- or major-league playing experience is no longer a prerequisite for employment. According to a list provided by MLB in November 2018, Manning was at that time one of only three women working in nonadministrative roles in a major-league team’s player-development department, and the only one ranking higher than the coordinator level. “As far as I know, there aren’t any other women with a role this baseball-intensive at the decision-making director level,” Manning said.

  Manning, who resigned for undisclosed reasons in February 2019 but continues to coach independently, doesn’t dwell on her field’s extreme gender skew. “Being a woman is no concern to me,” she said. “Being the best is my only focus.” But if teams want to be the best they can be at developing players, they’ll stop drawing the people doing that development from an unnecessarily narrow pool.

  MLB franchises are worth billions of dollars. Most turn a pretty profit per year and are owned and operated by corporations that could easily afford the expense—or more accurately, the investment—of paying minor leaguers enough to shrink or remove some of the off-the-field obstacles that stand in the way of their making the majors. Yet for years they denied them those dollars, both because most owners preferred not to spend a penny more than they had to and because no one was was willing to risk other owners’ displeasure by breaking ranks.

  MLB spent millions successfully lobbying Congress to pass the laughably named Save America’s Pastime Act in 2018. That legislation exempted minor-league players—who aren’t unionized—from protection under the Fair Labor Standards Act by classifying them as seasonal workers. As long as they make at least $1,160 a month, minor leaguers aren’t entitled to overtime and don’t get paid during spring training or the off-season. Consequently, many minor leaguers have to scrimp and save during the season and work second jobs over the winter, when they could be devoting their time to getting better at baseball. Although Triple-A players average roughly $10,000 a month, minor-league salaries start at a maximum of $1,100 a month (plus a $25 per diem on the road), and only a small percentage of players earn draft bonuses big enough to live on.

  In the past, one of the most obvious manifestations of minor leaguers’ lousy pay was an ascetic diet composed of items from the peak of the food pyramid. “The most difficult thing for me was making $250 every two weeks while living in one of the most expensive cities in the world,” says Brian Bannister, who started his pro career pitching for the Low-A Brooklyn Cyclones. “When my parents came to town, they took all of the guys on the team to Costco, and I bought a mountain of Gatorade, Top Ramen, and macaroni and cheese. I literally survived off of those three food groups for months.”

  Bannister’s Red Sox sidekick, Dave Bush, remembers a similar experience. “When I was coming through the minor leagues, the food we got was barely sustainable,” he says. “It was peanut butter and jelly before a game, and that was it, and in some cases there was no food postgame. And that was just how the minor leagues were. It was a kind of this mental proving ground where you had to show that you were tough enough to handle really difficult situations, and if you weren’t, then the big leagues weren’t for you.” Like Baker, Bannister and Bush are both under forty. They’re describing a very recent status quo.

  Playing pro ball at a high level is inherently hard; there’s no need to make it more difficult by forcing players to starve or spend their few funds on calorie-rich food with low nutritional value. “When the body is malnourished (or tired), the brain begins playing a game of triage with cognitive functions,” wrote Russell Carleton at Baseball Prospectus in 2012. “The first ones to go are the higher neurological functions, like attention, pattern recognition, and planning/decision-making centers, followed by fine motor control… things that might be helpful in playing baseball.” Carleton argued that spending money on minor-league diets would be one of the wisest investments teams could make, noting that “by placing players in a situation where they have access only to nutrient-poor food, teams are systemically depriving players of the materials that they need to fully grow and develop.” The development machine couldn’t run efficiently without fuel.

  Belatedly, teams are filling up players with premium unleaded. With the Red Sox, Bush says, “Guys get the food they need all the way down the levels.” That’s increasingly the case across the sport.

  Cubs minor leaguer Connor Myers, a center fielder who played the 2018 season at age twenty-four, has seen that change firsthand. Myers, a twenty-seventh-round draft pick in 2016, signed for a $5,000 bonus ($3,200 after taxes), which didn’t last long. When he debuted in pro ball, his paychecks netted him $330 every two weeks; in 2018, he made it to Double-A, but his payouts were still only “five-something.” Fortunately, food is less of a drain on his wallet than it once would have been. “Since the Cubs won the World Series [in 2016], they put a lot of money into nutrition at every level,” Myers says. “Each level has a nutritionist.… You have your protein smoothies, your weight-gaining smoothies, your hydration smoothies. You pretty much have everything you possibly need.”

  Myers is also a proponent of breathing exercises that he learned from the mental-skills staff. Whenever he’s under stress on or off the field, he breathes in for five seconds, holds it, and then breathes out for five seconds, which, he says, helps him “get myself locked into any situation.” He studies his TrackMan readings and praises the Cubs’ coaches, who he says, “always have something at your fingertips for you to take that next step in getting better.”

  Even so, Myers embodies the ways in which even relatively enlightened teams are still holding back. In Low-A, Myers lived in a packed, five-person apartment. He economizes however he can—staying with a host family at one level, borrowing a car from his parents at another—but he can’t come close to making ends meet via baseball alone. In the off-season, he works as a UPS driver, another occupation in which every movement he makes is tracked and made more efficient. He still finds time to train at a facility equipped with HitTrax and Rapsodo, but it’s not easy to juggle the job, practice, and sleep. Myers relishes his underdog status, so he isn’t complaining. When prompted, however, he acknowledges, “If I had more money I could get more machines that I could use, recovery tools, all that stuff.”

  “That stuff” could apply to a growing array of products and approaches. It’s true that teams are investing more in technology that can optimize a player’s performance within the constraints of his current physical form. But “if you want to be really forward thinking,” Mike Fast says, “that stuff is all the past. And the future is with sports science and strength and conditioning.”

  Sam Fuld, who’s even younger than Baker, Bannister, and Bush, says that during his minor-league career, teams “were just starting to hire strength coaches. Even at the Triple-A level… our athletic trainer was essentially 90 percent secretary or travel administrator and 10 percent athletic trainer.” Although that isn’t the case with the minor-league teams of today, it hints at how far the game had to go. “The strength and conditioning world in baseball, by and large, is still very backwards,” Fast says. “There are people who will say, ‘Oh, don’t lift because then you’ll get tight and your muscles won’t be flexible.’”

  Fast says when the Astros started moving into the realm of sports science and strength and conditioning, they noticed players “improving things that people thought, well, that’s just your God-given baseball ability.” It’s easy for a front-office analyst or a coach to advise that a player p
erform a certain movement to achieve a desired result, but “so much of those physical adjustments [is] dependent upon your body composition,” says Fuld, who notes that integrating coaching with athletic training is “the next obvious step.”

  According to a Quartz analysis of annual statistics provided by colleges to the US Department of Education, the fastest-growing major in postrecession America (2008–2017) was exercise science, which showed a 131 percent increase in its share of all majors over that span.2 Those throngs of aspiring degree seekers suggest that understanding how to improve performance is a growth market. That’s the case in baseball, where sports science or high-performance departments are popping up all over.

  Those departments differ by franchise, but their purviews typically encompass workload monitoring and recovery, injury prevention, and strength and conditioning, all of which utilize wearable, biomechanical, and tracking technology to offer feedback. The Blue Jays have been the most aggressive about building up in this area; their sprawling high-performance department, founded in 2016, includes everyone from mental-performance coaches to trainers, rehab specialists, nutritionists, chefs, and a “fueling coordinator.”

  One trait many sports science departments share is international leaders with nonbaseball backgrounds. The Astros’ sports science analyst, Jose Fernandez (who was hired in 2016), had most recently worked in Premier League soccer and international basketball, and the team’s head strength and conditioning coordinator, Dan Howells (who was hired in 2018), is a veteran of English rugby. Neither had worked in baseball before. The director and assistant director of the Blue Jays’ high-performance department, Angus Mugford and Clive Brewer, are both from the UK, and before beginning his own rugby phase, Brewer spent several years as the national program manager for SportScotland, a government body devoted to athlete development. The Yankees’ principal sports scientist, David Whiteside, previously worked with Tennis Australia.