Every year, more players are eager to learn, and fewer teams are unequipped to give them the tools they need. But players may have reasons to mistrust teams: maybe they don’t want wearable data in the hands of their employers, or maybe they think teams that aren’t currently contending will be more interested in suppressing their salaries in arbitration than enhancing their stats. That creates an opening for a new vector for development: the agency.
Traditionally, agents have tried to make players the most money they can given their past performance, but they haven’t done much to improve that performance. Caleb Cotham is the model for a new type of player agent, one who can, as he told us in May 2018, “help you with your curveball but also help you with arbitration.”
Cotham was a fifth-round Yankees draft pick in 2009 who climbed to Triple-A by 2013 but seemed stalled at that level, recording a 5.46 ERA in twenty-six games from 2013 to 2014. “I couldn’t have felt farther away from the big leagues,” he said, adding, “My window was closing very fast, and I think I knew I needed to take a little more risk in my training.” After the 2014 season, he spent a month and a half at Driveline. He went through the velocity-training program, raised his average fastball speed from 89 to 93, and used Rapsodo and Edgertronic to sharpen his slider. In 2015, he started the season with a 2.17 ERA in twenty-seven games between Double-A and Triple-A, striking out more than a batter per inning, and in late July, the Yankees called him up, which he attributes entirely to his winter’s work. “If I would have kept doing what I was doing, no chance,” he said.
Cotham’s time in the big leagues was brief, but at least he’d made it. Late in his career, Cotham switched his representation to The Bledsoe Agency, a boutique outfit just south of Nashville that was founded in 2009 by brothers Hunter Bledsoe (a former pro player) and Dustin Bledsoe (who went to law school while his younger brother was pursuing his playing career). “They went about the representation model a little differently, just in the sense that they [believe] being a really good player should be the primary goal,” Cotham said. “If you’re not good, nothing else matters… so we start with the idea that we should do everything in our power to get the player as good as possible.”
Cotham retired as a player after spring training 2017 and began working for the Bledsoe brothers. He became a certified agent and helped the agency construct an in-house, Driveline-style training area with a weight room and a technology-equipped hitting and pitching facility. Many of the agency’s twenty-some clients—a few big leaguers and 2018 first-overall draft pick Casey Mize among them—worked with Cotham in person over the off-season, and others he advised via video.
Cotham viewed his value partly as preparing players to utilize the training they could expect to receive in pro ball, and partly as preemptively inoculating them against misinformation. “If you understand the principle behind all these cues and drills, then you’re going to have a better chance of not going down a weird alley that might derail your career,” he said. But he was also a resource for players who might have fallen through the cracks in organizations that didn’t make their improvement a priority. In most cases, the interests of teams, players, and agencies should align—in theory, they all want the player to be better—but an agency may be able to offer more personalized service. “There are a lot of guys that [teams] have on their plate,” he said. “They want to get everyone better, but I think sometimes you might not get the information you need in the time you need it. The Double-A pitching coach might have the one cue you really need, but you’re stuck in High-A.” That’s where Cotham came in.
In 2016, when he was still pitching for the Reds, Cotham, future Bledsoe Agency client Tony Cingrani, and a couple of other Reds pitchers used to meet before and after batting practice to play Blokus, an abstract strategy board game. While they competed to place Tetris-shaped pieces on the board in a particular pattern, they talked about how to make the missing components of their pitching plan fall into place. Like Cotham, Cingrani visited and swears by Driveline, but his fortunes changed most dramatically after he was traded from the Reds to the Dodgers in July 2017, the same month he hired The Bledsoe Agency. In Cincinnati, Cingrani says, the support staff “was a lot of old-school baseball guys, as opposed to [LA], it’s trying to embrace that analytics side.” Although the Reds shared some information with players, it was barebones and not tailored to individual skill sets. “We were kind of on our own,” he says, adding, “It was just like, ‘Hopefully you have success. Good luck.’”
The Reds have addressed that deficiency: in January 2019, they hired Cotham as their assistant pitching coach, bringing him back to a modernized version of the organization where he ended his own athletic career. “I’m really excited to explore what this side looks like now and help players that are at the tip of the spear,” he says. Although he won’t be helping players on the agency side, he believes others will be, saying, “I think the rabbit’s out of the hat on that.… If you’re paying attention, it’s tough to miss that that’s an opportunity in the offseason to provide guys with that type of resource.”
The next generation may not even need Cotham’s help. Nate Freiman, a six-foot-eight former major-league first baseman who’s tied for the title of tallest-ever nonpitcher, played for the A’s in 2013–2014. Almost immediately after retiring at thirty-one in March 2018, he dedicated himself to learning more about the sport he’d stopped playing. Freiman knew the game was “accelerating toward the data now that teams are catching onto ways to use it in player development,” and he wanted to keep pace.
Freiman, who minored in math at Duke, started taking online courses in machine learning and the programming languages SQL and R. He voraciously read analytical writing about the game, and soon he started producing his own, becoming the first former big leaguer to write for FanGraphs, where he posted repeatedly as part of a residency program in August 2018.
With nine big-league homers, six FanGraphs posts, and multiple programming languages on his résumé, Freiman was a unicorn candidate for a conduit job, and in December, the Indians hired him to take on a far-ranging role in baseball operations. “If a current or former player were to ask, I would say don’t be afraid of being wrong and don’t be afraid to say you don’t know,” he says. He’d also advise picking up programming. “At the very least,” he concludes, “it shows a willingness to learn.” For the modern major leaguer, that’s the best quality to have.
17
NO CEILING
The game’s gotten harder.… The next generation’s here, and they’re really good.
—THIRTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD MLB OUTFIELDER ADAM JONES
On October 26, 2018, a few hours before the first pitch of World Series Game 3, legendary home-run hitter Hank Aaron sat at a dais alongside MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, Christian Yelich, and J.D. Martinez. The latter two were there to receive the Hank Aaron Award, an annual honor bestowed by broadcasters and fans on the best hitter in each league during the regular season. Aaron, one of the leading contenders for the title of “best living player,” name-dropped one of his primary competitors for that post. “I told Willie Mays that if he and I were playing [today], they’d probably be sending us to Class D ball because we wouldn’t know how to hit these [pitchers],” Aaron said. He gestured to Yelich and added, “I watched him play and walk up to the plate and hit somebody that was throwing 100 miles an hour, and I said, ‘Oh my God, I couldn’t do it.’” Not long after Aaron’s comments, Adam Ottavino—who hasn’t thrown 100, but has thrown 99.8—told MLB.com’s Statcast Podcast, “I would strike Babe Ruth out every time.”
Because baseball players’ performance is always relative to their contemporary opponents, it’s difficult for fans to assess skill across eras. But in April 2007, Hardball Times writer David Gassko performed a study on the quality of competition in baseball. He examined all players ages twenty-six to twenty-nine in each year dating back to the beginning of the big leagues and compared their performance in season x to their performance in
season x+1. Hitters in that cohort should be largely resistant to age-related decline, so a change in their collective results from one year to the next should reflect a change in the rest of the league’s talent.
Gassko discovered something surprising: players, it seemed, had stopped getting better. “Over the past 15 years, the quality of competition has been essentially flat,” he wrote. “I think it’s pretty clear that we are hitting some kind of wall of physical ability.”1
That seemed true at the time, but it’s usually a losing proposition to bet against human beings getting better. With help from sabermetrician Mitchel Lichtman, we’ve updated Gassko’s study. Here’s what MLB’s quality of competition has looked like postplateau:
Not only have MLB players not stopped improving, but they’re improving at one of the most rapid rates in history. If there is a ceiling, we haven’t come close to it yet.
The heightened competition of recent seasons has coincided with a historically significant youth movement. Weighted by WAR (so that more productive players have a higher impact), the average hitter age in 2018 was the league’s lowest since the advent of the designated hitter in 1973, and for the first time since 1977, every team had an average hitter age below 30. Hitters twenty-five and under accounted for their largest share of MLB plate appearances since 1978, when free agency was just getting going. Relative to the league, they collectively had their highest walk rate and second-highest isolated power in history, with a better strikeout rate than normal. If we lump together all players (both pitchers and position players) twenty-five and younger and thirty-five and older, we find that the “old” group accounted for the lowest percentage of league-wide WAR since the nineteenth century in 2017 and barely rebounded in 2018. The “young” group’s share, meanwhile, was close to a thirty-five-year high. The difference between the two proportions was at its widest since 1974.
A multitude of factors can affect the league’s quality of play, including the size of the pool of potential players (which has increased as a result of the breaking of the color line, the growth of the domestic population, and the internationalization of the sport); competition from rival baseball leagues; competition from other sports and forms of entertainment; increasing salaries and incentives to pursue playing baseball; expansion in the number of teams; and improvements in player evaluation. But improvements in player development should ensure that the caliber of play keeps climbing. “The difference between the best player and the worst player is really, really small in the big leagues,” Dave Bush says. “This type of information, if it makes you 1 percent better, that may be enough to keep you up there.”
Because today’s technology allows for more rapid evaluation, one might surmise that players are debuting younger than ever. Not so: the average debut ages for batters (24.8) and pitchers (25.1) in 2018 were the same as the averages over the previous twenty seasons. Nor are hitters or pitchers receiving less minor-league seasoning, on average, before making the majors.
Some clubs keep blue-chip prospects in the minors longer than necessary to delay starting their service clocks. Others, out of old habit, may be behaving too cautiously in abandoning veterans and promoting prospects. Because players who’ve benefited from new developmental measures are competing against similarly enhanced competition, MLB’s bar is higher and may take just as long to clear. It’s also possible that there’s a hardwired amount of experience players must accrue to be big-league quality. “We could move pitchers more quickly, but it seemed like there was something with hitters where they needed to see a lot of game pitches at new levels to adapt to better pitching,” Mike Fast says. That may be because prospects’ brains are still growing; the prefrontal cortex, the last brain region to complete its development, plays a part in pattern recognition, and perhaps in adapting to pitching.
Lastly, promotion patterns may only seem static because recent technological advances aren’t just boosting prospects, they’re also helping players who weren’t considered major-league material until new technology and techniques intervened. Left-handed pitcher Brandon Mann made his MLB debut for the Rangers in July 2018, a few days before his thirty-fourth birthday, making him the oldest American-born player to break into the bigs since 2002. Texas had signed him in January after watching him throw at Driveline, whose weighted-ball program he credits for propelling his fastball from the mid-to-high 80s to the low-to-mid 90s. Mann spent almost half his life pitching professionally—in four teams’ farm systems, Japan, and indy ball—before his opportunity in Texas arrived. “Where baseball is now, I don’t feel older,” he told Hill Country News. “I work with all the spin rates and (data) and try to use all of that to my advantage. That’s where baseball has gone. I just wish I did this when I was twenty-five, not thirty-four.”2
Although an increasing capacity for player improvement sounds like an unalloyed positive, the spread of the movement presents multiple problems for the sport that could come to a head within the next few years. “I think that any of this innovation and advancement hopefully leads to better players, who make more money, who create a better game,” says A’s GM David Forst. In practice, though, that may not be true beyond the “better players” part.
The first red flag is financial: the massive strides teams are making in player development are destabilizing the compensation structure that has reigned supreme in the sport since the 1970s, when the reserve clause binding players to teams was abolished and replaced by a service-time-based system that pays players via arbitration and free agency. Prearbitration players make close to the league minimum regardless of how good they are, but in theory, those who maintain their performance for several seasons can count on cashing in via free agency. Starting with the winter of 2017–2018, though, that model seemed to stop working, as free agents who once would have been in line for big paydays went without offers or settled for seemingly below-market contracts. The average MLB salary fell for the first time since 2004 and only the second time in the past fifty years in a season without a strike or collusion.
Although there was more than one cause of the market crash, one culprit appeared to be the increasing efficiency with which front offices obtain talent. On a dollars-per-win basis, free agents have never been the best investments. By the time players qualify for free agency, they’re typically past their peaks and headed for decline, yet they expect salaries commensurate with their past production. As the last of the late-adopting teams belatedly embraced data-driven analysis, awareness of aging patterns and projected performance began to govern every transaction, and the supply of overexuberant bidders dried up. Suddenly, no one was willing to pay top dollar on the free-agent market for depreciating players, and increasingly, teams even opted not to tender contracts to players approaching the end of their arbitration eligibility.
Increasingly, potent player development exacerbated the problem. Dating back to Branch Rickey, excelling at development has provided teams with an excuse not to spend on external solutions. Today’s teams try to create talent rather than importing proven veterans. Why pay a premium for a name-brand free agent when one could extract the same stats from a generic equivalent? With the right swing alteration or tweak to a pitch, today’s bench player or bullpen arm could be tomorrow’s successful starter, for a far lower salary than the better-known veteran on the verge of decline.
Although MLB still doesn’t have a salary cap, the luxury tax (essentially a soft cap on player payroll) exerts downward pressure on salaries, and bonuses on the domestic and international markets are now tightly controlled. With fewer places to direct their dollars without paying penalties, teams are funneling funds into R&D. Analysts and executives with the know-how to improve players more than pay for themselves, so when teams get a chance to pluck a key staffer from a franchise that’s further ahead, a front-office feeding frenzy results. “It’s not really publicized,” Brian Bannister says, “but the free-agent market in front-office hirings, to me, is hotter than on the players side.”
Owners often come from financial sectors, and they know a wise investment when they see one. “What is a $6,000 high-speed camera if you hit on two out of five international pitchers instead of one out of five?” Bannister says. “If you produce another major-league player because you spent $6,000 on a camera, it’s a no-brainer.” Despite the obvious advantages, there remains a vast asymmetry between teams in resources devoted to development, partly because more miserly owners are consistent in their unwillingness to spend. “The teams with more resources for their major-league payroll are going to have more resources in this area as well,” Forst says. “It’s not the difference between $200 million and $80 million, as it is in payrolls, but there’s still a gap there.”
Amid all of those investments in off-the-field infrastructure, star players are still getting paid, and some of those stars are reclamation projects, such as Hill, Turner, and Martinez, who have made more money than they could have imagined midway through their careers. While the recent revolution in player development has helped individual players perform better and make more, though, it may be costing players collectively. The player-compensation system—and by extension, baseball’s labor peace—rests on a foundation of free agency, and that foundation is fragile.
Moneyball was a movement led by low-payroll teams that were searching for ways to keep pace with big spenders. Eventually, the big spenders got smart and erased that small-market edge. As a consequence, some of the early practitioners of progressive development were also the teams with the greatest resources, including MLB’s bicoastal behemoths, the Yankees and Dodgers. For now, the concentration of talent in the cheap, prearbitration ranks favors teams that wouldn’t win bidding wars for free agents, but as Forst asks, “How long do you think that’s going to last?”
The MVP Machine Page 37