Players hope they’ll have to wait only until the current CBA expires on December 1, 2021. If front offices are going to keep bypassing the big-ticket items and converting raw talent into productive, pre-free-agency players with relatively little earning power, it’s imperative for the Players Association to adjust its own strategy. As the CBA’s expiration approaches, the MLBPA will work to get players paid earlier in their careers, but the league won’t make that concession lightly.
Posturing and rhetoric between the league and the union are already growing more heated as owners rack up value that the players don’t share via franchise appreciation, giant TV deals, and income from MLB’s digital arm, which have collectively decoupled profits from onfield results, suppressing the incentive to spend. Even if they’re earning a lower piece of the overall revenue pie, major leaguers may be reluctant to rock an MLB boat that still pays them handsomely by normal-citizen standards. But the ingredients are in place for a more contentious round of bargaining than the past few CBA cycles have seen, and it’s partly player development’s fault.
The other existential problem that the one-two tandem of Moneyball and the post-Moneyball focus on player enhancement poses for the sport is stylistic and aesthetic. Sabermetrics cemented the importance of pitchers preventing balls in play, as well as a few facts about offense: walks are valuable, strikeouts aren’t worse (on average) than any other out, and high-strikeout hitters tend to draw walks and hit homers, which makes them more productive than high-contact types. As high-strikeout pitchers became increasingly prized and the stigma surrounding high-strikeout hitters dissipated, competitive pressures pushed strikeout rates ever upward. Strikeouts pay, particularly for pitchers; as the Astros’ Cy Sneed says, “There’s never a situation where you strike a guy out and you’re like, aw, man.”
In the stands, though, that’s a common reaction. And here, too, the movement has helped baseball double down on a concerning trend. Teams are no longer limited to the existing supply of high-strikeout players; through pitch design, pitch-mix changes, velocity gains, and batters trading contact for power, they can create more Ks. MLB’s strikeout rate has climbed for thirteen consecutive seasons. In 2018, strikeouts outnumbered hits for the first time in history, and the rate of “three true outcomes”—strikeouts, walks, and homers—reached a record 33.8 percent of plate appearances. Throw in hit-by-pitches, which are also at an all-time high in the sport’s modern era (thanks to faster fastballs, more breaking balls, and evidently not enough sticky stuff), and nearly 35 percent of plate appearances don’t require the batter to run or a batted ball to be fielded.
“Baseball traditionalists hate that we’re trying to take balls out of play, [but] when your goal is to win, you’re trying to control the outcome as much as possible,” Bannister says. The better batters get at driving the ball, he adds, the more crucial it is for pitchers to steer clear of contact. And advanced development has barely started scratching the surface of fielding. “Eventually, the world of technology is going to get into fielding too,” says Mike Fast, who notes that fielding is difficult to train because it involves so many movements that are challenging to track. “You can get the Statcast data or FIELDf/x or whatever, and that’s great,” he says. “But when you try to show your players to train them, well, they don’t want to see a dot moving on a screen. They want to know how they were moving.” Some teams have started capturing high-speed video of defenders with an eye toward enhancing fielding technique.
Defense has already improved behind the plate, where a new emphasis on framing rather than blocking and throwing has rapidly remade the catching landscape. In the decade during which tracking technology has been available, the difference in framing performance between the best and worst teams—as measured by Baseball Prospectus’s framing runs—has been cut in half, while the variation among all teams has also reached a record low. “The average framer is now better than he was five years ago because clubs are able to coach him to get better,” an NL GM says. And that means more strikeouts even when hitters don’t swing.
The ongoing campaign against contact is a case of misaligned incentives. Players and teams are trying to do what’s best for them, but in baseball—as opposed to football or basketball, where deep passes and three-pointers, respectively, are both smart and entertaining—the optimal plays from a competitive perspective may not be optimal from a fan standpoint. “On the club level, we’re trying to create better players and a better formula for winning,” Forst says. “[On] the industry-wide question of whether it’s a better game, I will let Mr. Manfred handle that one.”
Aside from speechifying, Manfred hasn’t handled it decisively so far, although in fairness to the commissioner, the power of the Players Association makes it more difficult for the league to impose sweeping changes. There’s plenty that baseball could do to promote balls in play: deadening the ball, shrinking the strike zone, lowering the mound, or moving the mound back. Pitchers are taller than they used to be, and they’re releasing their pitches closer to the plate.
Baseball could learn from golf, which entered its talent-transformation era earlier and has already wrestled with the ramifications. As pro players used data to hit the ball farther and more efficiently, they began to break golf, getting too good for old courses. “The traditionalists really dislike that, and some of the players say it’s part of the evolution—‘We’re better, and that’s just one of the by-products,’” says Columbia Business School professor Mark Broadie, the Bill James of golf. “The improvements in players, both in their skill and perhaps in technology… have been intentionally offset by increases in course difficulty so that scores remain the same.… On the PGA Tour, you’ll almost never see a pin in the middle of the green anymore.”
In contrast to sports that tinker constantly with their products, MLB hasn’t made a meaningful move to curtail strikeouts since lowering the top of the strike zone in 1988, although in 2019 it announced plans to implement a three-batter minimum per pitcher appearance in 2020. They also set up a partnership with the independent Atlantic League to test a new mound distance, a TrackMan-assisted strike zone, and other experimental measures. MLB’s official historian, John Thorn, wrote in late 2018, “The dilemma for owners and players and fans may be understood as The Paradox of Progress: we know the game is better, so why, for so many, does it feel worse? I submit that while Science may win on the field, as clubs employ strategies that give them a better chance of victory, Aesthetics wins hearts and minds.” It won’t matter how good players get if fewer people want to watch them.3
Without MLB’s intervention, the strikeout-rate rise probably can’t be stopped. But for those who fear a boring brand of baseball, there is hope that the increase could be slowed or temporarily paused. Although strikeout rates have generally risen over time, they haven’t done so during every era. The strikeout rate in 1911 was higher than in 1951. The strikeout rate in 1963 was higher than in 1993. More recently, the strikeout rate in 1997 was the same as in 2007. As the Astros’ aforementioned recommitment to contact suggests, Ks can move in more than one direction. But to make more contact, hitters will have to solve spin.
When pitcher Jim Creighton began to spin balls by batters in the early 1860s, he changed baseball from a game whose core was contact, fielding, and running to one in which the pitcher-batter battle took precedence. That conflict is still the centerpiece of the sport, and with blazing fastballs becoming commodity goods, teams have taken their cue from Creighton. “Spin is really the driving factor for everything now, because you can find velocity anywhere,” Bannister says, adding, “Pitch design is going to be the next five years of baseball. I think that’s where everybody’s going.”
The latest skirmishes in this centuries-spanning war, Bannister explains, are being waged by “hitters getting on the perfect swing plane, [and] pitchers trying their best to get off of that swing plane with every pitch they throw.” Hitters craft their swings to take advantage of the fat part of the pitch-traject
ory bell curve: most pitches come in on a roughly 6 degree downward plane, so most hitters swing up at the same angle to maximize their margin of error and exit velocity. Pitchers on enlightened teams, in turn, are trying to work away from that hitting sweet spot, throwing 8 degree breaking balls down and 4 degree fastballs up—ideally disguised so that hitters can’t tell the difference. “The good teams are just expanding more than ever, more pitches outside the zone,” Bannister says. “It’s just that dance.”
A lot of hitters haven’t learned the steps. “Most hitters, even if you throw a high pitch, they still try to hit it with their 6 degree swing,” Bannister says. That’s changing. Baseball’s prevailing strategies are cyclical: When pitchers were still throwing low in the zone, hitters started swinging up to punish those pitches. When hitters went low, pitchers went high. Now some teams are trying to teach their hitters to go high also.
Astros outfielder Tony Kemp says the biggest benefit of TrackMan for him has been recognizing which pitchers do and don’t have hop on their heaters. Before every series, Astros coaches brief the hitters on which pitchers have high spin, and the hitters adjust accordingly. “You’ve been trained to hit the ball obviously where it’s pitched,” Kemp says. “But now that you have spin rate, and you have guys who can understand how to spin the baseball with four-seam hop, you can see that the baseball’s actually going to end up above your barrel. So now we’re talking about swinging above the baseball.”
That isn’t any easier than it sounds—imagine trying to hit a high-90s fastball that isn’t where it appears to be—but it’s the future of hitting. “It’s all about fine-tuning your skills to match the pitcher,” says Kemp, who adds, “I definitely can say that I’ve altered my swing in a way to adjust my barrel through the zone to hit pitches.” So have his teammates. In 2018, Astros hitters produced a .359 wOBA on four-seam fastballs in the upper third of the zone and above, easily topping the Red Sox and Indians for the major-league lead.
One factor holding back hitters is an inability to train against the same stuff they’re seeing in games. Pitching machines can’t currently match the spin rates of MLB’s outlier arms. “It doesn’t matter if you turn up the velocity, the spin rate is still the same,” Bannister says. “So you never actually, as a hitter, have any way to practice against really, really elite-spin-rate pitchers.”
Virtual reality may offer a solution long-term, but its visual fidelity isn’t yet up to snuff. Still, teams are testing it; Forst, a former independent-league player, recently donned a headset to face off against (and have trouble catching up to) a virtual Trevor Bauer. “It still remains to be seen how much can we use a tool like virtual reality to teach a guy what’s a strike and what’s not and see how it improves their performance,” he says. Whenever the next tech breakthrough comes, hitters will have one factor in their favor: they can take many more max-effort practice swings without hurting themselves than pitchers can throw practice pitches. If hitters keep hacking, maybe they can catch up.
Or maybe they don’t have to hack. Maybe hitting is all in their heads.
With each advance in technology, the cutting edge takes another step back from basic, box-score outcomes. For more than a century, all we knew about batters was their results: strikeout, single, home run. Later, with tools like TrackMan, we learned how well each ball was hit, which allowed us to estimate how a hitter was performing independent of results. But even a snapshot of the ball in the instant after contact is measuring a result: the outcome of a swing and the body movements that produced that swing. Lately, we’ve gained insight into those parts of the process. Now teams are trying to study what’s happening in the brain even before the body and bat start moving. With each step along this ontological quest to understand athletes, new paths to improvement appear, enabling earlier interventions.
Jason Sherwin and Jordan Muraskin are the founders of deCervo, one of the companies trying to bring neuroimaging and brain training to baseball. They met during their doctorate studies at Columbia University, where Sherwin was analyzing how expert musicians process music and Muraskin was using imaging to measure the ways in which expertise shapes the brain. They joined forces to study baseball players, designing custom software that tested users’ speed and accuracy in recognizing simulations of certain pitch types, in conjunction with a wireless EEG cap whose electrodes could detect the neural predecessors of their responses—the signals in their brains that were saying “slider” or “curve.” Testing on Division I college players revealed “an enhanced perception-action coupling” and “enhanced inhibitory control” compared to nonplayers—neural markers of athletic aptitude.
Sherwin and Muraskin initially envisioned their product as a scouting tool, capable of identifying players with preternatural pitch recognition—like Mookie Betts, who reportedly impressed the Red Sox with his predraft scores on a test administered by a Cambridge-based deCervo predecessor called NeuroScouting—or screening out those who were slow to pick up pitches. When they started working with teams, though, their clients viewed those initial measurements as a starting point, not the last word. “The next question was always, ‘How do we do it better?’” Sherwin says. “So we very quickly learned that the interest was more on development.”
In 2018, four MLB organizations used deCervo’s software in the minors, with one of them employing it at five affiliates. The company has introduced a mobile app that can be used without a headset, reducing expenses and the need for experts to be present to conduct the tests. Although it’s difficult to prove causation, deCervo claims to have established strong correlations between performance improvements in the app and performance improvements on the field. Its next step may be partnering with companies that make swing sensors or wearables, which could yield a grand unified tracking system capable of assessing a player’s performance from first thought to last action and from Little League to the big leagues. “I personally think it could have the most impact for kids that are younger,” Sherwin says, citing an age range of “seven to twelve, because those are extremely formative years when it comes to the nervous system.”
Sherwin says one of the first teams to experiment with deCervo concluded after one season, “the more the players used it, the better they did.” That answers one question, but it raises another: why some players practiced regularly while others, Sherwin says, would “play around with [it] for a few minutes and then go onto Instagram.” That dilemma may lead back to the unknown that drew Sherwin and Muraskin to the field in the first place: how experts get so good and whether their proficiency stems from something innate. “I think what’s really hardwired is the foundations to allow them to train more efficiently and train smarter and train harder,” Muraskin says. What teams would really like is a way to identify other players who share that part of Bauer’s brain. “We’re close to being able to spot some of this information,” Muraskin says.
Until all players get the benefits of transformative techniques from an early age, player performance will be subject to sudden spikes, all of which will surprise projection systems that aren’t privy to proprietary info. “The predictive nature of advanced analytics today is going to be thrown a curveball,” says Andy McKay. “This player-development technology is going to provide enough information that the players that are willing to go for it can make quantum leaps in their careers.”
One way for teams to minimize that uncertainty is to take an even more proactive role in player development, turning what began as a bottom-up movement into a top-down one.
In the off-season, Alex Hassan notes, players have historically had little contact with their teams. “A lot of the off-season is like, ‘Hey, go get ’em, we’ll see you next year.’” That’s about to change. Teams are hiring many of the former independent instructors at the leading edge of development. New ideas and new voices are invading dugouts; as Eno Sarris, a writer at The Athletic, observed, the average tenure of a major-league hitting coach in December 2018 was only 1.4 years, the lowest fig
ure in at least a decade. Only five hitting coaches at the start of 2019 had been with their respective teams for more than three years.
“I definitely don’t fault guys for going and seeking outside help wherever they can get it,” Dave Bush says, adding, “I look at it like if you’re sick and you’re going to see a specialist, you’re not always going to go to your regular doctor because you know there’s someone else out there that may know a little bit more about a particular topic.” If that specialist could be inside, though, that would be even better from the team’s perspective, leading to lower risk of a player seeing someone who isn’t qualified, less potential for conflict between internal and external coaches, and tighter integration with the team’s analytical resources.
In the past, teams were often so hesitant to tamper with players that they would wait until they failed, reducing the perceived risk of screwing them up. By not helping them, though, they were already hurting them—and indirectly driving them to people like Latta and Boddy. Now, Bannister says, “We’re trying to give them the personalized, Driveline-type experience.… They don’t have to go see a guru in the off-season in order to get that type of exposure to better player-development information.” Teams that develop a reputation for providing players with the proper support may make themselves more appealing landing spots for free agents in need of career rejuvenations. Over the 2018–2019 offseason, MLB teams hired eight former Driveline employees, including Ochart and Daniels.
Bannister expects more players to take a cue from PGA pros (and Bauer) and purchase their own sensors, trackers, and cameras to continue their training year-round. Although that could lead to more mastery and greater technological literacy, it may also exacerbate another growing problem with the sport. At the lower levels, baseball is becoming a more expensive undertaking and potentially a more discriminatory one.
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