Big Data Baseball Page 13
One-third of pitchers on Opening Day 2013 rosters had undergone Tommy John surgery. Pitchers, particularly young ones, were needing the surgery more than ever. Through September 2014, seventy-six pitchers had had Tommy John surgery, breaking the previous record of sixty-nine to undergo the operation in 2012. There were no signs of improvement in injury prevention.
Part of the increase in injuries is believed to be tied to the arrival of the first generation of pitchers who were raised and overused in a sports-specialization culture. Today’s pitchers threw in year-round programs as kids and overexerted themselves for scouts and college recruiters as teenagers at showcase events. That was the hypothesis of a 2013 position paper by the American Sports Medicine Institute, which studied the epidemic of Tommy John surgeries.
Velocity is perhaps another culprit. The average speed of a major league fastball has increased every year since 2007, according to PITCHf/x, which began tracking pitch data that year. Perhaps the human body simply cannot keep up with the increasing stress placed upon it. In 2008, the velocity of the average major league, four-seam fastball was 90.9 mph. By 2013 it was 92 mph. In 2014, it increased again to 92.1 mph. In 2003, Houston Astros reliever Billy Wagner was the only pitcher to throw at least 25 pitches at 100 mph or faster. In 2013, eight pitchers hit 100 mph at least 25 times, and Reds closer Aroldis Chapman threw 318 pitches at 100 mph or faster, according to CBSSports.com
While pitchers are taller and stronger than they were a generation ago, and while they can strengthen their muscles, they cannot strengthen their tendons and ligaments. The ulnar collateral ligament, about two centimeters long and one centimeter wide, is made up of bundles of fibers and frays like a rope. The ligament doesn’t snap on one throw; rather, it’s believed to wear down over time, and clearly the ligament has never been under more stress.
While the increase in injuries is well documented and there is a better understanding of why injuries occur, there is little understanding of how to prevent them. Baseball is still largely using rudimentary tools—raw pitch counts—as the universal preventive practice. The Pirates knew they needed pitching depth, but the club couldn’t afford proven, above-average pitchers on the free agent market. They had few easy fixes, but they thought they had identified one.
8
SPINNING GOLD
Hurdle’s background was in hitting. A former power-hitting prodigy, he had advanced to manager from minor league coach and major league hitting instructor. Despite his personal experience, he was obsessed with pitch efficiency. Perhaps he had witnessed too many pitchers become exhausted in the thin, run-scoring air of Coors Field or wilt in the oppressive, sweat-soaking August heat of Arlington, Texas, where he was briefly a hitting coach with the Rangers. He was not enamored with strikeouts, despite managing in an era of record strikeout totals. Rather, he preferred generating outs in “three pitches or less.” He wanted his pitchers to be more contact-oriented than swing-and-miss focused. He wanted to decrease pitch counts and increase innings from his starters and keep them and the bullpen fresh. He had recommended this approach since his arrival in Pittsburgh, and now he saw his opportunity to sell this philosophy to his pitchers.
Hurdle had taken a collective risk with a pitching staff before. The thin air of mile-high Coors Field had helped create a tremendous offensive environment in Colorado and helped give Hurdle a good reputation as a hitting coach. It springboarded him to being named Rockies manager early in the 2002 season. The thin-air environment was also a considerable barrier to creating effective and efficient pitching. Since the award of an expansion team to Denver in 1993, nothing had worked to make pitching effective at its mile-high altitude. Nearly every season, Coors Field ranked as the most friendly home-run and run-scoring ballpark in baseball. Placing the balls in a humidor prior to games to soak up humidity before use helped a little, but Coors Field remained a hitter’s paradise.
At first, the Rockies had forsaken pitching and loaded up on offense, but that was a difficult way to win, particularly in the postseason. The team then tried signing high-dollar free agent pitchers Mike Hampton and Denny Neagle, but that wasn’t effective either since their signature breaking pitches were not as effective at the higher altitude, where the lesser air resistance on the ball made it break less. So on August 15, 2005, Hurdle and the Rockies decided to try something that hadn’t been done in twenty years: they dropped the fifth starter from their pitching staff. It was difficult to attract and develop pitchers in Colorado, and besides, their fifth starters were horrendous. Denny Stark and Jeff Fassero were a combined 0-3 with a 17.47 ERA. Dropping them should improve the club’s overall pitching performance. To keep a four-pitcher rotation fresh, the Rockies’ four starters would also throw fewer pitches per start. This was important as a batter’s performance in a single game tends to improve with each subsequent plate appearance against a starting pitcher. The more looks a batter gets at a pitcher’s release point and pitches, the better he typically performs. Part of sabermetrics ideology is that starting pitchers should pitch fewer innings. By employing four starters the Rockies would slightly reduce their innings per start, thus their batters faced, with the bull-pen arms soaking up more innings.
“We were at a point in time where the fifth starter’s record, for a year and a half, was horrible,” Hurdle said. “The ERA was horrible. The [performances] weren’t anywhere close for what you’d ever hope. We kind of looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s eliminate it. Let’s see where it can take us.’ Tradition is a wonderful thing. There are reasons for honoring tradition and staying with tradition. But tradition can also be a vision killer.”
No team had employed a four-man pitching staff for an entire season since the 1984 Blue Jays. The 1995 Royals were the last team to experiment with a four-man staff for a significant portion of a season.
“We’ve batted the idea around for more than two years but have been too scared to try it,” Hurdle told reporters at the time. “It’s time for us to be a bit more creative to get our pitching right.”
Unfortunately, the four-man rotation didn’t last and neither did Hurdle. The pitchers were uncomfortable with the setup and the Rockies continued to lose. The Rockies ditched the four-man rotation by the end of the season. Hurdle failed to find a way to improve pitching effectiveness at Coors Field, and lost his job in 2009. But it wouldn’t be his last attempt to employ a radical theory with his pitching staff. He still believed it was the right approach, and had a successful team first adopted the philosophy, it might have gained traction. Baseball is a copycat game. Teams copy the practices of successful teams. In the spring of 2013, Hurdle was desperate again and ready to try another radical experiment. Not only would the Pirates place their infielders in untraditional positions, they would ask pitchers to change what and where they predominately threw. What if the Pirates pitchers could not only have more efficient outings, logging more innings using fewer pitchers, but could also create more ground balls? And what if those ground balls were hit into a more smartly aligned defense? Remember, ground balls were pulled by hitters nearly 80 percent of the time.
Hurdle discussed this idea with his pitching coach, Ray Searage, and organizational pitching guru Jim Benedict: “What if we could get more ground balls hit into the shift?” Hurdle and Searage and Benedict all agreed upon the merits of the three-pitches-or-less doctrine. They could sell it to their pitchers by telling them they’d pitch deeper into games, log more innings, and thereby have more opportunities to earn wins.
“It made sense when framed [that way],” Hurdle said. “And if that is your focus point, if you really bite into that and buy into that, the two-seam fastball becomes your best weapon.”
Some believed that whether one was a fly-ball or a ground-ball pitcher was an innate trait. The difference was based upon what a pitcher threw and how he threw, what angle the ball was delivered from, pitch movement, etc. These traits were thought to be hard to change. Moreover, for most of the game’s history no one had been reco
rding ground-ball rates of hitters or pitchers.
Groundball data was not available until more detailed play-by-play records began being kept in the 1980s. BaseballReference.com has ground ball-fly ball ratios on pitchers dating back to only 1988. The batted-ball data showed beyond a doubt that pitchers and batters each tended to either produce more fly balls or ground balls. The batted-ball data, combined with one of the game’s great technological innovations, its first true big data tool, PITCHf/x, explained why pitchers had groundball or fly ball tendencies. PITCHf/x demonstrated that not only could some pitchers change, but how they changed. PITCHf/x not only measured the speed, trajectory, and location of every pitch, but also accurately labeled every pitch type. For the first time analysts could see a clear statistical correlation between certain pitches and certain results, including pitches and ground balls. Anyone with an Internet connection could study the year-to-year changes in how often pitchers threw certain pitches and their corresponding ground-ball rates. While the fastball has been the most commonly thrown pitch in baseball from the sport’s beginnings to the present day, the two-seam, sinking fastball and variations of it produce more ground balls than the more commonly thrown four-seam fastball.
The four-seam fastball can be thrown with the most velocity and has therefore traditionally been the game’s most common pitch. Intuitively, pitchers want to throw a fastball as fast as possible. But four-seam fastballs also travel on a straighter plane toward home plate, making such pitches more likely to be squared up and lifted into the air by hitters. They are called four-seam fastballs because of the grip; the pitcher holds his index and middle fingers perpendicular to the seams. When the ball is released from the pitcher’s hand, all four of the ball’s seams are rotating, face front, end over end, toward the batter. Two-seam fastballs travel with slightly less velocity; but because of the way they are gripped, with a pitcher’s index and middle fingers overlapping two seams, their spin and air resistance create more downward and horizontal movement. The two-seam is more difficult to hit cleanly, and therefore the pitch produces more ground balls.
By simply changing pitch grips, some pitchers could change the nature of the balls in play against them. This was known naturally to some, but PITCHf/x demonstrated without a doubt through data how dramatic the change could be. So if a pitcher could produce more ground balls, combined with a smarter defensive alignment behind him, he should theoretically be able to lower his hits and runs allowed.
Producing more ground balls was the third prong of the most radical defensive plan in the game’s history—to be implemented along with the shifts and pitch-framing. There was little talk that spring of improving run production. Instead the entire off-season and spring training was focused on preventing runs. That’s where Fox, Huntington, and Hurdle believed opportunity resided, with all three of these opportunities rooted in data-based evidence.
Curiosity and desperation were recurring motivational factors in Hurdle’s career. They had led him to implement the four-man rotation in Colorado and to the MLB Network and exploring sabermetrics Web sites such as FanGraphs.com and finally to the two-seam fastball. That blend of curiosity and desperation had allowed Hurdle to change as a person and as a manager. He believed his pitching staff had the power to change, too. He had the PITCHf/x data to prove pitchers could improve their ground-ball rates, and the Pirates had witnessed one of their own make a remarkable transformation.
* * *
Charlie Morton had not pitched in a major league game in more than a year when he left his suburban home north of Pittsburgh to drive to PNC Park on a muggy, overcast afternoon on June 13, 2013. He was several hours away from making his first appearance since returning from Tommy John surgery. Headed south on I-279, winding through the northern hills of the city, he was already perspiring.
Morton wasn’t sure if his arm would ever again be the same thanks to the six-inch scar on the inside of his right elbow, the telltale sign of Tommy John surgery. The previous May, his career was placed in jeopardy just when he thought it was turning around. After a disastrous 2010 season, he’d rebounded with a much better campaign in 2011, posting a 10-10 record and 3.83 ERA with the Pirates. But after a start against Cincinnati in late May 2012, he felt that he had hyperextended his right elbow. Tests revealed he had torn the ulnar collateral ligament. He was headed for Tommy John surgery and a lengthy rehab and recovery.
Morton traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, to have ligament-reconstruction surgery done by Dr. James Andrews. The new ligament was a tendon extracted from below his knee and threaded through small holes drilled near the ends of the humerus and ulna bones where they connect at the elbow. He returned to Pittsburgh for a week, then headed for the club’s Pirate City complex in Florida to begin his rehab. One challenge of rehab is being away from the spotlight and the familiar faces and fellowship of coaches and teammates. And rehab is monotonous. The early weeks feature isometric therapy, where an athlete does simple exercises while remaining in static positions. In the back training room of the Pirate City complex, Morton stood against a wall and pushed against it at different angles, with different levels of resistance.
“I made good friends with the wall in the back training room,” Morton said.
Not only was his repaired elbow sore and stiff, but the area below his left knee where the replacement ligament was harvested was also uncomfortable, weak, and in need of strengthening. Rehab was tedious and painful, and tangible results were slow to come.
Perhaps the toughest part for Morton was the lack of a competitive outlet. To fill the void he invited other rehabbing players to come over to the four-bedroom, single-family home he had purchased in Bradenton for marathon video-game sessions, most often playing the military-themed, shoot-’em-up game Call of Duty. On Tuesdays they went to Gecko’s, a Bradenton bar and grill, where they played trivia. They called their team the Red Barons, after the red T-shirts the rehabbing players wore to distinguish themselves from the healthy players.
“Rehab was just driving us insane because we were competitive by nature,” Morton said.
Morton is different from many of his teammates, an oddity in a professional-baseball clubhouse. While he looks like a prototypical right-hander, long and lean at six-feet-four and athletic from having played a number of sports in high school—his father played basketball at Penn State—Morton is cerebral and introspective. He pauses to scratch his closely cropped black hair as he searches for the right words to articulate his thoughts, never relying on canned, clichéd responses when speaking with reporters. He feels compelled to be honest and interesting. He’d have loved to attend college, and would have, had the Braves not made him a third-round pick in the 2002 draft out of Barlow High in Redding, Connecticut. He looked at pitching as science. He loves numbers and examines data and is concerned not just with results but the hows and the whys of his craft. He is a thinker. And during rehab he had more time to think about his uncertain future.
That summer of 2012, Morton worried about things he’d never worried about before. He was careful with how he shut doors at home, how he closed the trunk of his car, worried about damaging the reconstructed ligament. He treated his elbow as if it housed a Fabergé egg. He knew that Tommy John surgery usually places pitchers back on the field, but it is not an automatic cure. Not every pitcher comes back. Morton even worried that he might not be tendered a contract for the 2013 season by the Pirates. He was entering arbitration and was becoming more expensive. However, he would eventually agree to a one-year, $2 million contract with the Pirates for 2013. It was a pay cut from his $2.4 million salary in 2012, the first time he had earned above the league minimum.
As he drove to the ballpark now, his thoughts wandered back to early that spring when he first threw off the mound in an extended spring training game, after the big league club had broken camp and headed north. He had no idea how hard he had thrown that inning against an assortment of Toronto Blue Jays minor leaguers. He knew that if his velocity was below 90
mph, he was in trouble. He completed his first inning of work in the dark about exactly how his arm had performed on the quiet back-fields of the Pirate City complex. It was the first time he had really cut it loose since the surgery. He approached Pirates pitching guru and special assistant to the general manager Jim Benedict in the makeshift, chain-link dugout. Benedict had worked with Morton throughout his rehab, rebuilding his mechanics and confidence. Morton considered Benedict not just a coach but a friend. The tall, broad-shouldered, and mustached man had stood behind the plate and put a radar gun to Morton’s pitches in that first inning back. An anxious and eager Morton asked what the top radar-gun reading was. Benedict broke into a smile and said, “You sat at ninety-four to ninety-six mph. You touched ninety-eight.” Morton hugged him.
“I hugged him, one, because I was happy and it was a relief,” Morton said. “And two, he was there with me the whole time [during rehab], working with me, putting in as much time as anyone.”
Morton’s sinker was consistently in the mid-90s that day, putting one fear to rest: his elbow had successfully been reconstructed and the grueling process had not been in vain. But on this June afternoon as he wound through the hills on the outskirts of the city and the skyline opened up before him, a different fear emerged: Could he get big league hitters out? This was no longer just about his rehab. The Pirates were playing well and he knew they needed him since Rodriguez and McDonald were both injured. In a rehab start a day earlier, McDonald allowed 5 runs in 6 innings at Triple-A Indianapolis. McDonald’s velocity was still down, his shoulder was still hurting. The Pirates’ first reserve, Gomez, was also out. The club was running out of arms. Morton was okay during his four rehab starts with Triple-A Indianapolis, but the Pirates needed him to be better than that.
There was little room for error in the National League Central Division. The Reds had made the play-offs a year earlier and were off to their best start since 1995. The Cardinals, perhaps the game’s model franchise and winners of the 2011 World Series, were off to another excellent start. The Pirates, Cardinals, and Reds all had .600 winning percentages or better entering June—the first time that had happened in any National League division since 1977. And those three teams continued to play .600 baseball twelve days into June. But would the Pirates be able to continue a winning season with the staggering amount of injuries that were accumulating?