Big Data Baseball Page 14

  Morton walked from the bull pen with his catcher, Russell Martin, a pregame routine after a pitcher had completed his warm-ups. Morton tried to relax and shake off nerves. The lineups had been introduced. Fans were taking their seats. Pregame music blared through the PNC Park speakers. A buzz was in the air that he had not felt in more than a year as he walked across the outfield grass to the home dugout. His career had been five years of uneven performance. In some ways this was a last chance with the Pirates. An added pressure was that his wife was seven months pregnant. He was out of options, and if he struggled, he could be released. He had already made enough money to be comfortable. But he wanted to pitch, he wanted to compete, and he wanted to be great. He had gotten by on potential for so long—would he produce results? Morton wondered. He knew the Pirates could no longer afford to be patient with him.

  The Pirates had a huge stake in Morton, too. They needed pitching depth. While Morton’s elbow was rebuilt after surgery, the club’s pitching coaches had also reconstructed him as a pitcher. They had changed what he threw, where he threw, and how he threw. Would the new model work?

  Morton had first tried to throw a two-seam fastball in 2006 with the Myrtle Beach Pelicans, the Atlanta Braves’ High-A minor league affiliate. On a hot afternoon, under a searing sun on the South Carolina coast, Morton experimented with the pitch in a practice session between his starts. Pitch after pitch, two-seamer after two-seamer, came out of his hand as straight as an arrow. Observing quietly in the bull pen was the pitching coach Bruce Dal Canton, a grandfather figure. The sixty-four-year-old had been around the game forever. He had pitched for the Pirates from 1967 to 1970, after he was discovered by a Pirates scout in an amateur league while working as a high school science teacher at Burgettstown High in southwestern Pennsylvania. He later pitched for the Royals, White Sox, and Braves. After his playing career ended he began coaching, working his way up to become the Braves’ pitching coach from 1987 to 1990. He was instrumental in the development of the Braves’ pitching greats Tom Glavine and John Smoltz. Dal Canton had seen about every kind of pitcher and every kind of problem. He was kind, patient, and observant. Over the years Dal Canton’s hair had turned a brilliant white, and his long, narrow face had thinned. Dal Canton was dying of esophageal cancer.

  He asked Morton to stop throwing and walked across the crushed red brick and artificial turf of the bull pen under a searing sun to demonstrate how to get inside the ball. That means, if you are right-handed and you hold a baseball straight in front of you, the force is applied to the inside, left-hand side of the ball. He showed Morton how to grip the ball more off center. Morton copied the grip and returned to the mound; suddenly the ball began diving.

  He gained more and more confidence with the pitch and started throwing the sinker in 2007 in Double-A, then with even more regularity in 2008 with Triple-A Gwinnett. He reached the majors in the second half of the 2008 season and produced an above-average ground-ball rate, 51 percent, in 15 starts. He thought his two-seamer could develop into one of his better pitches as batter after batter pounded the top half of the ball, driving it into the dirt in front of home plate. After his starts, it looked as if a toy army had landed an artillery barrage in front of home plate. But he was soon to be stripped of his new weapon.

  In June of 2009, the Pirates acquired Morton in a three-player trade with Atlanta. The Pirates sent outfielder Nate McLouth to the Braves for two young pitchers, Morton and Jeff Locke. McLouth was having a fine season, he finished with 20 home runs, 19 steals, and a .256 batting average. He was one of the club’s most popular players, but McLouth was not likely to be part of the club’s future as he did not have a long-term contract. The pitching-bereft Pirates needed arms and they liked Morton, whose four-seam fastball could touch the mid-90s. Morton had gone 7-2 with a 2.51 ERA with Atlanta’s Triple-A affiliate in 2009 and went 7-2 with a 2.29 ERA with Indianapolis, earning a call-up to finish the season with the Pirates.

  However, when the Pirates acquired Morton, one of the first things they did was strip him of his two-seam fastball. The Pirates coaches were troubled by all Morton’s thinking, tinkering, and assortment of pitches. They wanted to simplify things for him. The Pirates were intrigued with something else, too: radar-gun readings. Morton’s four-seam fastball routinely touched the mid-90s. His average fastball was 93 mph in 2010. Morton’s four-seam fastball possessed velocity, but it was also straight.

  “There was an organizational decision made that I wasn’t going to throw a two-seamer at all,” Morton said. “Four-seam, curveball, changeup; I did not have input. I think it was interpreted that my two-seamer was my four-seamer, just slower. So I went with it. That was the decision that was made.”

  The decision was a disaster. Morton started 17 games in 2010, the first season he broke camp with a big league club. He went 2–12 with a 7.57 ERA. He had the worst winning percentage and ERA in baseball. He allowed more fly balls than he ever had before. Those straight fastballs were hit hard and far, with 18 percent of the fly balls he allowed going for home runs. He didn’t throw a single two-seam fastball that season.

  “I respected that decision. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out. It took a weapon away from me. I think that year really exposed some things about me that I needed to improve upon,” Morton said. “I needed to get tougher. I needed to grow up. I needed to mature. It wasn’t just about getting by. I didn’t want to be a guy that didn’t really have an identity.”

  When Morton was demoted to the minor leagues that summer, he was told he could experiment. He began to think again about the sinker he had learned in Myrtle Beach in 2006. In the spring of 2011, Morton met a new coaching staff and welcomed a new voice: the scratchy, Long Island–accented tones of Ray Searage, the new Pirates pitching coach.

  When Hurdle was named Pirates manager late in 2010, one of his first and most pressing goals was to assemble a staff. Like any other CEO type, a manager must delegate. He must surround himself with competent assistants. In baseball, perhaps no other assistant is more important than the pitching coach, who must be part psychologist, part mechanic. He watches bull-pen sessions and work in games and identifies and quickly fixes mechanical flaws. He must make strategic and psychological adjustments in real time during mound visits.

  When Hurdle took the Pirates managerial position, he did not know Searage well. Searage had been named the interim Pirates pitching coach at the end of the 2010 season. His and Hurdle’s playing careers and coaching careers had rarely intersected. Hurdle interviewed Searage, and other external candidates. When Hurdle spoke with Searage, and people who knew him, he was drawn to Searage’s natural communication ability and his familiarity with a number of the young arms coming through the system who would impact the Pirates under Hurdle’s watch.

  There was something else striking about Searage: his story. As a boy, Searage accompanied his father to construction sites on Saturdays near his native Freeport on the shores of southeastern Long Island. His father directed the construction of department stores and commercial buildings. Searage remembered how his father addressed everyone the same way, treated everyone the same way, from the sweaty, sawdust-covered workers who were lowest on the food chain to his suit-wearing superiors. It left an indelible imprint on Searage, who described his father as a compassionate man.

  Searage also remembered how throughout his own baseball career, every pitching coach had tried to change him. It seemed like everyone knew what Ray Searage was supposed to be. He was a left-handed reliever for the White Sox, Dodgers, Brewers, Mets, and Indians; and every time he arrived to a new organization, its coaching staff tried to change him. The most extreme change came at the end of his career, with the Indians in 1991. That spring the Cleveland staff wanted Searage to adopt a high leg kick like Len Barker. Searage did as instructed but struggled to throw strikes. He was traded to the Mets that winter and after the 1991 season he was out of baseball, having thrown just 287 professional innings. He vowed, if he ever coached, he would be
different. He had been in pitchers’ shoes and didn’t want them to go through the same things he did. If he coached pitchers, he wanted them to keep their identities.

  That’s just what Morton was seeking: an identity. Searage wanted Morton to go back to feeling comfortable. Searage felt his best skill, the one that allowed him to communicate so well with players, was empathy. He knew what it was to feel like a broken player, and he inherited one in Morton in early 2011.

  Searage and special assistant Jim Benedict studied video on Morton. The first thing they noticed was that he was not throwing from his natural arm slot. This was not uncommon. Pitchers were told ideal mechanics began with an over-the-top motion, meaning the ball should be released high above their head, the idea being to create as much downward angle or downhill slope as possible. However, Searage believed that pitchers have natural arm paths and that they weren’t designed to throw as robots. The other thing they noticed from watching video and from speaking with those familiar with Morton was that he had been stripped of the two-seam fastball by the previous coaching staff. Morton lit up radar guns, but his four-seam fastballs were straight.

  In February 2011, Searage and Benedict called Morton in for a meeting to reveal their plan. Searage and Benedict told Morton that they were going to lower his arm slot and give him back his two-seam fastball. He trusted them because he felt, intuitively, that he should. Searage was a bit like Dal Canton, patient and soft-spoken, doing more watching than talking during bull-pen sessions. Searage didn’t overwhelm you, and he was positive. Morton felt that they cared about his success. Coming off the worst season of his career, what other choice did he have but to follow their advice? He was down to his final chances with the Pirates, and it was either succeed or else.

  Their presentation to Morton included video of All-Star pitcher Roy Halladay, whose arm slot they wanted Morton to emulate. Like Morton, Halladay was demoted to the minor leagues early in his career after severe struggles. He had to discover a new arm path to become the perennial Cy Young contender he became in the late 2000s. They told Morton when Halladay dropped his arm slot, he was able to throw around his body, better keeping his head still. If your head isn’t still, the target isn’t still, and command over the ball suffers, they reasoned. Morton was contorting his body and kicking his head left in his delivery to try and create that desired throwing plane. Morton agreed to try Benedict’s and Searage’s plan. The experiment began along the left-field foul line on field No. 2 of the back-fields complex at Pirate City, the same complex where Kyle Stark had experimented with spray paint and defensive alignments. The nondescript, windswept field enclosed by chain-link fencing was generally used for minor league spring training and Gulf Coast League games. With no one watching, no pressure, Morton began throwing with his new mechanics, and he was astounded by how natural it felt.

  “It killed me to feel it because it was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, I wish I had known earlier,’” Morton said. “That’s pretty much all they did. Keep your arm working around your body, keep your head still. It was incredible really. It was instantaneous. I knew something had changed.”

  In the second key part to the plan Searage wanted Morton to trade in his four-seam fastball for a two-seam, sinking fastball. Morton returned to placing the ball in the two-finger grip he had learned from Dal Canton. Morton got on the mound, coiled his body in his windup, and unleashed a ball that traveled on a plane that seemed to include an invisible cliff near home plate, where the ball dropped late and steeply at 93 mph.

  “It was just incredible. I got on the mound and it was unbelievable,” Morton said. “The sinker is a pitch I need to throw. They understand that’s part of who I was on the mound. I was just a totally different dude.”

  Pirates first baseman Lyle Overbay, a former teammate of Halladay’s in Toronto, took live batting practice against Morton that spring. He told Morton his motion was identical to Halladay’s, and then he told Sports Illustrated separately, “This is Roy Halladay with better stuff. Roy’s location makes him the elite of the elite. Charlie’s not there yet with his location. But once he is…’’

  Morton was now a different pitcher. He essentially tabled his four-seam fastball for his sinker.

  What made Morton’s sinking two-seamer so special?

  “The spin angle. Its angular rotation,” Morton said. “It’s just the angle of the ball, the way it rotates, the rpm of the ball. The way the air resists the ball, the way the seams are spinning, it just allows the ball to run and sink. It’s interesting. If you slow down a sinker on video, you’ll see the actual rotation. It’s almost like on an axis. The two seams are rotating and it rides like a rail.”

  In his first start of 2011, Morton faced the Cardinals. In the first inning of his first start, his confidence still fragile after the challenges of the 2010 season, he faced the National League’s most feared hitter, Albert Pujols. This was the first great test of the sinker, the first great leap of faith. Morton got the sign to throw the sinker. He went into his new windup, coiled, and unleashed a pitch that left his hand with his fingers applying pressure to the inside of the baseball. The pitch’s initial trajectory was to the inner third of the plate, then it suddenly dove down to the right and compelled Pujols to jackknife out of the way and drop to his knees. The pitch didn’t result in a weak ground ball or a swing and miss or even in a strike, but it had rare movement. Its movement had surprised Pujols, who barely had time to avoid being hit by it. For the first time against an elite major league batter, Morton saw the pitch had life.

  Morton’s teammates watching from the dugout were also intrigued. The starting pitchers, who usually congregate near the rail at the end of the dugout to watch games together when they are not assigned to pitch, broke into smiles and buzzed after the pitch seemed to fall off an invisible escarpment. They told Morton to watch the pitch on video after the game. He saw then the movement and saw the game’s best hitter react late to the pitch’s movement. He realized that if he could throw that pitch in the strike zone, it would result in swings and misses and ground balls thanks to its unconventional flight path. It wasn’t just video that buoyed Morton’s confidence. In 2008, when PITCHf/x went online in every major league stadium, there were, for the first time, standards of measurement for velocity, movement, and release point available to front offices, coaches, players, and fans. PITCHf/x could do more than label pitches and report accurate velocities, it could help a curious player such as Morton gain trust and confidence. It could give a data-savvy player a competitive edge.

  Beginning in 2009, Morton had begun employing PITCHf/x tools to study changes in his release point, pitch rotation, and velocity. His father studied Morton’s PITCHf/x readings, too. They discussed them and looked for changes and progress. As with Hurdle, this was an illumination period. Morton had objective data to study, and this data helped Morton to buy in to the Pirates’ plan.

  PITCHf/x gave Morton an objective baseline with which to evaluate himself, something that’s often difficult for a pitcher since so many variables are outside a pitcher’s control. He doesn’t control the defense behind him, the ballpark he is pitching in, or the lineup he’s facing. A pitcher could pitch exactly the same way in two separate outings and get completely different results. The resulting peaks and valleys of performance can be maddening, particularly to an analytical pitcher such as Morton. But with PITCHf/x data, he had an objective standard. He could see his location, release point, pitch movement, and velocity, factors he could control and judge his performance upon. He knew he could make the ball sink and run as well as any other pitcher in baseball. For instance, according PITCHf/x data at BrooksBaseball.net, Morton’s two-seamer averaged 93.1 mph in 2013 with 9.63 inches of horizontal movement, a rare combination of movement and velocity. Morton could see the results in real time in 2013. While pitchers had for years been able to look at the scoreboard to see their velocity, in 2013 at PNC Park, Dan Fox had the PITCHf/x horizontal and vertical movement for each pitch shown on the
thin, ribbonlike auxiliary scoreboards that were on the façades of the upper decks along the first- and third-base grandstands. The hard science, the measurable pitch movement, the big data that PITCHf/x provided, resulted in a soft-science benefit: confidence.

  PITCHf/x also told Morton an important data-based story. In 2011, his curveball wasn’t good, his changeup was a nonfactor, his cutter wasn’t cutting, and his four-seam fastball was flat. Morton saw he was a one-pitch pitcher, but it was an above-average pitch, and this one pitch changed the Pirates.

  In 2010, he had thrown only four-seam fastballs. In 2011, his four-seam fastball rate fell to 6.6 percent, and he threw his sinker 65.8 percent of the time, spiking his ground ball rate to 58.5 percent. He produced 3.1 ground balls for every fly ball, a remarkable ratio, even more so considering his ratio the previous year was 1.5. Morton finished the season 10-10 with a 3.83 ERA and went from one of the National League’s worst pitchers to one of its best ground-ball pitchers simply by changing pitch type and arm slot. Some took to calling him Ground Chuck.

  Morton was reinvented simply by his returning to a pitch he was comfortable with and adopting a new arm slot. It was an interesting case study for Hurdle and the Pirates, who were trying to improve their pitch efficiency beginning in the spring of 2012, and who in 2013 wanted to increase the number of ground balls hit into their infield shifts. Morton was a sort of test case; he built confidence in the two-seam plan. What if more pitchers could be like Morton? What if the Pirates could improve their own pitchers—and better prevent runs—through one pitch? What if every Pirates pitcher could generate more ground balls to be hit into a more smartly aligned defense? If they could make Morton a dominant ground-ball pitcher, who else could they change? A. J. Burnett became the second test case.