Big Data Baseball Page 17
Reds star Joey Votto followed Frazier. Votto was one of the most selective hitters in the league, a left-hander who rarely chased pitches out of the strike zone. Liriano again got ahead 0-2, in part because of Martin’s deft glove influencing the fringes of the strike zone. With two strikes, Liriano again went to his slider, one of the best breaking balls in baseball. Votto swung and missed at the sweeping pitch that finished well out of the strike zone, ending the inning. Votto shook his head in disgust but could do nothing about it. When Liriano got ahead in the count, most hitters become susceptible to his excellent slider, which breaks late and is difficult to differentiate from a fastball.
With the help of Martin behind the plate, Liriano struck out batter after batter in this game. In the third inning Derrick Robinson chased Liriano’s changeup out of the zone for the lefty’s seventh consecutive strikeout, tying a Pirates record, and all but two of the strikeouts came on Liriano’s hard-breaking slider. Liriano struck out 11 Reds that day, which would be his second-highest total of the season. Martin’s pitch framing was crucial in allowing pitchers to get ahead in counts and set up batters for pitches that broke out of the zone like Liriano’s strikeout slider.
In 2011, Liriano threw 52.9 percent of his fastballs for strikes, well below the major league average. During his trying 2012 season, he threw his changeup for a strike only 42 percent of the time. Hitters were better able to lay off his slider if they were ahead in the count. They could instead be patient and hunt for fastballs and elevated off-speed pitches. But with Martin catching him in 2013, Liriano’s strike totals jumped dramatically. He threw his fastball for strikes at 58.1 percent, the second-highest rate of his career, and his changeup was called as a strike 20 percent more than in previous seasons.
Liriano did not make the All-Star cut since he had missed the first month of the season, but he had been the Pirates’ best pitcher in the first half of the season with a 2.00 ERA. He had struck out 9.7 batters and walked just 1.7 batters per 9 innings, a remarkable improvement in command and performance. Moreover, Liriano’s ground-ball rate also spiked thanks to the Pirates’ staff’s getting him to trade in his four-seam fastball for a two-seam, sinking fastball.
The Pirates were on record saying they could not afford free agent pitchers who could do all the things Liriano had done. Those pitchers were Cy Young Award candidates. Instead, the Pirates had made Liriano into a Cy Young Award candidate. Yes, Liriano had come to the team with the strikeout slider and changeup, but his adoption of a new philosophy had improved his ground-ball rate, and his throwing from a new arm slot to Martin’s deft glove had improved his control.
Said Pirates television color commentator Bob Walk during Liriano’s 7-inning shutout performance against a tough Oakland A’s team in July, “He’s been remarkably consistent since he started the year.” No one had ever before said that about Liriano, and that’s in part because Liriano—or most other members of the Pirates’ pitching staff—had never had a catcher like Russell Martin making them look so good.
The Pirates paid Martin and Liriano a combined $10.25 million in 2013, after Liriano met his incentives. The pair produced a performance value of $39 million, giving the Pirates a surplus value of nearly $30 million. Surplus value is a player’s actual wages subtracted from his market value produced. A small-market club such as the Pirates had to find this type of value to win on an unfair economic playing field. The Pirates had to procure a significant return on investment. While the Pirates had unearthed hidden value in Martin, they had created value not just with Liriano, but with every other pitcher on the staff. The impact of Martin could be seen in the most traditional of statistics, ERA:
While Martin’s hidden talents were still underappreciated by the public, Liriano’s first-half numbers were eye-popping, as were Locke’s and the majority of the pitching staff’s. A city that had doubted the Pirates was finally beginning to believe something had changed.
In early July the Pirates produced five straight sellouts, which is believed to be a record in the club’s 132-year history. They entered the All-Star break with a 56-37 record, in the thick of the division race, and in a wild-card position. In suburban Pittsburgh, more and more houses proudly raised a Jolly Roger, the skull and crossbones a de facto club logo. More and more often, Pirates radio and television voice Greg Brown exclaimed, “Raise the Jolly Roger,” at the end of broadcasts, his victory call. Pittsburgh-area department stores featured a strange sight: Pirates merchandise, T-shirts, and jerseys were being prominently displayed near the checkout lines, not Steelers or Penguins gear. In early July, Pirates merchandise sales jumped 50 percent, according to Forbes.com, ranking number two in the game. Hurdle was even noticing an uptick in the number of people wearing Pirates T-shirts and jerseys at his local grocery store and Starbucks. And people weren’t just buying Andrew McCutchen jerseys. T-shirts boasting the names of the Pirates’ five All-Stars, and even some Russell Martin shirts, were being spotted around the reluctant, tortured baseball town that had been skeptical for the first three months of the season. Finally, the city wanted to believe—even if it couldn’t quite understand why or how this band of misfits was winning.
10
GEOGRAPHY TEST
A baseball field has a unique characteristic that differentiates it from every other field, court, or rink in other major professional sports: it does not have uniform dimensions. Every major league park has a unique footprint. Some have larger amounts of foul territory. Some parks feature deep left- or right-field gaps, some shallower. Unlike soccer pitches, football fields, basketball courts, or hockey rinks, major league fields do not have a uniform amount of territory, although the average field is 2.5 acres.
Using Google Earth and ballpark-dimension data from teams, illustrator Lou Spirito overlaid the outlines of every major league baseball stadium’s on-field dimensions, meaning the perimeters of their outfield fences and the walls separating the grandstands from foul territory. He found that PNC Park had the deepest left field in baseball, deeper even than the vast swath of outfield of Coors Field. The deepest left field in the game consists of the outfield lawn from “the notch” to near the left-field foul pole. The notch is where the deep left-center field wall juts away from home plate and forms a triangular patch near the bull pen—410 feet away from home plate. It makes the park a nightmare for right-handed pull hitters seeking home runs to left field, or for left-handed hitters trying to go the other way. The dimensions also made defending left field difficult for a slow-footed player.
In 2013, the Pirates masked their athletic deficiencies in their infield through defensive shifts and their ground-ball-centric pitching. The infield is the one place on a baseball field with uniform dimensions and takes up much less ground than the outfield. There was no way to mask defensive liabilities among the Pirates outfielders at PNC Park. And major league hitters tend to spray fly balls more than ground balls. According to BIS, the average major league hitter pulled 73 percent of his ground balls but just 40 percent of his fly balls. It was yet another challenge confronting the Pirates.
Clint Hurdle knew the importance of outfield defense from his time in Denver. Because fly balls traveled farther in the thin, mile-high air of Denver—about 5 percent farther than at sea level—Coors Field had been designed with a deep outfield to try to normalize home-run totals. This park’s dimensions led to an unintended consequence: because outfielders had to cover more ground and play deeper at Coors Field, it opened up more space for balls to fall in as singles and doubles. So not only were more balls flying over the head of Hurdle’s outfielders, but more balls were likely to fall to the ground ahead of them or in the gaps between.
Hurdle was never a fleet runner. It was the one physical tool he lacked. At Coors Field, Hurdle grew to appreciate athletic outfielders who could cover ground. Teams typically employ their fastest, rangiest outfielder in center field, which most commonly has the greatest amount of ground to cover. But left field at PNC Park was actually larger tha
n center. Hurdle knew that he essentially needed another center fielder to play left field. You could mask an infielder’s limitations by aligning him more smartly via shifts, but even with data-based outfield alignment you couldn’t hide lack of speed in the outfield or a player who ran poor routes to intercept fly balls and line drives. The Pirates needed an elite athlete to cover left field, and Hurdle needed someone to find him that player. That someone was Rene Gayo, who more than anyone else helped the Pirates meet their geographical challenges and take advantage of some of the game’s other undervalued skills: speed and athleticism.
To find those underrated athletic players, assets difficult to find in the June draft as America’s top amateur athletes often chose other sports, Huntington allowed Gayo to more than double the international staff under him, with the Pirates employing twenty-four full- and part-time scouts in Latin America in 2013. In Latin America, players were not subject to the draft, and a good scout could find cheap, undervalued talent there. Moreover, while on a visit to the Dominican Republic, Pirates owner Bob Nutting had been appalled at the conditions at the club’s Dominican academy, where the Pirates’ Dominican Summer League team plays along with other prospects invited to train there. Nutting paid $5 million to build a sparkling new facility, which opened in 2008, that Time magazine called the “Ritz of the Dominican.” The facility, a jewel among Dominican academies, provided a competitive edge for the Pirates in recruiting. Still, it was Gayo’s philosophy and his eyes that were paramount in solving the Pirates’ outfield defensive dilemma.
The United States brought baseball to Cuba. And the brothers Ignacio and Ubaldo Aloma introduced baseball to the Dominican Republic when they fled Cuba and founded a sugar plantation there, forming the first two baseball clubs there in 1891, according to author Adrian Burgos, Jr. Today, no other place on earth generates as much baseball talent per capita as the Dominican Republic, which is located on the eastern half of the island of Hispaniola. Despite a small population of 10 million, equivalent to that of Ohio, nearly 11 percent of major league baseball players are Dominican natives. Baseball is the country’s passion, and unlike in the United States, where the best athletes have a variety of options to choose from, baseball is the only sport in the island country, and excelling at it is for some a way to a better life.
Reno Gayo is a Cuban immigrant. Corpulent and mustached, charismatic and gregarious, he commands the attention of any audience before him. He is the Pirates’ director of Latin American scouting operations, and few have excavated more value from the area than Gayo. In an era when top Dominican players sign seven-figure contracts like first-round picks in baseball’s draft, Gayo signed the Pirates’ number one overall prospect, Gregory Polanco, for $150,000, and their top middle-infield prospect, Alen Hanson, for a similarly modest bonus of $90,000.
Gayo’s rise to prominence is an unlikely story. A second-generation American, he likes to say he was made in Cuba and born in the United States. In the early 1960s Gayo said his parents were members of the Student Revolutionary Directorate, a counterrevolutionary group in Cuba plotting against Castro. Gayo’s godfather was the vice president of the organization, which worked with the CIA in an attempt to overthrow the Communist government. He still remembers overhearing dinner conversations as a child where the grown-ups talked about having taken apart machine guns and having set explosives. It seemed strange to him that his parents, aunts, and uncles had all been guerrillas.
“They were basically, I hate saying this, they were terrorists against Castro,” Gayo said. “They were sneaking and ambushing like something out of a movie. Hard to believe these same people did that.”
They fled Cuba after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and settled in Miami, where Gayo’s mother learned she was pregnant. Gayo was born in 1962. What helped Gayo’s father assimilate was a love of baseball, an interest he passed down to his son. Gayo’s father had played in the Cuban League, the second-oldest professional baseball league after the National League. The only time it has ever ceased to play was during the Spanish-American War. Gayo’s father once saw Babe Ruth play, and he caught Tommy de la Cruz, who technically broke the color line in 1944 with the Reds. One of the few pictures in Gayo’s office is of his father with de la Cruz.
Gayo only saw his father cry twice. The first time was when he listened to a speech by Pirates Hall of Fame outfielder and Puerto Rican native Roberto Clemente, who addressed a major league crowd in Spanish, and then in English. Clemente, who played from 1955 to 1972, was an advocate of improving race relations, and as a testament to his character, each year baseball acknowledges a player for his good deeds off the field by presenting the Roberto Clemente Award.
The second time Gayo saw his father cry was at Gayo’s graduation from St. Mary’s in San Antonio, Texas, where he got a degree in economics.
Gayo had the same dream as his father: he wanted to play professional baseball. He was a catcher at St. Mary’s. He went undrafted but was signed by Reds scouting director Cam Bonifay, who later became Pirates general manager. Gayo’s professional playing career lasted all of 30 at bats before his knees betrayed him. Gayo wanted to stay in the game, and Bonifay saw a young man with a feel for the game. In 1989, Cam Bonifay hired Gayo to scout Texas and Louisiana part-time for the Pirates. In 1994 he received his first big break when Jesse Flores, who was the scouting supervisor for the Indians, recommended that the Indians hire him as a full-time scout. Gayo became responsible for scouting south Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico and drove tens of thousands of miles doing it.
Gayo says lots of people talk about working hard, but few actually do. Sometimes he’ll look around at the scouts sitting near him, his competition. He’ll see some look at their wristwatches disinterestedly. He calls them “watch lookers.” He believes they have no chance against him. They don’t have the patience or the desire to look under every rock for the next big thing.
Gayo said one competitive advantage he has tapped into in Latin America is simply outworking his rivals. Gayo said many scouts and scouting directors in the Dominican Republic do not stray far from the capital, Santo Domingo, and its plusher hotels. Gayo is willing to travel to the poorest towns and stay in cheap hotels at six hundred pesos per night so long as they have clean sheets. In short, Gayo is willing to collect more data on players. Said Washington Nationals international-scouting director Johnny DiPuglia to Baseball America, “A lot of guys won’t do [what Gayo does]. They won’t stay at hotels with no cable, no TV, dirty running water. I’ve done it. I try to avoid it now. I’ve done it plenty of times. I got tired of getting bacteria in my stomach.”
In the winter, when there is no major league baseball and Gayo is home from international scouting trips, he’ll watch old VCR videotape on his flat-screen television. He studies Tony Gwynn’s swing. He watches film of Roy Halladay in high school, seeing what a great athlete with a hiccup in his delivery looked like before he became a Cy Young Award winner. It might seem like a waste of time, but Gayo is adding to his mental library of player comparisons or comps, as they are called in the scouting community. To many, comps are dangerous. They are subjective. For Gayo, scouting begins with learning history, learning what stars looked like before they were stars. These are his data points.
“I’ll sit around and watch all that stuff, and the stuff in between like when the pitcher is walking around [after a pitch],” Gayo said. “I’ll sit there and watch that. I’ve been doing that for years. You might think I’m crazy.”
While Gayo has built an internal library of comps he has also created a philosophy. Over two decades of playing, watching, and scouting the game, he has learned through trial and error the type of player he prefers. The players he likes all have a common trait: they can run. These players were unlike Gayo, who was never fast, and now has balky knees. But he loved watching athletes run. He remembered seeing Bo Jackson run at Auburn and thinking it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Gayo prized speed, in part influenced by Whitey Herzog’s speed
y Cardinals and the Royals teams of the 1980s, teams Gayo loved watching.
Gayo has always been searching for fast athletes who can swing a bat. During the steroid era, in the 1990s and early 2000s, power had been at a premium while speed and athleticism were devalued. Teams simply tried to outslug each other with supersize batters. In today’s game, Gayo likes to say, “the pharmacy is closed.” With the advent of performance-enhancing-drug testing in 2004, speed and athleticism became more important. But even entering the 2013 season, defensive value was still not perfectly understood and therefore likely undervalued. The judgment of a player’s range and ability to run efficient routes was still largely based upon subjective and anecdotal evidence. These undervalued players were the ones Gayo wanted.
“Running is a very important thing in baseball,” Gayo said. “It’s a common denominator in offense and defense. It’s not just speed, it’s the threat of it that makes a difference.”
Despite being fluent in Spanish and English, Gayo had never scouted in Latin America until he was promoted to work as a Latin American scout for the Indians in 1999 by former general manager John Hart. Gayo was a perfect fit. In two years in that role, Gayo signed Willy Taveras, Jhonny Peralta, Roberto Hernandez, Rafael Perez, and Edward Mujica to modest deals, all of whom eventually became productive major league players. In 2001, the Indians came under the leadership of a new general manager in Mark Shapiro, who restructured their scouting department. Gayo was pulled out of Latin America. When the news hit, seven teams contacted him the following day. The first team that asked for permission to speak with Gayo was the Pirates.