Big Data Baseball Page 19

  The last time the Pirates had secured a winning season was on September 12, 1992, four days after Gerrit Cole’s second birthday. One day after turning twenty-three years old, with a city anxiously hoping and waiting for history to be made, Cole took the mound in Arlington, Texas, to try to end the twenty-year losing streak against Texas Rangers ace Yu Darvish, one of the best pitchers in the American League. Texas paid nearly $100 million to Darvish and his Japanese league team for his services. The Pirates could never afford such a pitcher in free agency, whether the market was domestic or international. The only place they could find similar talent was at the top of the draft, where they found Cole. The Pirates needed Cole to be better than he had been over 15 mostly good but not dominant starts since entering the rotation in early June after Wandy Rodriguez left the game in Atlanta with elbow pain. Pirates top veteran pitchers Francisco Liriano and A. J. Burnett had been less effective in recent weeks. Starling Marte was still out. The entire Pirate team seemed to be sputtering at the wrong time, stalling before their final ascent to a summit—Win No. 82.

  Clint Hurdle has said his thought-of-the-day e-mails are not typically designed for a particular player or member of the audience, which includes hundreds of recipients. Rather, he believes the message is often something that he, personally, needs to absorb that day. He often feels as if he is writing to himself. The once reality-deaf Hurdle had now become introspective and in search of truth. Still, his message on September 9 seemed tailored specifically for Cole, a UCLA product. This e-mail was first shared in an ESPN.com story on Hurdle, as more national reporters began circling around the Pirates and their compelling story, cramping Hurdle’s office during pregame interviews:

  Tim Wrightman, a former All-American UCLA football player, tells a story about how, as a rookie lineman in the National Football League, he was up against the legendary pass rusher Lawrence Taylor. Taylor was not only physically powerful and uncommonly quick, but a master at verbal intimidation. Looking Tim in the eye, [Taylor] said, “Sonny, get ready. I’m going left and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  Wrightman coolly responded, “Sir, is that your left or mine?”

  The question froze Taylor long enough to allow Wrightman to throw a perfect block on him.

  It’s amazing what we can accomplish if we refuse to be afraid. Fear—whether it’s of pain, failure or rejection—is a toxic emotion that creates monsters in our mind that consume self-confidence and intimidate us from doing our best or sometimes even trying at all.

  Make a difference today.

  Love Clint

  Hurdle wanted his players to perform without fear and for Cole to pitch without fear. Hurdle often spoke about “fearing nothing” but “respecting everything” regarding the game. He talked about the ideal mind-set of a player as being that of a “backyard ballplayer,” thinking back to when there was no pressure in playing as a child. From that came a freedom from fear, a freedom to perform instinctively, Hurdle suspected.

  The Pirates needed Cole to make a difference this day and going forward. The team’s pitching depth had been tested due to a variety of injuries. With Marte hurt, the Pirates needed fewer balls hit into play. They needed more strikeouts from their pitchers and in particular from Cole, the number one overall pick in the 2011 draft.

  Cole looked the part of a dominant pitcher. He was six feet four, 250 pounds, and broad shouldered, like a linebacker in the center of the field. He had grown a thick beard and mastered a piercing, no-nonsense glare on the mound. Cole’s skill was never in question, but the dominance of his raw ability had not yet translated into results. Nearly 70 percent of his offerings were fastballs, an unusual reliance on one pitch, and he had gotten by mostly with rare velocity. His fastball averaged 96.3 mph, the top speed among major league starting pitchers in 2013. In a game earlier that season against the Los Angeles Angels, Cole threw eight 100 mph pitches, topping out at 101.8 mph. Cole might have been a little too hyped up that night, performing as a major leaguer for the first time before friends and family in Southern California.

  But despite his impressive velocity, Cole owned a below-average strikeout rate of 6.2 strikeouts per 9 innings over the first two months of the season at Triple-A Indianapolis. Cole had been a one-pitch pitcher, and to become something more he had to evolve, and he did on that balmy night in Texas.

  Predicting what can become of someone’s talent is one thing; developing it is another. The early-season question regarding Cole in 2013, and dating back to his college career, was “Where are the strikeouts? Where is the dominance?” Cole bristled at the question earlier in the year when reporters asked it. Some evaluators suggested the problem was that Cole threw everything so hard. He threw a 90 mph changeup and a 90 mph slider, so there was some truth to this. However, on September 9, a different Cole emerged and the strikeouts arrived.

  In Texas, Cole unveiled a new weapon. Hurdle and the Pirates perhaps no longer wanted Cole to have any fear in throwing his new pitch, his curveball. The time to showcase a new trick was now.

  On the sixteenth and most important start of his young career, Cole took the mound knowing that the club’s veteran starting pitchers had faltered in recent starts. In the first inning, Cole struck out Elvis Andrus with a 98 mph fastball painting the outside corner of the plate. Fastball location had been a focus of his work in spring training and at Triple-A, and he had improved. But in the third inning, the baseball world saw his new weapon. Cole got Leonys Martin to swing and miss at a sharp-breaking curveball, and Ian Kinsler followed by badly missing another 83 mph curve. In the fifth, Mitch Moreland swung and missed an 84 mph curveball that had a sharp, sweeping breaking action. Geovany Soto also followed suit by swinging over the top of another breaking pitch. It wasn’t just the movement of the curveball that helped Cole. The pitch, roughly 15 mph slower than his fastball, was disrupting the timing of the Rangers hitters.

  “How do you create swing and miss? You get guys anxious, thinking, ‘I have to cover this,’” Cole said. “There is an art to striking guys out. [Milwaukee Brewers starter] Marco Estrada throws eighty-nine mph and struck out nine of our guys. He’s clearly [messing] with some dudes. How is he getting them anxious?”

  Cole produced anxiety in every hitter with a 100 mph fastball. The difference in speed on his curveball played on that anxiety. Cole continued to match Darvish frame for shutout frame. In the sixth, Adrian Beltre grounded to short for the inning’s final out on a 99 mph pitch. The fiery Cole pounded his mitt with his right fist and screamed something primal into the humid air as he walked off the mound toward the visiting dugout.

  In the seventh, a 97 mph two-seam fastball from Cole trailed back over the plate for a strike against Moreland for his career-best 9th strikeout. He had allowed just 3 hits, 2 walks, and no runs. He teammates congratulated him between innings.

  A Pedro Alvarez double in the seventh allowed Clint Barmes to score the game’s only run in a 1–0 Pittsburgh victory. The Pirates had reached the elusive 82nd win. They had ended the longest streak of consecutive losing seasons in North American pro sports history. On the cover the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review’s sports section the next morning were two simple, powerful, and golden numbers—82—designed in the Pirates uniform font and set against a black background.

  Pirates fans celebrated, sharing pictures of their celebrations on social media. Some fans literally had champagne on ice at home. The Pirates played it cool—no on-field, impromptu mosh pit or plastic-encased lockers in the visiting clubhouse to protect wardrobes from showers of alcoholic beverages. No parade was planned along the Boulevard of the Allies back in Pittsburgh, and Cole was not lifted upon his teammates’ shoulders. Most of the players had experienced little of the losing streak. Only Neil Walker, who had grown up in suburban Pittsburgh and was drafted by the Pirates out of high school, had experienced all twenty consecutive years of losing. The win aroused different emotions in the clubhouse than in the fan base. Yes, reaching win No. 82 mattered to an embat
tled Pirates front office and coaching staff, but what mattered more to the Pirates clubhouse that night was seeing Cole take the next step and securing a critical win in a pennant race. But a troubling question hovered about: How long would Cole continue to pitch in 2013?

  Just a year earlier, in early September, in the midst of a pennant race, the Washington Nationals decided to stop allowing young ace Stephen Strasburg, a former number one overall pick like Cole, to pitch as he reached the team’s self-imposed innings limit. Strasburg’s shadow loomed over Cole. Injuries to young pitchers in the game were epidemic. Of the ten hardest-throwing starting pitchers in 2014, only Gerrit Cole and Angels starter Garrett Richards had not required Tommy John surgery to date in their careers. Only two universal tools are designed to protect pitchers and prevent injury, and they are simplistic—counting the number of pitches a starter throws per start and the number of innings he throws in a season—and the effectiveness of these were extremely doubtful. The Nationals had set an arbitrary innings limit to protect their young ace from overwork in his second year back from surgery, and this triggered speculation about Cole. Would he, too, be shut down in the midst of a pennant race?

  Much like the Pirates’ march to win No. 82, Cole’s innings were also being counted and monitored by the public. As the calendar turned to September, Cole was on a pace for 190 pitched innings between the majors and Triple-A, more than a 25 percent jump from his 2012 total of 150. Major league teams are often hesitant to increase a young pitcher’s workload by such a percentage. Unlike the Nationals, who announced their plans publicly for Strasburg a year earlier, the Pirates remained quiet about Cole. When asked if Cole had a specific innings limit, Pirates general manager Neal Huntington told a reporter, “If we ever get there, we’ll let you know.”

  People had the false impression that the 2013 Pirates were a young team. That narrative was created to explain their unlikely and difficult-to-comprehend success. People thought of the team as a group that had found its way and matured. But in truth the Pirates were a middle-aged baseball club. The average age of the twenty-five-man roster was 28.4, the twelfth-oldest in baseball. The Pirates division rival, the first-place Cardinals, who were headed to a sixth straight winning season, were a much younger club, the fourth youngest in MLB. While building up the farm system was a key tenet of Huntington’s master plan, the farm system that he inherited was ranked 26th by Baseball America in 2008, and few in the first five draft classes under Huntington had impacted the major league club. Unlike in football or basketball, it takes years to develop prospects in baseball, even first-round selections.

  After years of nickel-and-diming the draft, Huntington had finally convinced the ownership to concentrate spending there, on the one talent-acquisition tool that a small-market team shouldn’t skimp on, the one place they could expect to find future star talent at a relatively reasonable cost.

  The shift in strategy began in 2008 when the Pirates selected Pedro Alvarez second overall. He was ranked as the draft’s top talent by Baseball America, and he eventually signed for a club record of $6 million. Huntington and club president Frank Coonelly began implementing a plan for the Pirates to play catch-up, to try to jam two draft classes into one. They pushed to spend on the draft. Not only would the Pirates pay the asking price for premium talent selected in the first round, they heavily engaged in overslotting, meaning that they exceeded Major League Baseball’s recommended signing bonuses for draft positions lower in the draft for talented players who had slid due to their hefty signing demands. Some of Dan Fox’s first assignments from Huntington were to study the amateur draft. From 2008 to 2012, Huntington’s first five seasons with the Pirates, they spent $51.4 million on draft bonuses, more than any other team in baseball and a record in the sport for a five-year period.

  Moreover, Huntington and the Pirates knew they could not compete in the free agent marketplace for top-of-the-rotation pitching, so instead this became a focus of their draft efforts. From 2009 to 2011, in the top ten rounds of the draft, twenty-two of the Pirates’ top thirty selections in each of those three drafts were pitchers (and seventeen were selected out of high school). They signed eighteen of those arms to bonuses totaling $25.6 million—more than they paid their major league starting pitching staff in 2013. They doled out seven-figure contracts to high school pitchers such as Colton Cain ($1.2 million), Stetson Allie ($2.3 million), Zachary Von Rosenberg ($1.2 million), and Clay Holmes ($1.2 million), who each fell out of the first round due to signing demands and were drafted at positions—such as in the seventh round—where players typically sign for thousands, not millions, of dollars.

  The Pirates weren’t just spending on any pitchers. They were seeking a specific type of pitcher: one with a tall, lean body that produced promising throwing velocity and had the potential to fill out and become stronger. The front office challenged their scouts with finding the next Justin Verlander and Stephen Strasburg, and with the first overall pick in the 2011 draft the Pirates selected a pitcher comparable in size and talent: Gerrit Cole. In June of 2013, Cole was the first potential impact starting pitcher to arrive to the major leagues from the Huntington draft classes. He was the bluest of diamonds in baseball: a young, relatively polished power arm who was under club control for six-plus seasons.

  The Pirates had employed Dan Fox’s math to find hidden value in shifts and free agents such as Francisco Liriano and Russell Martin, but to sustain success and be competitive every year they had to have a productive farm system. With injuries mounting in 2013 and their veteran starting pitchers struggling in the second half of the season, the Pirates needed some of the talent from the drafts to begin helping the club. They needed players such as Cole to arrive and make an impression. And just as important, they needed pitchers such as Cole to remain healthy.

  Cole had always been carefully handled in a dangerous environment. He was raised in Santa Ana, California, just south of Los Angeles, where pitchers are the most at risk for elbow injury in the world. According to Jon Roegele’s Tommy John database, which includes all known 839 Tommy John surgeries performed on pitchers through September 2014, more minor and major league pitchers who have had the surgery are from the Los Angeles metro area than from any other metro area in the country, or from Canada, Mexico, and Japan combined. This apparently has happened for a variety of factors. For starters, Southern California’s mild year-round temperatures permit year-round throwing. Moreover, affluence enables parents to send their promising sons to private instructors. As draft bonuses and major league salaries increase, it further spurs the sports-specialization culture in Southern California, and the wear on the elbow in baseball.

  While Cole came from a well-to-do family and received private instruction, his family made sure months off from throwing were included in his pitching program. Two-month breaks twice a year were built into his year-round pitching schedule.

  Unlike most fathers with sons playing baseball at a high level, Cole’s father, Mark, was a man of science with a degree in physiopathology, the study of the mechanisms of disease, from the University of Southern California. He was interested in how data could prevent injury and was particularly fascinated by Sports Illustrated writer Tom Verducci’s data-driven piece in the early 2000s that linked substantial year-to-year innings increases with injury for young professional pitchers. Mark began counting Gerrit’s pitches as early as Little League.

  In high school, Mark created a system where Cole rated his soreness and stiffness levels on a scale of 1 to 10 after every start. Cole was permitted to throw just once a week while pitching for his Orange Lutheran High School team and at UCLA. So while scores of other young, high-velocity arms were breaking down across the game, Cole entered professional baseball with less mileage on his arm. He was also carefully managed by the Pirates. His Triple-A strikeout totals were lower than expected and his strikeout-generating curveball did not come into play until September by design. There was a reason why observers in Indianapolis said they rarely,
if ever, saw Cole throw the curveball. While the Pirates are secretive about their injury-prevention strategies, it’s believed they do not treat all pitches as equal. It’s thought that the Pirates believe some pitches place more stress on young arms than others.

  Cole notes that a pitcher such as Miami Marlins star Jose Fernandez, who had Tommy John surgery in 2014, would not have been allowed to throw his curveball and slider so often if he had been drafted by the Pirates. “As good as some of our guys’ breaking balls are, that’s just not the emphasis,” Cole said.

  Cole suggested that even in college at UCLA he was not leaning on his breaking pitches as much as Stephen Strasburg did at San Diego State University, perhaps where the damage to his elbow began.

  “If you look at pitchers and look at longevity, not only throughout a season but throughout a career, the guys who stick around are the guys that have the best fastball command,” Cole said. “That’s driven probably from statistics, but I don’t need statistics to tell me that matters.”

  As analysts and fans wondered why Cole wasn’t striking out batters at a high rate at Triple-A, and where the dominance was in his first months in the big leagues, he explained strikeouts were not his focus; developing fastball command was the first building block.

  Will Carroll lives in Indianapolis and often travels to Victory Field there to watch top young arms when they come through either playing for or against the Pirates’ Triple-A affiliate there. Carroll has dedicated his career to studying injuries in sports, authoring a book titled Saving the Pitcher, and was the one who hired Dan Fox to write columns for BaseballProspectus.com. Carroll is frustrated by the industry’s general lack of interest in data-based injury-preventive practices, and technological solutions, but believes that Fox is employing a “smarter pitch count” that should help benefit his players.

  Carroll notes that when he and Fox worked together at Baseball Prospectus, Fox was particularly interested in the notion of “pitch cost,” the idea that not every pitch places equal stress on the elbow and shoulder. Moreover, a prevailing thought is that higher-stress situations in games result in even more stress and fatigue on elbows and shoulders. With smarter pitch counts, pitches would be weighted differently depending upon the type of pitch and the stress level of the game situation in which the pitch is thrown. For instance, pitching with the bases empty is thought to be less stressful than pitching with the bases loaded.