Big Data Baseball Page 2
Time was a scarce resource in Pittsburgh. Patience was wearing thin and the pressure was on. In each of Huntington’s first five seasons, the losing continued. The Pirates had successful neighbors: the Steelers had won Super Bowls in 2005 and 2008, and the NHL’s Penguins won the Stanley Cup in 2009. T-shirts were printed with the quip PITTSBURGH: THE CITY OF CHAMPIONS … AND THE PIRATES.
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Huntington and Hurdle both knew that time was running out for them with the Pirates. At the end of the season speculation was rampant that Huntington and his staff would be fired. Many in the public wanted a regime change. Not until November 6 did owner Bob Nutting end that speculation, telling the press that there would be no personnel changes. Nutting was frustrated much like the fans were after the 2012 season. Said Nutting on November 6, 2012, in speaking with the press: “If you’re angry, you count to ten. If you’re really angry, you count to one hundred. If you’re incredibly infuriated and frustrated, you wait four weeks.” After the season ended, he began conducting a review of the club examining every aspect of baseball operations. Ultimately, the Pirates’ owner decided there would be no scapegoat. Still, Huntington and Hurdle could not afford any more seasons like the last two. They needed to win to save their jobs, but since Huntington was younger, he could more afford to fail. He was part of the new school and would be able to find another prominent role in the business if things didn’t work out in Pittsburgh. Hurdle, however, was viewed as a traditional, old-school manager, a stubborn and resistant man trained in twentieth-century baseball orthodoxy. Sure, he might fit as a bench coach somewhere at a dramatically lower salary and in a much less relevant role, but this might well be his last chance to lead a team.
Hurdle and Huntington had scheduled this one-on-one meeting in advance of their organizational meetings to get on the same page, examine their roster assets, and brainstorm some sort of plan—to manufacture a miracle. They met at Hurdle’s home, around a dining-room table, to keep it private and to reduce the number of voices involved. Some speculated that they would not only need to produce more wins than losses in 2013, but also make the postseason as well. They needed a dramatic improvement to build public confidence and job stability. They had won 79 games in 2012 and would need to win around 94 games in 2013 to ensure a postseason berth; in baseball, such a 15-game improvement is considerable. Meanwhile most preseason publications would pick them to finish fourth or fifth in the National League Central Division, and to record their twenty-first consecutive losing season.
After the two men exchanged small-talk formalities, a sobering reality emerged. The Pirates were to be allotted some $15 million for free agent spending on their 2013 roster, which is a relatively paltry amount in baseball, considering that an average starting position player or starting pitcher was commanding $10 million per season in the off-season free agent market. The Pirates had to spread those dollars over at least three vacant spots on the twenty-five-man roster. They would not be able to spend their way to a winning season. They would have to shrewdly allocate the dollars they did have.
Huntington believed teams had to be built through the draft. But typically it takes at least five years for a draft pick to become established at the major league level, and no professional draft is as inefficient and inexact as baseball’s. While the Pirates farm system was beginning to show promise, with more depth and emerging impact prospects, the help it offered would not be immediate. From Baseball America’s list of the top ten Pirates prospects entering the 2013 season, only pitcher Gerrit Cole was expected to join the club at some point in the season.
Hurdle and Huntington would somehow have to increase the sum of the club’s individual parts. But was that even possible when the 2012 roster would comprise 90 percent of their 2013 team? If you consider the roster they reviewed early that off-season, it was akin to a package of baseball cards that contained mostly flawed players.
The pitching rotation was riddled with questions marks, and the club did not have a capable starting catcher. Everyone in the organization agreed that finding a catcher was a priority. The Pirates had declined the $3.5 million option on veteran Rod Barajas, a subpar defensive catcher.
In the infield, at third base, Huntington’s first draft pick, Pedro Alvarez, had 30 homers in 2012, but he also had one of the most extreme swing-and-miss rates in the game and played questionable defense in the field. First base was projected to be a platoon between Gaby Sanchez and Garrett Jones, neither of whom was a star-level talent.
Veteran shortstop Clint Barmes was a favorite of Hurdle’s. He was a good clubhouse guy, a veteran who wouldn’t squabble about playing time, was amiable toward reporters, and had made himself into an above-average defensive shortstop. But Barmes’s bat was in decline. They weren’t expecting improvement from him, but hoped he would continue to be a quality defensive player.
There were some bright spots. Neil Walker had developed into a solid regular at second base. Twenty-six-year-old center fielder Andrew McCutchen had produced career bests across the board the previous season and finished third in voting for the National League’s MVP, but could they rely on him to be even better?
Starling Marte had flashed power and speed as a twenty-three-year-old rookie in 2012. Hurdle planned on penciling him into the leadoff spot as a first-time everyday player. But besides McCutchen, he was the only other player in the lineup with above-average speed. Overall, the club had more question marks than strengths.
At their meeting, Huntington and Hurdle had no dreams or unrealistic hopes. What they had was a 79-win team from the previous year, and on paper, without significant help, it looked as if they would be a sub-.500 team yet again. They were not a particularly young team; young teams carried the hope of improvement through experience. Rather, they were only the twelfth-youngest team in the sport in 2012. The average age of the players on their roster was just shy of twenty-nine years. These were not comforting realities. But they would still somehow have to find a way to add 15 wins without adding much payroll. It was an impossible task.
They asked themselves during the meeting, How do we maximize what we have internally? How do we get the absolute most out of these returning players? What’s the biggest impact we can make from a strategic standpoint?
“Sometimes the easy fix isn’t to get another player, or to go buy a free agent, or reconstruct this or that,” Hurdle said. “You look at what the challenges are. You look at the talent pool that you have. What other adjustments can you make to enhance performance?”
With no money to spend on any big-name sluggers, they could do nothing from a run-scoring perspective, and players’ offensive skills were thought to be hardened and difficult to change. You either could hit or you couldn’t. The Pirates were stuck with the hitting abilities of their current roster.
At the center of their discussions was one unexplored frontier the Pirates’ analytics team believed they might be able to exploit: run prevention. Defense. Preventing runs was one of the untapped areas of opportunity remaining in the game, an area the Pirates had not maximized in the first two years under Hurdle. Their analysts had reexamined the way the Pirates played defense and had developed data-driven strategies for curbing the number of runs scored against them. Executing some of the theories did not require adding any payroll; other data-based ideas suggested they could afford some undervalued players on the free agent market.
What Huntington’s data-crunching lieutenants were championing was perhaps the most aggressive, universal approach to defense in baseball history. This new strategy was on a completely different level from the Moneyball revolution led by the Oakland A’s a decade earlier, or even from the data filtered by DiamondView, which predated the A’s approach. The A’s had tapped into on-base percentage, an undervalued stat that could be found on the back of baseball cards, visible to any team. Huntington was proposing to take advantage of some possibly significant opportunities in the game revealed by data that had not previously been recorded and analyzed. Th
e strategies demanded Hurdle embrace an avalanche of new data, to trust the millions of new data points that had entered the game and were stored in the Pirates’ powerful new computer database. Smarter baseball theory was for so long obfuscated by a lack of data. Now those numbers were flooding in from a variety of places: from an automated pitch-recognition system known as PITCHf/x, which began being installed in major league parks in 2007; from a competing pitch-tracking system from TrackMan, a Danish company that had made its name in golf using radar to track ball flight; and from an army of analysts hired by companies such as Baseball Info Solutions to track play-by-play details that had never before been recorded.
Because so much data had entered the game so quickly, it had overwhelmed teams. Most organizations were employing little of it, but Huntington was paying attention. To enact the defensive plan driven by the front office, incredible change was necessary in several key areas.
Player positioning had to change. Since the dawn of the game, defensive alignment had not been based upon data but rather by placing players equidistant from each other. In the new plan, players would have to shift from areas on the field where they had been stationed their entire careers.
The club would have to improve their pitchers’ performance and maximize the defensive alignments behind them. Pitchers would have to learn to trust to change what and where they threw.
Ownership would have to sign off on and invest in the belief that a catcher’s most important skill wasn’t easily visible and that a pitcher’s traditional stats weren’t revealing true ability.
Cooperation, collaboration, conversation, and respect had to be the norm from the bottom to the top of the organization. Old-school coaches had to accept data-based decisions and concepts from men who had never set foot in a professional batter’s box. The data analysts had to be better integrated into the Pirates culture and clubhouse.
This last point was critical. Over the last decade, almost every major league team had hired at least one number cruncher to analyze data. However, a common grumbling from those analysts was that so little of their research was finding its way to the field. The gatekeeper to implementing the data was the manager. While managers had lost significant influence over roster construction and player acquisitions in recent decades, they still largely controlled on-field strategies. The manager made out the lineup card every day. He decided upon game strategy and had more direct communication with players than anyone else in the organization.
While the front office’s plan could be the most elegant and dramatic ever devised, if the coaching staff didn’t buy in, it wouldn’t work. While many of baseball’s executives and front-office staff now had Ivy League roots, and little if any playing experience, coaches were almost exclusively ex-players. Huntington could not go find another manager. He was essentially a lame duck. He had to go into the season with Hurdle fully on board. The Pirates had picked Hurdle in part because of his leadership and communication skills. But also because they thought he might be willing to embrace more new-age concepts. But in many ways Hurdle was a traditionalist trained in the game’s twentieth-century thinking, and he had remained largely conventional in on-field strategy in 2012. He referred to his players as “men” and often spoke of the importance of the heartbeat, the human element of the game. He didn’t believe in trying to measure everything. He believed in seeing. Yet, Hurdle was being challenged to trust in something that he couldn’t see. While much of the plan was devised in the front office, the implementation of the entire plan rested on Hurdle’s shoulders.
2
DEMONS
Clint Hurdle’s picture graced the cover of Sports Illustrated’s March 20, 1978, issue with the headline “This Year’s Phenom: Kansas City’s Clint Hurdle.” The picture was taken as the Kansas City Royals held a morning workout in spring training. His face was youthful, but to this day he boasts the same boulevard-wide, pearly smile. His generous mop of once-brown locks has changed to the silver hair that he spikes up like a porcupine. His complexion, no longer tanned and smooth, is reddened and creased and, depending upon his anger level, morphs to various shades of purple. That his appearance has changed so dramatically speaks to the amount of time that has passed.
That magazine cover keeps showing up. Sometimes it arrives in the mail from an autograph seeker far away; sometimes he is served with one in person. It’s a cruel reminder of a ceiling not reached, of potential withered on the vine. Few people are reminded of their past, of their potential, of their previous inability to change, as often as Hurdle.
He looked at the photo on the magazine cover and thought about how much his life had changed since then. He thought about how much he had changed. Every time he sees the cover, he is shocked at how young he looks. He tried to think back at what he was thinking then. What was he doing? Why was he doing it? What where his priorities? He knew that too often back then his priorities were in the wrong place. He tried not to have regrets, at least outwardly. He was a leader after all, and leaders don’t express doubts in public.
He jokes that he’s not sure if they keep reprinting the Sports Illustrated cover as some sort of commemorative edition documenting his baseball failure or if the covers just keep showing up because fans stumble upon them while housecleaning.
“Would I have handled it better [without all the pressure]? There’s no doubt,” Hurdle said during a press conference at the 2013 winter meetings. “But I believe I am the man I am today from the things I’ve gone through in the past.”
Said Hurdle during a news conference several years earlier when asked about the magazine cover, “I’ve had many demons I’ve had to run from. The [magazine cover] isn’t a demon.”
One of Hurdle’s demons was expectation.
In the spring of 1978, Hurdle was one of the top prospects in baseball, perhaps the very top. Spring is a season of promise in baseball. If you squint hard enough, if you dream big enough, anything is possible for any team or for any player. But sometimes you can squint too hard and expectations can become too grand and unrealistic. The perceptions can begin to bend reality. Fans always want to believe what is next holds the promise of being better. Maybe even executives and coaches believe that, too. They’re human after all. Everyone in Kansas City that spring thought stardom was not just possible but a sure thing for Hurdle. He was the next George Brett. On the magazine cover, Hurdle appeared to believe it, too. In that moment he looked as if he had not a worry, as if he had never experienced failure. And he really hadn’t yet.
When he launched balls with ease in batting practice, teammates stopped and watched, which is noteworthy, considering batting practice is typically mundane. He was gregarious, outgoing, buoyed by the confidence that came with good looks and a lithe, six-foot-three frame that towered above most of his contemporaries.
His route to cover-boy status began in Michigan, where Hurdle was born July 30, 1957, to Clint Hurdle Sr., who had played shortstop at Ferris State. It was there that Clint senior caught the eye of a Chicago Cubs scout, but ended up being drafted into the military after graduation. After several years in the service, he was discharged. Jobs were sparse in his native Big Rapids, a small town located in central Michigan. In 1961, a friend recommended him for a job at the Kennedy Space Center. With few dollars to his name, Clint senior took a chance. He took his pregnant wife, son, and daughter to Florida where the Apollo missions began in October. Clint senior began at the bottom. His first job at the NASA complex was separating streams of paper and their carbon copies being spit out from computer printers. He was introduced to room-sized computers and their noisy, spinning tape drives. He learned computer functions and programming, and worked his way up as a subcontractor with NASA at companies like RCA and Grumman Aerospace. He eventually advanced to become a director of computer operations and maintenance at the complex. His division was responsible for monitoring the computers of the rockets and shuttles up until lift off, when mission control took over in Houston. Clint senior eventually oversaw m
ore than 300 people and once a month, he went around and met with as many subordinates as he could, from top lieutenants to entry-level workers.
“I went around and talked to everyone who worked for me.… I wanted to make sure they felt they were part of the program,” Clint senior said. “People learn to trust you, you gain credibility.”
Said Hurdle of his father: “He was a connector of people. He put people in the right spots.”
Hurdle also benefitted from the move south. In the Southeast, because of climate, baseball is played year-round, which is why Florida and the Atlanta area have become some of baseball’s greatest hotbeds for amateur talent. Kids there simply can play more often. On Sunday afternoons after church, when Hurdle’s friends went surfing at the nearby Atlantic beaches, Hurdle wanted to practice. Clint senior threw batting practice to Hurdle at the Merritt Island High School field. They would hit for hours with his mother and two sisters serving as outfielders to retrieve the balls he launched.
Clint senior gave Hurdle drills to strengthen his swing from swinging a lead bat to constantly squeezing hand grips. When Clint senior was working second shifts, son and mother would play catch after school. Clint played baseball year-round and got a taste of the pro game as a sometimes batboy for the then Cocoa Astros of the Florida State League, meeting future big leaguers such as John Mayberry.
Hurdle grew to tower over his five-foot-eight father and developed a perfect power hitter’s frame that gave him a lethal combination of length and leverage to go along with God-given bat speed, the product of quick-twitch muscles and a strong body core. Those innate traits also helped him uncork laserlike throws as a prep quarterback at Merritt Island High, where Hurdle became a top prospect in both football and baseball. The only athletic trait he lacked was speed.
During his senior season, Hurdle put on legendary workouts for major league scouts. Invited to work out at the Braves’ spring training home, Hurdle launched balls to places where they were rarely hit by professional hitters: a water-filtration center that was next to the baseball complex, according to an ESPN magazine story. Then Royals player-development official John Schuerholz was awestruck. The longtime Braves GM said later he had never seen another such power display by a prep prospect in his forty years of being around the game.