Big Data Baseball Page 23
“By the time the hitter has made up his mind to swing, it hasn’t broke yet, and within the last six to eight feet, that’s when the tightness and the depth comes in,” Martin said of Liriano’s slider. “Right out of his hand it looks like a fastball. You can tell yourself a slider is coming, but your mind is telling you it’s a fastball.”
Another celebration ensued in the clubhouse. More champagne and more Coors and Miller Lite were carted into the Pirates clubhouse. Plastic sheeting again protected lockers. Before popping the corks on champagne, the Pirates waited for Martin and Byrd to enter the clubhouse. A circle was formed, and pushed into the center by several players was Clint Hurdle. Hurdle raised both of his arms into the air, shaking both fists in jubilation as he was soaked in champagne.
Minutes later he spoke to reporters through squinting, irritated alcohol-soaked eyes in a rowdy clubhouse: “Did you feel that out there? That’s incredible. It was awesome. The fans made a difference from the time we took the field. I don’t know if it can scare the other team, but you can feel it.”
In the raucous clubhouse the man perhaps most responsible for the victory was nowhere to be found. Liriano was not part of the celebration. Local reporters waited and waited for him to appear, but he never did. One by one reporters gave up their quest for an interview and departed for the press box to try to beat deadline, attempting to eloquently put into words the madness they had just witnessed. When the locker room was nearly empty of reporters, Liriano finally appeared. He walked slowly to his locker in street clothes and explained why he had been absent, why he had not been able to talk, as he picked up an orange-tinted pharmacy bottle from his locker. Liriano had pitched with a sinus infection. This was a Jordan-toppling-the-Utah-Jazz-Blazers-while-battling-the-flu moment.
Liriano used but few words to explain the performance: “I was very calm. I wasn’t trying to do too much. I tried to do the same thing I was doing the whole year.”
What he had done the whole year was to trust Martin and the coaches. Liriano had also outperformed his contract by such an amount that if he wasn’t the greatest free agent value of the off-season, the man catching him that night was. Math had played such a big role in the Pirates’ turnaround—from the data-driven shifting and pitching philosophies to identifying the hidden value and skills of Liriano and Martin. Math and big data had helped the Pirates to their first winning season and postseason win in twenty-one years. But to get over the wild-card play-in game hurdle, to advance to their first postseason series since 1992, the Pirates also required the art of Martin’s in-game intuition and the magic of one of the greatest baseball crowds anyone had ever heard. Afterward, Reds third baseman Todd Frazier said it was the best crowd he had ever seen, and A. J. Burnett, who had played in the play-offs and in New York, said he had never experienced any other crowd like it. Neither had the veteran beat writers or the Pirates’ longtime official scorer. A disillusioned baseball city had once again fallen in love with its team. That had nothing to do with big data or complex algorithms. That was raw emotion.
EPILOGUE
A PERFECT CIRCLE
February 18, 2014, marked the first day of full-squad workouts for the Pirates in Bradenton, Florida. Clint Hurdle called the team to the cafeteria as he did every season to present a new message. At last year’s meeting he had introduced the team to Dan Fox and Mike Fitzgerald and unveiled the radical defensive plan to a guarded and curious club.
This meeting was different. It was different from all of the other first-day-of-spring-training meetings since 1993. That’s because for the first time in two decades the Pirates had entered the spring coming off a winning season and a play-off berth. They weren’t able to reach the ultimate goal of every team, winning the World Series, but they took the formidable St. Louis Cardinals to the fifth and final game of the National League Division Series before losing. Hurdle figured the club would battle new adversaries in 2014: they could no longer sneak up on opponents and could ill afford any complacency.
To focus on new goals and challenges and move on from last season, Hurdle asked video coordinator Kevin Roach and a local cable producer to compile a six-minute highlight clip from 2013, which was set to Aerosmith’s “Dream On.” The staff set up a digital projector and began to play the video. The cafeteria roared as they all relived moments from the previous season. As the video reached its climax, the play that began the streak of twenty consecutive years of losing—when the Braves’ Sid Bream beat Barry Bonds’s throw home in the 1992 NLCS game—was alternated on the screen with the play that ended a twenty-year playoff drought when Justin Morneau’s relay toss to Russell Martin beat the Cubs’ Nate Schierholtz at the plate at Wrigley Field on September 23, 2013. That play clinched the Pirates’ first postseason appearance in twenty-one years. The closing still frame was the iconic image of 2013: Martin holding the ball triumphantly above his head on his knees at home plate at Wrigley Field.
“Honestly, seeing that moment again like that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up,” said Martin to then Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnist Dejan Kovacevic who first recounted the video. “That belonged to all of us, to the whole city.”
As the video ended, one word flashed on the screen, NOW, in all caps. The message was clear: 2013 was over. Last season’s magic was over. It was time to go back to work and write a new story, to find new ways to improve, to find new hidden advantages. And it wasn’t going to be easy.
While the video revisited magic from the 2013 season, much of that magic had been the product of using math and taking advantage of underutilized skills and strategies. But this was a new season, and the three prongs of the Pirates’ aggressive defensive plan—shifts, ground balls, and pitch framing—would no longer provide the competitive advantage that they did in 2013, or at least not to the degree they had. These data-based concepts were not like player talent. They were not unique skills possessed by the Pirates. These successful practices were in a way like Coca-Cola having to reveal its recipe. As in any other industry, baseball teams always copied the successful strategies of rivals. More teams would be shifting, more pitching staffs would be focused on attempting to generate more ground balls hit into the shifts, and pitch framing would no longer be a hidden value possessed by catchers. And now, for the first time in more than two decades, the Pirates were wearing a target.
Hurdle, like his team, wanted his focus to be on the present. He could not afford to bask in the previous season’s accomplishment. He was named the National League Manager of the Year in November by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, earning 25 of 30 first-place votes. While this prestigious award was voted upon by some of the more traditional writers, who often recognized a manager’s worth based upon wins and losses, Hurdle was also named the NL’s top manager by the Internet Baseball Awards, which were voted on by a new-age, analytically inclined constituency. Hurdle was what stat geeks had long waited for: a manager who embraced analysts’ findings and was willing to move away from tradition.
Many view the major league manager’s office as having diminished influence in the modern age, with more and more control over the roster being concentrated in the front office. But the manager remains a key gatekeeper in allowing data-based practices to flow onto the field. Working with people will always be part of the game. The manager is still largely responsible for creating a clubhouse culture and must persuade and lead a team down a new path, as Hurdle did successfully in 2013. He also played an integral role in helping to create a culture of respect that enabled the Pirates to better integrate their quantitative analysts into the clubhouse to maximize their effect. Leadership is the ability to influence and persuade, and Hurdle did just that in 2013.
Pirates general manager Neal Huntington was also acknowledged for his good work, finishing second to Red Sox GM Ben Cherington for Major League Baseball’s Executive of the Year honors. Huntington’s signature moves were the signing of Russell Martin and Francisco Liriano, the top two free agent bargai
ns of the off-season. He also traded for an elite setup man in Mark Melancon and acquired Marlon Byrd and Justin Morneau for the postseason push. Huntington also had the vision to build the club’s proprietary database and to hire Dan Fox, and those decisions began to pay off in 2013.
After many in the public called for regime change in the fall of 2012, both Huntington and Hurdle were instead awarded three-year contract extensions in the spring of 2014. Through taking big risks, they had earned security. Still, they wanted to prove their success was not a fluke, and they knew repeating it would be more difficult than ending the streak. Said Huntington after the season, “We’ve said from day one it’s going to be one thing to build it but it’s going to be even harder to sustain it.”
* * *
In late March 2014, Dan Fox stood behind home plate on the crushed-brick warning track of the Red Sox’s spring training home in Fort Myers, Florida, watching batting practice. The Pirates had made the two-hour trip down I-75 to play the Red Sox in a rare spring training night game. Fox was approached by a reporter, and the pregame talk turned to pitch framing and how the Pirates had identified Martin as a bargain in the previous off-season and had taken advantage of pitch framing sooner than most other teams. Rather than bask in the prudent decision, Fox lamented that that competitive advantage was now gone.
For Fox and Fitzgerald, it was time to get back to work. Catchers who can frame pitchers and can hit were now going to be signed to mega-contracts. One such catcher, Brian McCann, signed a five-year, $85 million deal with the Yankees just months earlier. Even catchers who couldn’t hit but could frame pitches were also being sought. The punchless Ryan Hanigan—who had hit just .198 with the Reds in 2013—was aggressively targeted by the Rays in an off-season trade, and the team had also signed thirty-eight-year-old catcher Jose Molina despite his advancing age and negative value as a hitter.
Not only was the hidden value of pitch framing unearthed in 2013 by Pirates analysts and then copied in 2014. The Pirates anticipated that shifting would become more accepted throughout the game. While they were not the first team to shift, because their remarkable turnaround season was tied to a 500 percent increase in the use of shifting—an unheard-of pivot in strategy in a conservative industry that is slow to change—it got the sport’s attention. Recall, according to BIS, shifts more than doubled in the game in 2014. Not only were more teams shifting more often, but opposing hitters also began fighting back with more bunt attempts and with some more often successfully targeting the opposite field.
The Pirates’ approach with their pitchers was also replicated. In 2014, the percentage of pitchers who’d traded in their four-seam fastballs for two-seam fastballs continued to increase, and more clubs employed a pitching philosophy similar to that of the Pirates, loading up on ground-ball pitchers. In 2014, 14.6 percent of all pitches in baseball were two-seam fastballs, up from 13.6 percent a year earlier, and an increase from 3.8 percent in 2008, according to PITCHf/x data. As pitching staffs began throwing more sinking fastballs, one team began a creative counterpunch. In Oakland, A’s general manager Billy Beane began hoarding fly-ball hitters. In 2013, Oakland hitters combined for a 60 percent fly-ball rate. No other team in baseball lifted more than 39 percent of their batted balls into the air. The importance of fly-ball hitters was written about in a BaseballProspectus.com article by Andrew Koo titled “More Moneyball.” Koo wrote, “In The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, authors Tango, Litchman, and Dolphin found that fly-ball hitters had an advantage over ground-ball hitters, simply because they are better hitters—you can’t homer on grounders, after all. They also found that fly-ball hitters are especially good against ground-ball pitchers, because the former tend to swing under the ball while the latter want the hitter to swing over the ball.”
The A’s offense in 2013 and 2014 was among the game’s best despite their playing in an extremely pitcher-friendly stadium.
The game is constantly evolving. A constant cat-and-mouse game is played between hitters and pitchers, between opposing managers, and even between opposing analysts. This punch and counterpunch does not have an end point; rather, it is circular. Fox saw clearly that he and the Pirates would have to adjust, they couldn’t remain static, and for Fox, that is part of the fun.
* * *
A year ago to the day after the Pirates had clinched their first play-off berth in two decades at Wrigley Field, Pirates longtime equipment manager Scott Bonnett—or Bones as he’s known to everyone around the club—made his way back to the visiting clubhouse at Turner Field in Atlanta in the seventh inning and began prepping for an event that he had hosted just once before: celebrating a play-off berth.
Per MLB stipulations, every member of the team’s traveling party is allotted two bottles of champagne. The Pirates party included players, coaches, club officials, and members of the ownership. So Bonnett ordered twenty cases of champagne. He filled several deep plastic carts with ice, where he placed the bottles, and he helped hoist plastic sheeting to protect the lockers. He had also had ordered dozens of goggles and towed with him from Pittsburgh hundreds of commemorative T-shirts and sweatshirts.
Exactly a year after beating the Chicago Cubs to clinch their first play-off berth in two decades, the Pirates beat the Braves, 3–2, to clinch another play-off berth. The Pirates again soaked a visiting clubhouse carpet with champagne, and for the remainder of their series in Atlanta dehumidifiers and fans hummed in vain to dry and rid the space of the sour smell. One year after winning 94 games, the Pirates won 88 games and again finished second in the National League Central Division to again be a part of the select one-third of major league teams invited to the postseason. The Pirates managed to become one of the sport’s best teams yet again despite having one of the lowest payrolls—twenty-seventh out of thirty teams, at $78 million.
In some ways their path back to the postseason was similar to that of the previous year. While much of the sport had begun to shift in 2014, the Pirates shifted their defense even more often and in even more sophisticated ways. They stayed ahead of the pack not just by raising their overall number of defensive shifts from 494 to 659, but also by shifting their infielders not just based upon a hitter’s overall batted-ball distribution history, but also based upon his tendencies in each ball-strike scenario of an at bat. The Pirates knew hitters were more likely to pull the ball when the count was in their favor, and more likely to go to the opposite field when trailing in a count. Moreover, few teams positioned their outfielders away from conventional starting points as aggressively as the Pirates. Positioning outfielders based upon batted-ball data is more complex and nuanced than shifting infielders, since batted balls to the outfield have a variety of trajectories, speeds off the bat, and distances traveled. While the Pirates’ shifts were not quite as successful in 2014 as they were in 2013, they still ranked sixth in baseball with 36 defensive runs saved.
While pitch framing was no longer a secret in 2014, the Pirates doubled up on the practice. Prior to spring training, they quietly traded for Yankees catcher Chris Stewart to back up Martin even though Stewart was a significant offensive liability. In 2013, Stewart was even better than Martin at framing pitches. In 110 games for the Yankees, he had created a value of 21.7 runs saved through pitch framing, second only to Yadier Molina in the major leagues. Stewart’s pitch framing was worth roughly two wins above that of an average catcher. The acquisition of Stewart was significant since catchers receive the most off days of any position player. By acquiring him the Pirates could field an elite pitch framer not in just 120 games a year—the average workload of a catcher—but in all 162 games of the regular season.
The Pirates continued to seek and rehab pitchers who were coming off career-worst seasons but had raw talent and the ability to be better. Just as the Pirates were criticized for trading for A. J. Burnett and signing Francisco Liriano, they were also ridiculed for agreeing to a one-year, $5 million deal with Edinson Volquez. Volquez was a lot like Liriano. Despite great ra
w ability—a mid-90s fastball and a changeup with so much fade that it seemed to fall off an invisible cliff, Volquez struggled to harness his arm. He posted a 5.71 ERA in 2013 with the San Diego Padres and the Los Angeles Dodgers, the worst ERA among qualified major league starting pitchers, and that despite playing in pitcher-friendly environments. But the Pirates were able to work their magic yet again in 2014 as pitching gurus Ray Searage and Jim Benedict—and Martin’s glove—helped Volquez throw more strikes and better trust his defense and two-seam fastball. Volquez cut his ERA by nearly three runs (3.04 ERA) and became the fourth straight first-year Pirates pitcher to lead the club in wins with 13 victories.
The secretive preventive medical practices that the Pirates were investing in continued to yield results as they tallied the fewest days lost to injury in baseball in 2014, according to Grantland.com. They also began using more data-based medical practices as a number of players started to wear the Zephyr bio-harnesses during games, compression shirts worn under jerseys that contained an electronic, medallion-like monitor in the center of their chests, which measured their heartbeats and calories consumed among other metrics. It allowed players not only to better monitor their diets but also to see how performance correlated with adrenaline during games.