Deep within baseball’s duffel bag, which is now increasingly filled with wires, wearable tech and books on physics and biomechanics, somewhere nestled in between the ibuprofen and the energy drink, there’s a tricky emotion: doubt. Though some would like to eradicate it to pave the way for success — and though it never feels good in the moment — doubt can be incredibly useful.
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Teams can harness doubt for their benefit. Examining the way things are done and looking at other approaches can help improve the player development process and team culture overall. What if we’ve got it wrong? It’s an important question.
After all, we were once certain about an entirely different set of assumptions about how baseball players should be trained. Players were supposed to get the front foot down early, and chop down on the ball, and finish their delivery in a good position to field the ball. These things were gospel. Until they weren’t.
“Oh, there is chaos,” Seattle Mariners farm director Andy McKay said. “This is my 25th year of coaching. Twenty-five years ago, the shit I did was embarrassing. But at the time, it wasn’t.”
This might be the case for every era in retrospect. But this newest round of best practices is, supposedly, backed by data.
“In player development, we all go to the measurables because we have them, and that’s really powerful,” Brewers hitting coach Andy Haines said. “It’s unlocked several strategies for players to reach their talent level. It’s taken the opinion out and unlocked some things.”
But despite the data we now have, there’s still a fair amount of error when it comes to the value of player development. An assistant general manager ran through the following thought exercise to point out how difficult player development truly is.
Start with a player you’ve just acquired. You can be reasonably sure you have a good idea of his true talent because we’ve improved our ability to understand this over time — but there’s still noise.
So now you start your coaching process on this new player. You throw a bunch of different things at the player — tech, drills, data — and the player changes (you think). Each of those processes is vetted by data, but each has noise, and it’s probably more noise than you had in the first process, if only because it’s a newer science than strict player evaluation.
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Now your new player has a new talent level! Congratulations. In assessing that talent level, you’re adding noise to the whole process for the third time. Good luck figuring out what actually worked and how much your process did.
Breakout 29-year-old Giants outfielder Mike Yastrzemski has seen only two approaches to player development — the Giants’ and the Orioles’ — but he didn’t think there was any clear moment he could point to when it came to his advancement.
“I’ve always had a pretty good hard-hit rate, but it’s a matter of putting together the right swing on the right pitch,” he said last week. “A lot more research, more invested in coming up with a plan as opposed to just rolling in after watching a little video. I think that (when) people tell you that — Oh, I just found this drill and it really set me off — I don’t think that’s necessarily the truth. It’s just an easy answer and an easy way for someone to deflect the question.”
Maybe we’re too quick to attribute an outlier’s success to a single change. It’s easy enough to listen to Yasztremski and try to apply it to your own player development team— new teammate Mauricio Dubón affirmed that the Giants’ pregame prep was more extensive than he’d seen before in different organizations, and preparing minor-league players for the game as they would prepare in the majors seems like an easy, low-cost, low-risk move — but of course it’s not great process to just apply what has worked for one player to a whole group of players, wholesale.
Yastrzemski said he liked side toss, a strange drill that has a coach throwing a baseball to a player from a position they’d never seen in a game. Mandatory side toss for everyone? No, you’d want to test that in order to be sure. You’d want to know the process was a good one. And you’d want to be careful about throwing all the spaghetti you have at the wall at the same time.
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“Standardizing language on how you talk to athletes is one of the first things you learn in a well-designed research class,” Driveline Baseball’s Kyle Boddy said. “You have to tell people the exact same thing at the same time (most people are bad at this) and do the same things (most people are good at this) to get predictable enough results, and then you can swap out components and people to control for various effects. No different than any research or science project, just with humans involved; and though there is certainly more variability/bias included in the whole process, you can still do a good job of controlling what you can control.”
You can reduce the noise as much as you can, but it’s still there, and the source is our humanity. Just consider that the same cue to different players can produce different results. We’re supposedly moving past ‘chop down on the ball,’ but at least two prominent players still enjoy the cue because it helps them reduce the length of their swing.
“I’ve always swung this way,” said A’s first baseman Matt Olson about the big, looping swing that has him in the top 25 when it comes to barrels. “I didn’t have to add loft, at least. In fact, I can sometimes get too far under and then have to think about swinging down to the ball to get more compact. My cage swing is not my field swing, but my work in the cage translates best to work on the field now.”
“I do a drill where the ball is high and it makes you swing down on the ball,” Dodgers slugger Cody Bellinger told me in 2017. “I have an uppercut, so if I work on the uppercut in the cage, it’ll be too big of an uppercut. I work in the cage on leveling it and then in the game, it’s an uppercut but not as big. You don’t want to overdo it.”
The cue even worked for a player who was hitting too many low balls: Christian Yelich. His coaches told him to swing down on the ball, and power ensued.
“You find this mindset, and it’s coming off the bat like it really hadn’t for me before,” Yelich told ESPN’s Sam Miller. “Your body doesn’t actually do what your mind thinks, but it’s a way to get there.”
So, we don’t want players to chop down on the ball … unless they’re amazing at lifting the ball, and then in that case, maybe we’ll say we want them to chop down on the ball, but not so they actually chop down on the ball?
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Anybody who encounters this thought process and works in player development should probably feel some of that doubt creeping in.
If we can possibly make strides connecting certain cues to their associated physical outcomes, we’ll still have a missing ingredient that will probably never be quantified: player makeup.
“The makeup of the player matters a lot,” the data-driven Boddy said. “It’s why I think that scouts are more important today than ever before — using them to find out where someone trains, how they like to do things, if they’re a good fit for our player development department, etc.”
But, if you want to consider a dubious process, consider all the difficulty in scouting makeup. Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper has tried to refine his ability to do so over the years, but he still has plenty of questions.
“Scouting makeup is tough, in part because it’s hard to define makeup,” Cooper said. “Makeup is a very broad term. Is ‘makeup’ a drive to improve? Is it the ability to be well-behaved and stay out of trouble? Does it include the ability to make other players better and to help build a more harmonious clubhouse?”
You could look at this list and make some (difficult) decisions about your definition, and come up with one. Maybe you prioritize their ability to improve themselves, and their drive to do so, over their ability to play nice. That’s fine. That’s Step 1.
“Just think about people you interact with on a regular basis,” Cooper continued. “Have you ever been surprised that someone you thought you knew well proved to completely different than what you thought?”
OK, so you give the player in question multiple looks and send different people so there aren’t any weird interpersonal interaction effects going on. Are we there yet?
“Now add in an even more complicating factor,” Cooper said. “How many people are the same at 18 as they are at 25? Because when scouts are scouting makeup, they are also having to factor in the maturation process.”
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A smart way to scout makeup shows up in this great story about how J.T. Realmuto and Yelich were drafted. Jim Fleming, who was the Marlins vice president of scouting and development at the time, asked Realmuto to do a couple of things in a workout — just to see how the player would respond.
“We asked him to do some things catching because we were thinking about moving him to catcher,” Fleming said. “So we put him behind the plate, and you could see that he was going to be somebody that was going to be open and a quick study.”
But this is probably not possible on a nationwide scale. So the next question is, can we teach makeup?
“They are teaching them mechanics and pitches but are they teaching them how to pitch?” Giants pitcher Jeff Samardzija wondered about the new player development protocols. “How to figure it out when you’re hurting? How to be aggressive? How to have the balls to succeed?”
Haines — who was once the hitting coordinator for the Cubs organization — found something constructive in Samardzija’s query.
“Anytime you disregard something as completely unimportant, it’s probably short-sighted,” Haines said of teaching competitiveness. “You could have a beautiful swing in a controlled environment, and then you step in against 99 from Gerrit Cole and you can’t get out of that stationary autopilot into the right mindset at the plate, then it’s less important.”
Can you teach that drive, that competitiveness, in a situation like the minor leagues in which development is prioritized over winning the game?
“You walk a fine line,” Haines said. “That game in the minor leagues needs to be a competitive environment so that they get in the right mindset, channel adversity, thriving in the face of adversity when things are at stake. It can’t just be an instructional league thing where it doesn’t matter, results are going to matter a whole lot.”
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Some organizations seem to instill confidence in their players, which can make player development or coaching wins out of situations that might have happened on their own. The Yankees seem to be good at this. Gio Urshela is hitting for more power than ever, and though he’s in a more hitter-friendly park and hitting in a different offensive environment overall, it was more about a return to his roots than any newfangled drill that got him there.
“Before I knew I had the power, but then I had a lot of injuries — knee, back — so then I started doing different stuff at the plate,” Urshela said. “When I got here, we just looked at my old swing and tried to get back to what I was doing before. And I have a lot more confidence now.”
Mike Tauchman (Tommy Gilligan / USA Today)
Yankees outfielder Mike Tauchman was added for depth reasons, or so the late spring stories went, and then he went on to bat 22 percent better than league average and play all three outfield positions for them. There was a key difference between his old team, the Rockies, and his new one, but maybe dwarfed by the simple fact of the acquisition.
“It’s a big thing for someone to give you a real shot. Unless you’re a top prospect … getting a real shot, that’s a really big deal,” Tauchman said. “First and foremost, these guys are super prepared. The amount of information they have for us, and using that information to create an in-depth plan for us — a clear plan for me when I step to the plate.”
Yes, there’s talk of game planning in there, but Tauchman led with the organization’s belief in him. Confidence-instilling belief.
Can you sense the noise, the doubt creeping in again on this supposedly data-proven process?
Now add in the fact that the people dispensing the knowledge create another layer of noise. Is your message getting across uniformly through the minor leagues?
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In a time when the average tenure of a major-league coach is heading below one-and-a-quarter years, minor-league coaches are now feeling the burn. We’re heading into a second or third offseason where many organizations will make wholesale changes to their minor-league development staff in order to chase this uniformity of message.
The best MLB organizations have a consistent message from player acquisition to the end of that player's road in development.
Whether it's release, trade, or added to the 25/40-man roster, they can all be successes if the player felt he had every opportunity to improve.
— Kyle Boddy (@drivelinebases) September 4, 2019
In fact, the quote that inspired this piece came in the context of managing the culture of a player development process.
“There are a lot of things that probably don’t matter that we think do,” Seattle’s pitching coordinator Max Weiner said last month. “Our whole goal is to educate, not to dictate. So when you’re trying to create a sense of safety and belonging, and you’re a jerk and you’re saying do this, and your words are firm and brash — which we’ve all fallen victim to, I’ve definitely done it myself in the past — it’s really difficult. But if you offer up a sense of an option and you inform them and the decision becomes their own, it’s much more meaningful and it comes back to the quickest versus the most sustainable change. A lot of patience has to be involved.”
“The most successful people I’m around have an aura of confidence but also a paranoia of what am I missing,” Haines said about how doubt plays into a good player development process. “If you start thinking you’ve got all the answers, you’re starting to fall behind.”
— Eno Sarris (@enosarris) August 23, 2017
“You always have to understand, what I’m bringing to the Mariners today it’s as good as I can bring, but I know that a year from now, it’s going to be better,” McKay said. “You have to manage that contradicting thought, that this is really good but there is something better. If you go to players with ‘This is the Holy Grail,’ you’re eliminating the chance for evolution, which you don’t want.”
Doubt is a funny thing. You don’t want your players going onto the field with doubt.
“The amount of clarity of confidence that a player needs to have any shot competing in the big leagues becomes crystal clear in the moment,” Haines said.
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But doubt can also drive a player to improve himself.
“You turn on any TV and you see the No. 1s, as good as they are, and these guys are doing freakish new stuff that’s off the charts,” the Mariners’ top pitching prospect Logan Gilbert said, “and you know that there has to be something else that you could be doing, so I try not to leave any stone unturned, especially with the new tech that’s coming out.”
And that’s the same trick that player development professionals need to pull in their own lives. They need to use doubt to drive their organization toward discovery and growth, to ensure they never get caught standing still — even if knowing everything is impossible.
Maybe there’s a lesson here for all of us. We can be racked by doubt, no matter how accomplished we are, and it can feel debilitating. But if we examine that doubt, and use it to fuel a desire for better knowledge of self and profession, then it’s a powerful thing. No matter what you do for a living, don’t run from doubt — use it.
(Top photo of Yelich: Tim Warner / Getty Images)