StarTalk Radio - #ICYMI - Building an MVP Machine

Episode Date: August 15, 2019

In case you missed this episode on the Playing with Science channel…. Move over Moneyball, something new is coming. Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly explore the world of data-driven player development that’s re-shaping baseball today. Featuring Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik, authors of The MVP Machine, and astrophysicist and baseball sleuth Meredith Wills, PhD.Photo Credit: Erik Drost [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)] Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

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so you don't miss a thing thanks to our supporters on Patreon for sponsoring this episode of StarTalk join them and listen to every episode with no ads go to Patreon.com StarTalk Radio to learn how. I'm Gabriel Reilly.

And I'm Tom Nice. And this is Playing With Science. Today we are back at the plate facing a pitcher who last month could not throw a party. But this time around has more spin than an election campaign. What on earth happened?

Well, if you look at things in a different way, well, you get different results. And the people who have done just that are Ben Lindberg and Travis Sawchuk, co-authors of The MVP Machine, a superb book that sheds light on how player development techniques are taking baseball into the future

and leaving moneyball way, way behind. And to add to that, we will have the astrophysicist who is a baseball fanatic and is a super sleuth. Yes, our dear friend Meredith Wills will be here to explain why this year's baseball is doing what it's doing. This is going to be a great show. Absolutely. I am pumped to talk to these two guys. So, Chuck, introduce our first guests.

Here in studio and via Skype, or I should say that the other way around, the authors of The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players, Baseball's new nonconformists are using data to build better players. Author Travis Sotchick and Ben Lindbergh. Gentlemen, thank you for being here. Yeah, welcome. Yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah, without a doubt. First of all, congratulations on the book.

Very well received. Extremely excited are the baseball nerds, and they are a plenty. There are probably the nerdiest of sports would be baseball. And you guys are nerd gods at this point. All right. So we have a mantra here on Playing With Science. Go ahead.

Where jocks and geeks collide. That's right. And I think the MVP machine might be our Bible. That is it, yeah. It might just be. This might be the perfect cross-section. Epicenter. Of where geeks and jocks collide.

So, first of all, just a quick background on both you guys. You're both very accomplished authors. Both worked at one of my favorite places, 538. I think, Travis, you're still there, right? I am still employed there. Okay, cool. How does this come about? What makes you guys say, hey, let's take a look at this. Let's do a deep dive and let's figure out what the next incarnation of the whole data infusion with baseball. How'd that come about?

Yeah, well, we came to the subject independently. And then we learned that we were each working on something. And we decided to team up because we knew each other a little bit. And we figured we'd be even better if we combined forces. So I think this stood out to us as the subject of a baseball book in 2019 is player development. That's what this book is about, about applying information and technology to improve players. Because Travis and I both noticed that suddenly players in the middle of their careers, sometimes toward the end of their careers, or so we thought, were making major changes and reaching levels that they'd never reached before. And these were guys who should have been at the points of their careers

where you expect them to be declining. And instead, they were peaking. And we were thinking, what is going on here? You know, guys like Rich Hill, JD Martinez, Justin Turner, all these guys who were essentially on the fringes of the game, on their way out of the game, it looked like, and then suddenly were catapulted to being superstars, to landing these large contracts. And in every case, it was because there was new information, there was new technology, there was new coaching techniques

that they were able to adopt and implement to get better in a way that until very recently wasn't possible in baseball. So, Travis, the numbers were lying in the sense of your career at this point shouldn't be telling me this. And is this a lie? And if it isn't, which it obviously wasn't, how on earth? And where do you go? Why do we need to? Because I always, why do we need to because I always why do we need to tell this story? Why is it so important? Yeah, I think for each of us we kind of went into this book

thinking or this era of baseball thinking talent was sort of fixed your career followed this aging curve and all the history of player careers

and player aging arcs showed us that you should be in decline when you're 35 years old and you should be losing skill and your production your career should be you know coming to a close but we noticed player

you know ben mentioned some of them i used to report on pittsburgh on baseball in pittsburgh and the pirates acquired marlon bird in the 2013 season and uh he was at an age where he should be in decline but instead he was having his best year and i don't think it was steroids or performance enhancers it was because he dramatically changed his batt year. And I don't think it was steroids or performance enhancers. It was because he dramatically changed his batted ball profile. And that is something that, you know, I thought talent was kind of fixed. And to see Bird kind of change how he swung, how he hit, and the nature of the way the ball left the bat, more in the air than on the ground.

And that a player could do that in his mid-30s really opened my eyes. And then it's not, you know, extending careers is one aspect of that, whether it's Bird or Justin Turner. And then, you know, at the other end of the aging curve, what can young players do with this that adopted earlier? How can they change their futures, their trajectories? So just this whole idea that, you know, we flipped on its head, what we thought talent meant, what it was, how it's created.

And that's very exciting to be writing about this and really what's still the infancy of this movement. Oh, yeah. So let's take a step back very quickly, because as we talk about player development, what we're really talking about is the infusion of data into a sport and the utilization of that data in such a way that it informs the player and the coach how to make changes to improve. So baseball being such a statistical behemoth, people just love all the stats. How many times did this one spit at the plate before he hits a home?

Like, okay. So we understand that that's it. But that's been going on forever. I mean, like, if you think about what's the Hall of Fame do? Earl Weaver, right? He wasn't the guy with the index cards, right? And you had even Branch Rickey, right? You know, utilizing statisticians and stuff like that.

So let's back that. Let's back what the player development is. What is the progression and why is baseball so perfect for this? Yeah, I think for a few reasons. Baseball is very well suited to statistical analysis in general because you've got 150 years of data and it's been covered and chronicled as much as any human endeavor in that time, I think. So you've got this wealth of information.

For the past 10 years or so, you've had a much higher volume of information because now you're not just getting the results of things, you're also getting the process. You're tracking every pitch. You're tracking batted balls. You're now tracking fielders as they move around the field. So you're getting way more information than you ever had before. That's part of it. And of course, just the structure of baseball, it's just this series of discrete events, you know, batter versus pitcher. And it's

sort of easier to separate the independent contributions than it is in, say, football or hockey, where you have a lot of players in its continuous motion. But what we've seen here is a move from Moneyball, which we've all been talking about for 16 years now since that book came out and years since the movie came out. Moneyball was about using this information to find players who were already out there and were good already, but for whatever reason, they were undervalued by the market. Other teams just didn't realize that drawing walks was valuable, that on-base percentage was more important than batting average. And so you could go get these guys who were already doing things that were valuable, and you didn't have

to pay that much for them because no one else realized that they were good. But that book and that idea became so popular, not just in baseball, but in every other field that every other team got on board and kind of caught up and they hired their own statistical analysts and they were signing and trading for those same players. And suddenly you couldn't just find that free talent out there anymore. So the way to win in this era of baseball is not really by finding talent that already exists and is just undervalued and unrecognized. It's by building talent or creating talent.

And so that's where the emphasis is. That's what the book is about. And it's become easier and easier to do that because of the new technology that's available today. All right. So what I'm hearing you tell me there, Ben, is Moneyball told me about what had happened. And I could read how good this player could be in my organization and the value I could get out of him for whatever. This iteration of data analysis is changing the future. That's right. Yeah. So now we've gone

from a history lesson to, I want to call it science fiction, but it's not. It's a science fact. So who have been the pathfinders for this influx of new technology? Because you can't just be looking at it with the human eye and saying, hey, Chuck, this guy's good. Well, I can, but your team will be a horrible failure. Don't be down on yourself. It's like, yeah, it's just but your team will be a horrible failure. Don't be down on yourself. It's like, yeah.

It's just like, yeah, that guy right there, that's a winner, buddy. That's a winner. And then, of course, that's how teams used to do it. All right. So Pathfinders and exactly what tech are we talking about here? A lot of outsiders really brought this movement and these ideas into baseball. And we highlight a number of them in the book. And if you want to look at within the player ranks,

Trevor Bauer is a prominent player in this book. And we argue he's pushed forward player development in a lot of different ways. And we follow his – he designed a new pitch in 2018. And there's this idea, I think, that pitch – how you discovered pitches in the past was sort of incidental or magical. You picked up a ball one day or you just got lucky flipping a ball a certain way.

Where he took science and a process of trial, of measuring movement improvement in his pitch design, and he created this field of modern pitch design, created new pitches from scratch, and pairing technologies like the high-speed edutronic camera, which for the first time in baseball really shows a pitcher how his grip, his wrist position exactly imparts spin on a baseball. And when we think about a pitch, it's one of three things.

It's a velocity, it's a spin axis, and it's a spin rate. And that determines the shape of a pitch. But instead of just using guesswork in a bullpen, he put a high-speed camera on his throwing arm, his wrist, and he used Rapsodo pitch tracking technology, which gave him the axis and spin rate. And he would go off to driveline baseball, this facility in Seattle, and he began creating pitches from scratch there. And we followed a slider development, and he knew exactly what he wanted to design, and he was able to monitor his progress, get immediate feedback.

And he also popularized weighted ball practices, which is part of underload, overload training to create velocity and long toss and all these things. So he's a bit of a prickly character. He's been sort of a troublemaker, but I think that's also allowed him to not care what conventional coaches have to say. It's allowed him, he's always wanted to understand why things happen

and what the science behind it, the logic. And that's what's made him such an important character in this. He hasn't cared. He's trained with Kyle Bode at Driveline Baseball, another outsider who, he's a college dropout. He was an Olive Garden server. And he went out to Seattle to be closer to his girlfriend,

and he started coaching youth baseball. And he wondered why these youth coaches didn't seem to understand anything about moneyball baseball thought, how they couldn't explain the practices they were teaching. So he built his own biomechanics lab from scratch, starting in the aisle of a Home Depot and just started fundamentally asking why things work. And we see a lot of new ideas come up

from individual college programs at small Division I schools. And all these ideas seem to be filtering up into the game for the most part. So you just described the scientific method, by the way. Yeah. I mean, honestly, like if you just want to boil it down to a nutshell,

that is the scientific method in a nutshell. I mean, he may not be the most popular pitcher out there, for sure, but an inquiring mind has driven a lot of progress. Now, you've just described two outliers. How big is this particular tribe right now where we sit in 2019? Yeah, we describe it as the end of the beginning of this movement. And we've seen, you know, we've gone from moneyball ideology kind of,

it was rejected at first and it slowly crept into the game. And I think we're seeing players and coaches. There's at least one or two representatives, I think, in most big league clubhouses now. That many? I think that's fair to say. There's more of a curia. And when you see players like Justin Turner, J.D. Martinez, Rich Hill, there's these success stories now to follow. Like Adam Adovino read about Bauer and Driveline and his father-in-law

is in real estate in Manhattan. And he was looking for a place to throw. So he said, hey, Adam, I have this vacant storefront in Harlem. How about you create your own bullpen? You can outfit it with all this technology, the high-speed cameras. And so last winter, Adovino kind of following Bauer's footsteps, created a new cutter from scratch, and he revitalized his career. So we're seeing a buildup of acceptance. I don't think we've reached where it's 50% of clubhouses, but I do think there's at least a small representation of these believers throughout every professional clubhouse. So is the information any different than the information that's been here all along, Or is it the fact that computers allow us to see patterns in ways that we were never before able to do so? groundswell where you now have almost like a collective conscious that has invaded the game,

pushing the game where it wasn't being pushed before? Or is it just all of that? Who knows? I don't know. I don't know, seriously. It's multiple things, but I think it largely is that technology that's now measuring things that just couldn't be measured before. It really was the scout out there just saying, that looks good to me or that doesn't look good to me and maybe not being able to explain exactly why and what the flaw was and how to fix the flaw. Whereas now you have this immediate form of feedback from the technology that's telling you

not just what happens, that's a single, that's an out, but why it happens, you know, what that swing was like, what was the angle he was swinging at? What was the angle that ball left the bat? How many times is that pitch spinning on its way to the plate? These were things that you really couldn't see in many cases. And even if you couldn't see them, you couldn't record them on a large, massive scale and get that data immediately when you're in a batting cage or a bullpen. So all of this, I think the mechanics, the process that players use to perform,

that was all, a lot of it was instinctual and going by experience. And coaches in baseball historically have been former players. That's how you became a coach. And so you would teach the next generation of players the same way that you were taught. And so there was a lot of stagnation there. And so these you know, these guys would say, I didn't have this information when

I was coming up and I did okay. So why should I embrace it now? So now you get these outsiders, you get these open-minded thinkers, but it really is just being able to track everything, being able to quantify these mechanics. You know, what is a player doing? How is he swinging? How is he delivering the ball? And once you analyze that and break it down in unprecedented detail, then you can identify the flaws. And once you do, you can fix them. So what sort of speeds are we talking about with cameras? Because you've got, is it TrackMan and Edutronic?

How many frames a second? Because if I... Well, now they have this modus throw throw which you can put a sensor in a sleeve right and the modus throw uses your iphone or your your android phone so the thing is the most minuscule movement of my hand or a finger will completely change the pitch as much as i know about baseball i know that much but then i i read about the last season's World Series with the Red Sox. The two pitchers is Heath...

Hembree. Hembree and a guy who scares me when I looked at him first, Joe Kelly. He's got something going on that's scary. They threw sliders, but during October didn't throw one slider. Red Sox are using this technology. What did they see? How did they see it? What did they use to make this difference? Right. So the Red Sox have all this technology that we're talking about, the cameras,

the spin tracking devices set up in the outfield, in the bullpen before games, and the pitchers are constantly throwing, so they have a baseline of this is what this guy's stuff looks like when he's going well, and now it's a little different from that. Maybe he's slumping, he's not doing so well, and you can see why he's sort of straying from what he should be doing. With both of these guys over the course of the season, they sort of lost the feel for those pitches. They were guys who threw a lot of sliders.

They had good sliders, but their arm path sort of lost the feel for those pitches. You know, they were guys who threw a lot of sliders. They had good sliders. But their arm path sort of just changed, you know, in very subtle ways as the season went on. And so by the time they got to the playoffs, those pitches were not as effective as they had been before. Why don't you just change the arm path? It turns out to be quite difficult to do that at times. You know, Sometimes you can. This technology can allow you to intervene and say, hey, here's what you do when you're playing well.

Go back to that. And it's a subtle adjustment, and that's something that this technology can be very helpful for also. So this becomes a double bluff. If you know my best thing is a slider, and I get to October, and you're expecting, guess what? A slider, and I don't throw any.

How long before an opponent goes, whoa, that's not fair. But I mean, as an advantage, as a percentage, how much is that for an organization? Yeah, I mean, it can surprise a hitter, certainly. If the scouting report says, this guy throws a lot of sliders, expect sliders, and then, it can surprise a hitter, certainly, if the scouting report says, this guy throws a lot of sliders, expect sliders, and then you don't see any sliders. You wonder, what else is the scouting report getting wrong here? And am I completely unprepared for this plate appearance? So that can be a problem. But you know, those guys just, their pitches were not

performing as they used to. And so this technology enabled the Red Sox to say, these pitches are not the same as they used to be. They're not as effective. Let's just abandon them. Even though that seems somewhat radical because this is how you've succeeded in the past, just throw your curveballs instead. Your curveballs are actually performing better. So that's what they did.

And hitters weren't expecting it. And the pitches performed really well. And the Red Sox bullpen was great all the way through that World Series run. Interesting. So any documented cases where this was a failure? Yeah, we do cite some players who try to change their swings or they try to design a new pitch and it didn't quite work out for them. That is detailed in the book. And we're not arguing that the guy who throws 50 miles an hour at the county fair is going to adopt this and become a major league player you still have to be a very good athlete you still

have to i mean we you can only take so many lemons and make them into such quality of lemonade that sort of thing but uh there we're seeing this impact so widespread across baseball and uh the promise of just any pitcher being able to design new pitches from scratch in an off season. If even 50% of major league pitchers could do that, that would have a huge effect on performance and career trajectories. And not everyone who's gone to driveline baseball has added velocity or improved, but they've shown enough that if you use this weighted balls in a particular manner and you teach your shoulder to be more flexible, if you train your body to create more force

and have a greater range of motion, that can lift skill levels. It can't help everyone, but it can help enough players where it's definitely a revolutionary breakthrough in talent creation and the idea of talent formation. Oh, that's cool. I know we got to take a break, Gary. We do. Ben Lingberg and Travis Sorchik are going to remain with us whether they want to or not.

And we are going to talk more because there is so much more I want to talk about. For instance, we've just discussed elite level Major League Baseball. I'm looking at this saying, you could build an army of top-end baseball players if you took this to a high school. With my weather scene, I shall one day rule the world. And on that note, we'll take a break. See you shortly. Looking for that perfect space merch?

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Ben Limburg and Trevor Sorchek, the co-authors of The MVP Machine. Yes. If you've listened to the first part of this show, you'll know that it is fascinating to see what is now happening. If you're doing Moneyball, then you're so way back at the beginning of this century.

Things have changed. No, this is Moneyball for the guy that wants to emotionally scar his child by forcing him to play baseball and become a professional sports player. Okay? It's just now I have science that can help me scar my child. It's great. Spoken like a true parent. All right, before the break, I sort of teased a bit about

if you took this equipment to a high school, junior college, and you start to work on the adjustment, development, pitches, and swings, you are going to raise the floor level. Because the MVPs are going to come anyway. You don't do anything, they appear. I think that's about a given in just about every sport. You can polish certain surfaces, but they're there. But raising the level, now that could be really interesting. How much of this equipment, this technology, this thinking is filtering down the baseball pyramid? That's really starting to happen.

It's everywhere in college these days, especially in Division I. There are more than 50 schools now that have these TrackMan systems installed. So all their batted balls and pitches are being tracked. They often have a lot of these cameras and devices that we've been talking about. There's at least one Division II school now that has it. There's a high school, two high schools

actually, that have them as well. And if you go farther down, you might find even youth leagues with swing sensors and that sort of thing. I think kids and people who aspire to be professional players, they look to what the big leaguers are doing. And this is what the big leaguers are doing now. So they're embracing these ideas.

And often these guys are getting drafted just entering the minor leagues, knowing things that a previous generation of players would have had to bang their heads against the wall and trial and error and see what fails over big samples to learn. Now they know because they're getting introduced to these concepts. So if I want to install this system in Wayne Manor, right, and have Bruce start pitching, how much? What's our price point?

It's going to cost you at this point. A lot of this stuff is is still pretty pricey i mean the the trackman systems will cost you thousands of dollars the the cameras will still cost you thousands of dollars so you either have to you know be affiliated with some institution or be from a fairly privileged background or be located close to a facility that has some of this stuff installed. So it's not accessible to everyone, which is a shame in the future. It will probably be more widespread and more affordable, which I think would be a good thing. But, you know, there's affordable stuff that you can get swing sensors that you attach to your bat or the sensor that Chuck mentioned that you attach to your elbow. That stuff is actually

pretty cheap and pretty affordable, and that can give you good insights too. So who is it geared towards benefiting most, pitcher or hitter? Because if it's the pitcher only, you know what comes or doesn't come on the back of that. Yeah, it started, I think, as more of a pitcher-centric thing where we had pitches tracked before we had batted balls and bats tracked. And the hitter's kind of in a reactive position.

He's seeing what the pitcher does and trying to adjust to it, whereas the pitcher is planning and he has time to think about what he wants to do. But now the offensive side is catching up and there are more tools that can quantify that hitting performance too, which I think is important because we're seeing in baseball these days more strikeouts than ever before, which is not a coincidence. It's that these pitchers are getting so good that it's just incredibly hard to miss them. I was going to ask you about that. The fact that we've seen more immaculate innings than ever before, which, by the way, I think is pretty freaking awesome.

I mean, it's a thing of beauty to watch, you know, to watch a guy go out and just, you know, nine pitches, nine strikes and bang, you know what I mean? Like, is that because of this or is that is that anecdotal? I think some of it, certain cases are examples of player improvement. Some is just, you know, I think over time, athletes have always gotten better to form. That my old times has gotten better in track, that sort of thing. And we even had a quantified for us where the talent level in baseball

has improved over time, but it's never accelerated like it has over the last decade. Absolutely. We suspect and forecast it's going to even increase in that acceleration as more of these practices are adopted. It's more of the best athletes adopt these practices. And Mookie Betts,

the MVP last year in the American League, is an example of a guy who did change his swing. He was already good and he went to great. So he's an example of a guy actually becoming an MVP because he adopted

some of these swing change philosophies. So yeah, I think some of the talent improvement, I mean, you can just look at velocity. It's increased every year in the pitch tracking era since 2008. And I suspect that's going to continue. We're going to see more pitchers develop better breaking balls. And I think it's going to lead to talent improvement across the board. So the owners are going to love this because it's more or less organic growth. I don't have to open my dust-encrusted bank vault and pull out another hundred-something, $300 million contract. No.

I've got me a little farm full of demons coming straight through. And they're not costing me that much money. It's really kind of like real estate. Is this going to just really all over the free agency market? That has happened these past couple of winters. We've seen it happen. It's funny because this is helping

individual players, obviously, but in the aggregate, it's hurting earnings in a sense. And we've seen the average major league salary now decline for the past two seasons, which has never happened before in the free agency era. aggregate, it's hurting earnings in a sense. And we've seen the average major league salary now decline for the past two seasons, which has never happened before in the free agency era. Mike Trout would disagree. Well, even he's probably underpaid, but I mean...

Oh! I knew he's agent. By the way, let me just say, that's why this is the greatest country in the face of the earth, that we can actually have a statement where someone says, Mike Trout is probably underpaid. God bless America. Thank you. He's that good.

He's the MVP machine. But yes, you're right. Because you can build players now, because you can promote these prospects who in baseball don't make very much money, or you can go get this guy off the scrap heap who's never been that good before. But if you make a certain change, maybe he can be good. Teams don't feel like they need to go out

and pay a premium for the established star anymore. All right. Now, with that being said, is there any technology right now that does that kind of analysis from afar? Or, you know, for instance, okay, I'm a GM, right? I got this technology and I'm looking at guys.

I'm like, that guy right there is underperforming. I know that. So I'm going to go get him. I'm basically going to just harvest substandard players by the metrics that are being used by their team. But I know I have a different set of metrics that let me know that this guy could come up to a level of play that's going to make my team great.

Is that something that's happening? Yeah. We have a whole chapter dedicated to Houston Astros, and we argue that they're the vanguard of this movement in the pro game as an organization. And just to bring up the edutronic camera as an example again, where most teams are experimenting with one for the first time in spring training this past spring. The Astros had 75 of these cameras hard-mounted throughout all their minor league affiliates, all their minor league stadiums. And they have tons of cameras installed at their major league stadium. And they're taking all this pitch grip info, biomechanical information, who knows everything they're extracting from the cameras and TrackMan and everything. They're gaining all this intel, not just on their own players, but other players.

What we've seen is when they've acquired players from other teams, like a Garrett Cole, Ryan Presley, Justin Verlander, they'll make sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic changes. We've seen so many of these players go to the Astros and become much better players. I mean, Garrett Cole is a Cy Young contender this year. And two years ago at the Pirates, he had a very disappointing year. Justin Verlander had this renaissance in Houston, in part because of slight grip tweaks to his slider. So that's an example of an organization taking data, whether it's biomechanical or otherwise, and applying it and improving players they acquire from other clubs. And that's a great advantage to have. So you've touched on something there with the bio data.

That's probably next gen from where we are right now. Through other sports, there's a lot of acquisition of bio data to stop injury prevention. They do a lot in soccer. And they use that for football as well. However, here, you're going to run into the players' union. Yes. And the utilization

of information of a medical nature That's right. is a ah-ah. Right. You're not going to be happy with that. But, is there a way through that?

I mean, I agree that the bio data is vital. I'm actually waiting for someone to do the psychological profiling. I was about to bring that up. That's the next thing. Because I can turn up in the stadium and I'm the same guy. And I've just been an MVP for the last 75 years.

I don't feel like it today. And you don't know because I've got this history that tells me I'm really good. But today I don't feel like it. So think of that. I've got this history that tells me I'm really good. But today I don't feel like it. So think of that. Is there any data right now that's being used about the player who makes the impact

without making the impact? For instance, for some reason, when this guy is in the game, we always win. But yet when we look at his numbers, he really hasn't done anything spectacular. But yet somehow every time we play this dude, we win. Is there anybody like that? Yeah, Harry Potter.

For some reason, we always win Quidditch. Harry Potter always gets the snitch. We must have him in here. No, seriously, I'm serious. Have we gotten to the point where there's data like that? There are good clubhouse guys, good glue guys, they call them in baseball. Glue? Glue guys?

They make the team stick together. I think that's probably less important in baseball than it is in some sports just because you're not passing the ball around so much. It's kind of this series of individual events. Terrell Owens would not be

as caustic of effect in a clubhouse as he would in a locker room. Yeah, it's harder to quantify. But, you know, we touch on all these things in the book too, that teams are making mindfulness and meditation and mental skills a big part of their training now. And, you know, as you were just talking about,

I mean, some of the sports science, high performance stuff, teams are getting into that too. They're hiring people who've been in football and rugby and bringing them over into baseball now. And as you said, the Players Association is very powerful in baseball. And so major leaguers can opt out of all of that stuff. But minor leaguers are not part of that union.

And so teams can essentially make minor leaguers do whatever they want and wear whatever sensors they tell them to. So they are very much... That doesn't sound good. No, it's a concern. It's a privacy. It's a privacy. It's an invasive thing. You know, it can help players, but you can also construct scenarios

where it could hurt players. So that's going to be a big concern, I think, for the union. Or to just get to a point where this becomes so ubiquitous that the playing field is just level across the board. And it really will come down

to what division you play, what school you go to, and who can afford to do this. Or scouting will change from scouting guys like we normally and traditionally do to going to the places where they don't have this technology with this technology to find those guys. Does that make sense? Yeah, very much so.

That's happening. The Astros are sending their people with these high-tech cameras to backfields and high schools and international fields where no one has this information. And that's been a big advantage. But even if the technology is everywhere and all of these stats are available, I think there will still be a difference between players because of their mental makeup, because of how hard they're willing to work, how open they are to this information.

I think that's really going to separate players. It's now that talent maybe dictates a little less than it used to what you're going to turn into. Now I think what's even more important is are you receptive to this information and can you incorporate it into your practice? And that's where the psychologically scarring father

comes into play. I'm worried we're going to ruin a few childhoods with this. Oh, don't worry. The idea of your little junior becoming a major league, something that has crushed many in history. Right, gentlemen, I'm sorry because we are going to have to wrap. You guys are amazing. You guys are great.

I'll say it in English. Oh, you're really rather fun. No, really, it's been an absolute thrill. Thank you to Ben Lindbergh. Thank you. Travis Sorchik, the co-authors of The MVP Machine. If you haven't, get a copy. Get a copy.

Go buy it. Find it. Read it. Think about it. Because what's happening in this book is out there and it's evolving. Just like Moneyball evolved, you'll find these guys will be thinking their way through. And there's lots of different chapters on lots of different things. And for the low price of $1,000, I'll give you an audio version where I read it to you.

Oh, dear. Right, we're going to take a break. I might need a break. One with a beach and a palm tree. Right, thank you both again, gentlemen. What a pleasure. Stick around because when we come back, we have our favorite baseball sleuth, Meredith Wills.

And she's not just an astrophysicist. She is a baseball data analyst. And she's fantastic. And we'll talk to her and no doubt, Chuck, have as much fun as we have with these guys. Absolutely. So stick around. Back shortly.

Welcome back to Playing With Science with our baseball data analytics, our new cutting-edge technology, everything we just spoke to with Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sorchik, the co-authors of the MVP machine. But now, our dear friend, our baseball sleuth. Yes. Our astrophysicist. Yes.

And. Our data analytics extraordinaire, Meredith Wills. Hello, Meredith. Hi, guys. How you doing? We're good. So good to have you back on the show. Yeah. Chuck, you do this far better than I do. What's that? Introduce Meredith.

Oh, well, listen, everybody knows about Meredith. The fact that she is an astrophysicist, a brilliant astrophysicist, as well as a baseball aficionado, as well as a baseball super fan. I follow you on Twitter and I get to see all the cool stuff that you do in the world of baseball. A well-respected voice and editorial presence in the world of baseball. flipped the whole home run surge controversy on its ear by giving us research that showed that perhaps there was one definable difference in a baseball that caused perhaps the increase in home runs that we were seeing. And I'll let you tell it because I love telling the story because quite frankly,

very, very quickly, people, sometimes you got to think differently. How about you just change the way you think, period. And that is what Meredith did because everybody, when they were researching this problem, they were cutting balls open.

Well, I'm going to let you let, I'm going to let Meredith tell us what she did and her findings. Meredith. All right. Well, I got to start. Visual aids. Yes, visual aids.

We got the baseballs. Yes, baseballs. And so I have a really awesome editor at The Athletic who got in touch with me and said, so, Meredith, you want to look at this one too? And so I did. And it turns out that the ball is different again. Again. And it's

way different from not just the ball that we had for 2017, but for every baseball that's ever been made. Awesome. It's square. This is exciting. Please continue. It's a cliffhanger. I love watching Chuck get excited about this stuff.

It's so great. I'm bringing you to every presentation I ever give from now on. Well, it is exciting stuff. So where are we? Where are we? Where are we? So we know. First, I'm going to show you what last year's ball looked like.

Okay. All right. We're looking at last year's ball. Yep. A Fisher Major League Baseball. Yep. With the seams, like the width of the seams,

like at the edge there, if you can see the edge. Right. That's last year's ball. This is this year's ball. Okay. They're next to each other. Once again,

we kind of have different. Yeah. One's shiny, one isn't. What makes that to be different is that on the new balls, the 2019 balls. Right.

The leather is smoother. Yep. the laces are thinner oh but the two that are really contributing to the aerodynamics or to the change in the home runs is that the um seams themselves are lower and the ball is rounder oh so thank you because that's what i was looking. I was looking at the new ball having a greater spherical presence than the older ball. And when I said shiny, I wasn't being rude. No, shiny is a good description. Yeah, it's smoother. So now listen, everything that you just said, judging from the last research that I read that you put out, basically all of that leads to a lower drag coefficient.

Pretty much. And so that lower drag coefficient means that the ball is going to fly farther if it's hit with the same power. Yep. The way I like to describe it is that the ball just doesn't slow down as fast. Oh, I like that. That's even better.

That's why it goes further. It's literally not slowing down as fast. Oh, I like that. That's even better. That's even better. It doesn't slow. It goes further. It's literally not slowing down as fast. Hence, it can travel farther with the same, you know, being hit. All right. Now put that next to the discussion we just had with the two guys, the author, right?

And they're saying that at the moment, the high-tech cameras, the edutronics, the track man cameras is improving pitching. And it's the hitters that are suffering to a certain extent because of the improvement in pitching. Throw in a ball that favors the hitter. And a ball that's very, very hard to throw.

Yeah. One thing you have to realize is that you're getting better aerodynamics. The ball is not slowing down as quickly. But that shininess you're talking about, that slicker leather, and the fact that the seams are lower, make it really, really hard to pitch with. And it's not as if you don't use. If I relate to cricket, that ball will hit the dirt, come back.

You can shine it and create this shiny surface against a cut surface, if you like. That hits the dirt. That's out of here. It's no longer used. So every time you go back to this particular surface. Right. And therefore, pitchers have got to learn how to pitch again because this thing's, well, it's like a bar of soap. It's all slippery and shiny. What's going on? That's a good one. Noah Syndergaard called it an ice cube. Ice cube. Pitching an ice cube. That's good. Nice. So you put this research out there and, you know, it makes perfect sense. For some reason, it doesn't get the kind of attention. I mean, first of all, I think it's great. It's kind of solving a mystery that people are interested in. And it doesn't really make a difference. Everybody's playing

with the same ball. You know what I mean? So it's not like you're, and these aren't necessarily juiced balls, which is what a lot of the headlines say. They say the ball is juiced, but the ball is different. And that difference creates different outcomes. And that's really what we're talking about, right? Right. Yeah, for some reason,

there's been this focus on the interior of the ball. Right. In a way that I hadn't thought about, even to the point where I guess there's one, I mean, I guess I got it.

I didn't see it until I read the article through the second time, so even I missed it. 1950s, I think, where you had a physics professor going through and looking at the ball traveling and he, right off the bat, discounted the leather and the laces

as possibly being able to contribute to home runs and decided he was going to look at the interior uh particularly the way the term is coefficient of restitution but all it really means is how the ball bounces off the bat when it's hit okay and that's been like what everybody's super excited about all the time right how does the ball come off the bat we can see that in exit velocity that's basically what exit velocity shows us is the ball coming off the bat. You know, if the exit velocity is higher, then one of the possible changes for that can be coefficient of restitution. However, if the exit velocity hasn't changed, it's probably not that. Right. Right.

I mean, yeah, I'm not a scientist and I got that exactly. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Super cool stuff. Looking at the same thing from a different angle to get a different outcome. Right. And we've looked at this through so many different things.

And we started off the show with our two authors saying basically that. And it talked about outliers thinking differently. And then all of a sudden finding they're no longer out there on their own. They've become a tribe. And that tribe is forever growing. And I think Meredith is another example of this. Oh, yeah.

Chose to look at it in a different way. In a different way. Yeah. And the people are beginning to go, that makes sense. Yes, exactly. Well, listen, I got to tell you, I love what you do, Meredith.

We are almost out of time, but I got to ask you about this because I thought it was really, really funny. Rob Arthur of The Slate, you know who he is, and he wrote an article postulating that Barry Bonds would have hit 100 home

runs using the current MLB balls. How do you feel about those suppositions? I Rob, one of the things I love about Rob's piece is and this is a compliment, Rob, I promise is he is very, very

good at taking into account that there are uncertainties around things. So, you know, maybe this would happen, maybe it wouldn't. And so the situation that he comes up with for, yeah, you know, if it was really warm and he was playing Minnesota or whatever, then maybe it could have happened. You know, if such and such was pitching against,

I don't remember all the details, but against all these lovely caveats after a while, it's like, yeah, it's possible. Yeah, it's basic. It's absolutely possible, but I just love the way it's, yeah, you know, by all means. Exactly, right.

We're also moving the target anyway, no pun intended, Jesus. Sorry. Hey, you know what? It is what it is. I got one last thing for you because I know you're a huge baseball fan. I know you've got for you because I know you're a huge baseball fan. I know you've got 10 games.

I know you have caught a foul ball. So this has nothing to do with anything that we're talking about now. How do you feel about this movement to put netting up all around every park so that foul balls have no chance of injuring fans, which have happened in certain cases in certain parks. Do you think that takes away from the fan experience of the game, or do you think that safety is more important? I think, honestly, I think safety is more important.

Especially, again, this ball doesn't slow down as fast. Oh, that's right. This ball is actually more, I don't know how much more dangerous, but we know it's more dangerous, or we wouldn't be seeing the home dangerous but we know it's more dangerous or we wouldn't be seeing the home runs that we're seeing so there's the way that i'm looking at netting is it's almost like a fan equivalent of baseball equivalent of seatbelts people are going to complain people are going to think it's you know taking away from your driving experience

your fan experience whatever that's fine you as a fan are not capable of catching a line drive like that i don't care if you're not on your phone i don't care if you're paying attention i don't care if you're holding a glove you are not going to catch that fall you're not that good i'm sorry no you're not i feel like i've just been i feel like I've just been grounded. That was great. I've been set. I've come in late, and I've just been grounded.

Oh, but that's perfect. You're right, though. Oh, God. I don't know. MLB needs you. I'm telling you, they need you. We need you. We love you.

My dad's been saying that for years. Yes. Yeah. That should play before every game at every stadium. You are not good enough to catch a line drive. That's why you're not on the field.

That's why you're sitting in the seat. That's why you're that side of the net. And that's why we put up netting. That's amazing. Oh, man. I'm going to put up netting

to a ringtone for my phone because you've inspired me. Absolutely. What the heck it sounds like. That is so great. Meredith Wills, I'm never disappointed when you come on sounds like. That is so great. Meredith Wills, I'm never disappointed when you come on the show.

Thank you so much. And it's going to happen again, I can tell you. Thank you so much. Really, absolute pleasure. Great to talk to you, Meredith. We'll see you. By the way, the pleasure's ours.

Oh, Chuck. What a great show, man. Yeah. A baseball-loving astrophysicist who brings a brain power to just simple things like, yeah, this thing travels further and it's for your safety.

Yeah, put the nets up. Yeah. Just thinking, just basic thinking like that. That's why it's changing the game. And that's why we have Meredith on the show. Absolutely.

All right. Well, that's our show, everybody. I hope what we've done is make you think differently, get you to take a pause and look at the same thing from a slightly different angle and maybe come up with a thought for your own.

And stop practicing with your kids without that data analytics equipment, doggone it. They're never going to make the pros without it. Yeah, get down to the electronic shop and drop about $15,000. Wow. Easy peasy. There you go.

Right, isn't it just? Right, I've been Gary O'Reilly. And I've been Chuck Nice. And this has been Playing With Science. Psst. Hey, bud. Come here. You could have listened to this episode with no ads. I tell you how. For five bucks a month, you can join StarTalk on Patreon and lose all the commercials.

Learn more at patreon.com slash startalkradio. But you didn't hear it from me.