Hey, data data: MLB teams face challenge delivering info to players

New Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman is a notorious late-night emailer, and catcher A.J. Ellis will sometimes awake to a series of messages in his inbox from the boss with detailed scouting reports.

Ellis said he’s appreciative of the insights, which range from how opposing hitters are reacting to Los Angeles’ staff to different pitch sequences he and starting catcher Yasmani Grandal could consider.

“The information is always available to us,” Ellis said. “It’s not pushed upon us as ‘you have to do this,’ but it’s presented to us and it’s up to us to really implement it into our game plan and into our game calling.”

Earlier this month, Yankees third baseman Chase Headley received a scouting report on rookie Blue Jays closer Roberto Osuna that indicated he threw sliders to left-handed hitters only 1% of the time.

With two outs in the ninth inning of a game Toronto led 2-0, Headley had fouled off a pair of two-strike offerings from Osuna, whose sixth pitch of the at bat was a slider that froze Headley for strike three to end the game. It was just the sixth slider Osuna had thrown to lefties in 385 pitches.

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“He basically doesn’t throw a slider to lefties, you know?” Headley said. “Last pitch of the game, backdoor slider. He hadn’t thrown one in three weeks.”

He added, “That’s not anybody’s fault. That’s not the scouting report’s fault. Obviously the numbers say what the numbers say.”

While Headley says he is generally appreciative for such advanced information, he worries that it can go too far; he prefers to prepare for opponents with his own video work.

“I like to do my own because then if it’s wrong, it’s on me, you know what I mean?” he said. “It’s frustrating when you trust something and it doesn’t stack up that way.”

There is more advanced information than ever before, but how much actually trickles down to the players? While the “scouts vs. stats” debate - brewing since the 2003 publication of Moneyball - is growing more harmonious, this remains a contentious topic on some clubs, particularly as quantitative theories challenge long held beliefs of the old guard of uniformed personnel.

Such a divide reportedly was a key reason Angels general manager Jerry Dipoto abruptly resigned earlier this summer.

Every team has some degree of sabermetric data in the form of heat maps (strike-zone illustrations of where a hitter is most and least proficient), spray charts (dotted field maps showing recent batted-ball locations to help guide defensive positioning and shifting) and numeric tendencies (results against certain velocities or percentages a pitcher throws a particular pitch).

The sophistication and utilization of that information is what separates franchises.

'Like you’re speaking a foreign language'

A leading supplier of advanced and intricate information is TrackMan, whose radars are installed in all 30 major league parks and more than 70 minor league, college and international stadiums. TrackMan, a Danish company, was originally founded to record data points of golf swings before expanding into other sports.

John Olshan, general manager of TrackMan Baseball, said that he received early advice to translate jargon terms into baseball language: a slider’s spin axis became its tilt; a pitcher’s release distance became his extension; a curve’s movement on a 360-degree scale was transformed into a clock face.

TrackMan introduced its technology to coaches, pitching coordinators and other front-office associates at the Arizona Fall League a few years ago.

“You’d be sitting there in a surreal meeting with people in baseball uniforms around a conference table,” Olshan recalled. “You’ve got a PowerPoint and they're looking at you like you’re speaking a foreign language.”

The second stage of the demonstration occurred behind home plate as the radars began tracking pitches, giving the baseball men a chance to see the practical use.

“After a few innings, they could tell me more about the numbers than I’ll never know just because they’ve been watching it every day their whole life,” Olshan said, explaining, “A lot of it is how the change is introduced and managed. As long as a coach starts to get comfortable that what we’re measuring lines up with what he sees with his eyes, then those barriers start to drop.”

The Pirates have the most visible integration of its analytics department within the uniformed staff. Two of their quants, Dan Fox and Mike Fitzgerald, are embedded in the clubhouse and attend meetings with a goal, Pittsburgh general manager Neal Huntington said, of opening channels of communication to make the information “manageable and applicable.”

“Essentially, Dan and Mike are members of our coaching staff because of the environment created by Clint Hurdle, because of the environment created by our coaches,” said Huntington, who later added, “When those two groups come together and combine into one, you have a very powerful group of people, and we’re fortunate that our guys have checked their egos at the door and their goal is to help each other, which means that their goal is ultimately to help this team be as good as it can be.”

The most common conduit of advanced data is the coaching staff, whose job descriptions have expanded to include “sabermetric interpreter.” They provide information to the coaches, who choose how and how much to relay to players.

“You have to filter it a little bit,” Twins manager Paul Molitor said.

“It’s our job to get know the player and figure out what he wants, what he needs and what he can handle,” Yankees bench coach Rob Thomson said. “Then it’s about sifting through and figuring out what’s usable, what’s not, depending on the player and the situation.”

“Only so much information we can retain”

Indians starter Trevor Bauer is as intellectually curious as any pitcher — he installed a TrackMan at his house for experimentation — and he acknowledged that stats give him a starting point, so he knows which part of his pitching “ecosystem” to use.

“I look at a lot. How much I actually apply, I don’t know,” Bauer said. “It gives me an idea going in, and then everything I do in the game is based on how the game’s going and how the hitters are reacting, what I feel good with.”

Several players said they still mostly rely on video and only take a cursory look at some of the wonkier data. That’s true even of Yankees closer Andrew Miller, another of the game’s more cerebral thinkers, who said he doesn’t receive much information that would qualify as sabermetrics.

“Most of our scouting stuff, they might try to rework to a way that it doesn’t sound like that to us,” Miller said. “I don’t think people would be very receptive to, I know when you go to FanGraphs, you get Z-Swing Percentage” — referring to the site’s tabulation of how often a hitter swings at pitches in the strike zone — “I don’t think anybody that I’m aware of in this clubhouse would react favorably to that information being given to them.”

Thomson confirmed that there’s a bit of translation involved, saying, “You try to make a story out of it instead of having them look at the raw data.”

According to FanGraphs’ Pitch F/X data, for instance, Miller’s Z-Swing Percentage is currently tied for his career-low at 55.2%, so his paraphrased scouting report might note that hitters have been patient and recommend that he should aggressively attack the zone.

“There’s only so much information we can retain out there,” Miller said. “The way that my brain works, I would rather draw from a visual memory rather than knowing that this guy is whatever-some-terminology-I-don’t-even-know.”

Indians manager Terry Francona said he worries about giving a player “paralysis by analysis.”

“I don’t know that they need to have that (data),” he said. They’re supposed to see the ball and hit the ball. I think it’s maybe for us, helping us make decisions in the winter on acquiring players, how to defend the players, match up—things like that.”

Francona added that some players do want that information, so the staff needs to present it helpfully.

Under their new leadership, Dodgers players all receive heat maps with green and red boxes signaling good and bad zones — it’s become so ubiquitous that, when a player overheard a conversation about the reports, he chanted a zen-like mantra, “Green and red, green and red,” as he continued to walk by.

Dodgers reliever J.P. Howell said he trusts the heat maps more since the new front office took over, because the visual representation is more based on numbers than scouting opinion.

“They’ve always done it, but they use a lot more numbers,” he said. “When they put red and when they put green, there’s more of a reason.”

Some still choose to do their trend-spotting homework themselves. In addition to video and heat maps, Twins catcher Kurt Suzuki said he delves into the raw data while scouting opposing hitters.

“You look at exit speed velocity,” he said. “You look at tendencies in certain counts and certain pitches and quadrants of the zone. Velocity comes into play.

“You try to match it up with your pitcher that you have that day.”

Like Headley learned against Osuna, those tendencies are not ironclad, of course. Suzuki said it’s not uncommon to study a pitcher who only threw his changeup with in two-strike counts — only to roll over on a 1-0 changeup and mutter to himself, “You’re not supposed to throw that.”

Bauer noted that separating one plate appearance from the aggregate is of the utmost importance.

“Over the course of the season, the numbers might play out in my favor or his favor,” he said, “but in that given at bat, there’s no telling.”

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