Fifty years ago, a high school baseball manager relied on some simple data inputs. He brought to the game a sheet divided with a line down the middle for balls and strikes. There were also seven columns for the seven innings of the game. The last day’s pitcher who was tasked with charting the pitches would tabulate the pitches in the various columns and make it available to the manager between innings. The manager might also have the team’s scorebook to scour if there had been a matchup between the teams earlier in the season. Sometimes he might get lucky if the local newspaper ran a scoreline about the other team in the past couple weeks. Pretty basic stuff, but they learned to work with what information they had.

MLB managers back then didn’t have a whole lot more in term of data analytics. It was very old school. Teams would have a couple advance scouts to see opposing teams play in the weeks leading up to the series at hand. Managers would see who’s hot and who’s not in those reports, but not that much more. Some of the greatest managers the game has ever seen, Walter Alston, Gene Mauch, and Sparky Anderson would manage primarily by experience, baseball intuition, and sometimes just plain hunches. One of the all-time best, Baltimore’s Earl Weaver, a three-time Manager of the Year and 1970 World Series champion, described his role as staying out of the players way. Indeed, he was famous for playing for the big inning, a big home run to win the day. Earl might have fit in nicely to today’s cadre of managers.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, written by Michael Lewis in 2003, changed the game from an analytical standpoint. Billy Beane served as the Oakland Athletics general manager from 1997-2015. He was in a word, revolutionary. The book illustrates how Beane’s approach took a low-budget team to the playoffs in 2002 and 2003. He brought sabermetrics and statistical analysis to the game, replacing old school theories. For Beane, it was all about finding players who could add value to winning games. Hitters should be measured by on-base and slugging percentages, not the traditional batting average, RBIs and HRs. Teams began to use data analytics in drafting players, game preparation, and game management. Team executives, managers, and coaches who could effectively use the new data points became the norm.

Baseball has come a long way in the last twenty years in terms of data analytics and use of technology. With the advent of the automatic balls strikes (ABS) system this year, we now have a new dynamic in calling balls and strikes. Technology is literally looking over our shoulders. MLB has had to rewrite the strike zone to accommodate ABS. The zone starts at 27% of a batter’s height and stretches to 53.5%, top to bottom. In width, the ABS zone is, of course, 17 inches wide, matching the width of home plate. It’s incredibly precise, as evidenced by the strike zone box you see on television and on ballpark scoreboards. And with just about 40 games left in the season, it seems to be really working. Catchers and hitters for the most part know just when to use it, saving the challenges for key at-bats later in the games. It’s time sensitive, dramatic, and kind of fun.

Players prepare themselves for game day action with an assortment of technology to give them an advantage. Biometric arm and leg sleeves measure joint angles, movement symmetry, and muscle load. There are “smart garments” to use, including shirts and shorts embedded with ECG and breathing sensors. GPS vests track speed and acceleration, while multisport watches (Garmin Fenix is an example) can be worn to map running routes, pace, and elevation. Smart insoles are inserted into shoes to track stride. And after a workout, recovery compression is utilized to boost circulation. The players are athletes with several data points to track performance. It’s a whole new ballgame.

As a fan, I’m sure your head is spinning like mine when the commentators themselves use new lingo to describe performance. Indeed, ballparks now have launch monitors which are portable radar or camera devices that track hitting and pitching metrics and give the commentators loads of information to relate. There is no such thing as a “hard hit ball” anymore, but rather you get the exit velocity of the baseball and the speed of the bat. Home runs are not just measured in feet but in launch angles. My favorite one is spin rate, a measure of how fast a pitched ball rotates in revolutions per minute upon release. It’s no longer just a “sinking fastball” but you need to know the rpms involved. Crazy, new info.

One of the more interesting ESPN baseball analysts is Rob Friedman, aka the “PitchingNinja”. His new book published just this year, Unhittable: How Technology, Mavericks, and Innovators Engineered Baseball’s New Era of Pitching Dominance, is the current rage in the game. In his book, Friedman explores how data, AI, high-speed cameras, and modern training labs have transformed pitching in baseball. Pitching experts like Tom House are leading the technological surge, and today’s stars, such as Paul Skenes, are following closely.

There are aids for managers and coaches as well. The best-known product is the Edgertronic High-Speed Camera, which can capture 500 to 1,000 frames per second, giving pitching instructors information on finger pressure, release points, and seam orientation in ultra-slow motion to optimize pitch design. The more I explored this topic, I found myself asking, is this too much? Can’t we just play and watch the game of baseball I used to know?

Most recently, two divergent answers to the “too much “ question came into play. MLB decided to put limits on iPad use in the dugout. I’m sure you’ve seen your favorite players between innings or after an at-bat go immediately to an iPad to see what went wrong. The Mets, not that they were getting an advantage in the win-loss column, were using the iPads to run AI to assist in strategy decisions. MLB has said no to that for now.

Meanwhile, the Angels this past week fired one of the most respected pitching coaches in the game, Mike Maddux, along with his assistant and the bullpen coach, seemingly for not being up to speed with the technological advances in pitching. When I read the story, I was reminded of Mike’s brother, Greg Maddux, who effectively used his own baseball savvy, not technology, in his pathway to the Hall of Fame.

One of my favorite baseball expressions is that games are won or lost based upon “how you play between the lines”. I’m not too sure anymore.

Until next Monday,

your Baseball Bench Coach