The MVP Machine: It’s Good
The Only Rule is It Has To Work, the last book from Ben Lindburgh, coauthored with Sam Miller, was one of my favorite reads ever. I blew through it in two days, before recommending it to all my friends and former college baseball teammates, who universally echoed my enthusiasm.
The Only Rule was a bonafide page-turner. Lindburgh’s new book, The MVP Machine, this one authored with Travis Sawchik, isn’t – but don’t let that turn you off.
Where The Only Rule was a story, MVP Machine is more like a series of linked essays – which makes sense given that Lindburgh’s day job is as a writer for The Ringer and podcaster for FanGraphs, and Sawchik is a writer at Five Thirty Eight with a bestseller called Big Data Baseball under his belt (Miller, for his part, writes for ESPN).
Rather than chronicle a personal experience like The Only Rule, this latest book, subtitled: ‘How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data To Build Better Ballplayers’, tells the story of how data, analytics, and new-school thinking have made their way – finally -to player development, and that the consequences are already massive.
The book is interesting, but really it feels like it’s more necessary. It sort of surveys the landscape of data- driven player development, recounting where we were, where we are, how we got here, and where we might be going – both within the formal, organized game and in warehouses, ranches, and parking lots where smart people are using incredible technology to draw every last drop of talent from aspiring (and already successful) athletes.
The first question this whole concept demands is why the heck did it take so long for Moneyball-style thinking to translate to player development? Lindburgh and Sawchik make the very sound argument that as new-agey as it may have seemed, Moneyball was sort of proto-evaluation; Billy Beane and co used existing, conventional stats in a new way to identify players that were good at things that were overlooked in the game at large. Now, teams and players are using new technology to quantify things never quantified before, to understand not if players are good, but what makes players good – and hone those skills. It’s like a Turing Machine compared to an iPhone 10 – they’re the same general thing, but they’re really not all that similar.
Lindburgh does a great job employing the stories of specific, well-known ballplayers reinventing themselves on the fly – either out of desperation, or competitive drive. I won’t ruin the anecdotes, but the background on guys like Justin Turner and Rich Hill are some of the best parts.
As a former Division 3 college baseball player, I sort of existed on the lagging-edge of the exceptionally good. And something about that made this book so damn frustrating.
Playing D3 requires more drive than talent, making the most of not very much – but still more than most. All the D3 guys did the same workouts, had the same coaches, practiced the same drills, ran the same sprints, as the guys that played at big time programs or went on to the Majors and Minors. We did all that better than almost anyone else around – but significantly, and noticeably, worse than the best of those doing it.
Reading about new technology driving biomechanics-informed training regiments that add 5-7 MPH to the fastballs of players ranging from high school to the MLB in just a few months was almost painful. New thinking about swings and plate approach, courtesy of the launch angle and exit velocity revelation, that turns marginal players into All-Star sluggers and fringe players into college success was almost too much to bear.
I’m 28. I didn’t miss this player development revolution by much, and I would argue there’s no one it would have helped quite as much as the D3 player. Anyone who ever played at that level will tell you the difference 7 MPH makes on an 80 MPH fastball.
Reading this book stirred up bygone musings; I couldn’t help but play the age old game: If I, and players like me, had access to these tools, this data, these training regimens…. it’s almost too frustrating to consider.
To spare you, reader, more self-aggrandizing nostalgia, I’ll close with this: we here at OTBB get sent a lot of books. Many of them I read parts of; some I can’t bring myself to pick up at all. This one, I felt compelled to write about. It’s not a beach read, but you should buy it. It has a place on any baseball fan’s bookcase, and I think with time and distance, its survey-like take on the current state of play will prove even more interesting and instructive.
-Max Frankel
