Real Baseball. Real Sports Data

 Update:  I should have linked to the pod.  Transcript available there. The phrase "talent stack" was used for Boddy in the comments.  I think that's the right idea.

In hitting a baseball, there are three aspects: bat speed, smash factor (a concept from golf, of squaring up the ball properly and hitting it at the correct angle), and pitch selection. If you ask coaches and players, down to the Little League level, they will tell you that pitch selection is most important.  Don't swing at bad pitches. 

But they are wrong.  Bat speed is the most important. AA and AAA is full of guys who have great pitch selection. Giancarlo Stanton, on the other hand, has poor pitch selection. He does draw some walks, but he has never hit .300, seldom even .280, in any year. But he hit 59 homers one season and has over 400 for his career.  He is now a .200 hitter being paid $30M/year to play baseball. He has bat speed.

The reason kids get taught to concentrate on pitch selection is because of the psychology of it. It feels terrible to swing and miss, worse to strike out. "Striking out" is one of the baseball metaphors that has fully penetrated the culture. It is one of the things adults remember about playing as a child, wincing at the thought. The action in baseball is not continuous, we wait a long time between pitches, and everyone is focused on the batter, even when he is eight years old. Pitches are so far out of the zone so often at that level that a decent pitch that a kid can swing at occurs infrequently. Frankly, even in highschool that is mostly true: a long time between pitches, at lot of badly-thrown pitches. The disappointed feeling that not only the player, but the coaches and parents feel is magnified. 

Everyone is afraid the kid is going to give up the game in frustration if they keep failing that embarrassingly that often, so they focus on seeing if they can get the kid a little something, that feeling of at least chipping the ball, or even poking it out into fair territory. But the reward of those is only psychological, including a lot of relief and the sense that one got a bit lucky.

Swinging really hard and getting great contact, however, is also physically rewarding.  It feels great to be able to hit a ball squarely and hard -so great that a player will put up with a lot of really boring baseball in order to experience it. If you play baseball, it's what you really want to do, not hit five times as many little chippy things and foul tips. So we coach kids badly, and we keep doing it even up to the major league level.

Kyle Boddy works with a lot of teams and a lot of players, especially younger ones, and stresses bat speed, then smash factor, then pitch selection, and it works. The players get better and go up to the next level. He predicts we will be seeing much more of this over the next 5-10 years, not only more home runs, but more long doubles to the wall, more ground balls through the gaps because they are just plain hit hard. More Elly De La Cruz types coming. He says nothing about keeping your eye on the ball, because the best players don't.  They are looking all over the place on the pitch: at the pitcher's chest, over his head. It is usually somewhere up, so that the head is up, rather than at the ground, but really it could be anywhere.  Now that we have the camera equipment to track exactly where the eyes are going, we find that the players don't even know where they are looking.  They give wrong answers.  Because they have to swing long before the ball gets to them, and it is largely intuitive, built up over years of swinging at faster and faster pitches. Only those with excellent hand-eye coordination survived beyond Little League, and only those with superior native skills get past high school. But then practice increasingly becomes important to get to further levels.

Boddy has turned the same cameras on the pitchers, and it's the same story. Velocity is everything.  Years of baseball lore will tell you that it is pitching on the black, showing tremendous control, but if you slow down enough to have that kind of control, the best hitters hit it anyway. Pitchers throwing at their top speed cannot reliably put the ball in an eight-inch window more than 70% of the time. The window is actually about ten inches, five on each side of where he was aiming for. They believe they can.  Boddy starts working with a player and tells him to put five pitches straight down the middle. They sneer that this is too easy. They don't go to the middle, though, but in that ten-inch window. Working with overweight and underweight plyo balls can improve their speed 2-4 mph - and that is what they should do. If you can throw 98, you should get a good catcher and just throw down the middle - or what you think would be down the middle. Your other pitches should just be variations of that.

I love baseball history, and don't even much follow the sport now. I check on the first of each month if the Red Sox are in it. I have sons who follow it more, and young friends in my fantasy football leagues that follow the Orioles and Mariners closely, so I keep up with those a bit. I loved the exercise of picking an all-time team starting with Josh Gibson, and even made a pilgrimage to the Negro Leagues Museum almost a decade ago. But the new players are just better.  Your all-star team is likely mostly playing right now, or only recently retired. Very few pitched this fast in the Goode Olde Days and very few swung this hard, so the former could take a lot of pitches off, or even parts of the order off then.  Those few batters with that kind of bat speed could likewise feast on everyone.  Ted Williams said even forty years ago that no one was ever going to hit .400 again, "because of that damned slider." Arraez, the player who was flirting with it earlier in the season is down to about .350 now. 

Boddy takes his lessons from the improvements in chess strategy, and now go strategy because of computers and AI, even after hundreds of years of experts working at it obsessively.   He is an exceptional chess player himself (and card player). He started as a computer security expert but loved baseball, particularly developing young players.  He considers it "un-American" that baseball organisations* do not spend equal amounts of time in developing the players who were undrafted and cheaper to get once they get in the door. They are too wedded to the sunk cost of what they have already paid. He has provided significant consulting help to the Astros and Reds as well as individual players down to the high school level.

He has started moving into basketball next.  We'll see.

*He compares them to European aristocracies and a widening gap between those organisations and those which evaluate their players and improve them more precisely.