Sam Fuld retired from the outfield last fall, leaving behind an eight-year playing career in the big leagues and joining the Phillies in a newly created role: major league player information coordinator.
Fuld is as well educated as any ballplayer. He has an economics degree from Stanford, interned at Stats, Inc., while in the minors, and was working towards a master’s degree in statistics before he got the call up to the majors. In his playing days, Fuld would study his opponents more deeply than just the mainstream metrics of a pitcher’s strikeouts and walks, checking key peripheral stats like the groundball/flyball ratio against that opponent’s heater. “That told me a lot about fastball characteristics,” he said.
That resumé made Fuld an ideal candidate for sharing complex data with players. But it didn’t quite prepare him for the day in spring training in Florida this year when he had to teach the Phillies players about advanced stats because, well, he had never needed to use PowerPoint before. “Hopefully I’m a lot better PowerPointer by the end of this year,” he said with a laugh.
Still, his message appears to have gotten through: Philadelphia’s offense has shown marked improvement in the two obscure hitting stats the coaching staff emphasized: wOBA and wRC+. Phillies’ pitchers, meanwhile, were surprised to discover just how effective certain overlooked pitches in their repertoire actually were.
Fuld is among the leaders of a new breed of baseball coach: an analytics translator. The advent of Statcast’s radar- and camera-tracking technology in 2015 exponentially increased the number of measurable actions on the field. Data now governs decision-making throughout every organization, from lineup construction to player evaluation. But that knowledge doesn’t always filter downwards.
“Front offices spend so much time looking at this information that it’s almost assumed that everybody knows it,” Fuld said. “Players just have a rough idea unless you go out of your way to search that information.
“We’re all very flawed as humans in our ability to accurately measure how much we throw a pitch or how well we hit against it.”
As recently as three years ago, I conducted an informal survey around the major leagues and found that shockingly little of the voluminous advanced data collected and studied by front offices actually reached the players. The Pirates had the most visible integration, although data-minded clubs like the Astros and the Rays had good communication lines in place, too.
A scan of 2018 organizational directories, however, shows the proliferation of these data-minded coaching roles. The Dodgers employ game planning/communications coach Danny Lehmann, the Rays tabbed Rocco Baldelli as major league field coordinator, the Pirates list Bob Cook as major league quantitative analyst, the Astros employ major league advance information coordinator Tommy Kawamura; and the Red Sox have dubbed Ramon Vazquez as its liaison.
In 2016, the Astros created a development coach role called for a couple minor league affiliates, hiring Kawamura and Aaron DelGiudice. Mickey Storey and Jason Bell were embedded with Houston’s farm teams in 2017, as was the organization’s top analyst, Sig Mejdal—the right-hand man of general manager Jeff Luhnow. Mejdal formerly held the exotic title of “director of decision sciences” but now is a special assistant to the GM for process improvement. He immersed himself with the Class A Tri-City Valley Cats last summer and is doing the same with the Double A Corpus Christi Hooks this season.
According to Luhnow, the job description for those development coach roles included just two requirements: “They had to be able to throw batting practice, and they had to be able to understand SQL.” (SQL is a programming language used for managing databases.)
The cross section of those candidates was small. “We found all of them,” Luhnow said.
The task for the new employees was to take the innovation coming out of the Astros’ front office in Houston and help implement advanced data in the minors. The Astros’ farm teams became “learning laboratories,” the GM said, to test efficacy of different ideas and to familiarize the players and staff with the concepts before reaching the majors.
“Now we have a roster of hitting coaches and pitching coaches that are very technologically capable,” Luhnow said. “In fact, they’re pushing a lot of the advancement now.”
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For years, the thinking went, too much data would overwhelm a player. Even Luhnow acknowledged that there’s an “overabundance” of information available. But while the primary means of communication generally remains a three-step process—front office to coaches to players—the modern implementation includes increasingly stat-savvy coaches or analysts working directly with players.
A baseball player needs to trust the data messenger, especially when the numbers suggest an old habit needs to change. That’s why so many organizations previously deferred to coaches. But what the Pirates, Astros, Phillies, and others have done is build a relationship directly between player and analyst. If a player has a question, the analyst can explain the reasoning and context instead of a coach having to go fetch someone else, and can drill down to the most important details.
Nationals manager Davey Martinez said, “I’ll use all the information possible. There’s a fine line on how we want to present it to the players—which players get a lot of it, which players don’t need a whole lot of it.”
In the standard scouting meeting prior to each new series, Martinez said the reports given to players include what he calls “the nugget,” the singular stat with greatest resonance.
Washington closer Sean Doolittle has said that he is most interested in the Statcast-collected data about his release point. After a few good early season outings, he told a coach those should be bookmarked as his baseline. Now, he only wants to be told if he deviates from those benchmarks.
“I like that feedback,” Doolittle said. “When I throw 90 percent fastballs, it’s a really specific thing, and I want to make sure that what I’m feeling on the mound is matching up with the data.”
Regarding opponents, Doolittle said what’s most helpful is if the quantitative data is translated into something qualitative.
“I couldn’t tell you the percentage of swings this guy takes on fastballs out of the zone,” Doolittle said. “Somewhere, somebody knows that data, and they’ve sifted through it and boiled it down to the point where they can be like, ‘This guy’s super-aggressive with guys in scoring position.’ I need the bullet point that I can have in the back of my head.”
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The offensive stats that Fuld and the Phillies coaches have honed in on so far are weighted on-base average (wOBA), and weighted runs created plus (wRC+), and pitch frequency and effectiveness for the pitchers. While on-base-plus slugging percentage (OPS) has caught on as a single measure of offensive effectiveness, it’s a little crude. On-base percentage is more important than slugging—1.8 times as valuable, by most estimates—so wOBA takes that into account. wRC+ attempts to quantify how many runs a player contributed to his team when normalized for ballpark and league factors.
In 2017, the Phillies ranked 26th out of the 30 major league teams in both categories, with a .310 wOBA and 88 wRC+. In 2018, they rank 13th, with a .320 wOBA and 12th, with a 100 wRC+, respectively. Personnel has improved, but so have hitters’ approaches at the plate. It’s no wonder the Phillies’ assistant hitting coach was recently spotted wearing a “Chicks Dig The wOBA” t-shirt.
“Any advantage we can get,” outfielder Aaron Altherr said, “I’m all for it,”
Phillies manager Gabe Kapler called Fuld “a really good conduit” because of his ability to compartmentalize a lot of information and find the right moment to communicate the most relevant part. Fuld, though, is quick to point out that he is merely one member of a larger team that includes the other coaches, the front office headed by GM Matt Klentak and the advance scouting team led by Mike Calitri.
Kapler is an unabashed data-phile who ruffled feathers in the first week of this season when some moves didn’t work as planned. Those misgivings quickly calmed when the Phillies won 13 of the next 16 games. Playing the probabilities, after all, works in the aggregate.
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Fuld’s own playing career included stints with the data-savvy A’s and Rays. All manner of statistics were available, he said, but the prerogative was on the player to seek them out. Finding the time to do that around working on fitness and baseball-specific skills could be challenging. And too much data, or the wrong data, could be misleading.
“I definitely found myself thinking,” he said, “‘Wow, there could be a role in there for somebody to just make this a little more concise, make it more efficient, make it more understandable.’”
Yankees first baseman Tyler Austin spent a good portion of the offseason contemplating the Statcast-induced hitting revolution chronicled by the metrics of exit velocity (how fast the ball comes off the bat) and launch angle (the initial vertical path the ball takes). When spring training rolled around, however, Austin found himself overthinking in the batter’s box to the detriment of his results.
“I found myself thinking about the stuff, like ‘hit the ball in the air, hit the ball in the air,’ and it didn’t work out for me,” he said. “So I try to not think about it as much as possible now.”
This season, Austin leads the Yankees’ league-leading offense in home run rate, with six in just 83 at bats.
Some pitchers, like relievers Seth Lugo of the Mets and John Axford of the Blue Jays, have said they have sought out their data as a calibration tool. Lugo is famous in niche analytic circles for his curveball’s high spin rate, so he was worried last year when he heard a commentator said that rate had dropped. He sought out Mets data guru T.J. Barra and asked whether the maximum was down. Told that the average had lowered, but the maximum was the same, Lugo was relieved—he had purposefully been working on a second, slower version of his curveball that would be about 70 mph instead of 82, so of course that would spin less.
Axford said he learned his release point was a half-foot higher than the average pitcher (he’s 6’5”) and that the extension of his arm makes his pitches’ perceived velocity higher than their actual velocity. He also knows his velocity is above average but his spin rate is below average.
“Seeing spin rates and things like that—I’m still trying to wrap my head around as to what benefit, I guess, I’m gathering from that,” Axford said.
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Luhnow began working in the St. Louis Cardinals’ front office 15 years ago. He came into baseball with a business and engineering pedigree that included an undergraduate degree from Penn and an MBA from Northwestern as well as work experience as an engineer, a McKinsey consultant, and a startup executive. He quickly realized that communication in baseball circles was a bit different.
“A lot happened during in those first few years where I realized that the traditional methods of convincing people—using facts and data—that I was used to in management consulting and business school and pitching VCs on a startup, those didn’t matter,” Luhnow said. “You had to talk to people about situations. You had to connect with them as human beings. You had to really convince them, and more importantly, you had to make it their idea.”
Players won’t like every decision, but they generally appreciate an honest explanation of the facts. Doolittle, who played six years for A’s manager Bob Melvin, said he and his teammates didn’t mind data-based directives on playing time because they had respect for the source and the rationale.
“Guys loved playing for Bob,” he said, “because he communicated really well with them and was able to give guys a reason why.”