Old School Isn’t Working for the D-backs

If there’s one pervasive description for the Arizona Diamondbacks, it’s that they’re an old school organization. The fan base has resonated with this in the past and the franchise is run with a unique, albeit perhaps outdated style. The question is whether or not this is working, and it’s something that deserves to be discussed. Taking a break from the numbers, let’s use a story or to drive this conversation.

In case you missed it, Jason Turbow dropped a gem last week over at SB Nation. He did a fabulous job writing up a concept that’s nearly a decade old: effective velocity (EV). Perry Husband coined the term and really established, or at least “branded,” the theory that is effective velocity after washing out of professional baseball not long after his career started. Husband had been creating the theory for nearly 25 years before he first pitched it to a major league organization. And while the theory of effective velocity makes a ton of sense and is really just a collection and refinement of the common beliefs of many pitchers, catchers, pitching coaches and managers, Husband is yet to see an organization really take the idea and run with it. When it’s all said and done, Turbow’s article on effective velocity is well worth the 20 minutes it will take to digest it. But do yourself a favor and bookmark it for later reading, because it’s received a lot of critical praise, and for good reason.

So what does all of this have to do with the Diamondbacks? There’s a strong connection to the desert about half way through the piece when it’s revealed that one of the biggest supporters of effective velocity was none other than Trevor Bauer, Arizona’s first round pick back in 2011. His “quirks” have been well documented, but this is perhaps the most detail we’ve heard about the issues as Bauer was “…as solid an adherent to EV as could be found in organized baseball.” His exposure to effective velocity came via the summers that Bauer spent at the Texas Baseball Ranch where Perry Husband had greatly influenced camp founder Ron Wolforth and the two had started to really share ideologies around pitching. 

“You hear people in the industry talk about hard in, slow away,” Wolforth said. “Perry took a concept that we already accepted to be true, and quantified it. He showed not only why it works, but how it works. That was the first time that this stuff really started to make sense. I always knew it to be true, but when you start putting numbers to it, it becomes very powerful.”

…

Wolforth quickly adopted Husband’s model for his academy. Bauer, a naturally curious competitor who studied mechanical engineering in college, was among the first pitchers to embrace it.

The Diamondbacks, it seems, weren’t very receptive to the ideas and theories that Bauer subscribed to, no matter how much they resembled the accepted practices of baseball. What Bauer sought to do was “tunnel” his pitches, meaning that he wanted all of his offerings to resemble his fastball as they left his hand and traveled towards the plate. His breaking pitches would dive and his off speed  stuff would fade, but out of the hand and a third of the way to the plate, the hitter would have no clue what was coming. This was part of Husband’s theory and Bauer and his father engineered their own homemade devices to help train Trevor to pitch this way. Deception is what Bauer was seeking to create, and that’s usually a good thing, but the Diamondbacks saw otherwise.

Arizona’s catcher, Miguel Montero — at the time a seven-year vet — complained about the rookie’s habit of shaking off his signals, starting with his first-ever big league pitch and barely relenting from there. (Montero said the rest of the staff disagreed with his pitch selections three or four times per game, reported The Arizona Republic, while on at least one occasion Bauer shook him off on “almost every pitch.”) Montero, of course, called pitches according to a combination of scouting reports and personal experience. Bauer, however, wanted to execute an EV-based game plan built entirely on sequence and location, regardless of who was at the plate.

To say that Montero and Bauer weren’t on the same page is an understatement as they were approaching the task of retiring batters from vastly different backgrounds and even different ideologies. Montero had some words for The Kid:

“This is not high school anymore,” Montero said of the experience. “This is not college anymore. There are different ways to attack big league hitters. They make adjustments, so you have to make adjustments. If you attack them one way the first at-bat, they will adjust, and you have to attack in a different way the next time.”

Meanwhile, Bauer was perplexed at the situation:

“It’s tough for me to understand how a hitter-dependent approach works,” said Bauer, later that season. “It’s also hard for someone who’s been taught that way to understand how a hitter-independent approach works. It was frustrating for everybody.”

The experiment was essentially over before it even started. Manager Kirk Gibson aligned with his catcher and pitching coach Charles Nagy while Bauer was on a island. The young hurler was criticized for pitching up in the zone, which is a key tenet of effective velocity. Bauer didn’t want to give up everything he knew about pitching while Gibson publicly denounced his stubbornness to change. It was obviously a strained relationship and in December of 2012, the organization flipped Bauer to the Indians as part of a three-team deal, netting them Didi Gregorius. Cleveland took Bauer in with open arms and did their homework before adopting the former top prospect.

Cleveland did not enter into this relationship with eyes closed. Not only did they scout Bauer before making the deal with Arizona, they went so far as to send representatives to Wolforth’s coaching clinic in Montgomery — reconnaissance agents whose targets were only too happy to spill the beans — just weeks before pulling the trigger. There, they watched Bauer, together with a Ranch regular named Eric Binder — a 26-year-old whose two-season professional pitching career crested in the Single-A New York-Penn League in 2011 — give a presentation on lower-half pitching mechanics. The team was so taken that they didn’t just trade for Bauer, they also hired Binder, who currently serves as an assistant in player development.

What did the Indians get for their open-mindedness? They received a starter with a bright future even if he has had an up-and-down big league season so far. At just 23, Bauer has tens of thousands of pitches to throw and his story is just getting started. The results aren’t amazing just yet, but there have been glimpses of greatness from him and Diamondbacks fans will always keep an eye on the righty, wondering just what could have been.

Where this gets really interesting, however, is when we look at how closed-minded the D-backs appear compared to the open-mindedness of other organizations. I feel that it’s safe to say that the old-school, eye-for-an-eye style of Towers and Gibson, no matter how drenched in tradition, has done more harm than good. Throwing at Ryan Braun when the Brewers were in town was an embarrassment and so are GM comments about “proven closers.” Trading team-controlled assets away for one-dimensional players with explicit weaknesses is a bad policy. The questionable decisions of this management team are numerous and they’ve stayed in power largely thanks to one overachieving season (2011) that brought on some serious praise. Without it, they’d likely have been dismissed by now.

I’m not saying that the Diamondbacks should adopt effective velocity. I’m not saying that they should manage their team based only on the things discussed at this website and other like it. What I am suggesting, however, is that they quit walling themselves off from new ideas, especially in regards to baseball operations. It’s not fun getting plundered, then laughed at by everyone else. It’s not fun getting scorned by everyone with a brain when they plunk a player, then give up the lead-blowing grand slam on the next pitch. It’s time the Diamondbacks get smarter, and to do that, they’re going to have to open up to some ideas that aren’t as “traditional” as the ones the current management employs.

Because at the end of the day, we all want to win, and if you’ve looked around baseball lately, the smart teams are winning and/or on the verge of winning for a long time. Arizona won’t be outspending the division any time soon, so the sooner they wise up, the better. As committed and concerned fans of this team, we deserve a smarter baseball team and a better baseball team.