We are only a couple days away from the pitchers and catchers report date on Feb. 12, but plenty of Mets have already shown up in Port St. Lucie. On Thursday, Mark Vientos and Francisco Álvarez were in camp and talked to SNY about the 2024 season.

Álvarez talked about his excitement to catch star closer Edwin Díaz.

Now, onto the morning briefing!

Latest MLB News

The New York Mets have unveiled the player development staff for the 2024 season. Andy Green, a former Mets player and ex-manager of the San Diego Padres, is set to manage and guide player development in his comeback to the organization. Here’s the full list of player development staff, along with staff for minor league operations and performance and the Dominican Republic.

Mark Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times reported that the Tampa Bay Rays have given contract extensions to baseball operations president Erik Neander and manager Kevin Cash.

The Baltimore Orioles have claimed infielder Livan Soto off waivers from the Los Angeles Angels.

Commissioner Rob Manfred aims to launch a direct-to-consumer streaming package, featuring at least half of the Major League Baseball teams, by 2025, writes Evan Drelich from The Athletic. The feasibility of this plan remains uncertain and could hinge significantly on the outcome of the Diamond Sports Group bankruptcy case.

Tenchy Rodriguez of Zdigital announces that former Mets outfielder Carlos Gomez has been named a special assistant to MLBPA President Tony Clark.

According to Robert Murray of FanSided, right-hander Luis Perdomo has signed a minor league contract with the Washington Nationals. The agreement also includes an invitation to participate in major league spring training.

The Red Sox have signed former Mets prospect Michael Fulmer, per Michael Mayer of MMO.

Latest on MMO

Elliot Teichman profiles Mets non-roster invitee Eric Orze.

Ari Berkowitz writes about the bullpen options that will be in place that will potentially lead up to Mets closer Edwin Diaz

On This Date in Mets History

Birthdays: Danny Muno (35), Todd Pratt (57), Doug Linton (59), Mookie Wilson (68)

The post Morning Briefing: Mark Vientos, Francisco Álvarez in Port St. Lucie appeared first on Metsmerized.

Mike Bell

Current Position: Vice President of Player Development, Arizona Diamondbacks

Age: December 7, 1974 (44)

Managerial Experience: Yakima Bears (2007), Visalia Rawhide (2008-2009)

The younger brother of David Bell, Cincinnati Reds manager, Mike Bell is a new name on the Mets’ radar. Bell is currently serving as the Arizona Daimondbacks’ Vice President of Player Development. He’s also the son of former long-time player and manager, Bob Buddy Bell and grandson of original Met, Gus Bell.

Bell is set to be one of four men to interview for the Mets’ managerial opening (so far), along with Carlos Beltran, Joe Girardi, and Derek Shelton.

In 1993 he was taken in the first round of the draft at number thirty by the Texas Rangers. He played in just 19 games in the Major Leagues with the Reds in 2000. Bell spent time in the Mets’ system in 1998 and 1999 between St. Lucie, Binghamton, and then Triple-A affiliate Norfolk Tides. Bell would retire in 2005 after five straight season in the minor leagues.

According to the Diamondbacks’ Front Office Directory, “Bell spent the previous 6 seasons as the Director of Player Development before being promoted to his current position in November 2016. In 8 seasons overseeing D-backs affiliates, 31 clubs have made playoff appearances and 8 have claimed league championships, including Reno’s 2012 Triple-A Championship. In 2014, the D-backs had a franchise record-setting 5 postseason teams.”

Bell just finished his 13th season with the Diamondbacks, three of which have been in his current position. Prior to that, Bell served as the Director of Player Development which specifically oversaw their minor league teams, where eight of them won a league title.

Bell has been in Arizona’s Player Development department for nine seasons, in which 42 homegrown players have reached the major leagues. Of note, one of the more recent Directors of Player Developments is currently a World Series championship manager, being AJ Hinch.

In 2007, Mike Bell was named in the “Mitchell Report”, which was a report released by former Democratic Senator George J. Mitchell of Maine, naming MLB players that he had been found in use of performance enhancing drugs. Bell was named as a client of known dealer Kirk Radomski, and later admitted to taking Human Growth Hormones and using the majority of them in 2003 during his minor league stint with Diamondbacks’ Triple-A team.

Despite not much managerial experience, Bell has become a candidate for managerial openings. Last year, he interviewed for the Baltimore Orioles and the Texas Rangers jobs. This year, he is going to be one of four known candidates to receive an in-person interview for the Mets job. While there may be some skepticism about his ability to do the job, his brother believes he is capable of the job.

Speaking with Jon Meoli of the Baltimore Sun, Bell would say, “As far as Mike, he’s had so much experience leading, and leading a player development system is great preparation for really anything in this game, because there’s so many people that you’re in charge of. You have 80-plus staff and 200-plus players, and the experience and practice of creating a culture and creating a great environment to work in, he’s definitely prepared. I know he would do great, given the opportunity.”

What They Say

AJ Hinch – “His passion for the game and eagerness to pass along his knowledge and experience is a perfect combination for our players in Yakima. We are lucky to have him and I look forward to his time in Yakima.” (K.L. Wombacher, MiLB.com)

Tony La Russa – “Our Minor League system — our player development guy, Mike Bell, is as good as anyone I’ve ever been around. Every team I went to — all five of them — had a great vibe.” (Richard Justice, MiLB.com).

Recommendation

Mike Bell is an interesting candidate. His experience in player development shows an ability to work with younger players, which is a must on a roster with such a young core as the Mets. Bell worked under AJ Hinch for many years, and one can only hope he picked up a thing or two during their time together.

On the other hand, Bell will enter a high-profile job with no Major League managerial experience, no experience handling the press, and will begin his first gig in a crucial season for the Mets in which they will likely have a playoff-or-bust outlook. While Bell certainly has the chance to become a solid manager, the Mets would also be taking a risk with someone with only three years of experience as a coach, all of which came at the least a decade ago, which is less than ideal for an opening as intense as the Mets’ opening will be. Whether or not Bell will be a good manager is still to be determined, but it nay be best for both sides of Bell gets that opportunity with a different organization.

That’s not to say Bell couldn’t prove to be an asset to the team. As we saw with Bob Geren being interviewed by the Los Angeles Dodgers, this creates an opportunity to learn about Bell and see if there is a spot for him in the Mets organization. That could be in Luis Rojas‘ role as a Quality Control Coach. Maybe, he’ll accept a job as a bench coach. These could be good fits for him, but the one that isn’t is manager.

By Jack Ramsey and John Sheridan

The post Mets Manager Candidate: MIke Bell appeared first on Metsmerized.

In this age of Major League Baseball, one in which data, analytics and technology are at the forefront and supply teams with substantiated numbers and information, players and front offices are using these advances to help enhance talent and shape organizational philosophies.

While utilizing this technology and data, players, coaches and the front office are able to more accurately assess strengths and weaknesses, along with helping to understand how improvements can be made and where.

In prior player developments, organizations would have their respective ideologies and techniques for improving talent from the bottom up in their systems. With the increased usage of tech and analytics, organizations can more accurately fine-tune players’ skill-sets with measurable data.

For example, if a pitcher is looking to add another pitch to his repertoire, he can use an Edgertronic – high-speed cameras that capture video at 1,000 frames per second – that can give him a much clearer breakdown of his release point, how it’s leaving his hand and the spin to better discern the quality. Pair that with a Rapsodo, a device that generates real-time data such as spin axis and spin efficiency to allow a pitcher to monitor if the pitch he’s designing is getting enough movement, and you’ll find how Trevor Bauer developed his slider after the 2017 season.

This type of data offers intricate precision that allows a player to better understand what the pitch is doing and what he needs to tinker in order to get the results he’s looking for. Being able to have the tangible data to verify how a pitch is moving, spinning, etc. is satisfying and gives a pitcher more assurance than just going off of feel.

On the offensive side, hitters can wear K-Vests, which measure the kinetic sequence along with tracking the body positions at different points of a swing to develop better habits and mechanics at the plate. Many have also taken it upon themselves to receive outside instruction from private hitting coaches, who have personalized and revived players’ careers, with J.D. Martinez and Justin Turner as two prime examples of this.

Teams are also employing more and more conduits – former professionals who act as liaisons between the players and front offices – who analyze and break down data and then bring it to players to discuss. Brian Bannister, the former Mets and Royals pitcher from 2006-10, who was hired by the Boston Red Sox as an analyst and pro scout in 2015 and has since become Vice President, Pitching Development and Assistant Pitching coach. In ’15, Bannister was the one who approached journeyman lefty Rich Hill, who was pitching with the Triple-A Pawtucket Red Sox, about throwing his curve more often due to the high spin rate and great separation between his fastball.

Since 2016, Hill has thrown his curve 38.9% of the time, second-most among qualified pitchers in that span. Opposing batters have hit just .213 against Hill’s curve.

In regards to organizations, no team has embraced the growth mindset and changing landscape in player development quite like the Houston Astros. The Astros have fully embraced the technology and analytics from top to bottom.

General Manager Jeff Luhnow has completely overhauled the entire Astros’ system, utilizing technology and employing the data from the lowest rungs of their minor league system. The organization has been leading the charge of implementing high-speed cameras and radar tracking systems in every one of their minor league affiliates, and has essentially gotten a head start among all other teams in gathering data and using that for scouting and development purposes.

The success the Astros have displayed, both behind the scenes and on the field, has made their coaching staff and front office employees extremely in demand, as clubs have swooped in to hire many of their former executives and coaches in hopes to extract what they’ve learned in Houston to their new organization.

The exciting aspect of what a team, such as the Astros, has done with their system means prospects are not necessarily bound by a natural ceiling any longer. Scouts and those in the industry use terms such as ceiling and floor to help project what a player’s best and worst-case scenarios may be in helping to perceive their value. With the use of technology and data, teams are able to unlock players’ latent potential with discernible evidence to back it up.

Perhaps the numbers indicate that a pitcher’s two-seam fastball to left-handed hitters was underwhelming and that he wasn’t utilizing his curve – which had a high spin rate – enough. Then, they asked the pitcher to elevate his four-seam fastball and increase his slider usage to play off the fastball to make it that much more effective.

That’s exactly what the Astros asked reliever Ryan Pressly to do, who has since seen big increases in whiff rate, and has been one of the more dominant relievers in the game.

The role of player development has reached new heights over the last several years, as organizations are looking for ways in which to gain an edge in the sport. After the release of “Moneyball” in 2003, teams were looking for undervalued players and market inefficiencies by looking at and analyzing data.

This idea swept through Major League Baseball, and soon every organization featured a statistical analysis department that was able to discern and break down sabermetrics. The gap between all 30 clubs in searching and being able to find untapped value was essentially shrinking.

The next frontier for front offices was not necessarily finding players who already have value but about being able to enhance their own internal talent.

Writers Ben Lindbergh (The Ringer, Effectively Wild Podcast) and Travis Sawchik (FiveThirtyEight) sought out to shed light on the techniques, technologies and data used to help shape and enhance players in their new book, “The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players.”

The book delivers detailed insight into the transformation baseball has undergone in player development, tracing its roots from Branch Rickey and the introduction of a farm system to the Royals Academy in the early 1970s to today’s wealth of incontrovertible data which has aided in talent development.

Lindbergh and Sawchik lift the curtains to expose many of the processes, techniques and ideologies that teams and players are using in helping to get players to fully realize their potential in the game. The information shared by the authors in this book is the type of stuff that had gone previously unnoticed by fans and yet, is crucial in the development and success of players and teams.

I had the privilege of speaking to one of the authors, Ben Lindbergh, about his latest work for this Mets Merized interview.

MMO: Where did the idea of writing a book on player development come from?

Lindbergh: We came to it independently and then ultimately teamed up. Both of us thought that this was the story of baseball in this era; that player development was the area of greatest growth, innovation and excitement when it came to being able to make players better.

I think each of us had a different origin story or player who made us realize that something was going on here. I think in Travis’s case he was covering the Pirates in 2013 when Marlon Byrd was there, and Byrd had kind of a career year at 35. He had changed his swing and gone to see hitting coach Doug Latta, and Travis was really struck by how Byrd had become more of a flyball hitter at that age. He had thought at that point, having taken so many thousands of swings, getting to the big leagues, and staying there for a long time, that your swing was probably pretty fixed and set. That there wasn’t a whole lot you could do with it. And then Byrd showed that wasn’t the case; you really could change your career even at that late of an age.

For me, it was another 35-year-old in Rich Hill who had been bouncing around in the minors, Indy ball and the big leagues for years. When Brian Bannister of the Red Sox told him, “Hey, I looked at your TrackMan data and you’ve got a really incredible curveball, and you should throw that more often,” did he really unlock that latent potential that was there the whole time? He went from Indy ball to being one of the best pitchers in baseball and making more money than he had in his whole career up until that point.

Those stories were really inspirational and eye-opening to us, and we really hadn’t considered that players who had already reached the pinnacle of their profession could possibly unlock even more. And yet, guys like that and J.D. Martinez and Justin Turner, they were doing that, and it seemed like that was spreading.

There was this technology and a new emphasis on enhancing player performance, and we wanted to be the first to tell that story because I think player development has kind of been undercovered historically. There really hasn’t been books on it before, and we thought this would be a way to stake out some new territory and tell a story people might not be aware of.

MMO: How did you and Travis split up the research and writing for the book?

Lindbergh: We sort of decided at the beginning that each of us had certain specialties, interests, connections and geographic locations that made us better to do certain things. Travis is in Cleveland, so it made it convenient for him to talk to Trevor Bauer a lot, so he handled the Bauer parts of the book, at least the initial drafts.

I was interested in history, so I worked on the history stuff, and I was interested in Bannister and had a relationship with him, so I worked on the Bannister stuff.

I think it sort of worked out where we each had things that we thought we were probably a little bit better suited for that would be easier for us to do. We divided it almost down the middle in terms of workload and divvied up the chapters and said we would each do the initial writing, research and reporting.

Each of the chapters sort of started as a Ben or Travis chapter, but by the end, they were all Ben and Travis chapters because we traded chapters back and forth, and then we gave each other feedback and revised everything and contributed reporting to each other’s chapter. It ended up being very much a team effort, even though we tried to kind of divide and conquer.

MMO: While all 30 clubs employ an analytics department – with some more heavily involved and invested than others – your book takes a deeper dive into the evolution of the sabermetric movement in helping to improve and enhance players already in their systems through the use of data and technology. Can you talk a bit about the change we’ve seen in player development over the years, and the time frame that baseball started to witness this change?

Lindbergh: I think there were precursors to this movement, and we wanted to document those because baseball has such a long, rich history. A lot of the things we think are new and unprecedented do turn out to have some precedence somewhere at some time, and we wanted to make those connections and show how things that are happening today, in some cases, are things that people were thinking about years ago. I think the game wasn’t really ready for them on a broad scale, and in many cases, the technology wasn’t there yet.

I think it’s a confluence of those two things that you needed the sabermetric movement to kind of question some of the traditions in baseball and bring some new thinking into the game. The same disruption that happened with front offices, where you had people with non-traditional backgrounds getting hired and making those decisions. I think that’s now filtered down into the coaching ranks and instruction, which previously – like front offices used to be – were really the realm of former players. Former players would become coaches and teach the next generation of players the same things they had been taught, so these same tactics and techniques would be passed down from generation to generation. There was some stagnation in thinking, and you had to be a former professional player, a high-level player in almost all cases, to be a big-league coach.

There wasn’t that rich variety of perspectives that you get now. I think teams are looking more at: What can these coaches do, and are they intellectually curious? Are they open to new ideas, and are they based on reason and evidence? Do they have a track record of making players better? I think all that is more important now than where did you play and how good were you as a player. I think that has really shaken things up a bit.

We portray it as a new phase of the game, and it’s sort of an extension of the previous phase, and we’ve been talking about Moneyball for fifteen plus years at this point. The idea of Moneyball is that you’re really just looking for some inefficiencies, some competitive advantage that initially took the form of finding talent that was already out there. Finding players who were already good and already valuable, but for whatever reason, the market just didn’t recognize that value, whether it was walks and OBP, catcher framing, etc.

The idea was players were already good and teams didn’t realize it, and that now becomes very difficult to do. You can’t really find that free talent out there anymore because I think all teams are pretty good at appraising past performance and saying this is what this player was worth.

Now the real way to separate yourself is not to be better at finding talent that’s already out there but to be better at building, creating or enhancing talent. I think that’s the big emphasis now. The technology is there to analyze how players are performing, not just the results but the mechanics and the process. What can they do better, whether it’s building a new pitch from scratch, throwing a certain pitch that’s already good more, or changing the swing so that if you’re already hitting the ball hard, you’re hitting it in the air instead of on the ground.

All of these things are seen as possible now, whereas in the past, I think the prevailing idea was that you got the most talented prospects, and they would ultimately turn out to be the most talented players. These days, I think there’s a little more flexibility there, and maybe your raw talent dictates your ultimate outcome a little less than it used to.

Word.

MMO: I think what’s exciting about the strategies and implementations of the advanced player development system we’re witnessing now is the fact that players are in a sense no longer bound by a natural ceiling. We’ve seen older players like Rich Hill, J.D. Martinez and Justin Turner completely change their projections and become stars.

Lindbergh: Yeah, I think so. And there are unintended consequences of this whole movement, and maybe negative consequences. And we talk about that in the book, too. I think it’s an inspirational thing that players who were written off who were believed to be a certain type of player, it turns out that they’re not necessarily bound by that. I think these days we’ve seen so many players who were supposed to have a certain ceiling be much better than that.

The idea of talent is less fixed now than it used to be is an exciting idea when it comes to players like Byrd, Turner, Martinez or Hill; guys who already made it to the big leagues but also with prospects, young players and amateur guys who are just coming up now and are being exposed to all these ideas early on. That’s not to say that natural talent isn’t still a factor; it certainly is. There are some people who probably don’t have to apply themselves quite as hard and make it to that level, and there are others who might apply themselves incredibly hard and will still not make it to that level. But I still think it dictates what you turn out to be a little less than it used to be.

In the past, you might’ve been written off because you couldn’t throw a fastball this speed or you weren’t a big guy and you weren’t believed to have the potential to hit for power. But now maybe you can throw your curveball or slider thirty or forty percent of the time, and if it’s really good, then that can make up for a lackluster fastball. Or if you’re not a big guy, you can still optimize your swing; you can hit the ball farther out in front of the plate. You can hit for a lot of power even though you don’t have the build of a traditional power hitter. I think that’s a pretty powerful idea, and it’s one that we hoped would extend beyond baseball as well.

MMO: Trevor Bauer is a central figure in the book. Can you talk a little about his ascension, and his role in shaping the use of advanced technology and data in today’s game?

Lindbergh: There were pluses and minuses with featuring Bauer, of course. Off the field, and the things he’s said on Twitter, he is far from a perfect poster boy for this movement, and he’s a flawed person for sure. But he has been a pioneering player and probably has done more than any other player in this era to push player development forward through his own success when we talk about designing a slider and making that into one of the best pitches in baseball and being one of the best pitchers in the game last year.

I think it goes beyond his own performance to the influence he’s had on other players, whether it’s teammates and front offices who’ve looked at the things he’s done. I mean, he’s introduced a lot of tactics, techniques and technology to the game that prior to him just weren’t a part of baseball or were kind of on the fringes but weren’t being used actively by a major leaguer. He’s set the example of showing that you really can benefit from these things.

He was the first player to use the Edgertronic cameras to show that it can play an important part in pitch design. He sort of created the science of pitch design. Previously, pitchers would pass on pitches to other players or pitching coaches would pass on to players, but it wasn’t such a scientific tech process the way it is now.

Today, you’re pairing these high-speed cameras with Rapsodo spin-tracking devices, and you’re saying this is what I want my pitches to look like, and I want to tunnel them so they play really well with each other. I’m just going to throw off the mound and see how they look based on this footage and data, and I’ll just tweak pitch-by-pitch until I get closer to what I want these pitches to be.

I think Bauer has shown the potential of that process, and it’s been widely adapted. It’s difficult to buy an Edgertronic camera these days because they’re often sold out because teams are buying them up as quickly as they’re manufactured. And that’s in large part because he showed there was potential there.

Whatever you think of him as a person, I don’t think that we could’ve pulled the story of modern player development accurately and comprehensively without explaining the role that he’s played in it.

MMO: A name that Mets fans will remember is Brian Bannister, who you and Travis also profile in the book. He’s now the Vice President / Pitching Development & Assistant Pitching Coach for the Red Sox. I loved this quote from the book, in which Bannister talks about the work he put in with Zack Greinke: “I realized that my future was not about me competing for a Cy Young Award or being an All-Star, but about taking that information, studying it more than anybody and using it to help the best players in the world become even better.” What makes Bannister such an influential figure in the world of pitching?

Lindbergh: The Bannister chapter might be my favorite part of the book. He really helped us out a lot in sharing his perspective. Before I teamed up with Travis, I had envisioned maybe writing a whole book on players like Bannister; former players who are now in this role we call the conduit who are conveying this information from the front office to the field. That has been such a big part of this process because Bannister was a player who didn’t throw very hard and was always looking for information and ways to make himself better. He was pitching at the time that PITCHf/x came on; the first pitch-tracking technology that was widely available. He used that to evaluate himself, developed a cutter, prolonged his career and made himself a bit more effective.

I think the greater impact that he’s had has been post-playing days when he transitioned to this hybrid role where right now he is the assistant pitching coach for the Red Sox but he is also the vice president of pitcher development. He’s kind of this go-between where players will listen to him as he was a player himself and been in uniform. He’s comfortable in that world, but he’s also really familiar with the physics, the advanced concepts, stats and ideas these front office people talk about.

I think some of these insights were there, but there was a bottleneck between the front office and the field where someone upstairs might say that so and so should throw this pitch more often, but if that message wasn’t getting passed down to the players then it wasn’t doing anyone any good.

It turns out, I think, that you need these communicators, these people who are comfortable in both of these worlds, to pass that message along and to translate that information to both directions. A lot of teams are now employing former big leaguers who are recently retired players who have an interest in analysis and are kind of in similar roles as Bannister, and I think it’s an exciting idea.

Fifteen years ago or so, when all of those stats started pervading the game, there was this kind of us versus them mentality, and it was jocks versus nerds and players being skeptical and thinking why do we need this? I didn’t have this when I was coming up; what are these people who have never played the game going to tell me about playing? Now I really don’t think there’s this adversarial relationship anymore. I think both sides have realized that they have a lot to learn from one another, and I think someone like Bannister has really personified that progress where you have both sides working together to make players better.

MMO: You detail an entire chapter to the Houston Astros, an organization that is seemingly ahead of the rest in terms of technology investment, resources and using new techniques to enhance players. We’ve seen other teams come in and hire away many of the Astros front office executives, coordinators and coaches in hopes of bringing some of that wealth of knowledge and info to their organization. What has made the Astros such a powerhouse when it comes to player development?

Lindbergh: In our book proposal, I don’t even know if the Astros were mentioned. I think we wanted to feature some team and explain how they were implementing all of this because it is sort of this bottom-up movement with these outsiders and players with independent coaches and their ideas have been implemented into the game. We wanted to show how one team has really made use of all this, and we didn’t know which team that would be.

As we started doing reporting for the book and as we had a lot of conversations, all of them just kept pointing to the Astros. They were clearly at the forefront of all of this, and I think they were just the first to realize that this was the next frontier. They had been among the leaders in evaluating players, and they built a model in St. Louis – Sig Mejdal and Jeff Luhnow – to evaluate amateur players and prospects and use college stats to try and forecast who would be good big leaguers.

They realized in Houston in 2013-14 that the players they were able to draft in St. Louis because no one else was looking at the same things they were looking at were being snapped up even before they fell to the Astros. Other teams had caught up. And that’s what I was talking about earlier with the parity when it came to player evaluations.

They realized that the next great opportunity was in player development, to bring that same rigor to player development that had been brought to player evaluation. They really pivoted to player development; they hired people like Mike Fast from Baseball Prospectus, who had an interest in applying data to help players. They were very aggressive in turning over their entire minor league staff and also expanding it so that anyone who wasn’t on board and who was sort of set in their ways and didn’t want to adjust to the way that the Astros wanted to do things were let go and replaced with someone who would. They were kind of ruthless when it came to that more than most teams tend to be.

They also invested in technology and bought 75 Edgertronic cameras before some teams had one, and they installed them at all the ballparks in their system. I think they realized this was important because they had a couple of high-profile failures, like releasing J.D. Martinez just before he broke out. They were the team who drafted Mark Appel first overall, and he never made the majors. I think in a way those very glaring failures made them realize that they had to be better.

The Astros changed their whole player development pipeline and process so that when you enter the system now, you get a full workup essentially on day one. You throw with Edgertronics and Rapsodos in the bullpen, or swing sensors if you’re a hitter on your bat, and you get a diagnosis of what your flaws are and how you can be better and what you should be aiming for. I think that’s what they realized: You can’t just tell players to be better at something; you have to tell them how to be better at something.

I think they really closed the gap between scouting and player development, where traditionally those were two different worlds. You had the scouts and scouting director bringing in players, and then you had the player development staff and player development director whose job it would be turning those players into productive big leaguers. Those two worlds didn’t really interact all that much, and I think the Astros unified them so that now when you’re bringing a player into the Astros system when you’re trading for him, signing him, drafting him, I think it’s always part of that discussion: Can we make him better? What can we do to improve that player?

And I think that’s a really revolutionary idea.

MMO: I’m surprised more teams haven’t bought more into this organizational thinking like the Astros have. The relative investment in doing something like this organizationally seems to me like it would pay off big in the long run.

Lindbergh: Yes, I think so. The Astros had a five-year head start on some teams, and I think that a lot of teams have gotten some of these devices. There’s much more than checking that box and saying yeah, we bought a camera, we bought this Rapsodo device. That’s a good start, but you have to not just have these things lying around, but have people who are really qualified to use them and understand them. It’s not just a novelty in something players try once and experiment with. It’s something that you’re using on a regular basis, and your team really has the infrastructure to support.

The Astros hired these player development coaches at every level that kind of provide this statistical support to the coaches, and that was a really important role because those coaches would interact with the front office so everyone would be on the same page. You’d go from one level of the minor league system to the next, and players would be hearing the same thing.

There’s a consistency and instruction, and I think that takes some time to implement. Not every team is willing to kind of clean house the way that the Astros did under Luhnow. It can also be difficult depending, on your ownership, to convince them to loosen the purse strings a little to invest in these areas, even though it’s cheaper to hire coaches or buy cameras than it is to sign a big free agent. It’s still an area where there’s not a lot of history behind it, so you’re trying to sell your ownership on something that is a fairly recent innovation. And you can’t always point to an immediate day one improvement from it. You can’t say this is going to be worth exactly this to us the way that you can with a player where you’ll say he’ll be worth three wins above replacement.

It’s harder to forecast what buying a camera gets you, so I think it can be tough at times to convince these owners to make the investment even though it seems obvious that it would be beneficial in the long run. All teams are still not paying their minor leaguers nearly enough for them to just focus on baseball, which aside from ethical concerns just seems very short-sided and counterproductive if you’re trying to win.

I think it’s definitely happening, and by the time a book comes out about something, I think teams are probably aware that this is going on, and maybe the book has helped raise some awareness of it, as has the success of teams like the Astros, Dodgers, Yankees and Rays. I think we will see more and more of it, and in the next five to ten years of baseball, it’ll probably be about teams investing more and more in this and this becoming not just something that a few teams are really implementing in a top to bottom way but that most or all teams are.

MMO: I really enjoyed the Amateur Ball chapter, in which you underwent the three-part intake process that any player goes through at Driveline for an assessment. Can you talk a little about your experience, and how influential Driveline has become with their tutelage and analysis?

Lindbergh: My first book, The Only Rule Is It Has to Work, was more of a first-person story, more of a participatory element where Sam Miller and I went and took over an Independent League baseball team for a summer, and we wrote that story from a first-person perspective. This book is not like that; this book is telling this tale of other people’s successes.

We thought it would be nice to have at least one section where we had a sort of hands-on approach and experience some of it ourselves. We hoped that it would make it more relatable to the average reader who is not a professional baseball player. It’s one thing to read about Justin Turner and Trevor Bauer doing these things, but of course, those guys were more focused on being professional athletes than most of us are. The hope was that by trying out some of this stuff ourselves and explaining what it was like for us, we could kind of convey more clearly the potential of these devices and techniques.

I went to Driveline and put myself through their intake process and also worked with some other technologies around the country that teams and players are using these days, and for me, it was enlightening and eye-opening. Of course, I had no illusions about being anywhere close to a pro athlete. But I wanted to be able to measure myself, and so I threw off a mound with all of these cameras tracking me and took swings with sensors and had them all over my body tracking my movements.

It was somewhat humbling, of course, to get the data and see just how far I was from a real player, but I think I also got a sense of, if I were dedicated to this, these technologies really could be transformative. You can see exactly where you’re going wrong with a precision that you couldn’t before when it was all about eyeballing things and using your experience to hopefully perceive something. Some of this stuff just couldn’t be seen because it was so subtle or it happened so quickly, and now you can get these precise readouts which show you exactly what you’re doing at every millisecond, and you can diagnose flaws that previously would’ve gone undetected.

Once you can diagnose something, then in theory you can fix them. It’s really powerful, and going through that myself and making some minor improvements and just being able to see what was wrong with me essentially made it all much more clearer to me and to be in that.

A lot of players have gone to Driveline and have rebuilt themselves in some way, and there are plenty of success stories like Bauer, Adam Ottavino and Matthew Boyd. But that ethos, that idea of questioning everything and why are we doing this, is the best thing we can do. Let’s question everything and test everything, and try to determine the best way to do things.

I don’t think Driveline has all the answers, and I don’t think they would say they have all the answers. But they’re trying to get to the answers or reexamine what we think the answers are. And I think it’s very good that someone is doing that because a lot of times tradition can just become ingrained, and people will forget why exactly you’re doing something a certain way other than that’s always how it’s been done before. It’s a good thing to constantly question and revisit those things, especially as we get new and better information.

MMO: Where do you foresee player development going next? Is it with wearables, virtual reality, injury-prevention or something else?

Lindbergh: I think in the short term it’ll probably be a wider adoption of the things that we wrote about in the book, including pitch design and making that a part of every player’s routine. Just getting everyone comfortable with these technologies. I think that will happen naturally just as more players get exposed to them in college and high school and they see big leaguers doing these things. They’ll be comfortable working in this way by the time they get drafted. You may start to see players move more quickly [through the minors] because the things that once would’ve taken them years of trial and error and having to make these discoveries as you went along, players are now coming into pro ball knowing these things already.

The wearable technology will continue to spread and hopefully be more affordable because, at this point, there are certain devices that I think can help players but not everyone can afford them. It would be bad if people from certain economic backgrounds were excluded from the future of the game because they didn’t have access to these tools. Hopefully, that will change; maybe MLB will continue to make investments in that area to ensure access to this technology. I think that would be beneficial.

I think teams are continuing to look into psychology and mental skills and ways to integrate all of that. Teams are starting to form high-performance departments and sports science departments, kind of taking cues from some other sports and looking at ways to make sure players are always in the best physical shape possible. Are they sleeping well? Are they getting the right nutrition? Does their exercise plan make sense, and are they overexerting themselves?

I think that ties into – if you want to call it the next frontier – injury prevention, which I think some teams are making strides in. Having pitchers change their deliveries to reduce the stress on their body, for instance. There’s more to do in that area, but I don’t know if we’ll ever get to the point where you won’t see pitchers blowing out their elbows. I think there are just some natural limitations in anatomy where there are weak points and as pitchers throw harder and harder, they’re going to break down inevitably. Teams obviously want to keep players healthy because they collectively spend billions of dollars every year on players who are not able to take the field, and that’s bad for them; it’s bad for the players, and it’s bad for the sport not to have the best players playing at all times.

I’ll be excited to see what teams are able to achieve. You hope that whatever insights are gleamed, they will be shared throughout the game. Maybe for a while you might see certain teams have an edge there, but players move around, front office members move around, and hopefully they will bring that information with them no matter where they go so that more players can take advantage of it. I think that would be best for the sport as a whole if those preventive measures were available to as many players as possible.

MMO: Thanks very much for your time, Ben. Best of luck with the book.

Lindbergh: Thanks very much.

Follow Ben Lindbergh on Twitter, @BenLindbergh

Purchase “The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players” here.

Read more of Ben’s work for The Ringer here.

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Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic has reported that Allard Baird of the Boston Red Sox has joined the Mets front office. Baird was once the General Manager of the Kansas City Royals. After his tenure there, he was hired by Theo Epstein in Boston. Baird, 57, was named the Executive of the Year in 2003.

According to the University of Southern Arkansas page, he is credited for “being a major key to the Red Sox’s success over the past several seasons…As VP of player personnel, he’s the man largely in charge of finding players…He and his team of nine scouts saw to it that holes would be plugged with players who gave surprisingly significant contributions, and…Baird has the ability to turn rocks into diamonds in the rough.”

Under his watch, the Red Sox added several high-end talents through the draft, including 2018 MVP, Mookie Betts.

Baird was a candidate for the Mets GM position in 2010, a job that went to Sandy Alderson.

As per Rosenthal, his official title is Vice President/Assistant GM of Scouting and Player Development. He was the Vice President of Player Personnel as a Red Sox official. The Mets current director of Player Development is Ian Levin. He will likely oversee a Scouting Department led by Tommy Tanous.

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Ed Delany, MMO

In a report by Mike Puma of the New York Post that suggest the Mets are showing interest in Gary LaRocque for their general manager, it’s also brought to light that Mets owner Fred Wilpon is unlikely to hire a young, analytical-driven person to be the next Mets GM.

The Mets are said to be looking for an external candidate to replace the ailing Sandy Alderson though team officials believe that it’s possible the Mets have been too analytical-driven in recent seasons under the helm of Alderson.

LaRocque, 65, is currently the Director of Player Development for the St. Louis Cardinals and worked as the Mets’ scouting director from 1998-2003. He was responsible for drafting such as David Wright and Scott Kazmir during his Mets tenure.

During a recent MLB podcast, former front office employee Adam Fisher talked about the unusually small analytics department the Mets have. It was also reported recently that the Mets’ analytics department advised against the disastrous Jason Vargas signing. 

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Mets left-handed pitching prospect, Steven Matz, had perhaps the most dominating season of any player in the Mets minors in 2014. Matz posted an excellent  2.24 ERA with 131 strikeouts in 140 innings pitched for Double-A Binghamton and Advanced-A St. Lucie. Matz also excelled in the playoffs with a phenomenal start in the Eastern League Championship Series. Matz struck out 11 batters and allowed just one run in 7.1 innings to lead the B-Mets to a title.

Following this fantastic season, expectations about Matz’s future are beginning to rise. His success has propelled him to the top of most Mets prospect rankings this winter. Both Baseball America and Baseball Prospectus rate him as the Mets second best prospect behind only Noah Syndergaard.

In a recent article by Kristie Ackert of the NY Daily News, Mets Vice President of Player Development, Paul DePodesta, said he believes Matz will continue to thrive once he arrives to the major leagues. DePodesta compared Matz to 2014 National League Rookie of the Year winner, Jacob deGrom.

“I am not predicting the rookie of the year in 2015 by any stretch,” DePodesta said. “But I do think there are a lot similarities between the guys.”

“This is a guy who absolutely rises to the occasion and I think that his maturity has a lot to do with it.”

Matz says that seeing deGrom’s success with New York has been inspiring to watch.

“He had called me, told me he was going up (to the major-league club) and he was getting a start,” Matz recalled in a phone interview. “They all had the TVs on his game. We had a game, but I wasn’t pitching that day, so I’d run in and keep checking on how he was doing.”

“Obviously, coming from the minor leagues, you never know what it is like, but watching him go through all that and make his debut, watch his rookie season I can relate to that. I know what kind of pitcher he is, and knowing (his) personal level, watching him throughout the season, it’s been exciting and encouraging.”

“The Mets have so many good arms in minor league system, if you don’t do well, you will get put aside,” Matz said. “That definitely gives you a little extra push, a little extra drive.”

Matz is projected to start this season Triple-A Las Vegas, but it is more than likely that he gets called-up at some point this season. While it is unrealistic to expect him to come up and duplicate deGrom’s extraordinary level of success upon his promotion, Matz certainly has the talent to shine and become a difference maker for the Mets in the near future.

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MiLB.com recently published an article ranking the Mets organizational all-stars by position The article included analysis from the Mets Vice President of Player Development, Paul DePodesta.  Here is what he had to say about the Mets top prospects.

Kevin Plawecki: “We were really pleased with the year he had,” said Paul DePodesta, the club’s vice president of player development, said. “Spent the first half of the year in Double-A and didn’t really miss a beat, then went up to Triple-A and continued to perform very well. For a guy that was drafted just in 2012, we’re extremely pleased with how quickly he’s made it through the system. He’s continued to make progress offensively and defensively. Offensively, we’re starting to see some of the power that we always believed was there. Defensively, he’s a strong receiver and his throwing is starting to get better. ”

Dilson Herrera: “I’d say he exceeded our expectations,” he said. “We were excited about him when we traded for him the year before — thought he had a good chance to go to Double-A at some point during the course of 2014, but I don’t think any of us imagined he’d be as productive as he was when he got to Double-A and then be able to make the jump all the way to the big leagues. It was a huge year for him and he had a great, great year. We have very high hopes for him.”

Matt Reynolds: “He went to our offseason training program and he also did some things with his swing to make it shorter and more compact last winter,” DePodesta said of Reynolds, who turned 24 on Wednesday. “It was a combination of all those factors. He certainly showed he can handle the pitching out there and had a tremendous year for us.”

Brandon Nimmo: “I think, given his age and plate discipline, we felt like he had a real foundation for success, and as he continued to move through our system and sort of gained strength, he was going to take off,” DePodesta said. “That’s exactly what happened this year. I think the most encouraging thing about this year was that, not only did he have a big year and continued that successm, he not only maintained his plate discipline, it actually got better. While his power went up, his strikeout rate went down.

Marcos Molina: “He’s a guy we obviously like an awful lot,” DePodesta said. “We felt like he was going to throw hard one day. He’s an incredibly good athlete and has a good feel for the baseball. He attacks with his fastball. Over the last two years, his fastball has continued to jump in velocity. This year he made big strides in understanding his own stuff and how to limit damage and went out and had a good year. I think he has a chance to be a top-of-the-rotation guy — mid-90s fastball, secondary stuff is solid now. Very excited about him.”

Steven Matz: “I think the two things for me that stand out are one — he’s very mature for his age in terms of his work ethic, his competitiveness. Talk about a guy who rises to the occasion — every big game this guy is just nails. What turned out to be the championship game at Double-A, he’s got a no-hitter going. When it’s on the line, he gets that much better. The second thing is he can really pitch with his fastball. Guys just don’t square it up. That foundation with attacking guys with the fastball — that’s going to serve him well in the big leagues and why I think he’s awfully close to the big leagues.”

Akeel Morris: “The stuff was there, plus fastball, plus-plus changeup — it’s devastating,” DePodesta said. “It’s hard to pick up, it’s a 15-mile per hour differential. In previous years he didn’t have a lot of experience — we just wanted to give him mound time. I think his hits against… they were like video game numbers.”

Hat tip to MMO reader Bo Beck for the link.

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Amazin’ Avenue‘s Chris McShane recently spoke with Paul DePodesta, the Mets’ Vice President of Player Development and Amateur Scouting, about how the Mets’ minor league system doesn’t appear to be nearly as lopsided as it once was.

The Mets have a good amount of highly touted young pitchers as well as a group of minor league position players who are very close to contributing with the big club.

DePodesta knows that recent signings and trades have put the Mets in a great position with their prospects, ”A lot of things went well for us, position player-wise,” he says.

Out of the many prospects that make up the Mets minor leagues, Cesar Puello is one player that has helped to change the makeup of the organization from being weak in talent, to one of the top systems in all of baseball.

DePodesta raves about Puello and all that he will be capable of in 2014, ”He’s always run, he’s always had power, he could always throw, but he finally started hitting. He just had a much better approach at the plate. We’re anxious to see that happen again in 2014 because if he does continue to do that again, he has all the tools to be a very productive player, even at the highest level.”

Puello’s season was cut short after he was suspended for his involvement in the Biogenesis scandal that rocked baseball last summer. But prior to his departure he was batting .326/.403/.547 with 21 doubles, 16 home runs, 73 RBI, and 24 stolen bases in 377 plate appearances.

Now with the suspension behind him, Puello works towards showing everyone that the great numbers he showcased in 2013, were not a fluke and are something that he will continue to build on. And from the looks of it, he also has the full support of the Mets. Can’t wait to see him take another step in his development as he moves ever so closer to his major league debut.

(Photo: Howard Simmons, Daily News)

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While the Mets plethora of pitching prospects often receives the most attention, they have some talented offensive players in the minors as well. In an excellent article for the New York Post, Fred Kerber spoke with Brandon Nimmo and Kevin Plawecki– two young hitters about to enter their first big league camp.

Nimmo, the 13th pick in the 2011 draft, had a great season in 2013 for the Mets Low-A affiliate in Savannah. In 110 games for the Sand Gnats, the Wyoming native hit .273/.397/.359 with 24 extra base hits while manning centerfield defensively. For his efforts, the Mets rewarded him with a invite to Spring Training.

“I told my dad, ‘If it feels this good to get called to big league spring training, I can’t wait to get the call up to the big leagues,’ ” Nimmo told Kerber. “I’m going there to learn. I’ll keep my ears open, my mouth shut.”

Plawecki, a catcher drafted 35th overall in 2012, had perhaps the most impressive 2013 of any Mets hitting prospect. The Purdue University product hit .305/.390/.448 with a staggering 47 extra base hits– including 38 doubles– while splitting his season between Low-A Savannah and High-A St. Lucie. The slugging backstop will join Nimmo in camp.

“Hopefully I can learn from all the guys at the big league camp, soak in and absorb all the information I can, pick as many brains as I can,” Plawecki tells the Post. “In baseball, it’s who can be the most consistent the whole season and who can ride the highs and not get down on themselves during the lows.”

Paul DePodesta, Mets Vice President of Player Development and Scouting, spoke about his talented duo.

“We were thrilled with the year [Plawecki] had,” said DePodesta . “He played in two pretty difficult environments but certainly more than held his own, especially playing such a premium defensive position.”

“We’re excited to see what this year brings,” DePo says of Nimmo. “He’ll be a 20-year-old while he’s in major league camp. He continues to get better, stronger, filling out as he becomes a man physically.”

These two are part of an impressive group of hitters in the Mets minors that may be getting overlooked. As a fan, you have to love the attitude these guys are bringing with them to camp. Neither is talking about turning heads or making the team. They know they’re simply there to learn. Hopefully this taste of the Show gives them motivation to continue to work hard to attain their goals.

Information from the New York Post was used in completing this article. 

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Warning !!  What you are about to see is an exercise in futility.

What if Johan Santana didn’t blow out his surgically repaired shoulder again during Spring Training ?

What if Shaun Marcum pitched anywhere near the numbers on the back of his baseball card ?

What if Matt Harvey didn’t injure his elbow – possibly requiring Tommy John Surgery ?

What if David Wright didn’t tweak his hamstring and missed seven weeks of the season ?

What if Ruben Tejada actually showed that he belonged on a Major League Roster ?

What if Jordany Valdespin showed that his baseball  I.Q was higher than his batting average ?

What if Ike Davis hit like he did during the second half of last season ?

What if Lucas Duda actually proved that he is a power hitter – or at least could hit with RISP?

What if Eric Young Jr was on the Opening Day Roster.

What if the Mets offense gave some run support to Harvey, Wheeler, Gee, Niese etc. ?

What if Frank Francisco was arrested for impersonating  Armando Benitez ?

What if Bobby Parnell didn’t injure his neck ?

What if Terry Collins was a good in-game manager ?

What if Sandy Alderson was given a little bit more flexibility with this past offseason budget ?

What if Freddie never met Bernie ?

Could/would the Mets have finished over .500 with a chance of a wild card berth ?

Does is really matter ?

And with that said….. HERE COMES THE INFAMY !!!!!

Mets alumni celebrating a birthday today includes:

Dick Gernert  is 85 (1928). Most fans never heard of Dick Gernert, but I guess when you were the Mets Director of Player Development from 1978-1980 I am sure you wouldn’t want to be remembered for that job anyway.

Reserve catcher from ’82-’85, Ronn Reynolds is 55 (1958).

Middle reliever from t’04-’05, Mike DeJean is 43 (1970). In his 2 seasons with the Mets Dejean compiled a record of 3-1 with an ERA of 4.21.

Mo Vaughn frequently wonders what if he followed his childhood dream of being an opera singer instead of playing baseball !!!!

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