PITTSBURGH (93.7 The Fan) – It could sink the weekend series, but Pirates general manager Ben Cherington is not against the new ‘Torpedo’ bats, rather he applauds them.
It came to the forefront this weekend after the New York Yankees scored 36 runs with help of 15 home runs against the Milwaukee Brewers. 15 home runs in a three-game series and did so with a number of their hitters using an oddly shaped bat. The Yankees organization developed a bat that shifted the largest hitting area from the end of the bat to a few inches down the barrel.
The results are obviously dramatic and for a team already capable of hitting home runs, they now have a new technology to make them even better. The reaction from the Pirates GM wasn’t disgust or a thought of the Yankees cheating, rather it was to commend them for taking a chance.
“We talk about innovation and developing insights to give us an advantage,” Cherington said during his show on 93.7 The Fan and the Pirates Radio Network. “That’s an example the Yankees believe, maybe correctly, they’ve developed an insight that led to an innovation that gave them an advantage.”
“That’s what every team is doing.”
“People hear about investing in these different areas of baseball operations and what do you do with data. What does that mean? The reason you do it is to beat 29 other teams you have to be constantly looking for some way to build an advantage.”
“Signing a big free agent is one way to do that, but you can’t just rely on that. Especially in our situation, we have to be able to develop insights internally that lead to advantages on the field.”
What seems to be driving some Pirates and small-market fans crazy about this is that the Yankees are one of the teams that has the ability to sign a big free agent. And now they are also developing a technology that looks like cheating. When you look at the baseball rulebook, it’s not. There are specifications on weight, length and composition, but not on where the sweet spot is.
Cherington said, while not specifics of the Yankees situation, it would have taken a lot of research to come up with this design. Then there would have been the meetings with the bat manufacture about the feasibility of investing in a prototype. Then allowing your employees to work in collaboration with the manufacturers to figure out exactly how it would be shaped. For generations the shape of the bat hasn’t changed, this is something completely new and there is risk with that.
Then Cherington said you will need to convince the players that this bat is a better option. Players who have worked their whole lives to become professionals and now you are saying try something completely new. That requires the players trusting your research and your vision and it’s not always easy to sell that idea.
“My immediate reaction from seeing it, motivation,” Cherington said on 93.7 The Fan and the Pirates Radio Network. “How do we find the next insight that leads to an advantage like that?”
The game has changed. Cherington said all teams invest heavily in analytics and research and development. He called it the biggest single change in the game when they started capturing everything that was happening on the field. There are now ‘oceans of data’ coming into teams every single day there weren’t coming a recent as a decade ago. Gone are the days of trying to decipher box scores.
“Now the data is precisely where did the ball make contact on the bat?” Cherington explained. “That’s something that the Yankees are capturing over time. Once you have enough of it, you can start to infer things. You can start to see tendencies. This hitter tends to make contact on this part of the bat more often than not. That’s what I expect what led to what we saw with the Yankees.”
He joked he probably wouldn’t be in baseball if he were 23. It’s a world not only filled with baseball lifers, but physicists and PhDs. Cherington said the Pirates are heavily invested in making this information work for them.
“It’s exciting and I’m particularly excited about where our group is because I really believe, we already have, and will continue to develop insights and innovate into the ways that will help us win on the field,” Cherington said.