If MLB Network broadcaster Brian Kenny had gone into police work — his original Plan A — his analytical skills would have wiped out all crime in the New York area.
Instead, he turned his attention to baseball, and he’s been making trouble for troglodyte-minded baseball people ever since.
His new book “Ahead of the Curve: Inside the Baseball Revolution” (Simon & Schuster) received perhaps the greatest praise of any sports book in history: Bob Costas said that he would “continue to refer to it.”
If you write about sports, it doesn’t get any better than that.
Kenny has thought through the issues of why the game is played the way it’s played, and he has come up with answers that demonstrate an understanding of the game that’s insightful and unique.
He took time from talking about non-Red Sox-related (and therefore inconsequential) baseball news on MLB to speak about his book, his pitching, and his claim that if he were to step into a Major League dugout, he could hold his own as a manager.
Michael Levin: Your innovative thinking about baseball constantly runs into massive objections. Why is that?
Brian Kenny: My ideas were openly resisted by the game itself and, a little more important to me, in the media. I was having on-air battles at ESPN and then at the MLB Network. I wondered why.
I realized it’s not that, “Oh, players are dumb, and the game is dumb, and jocks are dumb.” No, these are humans who are actively trying to beat each other for money. That’s what this is about, defeating your opponent and making more money and thriving and being successful.
And yet for all the work that they would do, just killing themselves to get better and to win and to keep their jobs when a no-cost solution was coming their way, they openly resisted it.
I found that through the decades, that’s always been the case. There’s always a lag time in seizing a competitive advantage, whether it’s the live ball or relief pitching or defensive shift or sabermetrics.
ML: How come?
BK: It comes down to a herd mentality. We’re herd animals. We only do things when the rest of the herd is ready to do them. That holds all the way up to what we just saw in the playoffs where Andrew Miller was being used in the fifth and the sixth inning and he was used for three outs or four outs or six outs by Terry Francona, and then he was used that way in the playoffs.
We saw teams that he was playing affected by what he did. We saw Aroldis Chapman’s role change a little bit, Kenley Jansen’s role change a little bit, because when your competition is doing it, you look silly if you’re not doing it. They’re beating you. You must adjust, you must adapt, but my question is, why weren’t you doing that before?
No one was doing it before because no one else was doing it. As long as nobody gets cute, we can just keep doing this the same way. But when part of your herd moves over and everyone sees it’s successful, and does so very publicly, like in the playoffs, then the herd can move with that person, and that person was Tito Francona this year.
ML: Who is not a ruggedly handsome former catcher. In your book, you write that we want handsome men as managers, even if they aren’t good at managing.
BK: That’s right. We want men who look like Captain Morgan or George Washington, standing with one foot on the dugout steps, looking like leaders even if they aren’t that good at managing.
ML: In the book, you list recent managers in terms of who are strikingly handsome former catchers and who are not, and it seems as though, is it possible in the era of television how a manager looks may matter more than how good the manager is?
BK: It really has to do with what we value or what the subconscious cues are to what we don’t even know we value. We want a large, striking-looking person with a deep voice, someone with a large head, someone who has an enormous amount of testosterone to lead our tribe. And while we don’t need them to forage for food and beat back other tribes, those are actually the qualities what we’re looking for.
During the World Series, looking down the foul line, I saw both managers standing there, one foot up, one down, and they’re both looking like Washington crossing the Delaware. I’m like, I don’t think this is an accident! This is what a leader looks like, and by God, that’s what we want around here, a real man’s man. That’s what you get.
It’s also true, as I point out with Bruce Bochy, that you can get a large ruggedly handsome male who is also very good at his job. That’s possible, so I wouldn’t rule out someone because he was a large, ruggedly handsome white male. I think some good candidates might come from there, but there are other good candidates that come from sets of people that really aren’t getting that chance.
ML: In your book, you write a lot about finding better ways to handle pitching.
BK: That’s right. Some guys who are low intensity pitchers will give you the best production pitching six, seven innings a pop. Maybe there is a guy who gets thrown off by not starting a game and starting a game in the second or third inning. If that’s the case, let him start! Let him go six, seven innings. Always tailor it to your personnel.
But right now, all we’re doing is looking at, “This guy’s a miler. He pitches six, seven innings. This guy’s a sprinter. He gets three outs.”
It just can’t be that that those are the skill sets of every pitcher in the world. It’s just not the case. You can have guys who are really good going two and a third, guys who can go four, guys who can go eight, and certain guys who will be great getting three outs, and I know we’ve seen that it is obviously much more effective to pitch in a short burst than in a long stretch.
Basically, we still do things the way they did it in the 19th century, which is roll a guy out there, have him stride out there like a leading man, like an actor on a Broadway stage, and he goes out there until he’s gassed, and you take him out. It’s only because we did it that way in the 19th century that we continue to do it, and that makes no sense.
ML: What metrics exist today for knowing when to take a pitcher out and when to leave him in?
BK: Today you can ask, when do we see his velocity diminish? When do we see his spin rate, his movement, his horizontal movement start to diminish on his pitches? You can measure that. So while you’re measuring that, you see this falling apart. You can say he’s starting to fatigue.
And you can also look at a guy’s physical mechanics. You can measure now, is he lagging with his arm? Is the arm lagging behind? Is there a change?
Because a lot of times, to get inside baseball here, you’ll have a guy throwing just as hard, but as players will tell you and coaching will tell you, yeah, he’s throwing just as hard, but he’s working a lot harder to get there. Okay, he’s really putting himself under stress to get that extra oomph. That’s not what we want. You can measure all these things.
So let’s say you have a guy pitching into the eighth inning or the ninth inning, and he’s at 120 pitches. And he’s not showing any of that. Let him pitch! I’m not saying, “Oh, you’ve got to have a guy throw 20 pitches and get out.” I’m saying, “You now have the ways of measuring if he’s fatiguing, and if he’s not fatiguing, and he’s throwing free and easy, let him pitch. Let him finish that game.”
ML: You’ve got Terry Collins of the Mets in the World Series. He had mounds of research. It was expensive and time-consuming to compile, and he basically blew the World Series by looking into the eyes of the pitcher and making a subjective decision.
BK: Not only that, this guy has a magic number where he turns into a pumpkin, which is exactly the number that Pedro Martinez had, and it’s the number that’s the generic name for pitcher fatigue: 100 pitches.
That was a ridiculous decision! It’s something that you can see coming. I make a distinction between things that happen too fast for a manager, like when a ball bounces off a glove for a shortstop. You don’t blame him for that. Players are going to make errors in the heat of the moment. Physical mistakes are going to happen, and things happen quickly for managers, too.
But this was one that you had to be planning your whole day and your whole season, and they still didn’t see it coming. That part is unforgivable.
ML: You wrote that if you were to step into the dugout of an MLB team, you could hold your own as a manager, whereas put you as an NFL head coach or an NBA head coach, and it wouldn’t work.
BK: Yes, absolutely. With the NBA, I wouldn’t know how to do a pick and roll, how to defend it, I wouldn’t know any of those things. As an MLB manger, I didn’t say I’d be great. I said I’d be better than a third of them. Right off the bat! I can’t fix my own car, I don’t say that about being a surgeon, I’m not an electrical engineer, no, I can’t do that either. But manage a baseball club? Yes, I can do that. It’s really not that complicated.
Michael Levin, a 12-time bestselling author, runs BusinessGhost.com, a provider of ghostwriting and publishing services.
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