Bull Durham saw straight through the bull about how baseball is played.
“You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball,” fictional catcher Crash Davis explained to rookie pitcher Nuke LaLoosh. “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.”
But that simple, movie spin no longer translates to baseball’s language of spin rates, exit velocities and launch angles. If you want an edge, you’d better migrate to cybernation — and UC Santa Barbara has lived on that cutting edge now for four seasons and counting.
“Our analytics guys have been a big separator for us,” Gaucho coach Andrew Checketts said. “We’re trying to hang our hat on player development and guys improving, and that being the focus.
“From a facilities standpoint, we’re $15 million away from being competitive with the other top 25 teams on the West Coast and even with teams in our conference. This is something we can do with $30,000 to $50,000 and hopefully create some kind of competitive advantage.”
That hope has been realized with a win-loss record of 99-33 the last three seasons and a No. 17 ranking in this year’s Collegiate Baseball preseason poll. UCSB will tune up for next month’s start of the season with intrasquad scrimmages at 4 p.m. Friday and 9:30 a.m. Sunday as part of its Alumni Weekend.
“We try to take the numbers we have from the fall and come up with individual skill development plans for guys, or work on some of those research projects and find out what’s next,” Checketts said. “It’s like recruiting: It never stops.”
Team of Analysts
The Gauchos use as many “analytics guys” — staff members Spencer Stewart, Sean Isaac and Maxine Wang, and twice that number of interns — as the nine who take the field each game.
Evan Short, a statistics and sociology student, was serving as an intern for UCSB assistant coach Eddie Cornejo when he made the pitch to Checketts about investing in analytics.
“He was doing some stats stuff on the side, helping out coach Cornejo with recruiting data and stuff like that,” Checketts recalled. “Then sometime around 2018 he put a packet on my desk and said, ‘Here’s something we could do if you could put some money into the infrastructure and the stuff to gather the data.’
“He pushed us. He told me, ‘You’re missing the boat. This is something that could really help you out.’”
Short got the green light and started with a program called Pitch Design. It adjusts and modifies pitches to how they project against certain hitters. The Gauchos wound up tailoring their offensive strategies and defensive positioning from the data analysis.
“When we got Trackman and Rapsodo (a radar device that measures a baseball’s spin while tracking its flight), we were able to do a flood of data,” Short explained. “We didn’t know what to do with it at the beginning, but eventually we were able to figure out some things, of how the traits of certain pitches play better for a pitcher than other traits.
“It gave us clues about what they do best and what they don’t do very well.”
A Boon for Boone and Torra
Both Rodney Boone and Zach Torra, two of UCSB’s top left-handed pitchers the last few seasons, made key adjustments with the data they received.
“Boone was struggling with his changeup during the middle of his freshman year,” Checketts recalled. “We got some super slow-mo video on it and took the Trackman data and recognized that it was rising more than we wanted it to.
“We quantified it and took the video. We saw what his good changeups — the ones that dropped more — looked like, and what they looked like coming out of his hand. He made the adjustment and came back at the end of the year with his changeup much improved. It made a big difference for him.”
The computer data convinced Torra to switch his fastball to a four-seam grip from a two-seamer.
“When we got him on the machines, we found out, ‘Hey, his ball really rises,’” Checketts said. “He’s got really true spin — his spin rate is above average based on his arm slot.
“We spent almost the entire fall limiting his two-seamer, working on a four-seamer, working on back-spinning it, and throwing the ball more up in the zone. That really helped him.”
Cleveland selected Boone in the eighth round of last June’s Major League Baseball Draft. Torra hopes to sign a free-agent contract once he recovers from off-season elbow surgery.
Big-League Number Crunchers
Several of the Gauchos’ number crunchers have graduated to big-league careers. Short is now the Toronto Blue Jays’ player development and performance analyst. Tony Ortiz, his successor as UCSB’s director of baseball analytics, was hired by the New York Yankees two years ago to serve as a “quantitative analyst associate.”
UCSB alumni Marcus Cuellar (San Francisco Giants) and Ryan Bobb (Boston Red Sox) followed them into MLB jobs.
“Ryan worked his way up fast and got a World Series ring,” Checketts said. “He started out in international scouting and is doing some things in South America. Those guys made us better over the years.”
Wang, a double-major in Statistics-Data Science and Economics-Accounting, got her first taste of professional baseball last summer as an intern with the Blue Jays. She and Isaac, a former pitcher in the Los Angeles Angels organization, were in charge of analyzing the Gauchos’ pitching data during their fall workouts. Stewart handled the hitting side.
Isaac, who was recently hired by the Milwaukee Brewers as a minor league pitching coach, said the Gauchos have several promising starters who can fill the cleats of Boone and Michael McGreevy, a first-round pick of the St. Louis Cardinals.
Collegiate Baseball recently selected sophomores Cory Lewis and Carter Benbrook, as well as sophomore shortstop Jordan Sprinkle, as preseason All-Americans.
“As far as starters go, we saw a handful of guys really come on,” Stewart said. “(Mt. SAC transfer) Mike Gutierrez comes to mind. Cory Lewis, Ryan Harvey and Cooper Rons, too. Harvey was up to 95-plus mph this fall.
“Carter Benbrook has an elite changeup, and especially coming from the left side, and he’s working his way back. If it looks this good in the bullpen, I can’t wait to see it on Trackman and with a guy in the box.”
Wang said the fall data also showed that Hayden Hattenbach has developed one of the team’s best splitters.
“I’m excited to see that in games and how he develops,” she said.
Powering Up for the Season
Outfielder Nick Vogt, meanwhile, put up some of fall’s best hitting numbers.
“He was our exit velo leaderboard winner this fall with a healthy 108.5 (mph),” Stewart said. “That was a triple that he put into right-centerfield. He also put a couple into the trees in center.
“His swing-and-miss percentage was low, as well — just 17%. And there were some guys even lower than that like (Christian) Kirtley and (Jason) Willow at 15% and 12%, respectively.”
Checketts admits you can go so overboard with analytics that you drown in the numbers.
“Sometimes you get so far out there you forget about the basics,” he said. “We had all our data and went into our exit meetings and I said, ‘Hey, can I just get regular stats?’
“‘What was his batting average? I’ve got his average exit velocity and the average launch angle … And I’ve got this pitcher’s average spin rates and vertical approach angle, but how many runs does he give up per nine innings?’
“I’m trying to combine those things with the analytics and come up with something that really helps us.”
It’s been enough for the Gauchos to rewrite the Bull Durham script: Oftentimes they win, less often they lose, and rarely does it rain on that parade at Caesar Uyesaka Stadium.
— Noozhawk sports columnist Mark Patton is a longtime local sports writer. Contact him at sports@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk Sports on Twitter: @NoozhawkSports. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook. The opinions expressed are his own.