What an iconic 1986 Mets moment tells us about modern analytics

PORT ST. LUCIE -- It’s one of the iconic moments in Mets history: Game 6 of the 1986 National League Championship Series in Houston, bottom of the 16th inning, Mets up by a run and trying to clinch the pennant.

Jesse Orosco is pitching to Kevin Bass with the tying and winning runs on base, and he is gassed. He has nothing on his heater, but is still throwing it.

Keith Hernandez walks to the mound.

“If you throw another fastball,” Hernandez said (he confirmed the exact words on Tuesday), “We’re gonna fight.”

Orosco listened, and struck out Bass with a slider to clinch the pennant.

Recalling this moment a few days ago at Mets camp with Hernandez’s teammate (and our SNY co-worker) Ron Darling, I was struck by a thought: Wasn’t Hernandez’s recommendation exactly what an analytics department would have advised 36 years later?

And if so, isn’t the gap between the modern and traditional often smaller than it seems?

Teams like the Tampa Bay Rays have moved toward calling for relievers to mostly or entirely throw a single elite pitch, often a high-spin slider. The Yankees, Astros, Mets, Dodgers, Brewers and many other organizations have used technology to identify, improve and emphasize these pitches.

It’s a very different game plan than the traditional way of working a hitter and setting him up with an array of pitches. The idea is to never allow oneself to be beaten with one’s second-best pitch. And that's exactly what Hernandez was advising Orosco.

I ran my idea by Mets assistant GM Ben Zauzmer, who oversees the team’s analytics department with what colleagues say is an unusually high emotional intelligence.

“It is a really good anecdote that illustrates that the concepts we are trying to do today are basically identical,” Zauzmer said. “We’re just trying to take the pitch tracking data that now all 30 teams have and use it to reinforce these same types of decisions that people have been trying to make for 100 years.

“Ultimately what we’re trying to do is help every pitcher get the most out of their arsenal, so if you go back even in times when we didn’t have pitch tracking data -- if we had, it’s very plausible to believe that we would have been looking at that data on Orosco, and tried to figure out, ‘what is the best pitch to attack that batter?’ And say, ‘you should be throwing that more and here are the locations where it might work.’

“And then you work with the pitcher, you work with the pitching coach, you work with the catcher to figure out which game plan makes the most sense.”

As Zauzmer noted, we don’t have data from high-speed cameras to measure the spin on Orosco’s slider. Darling is sure that it would have registered as an elite pitch.

“He’s the only guy who used to spin the ball so hard when you played catch with him, you could hear it whistle,” Darling said.

Hernandez accepted my premise too, adding, “Yeah, and I didn’t have to read a chart to figure that out.”

That was a valuable point, and one that the more arrogant members of the analytics movement would do well to understand. A baseball savant like Hernandez not only knows the game, but has muscle memory from actually playing it.

This brings us to a deeper truth about the current Mets and their goals. When Sandy Alderson returned after Steve Cohen purchased the team, he sought to pursue implementation, empathy and respect as the next frontiers of an analytics movement that he started as Oakland Athletics GM in the 1980s.

The next market inefficiency would not be a number, Alderson thought, but the ability to communicate concepts in a way that would foster collaboration instead of conflict.

He hired two GMs, Jared Porter and Billy Eppler, who had dual backgrounds in scouting and analytics. That was no accident: He wanted a modern front office that could talk to baseball players, coaches and scouts.

“Billy does a fantastic job of blending the two,” says Zauzmer, who earns similar compliments from coworkers. “That has been clear since day one.”

Zauzmer sees it as part of his job to listen to and respect the experience of baseball players.

“The innovations are less likely to be continuing on the statistics side -- though they definitely are, and that’s why we have really smart statisticians -- but the innovations are probably even more likely to be in bridging that gap,” he said.

Once the old and new guard learn to talk to each other, they might even realize that both would want Jesse Orosco to throw his slider.