Cubs shake up player-development operation

CHICAGO (AP) — The Chicago Cubs shook up their player-development operation, with Matt Dorey taking over as senior vice president of player development and directors of pitching and hitting being appointed.

Dorey, Chicago’s director of amateur scouting the past six years, was previously a scout for the Boston Red Sox and a college coach.

Any thoughts, either from the Cubs perspective or that of considering the field of player development generally?

Cleveland’s Luke Carlin on Organizational Leadership and Collaborative Culture | FanGraphs Baseball

“Here with the Indians, it’s a team-first approach and a growth mindset. There is language we use that gets our players to understand the standards we set. We have very high standards of excellence, and we need to consistently message that. We need to model that as a staff. There is going to be developmental feedback that is done more privately. There is going to be psychological safety. We want an environment where the players aren’t afraid to make mistakes. We’re equipping them with a ton of great content, and we’re using our experience to weave everything they need into a language that allows them to apply it.

Sarris: Why doubt and uncertainty are crucial to modern player development – The Athletic

True this.

“There are a lot of things that probably don’t matter that we think do,” Seattle’s pitching coordinator Max Weiner said last month. “Our whole goal is to educate, not to dictate. So when you’re trying to create a sense of safety and belonging, and you’re a jerk and you’re saying do this, and your words are firm and brash — which we’ve all fallen victim to, I’ve definitely done it myself in the past — it’s really difficult. But if you offer up a sense of an option and you inform them and the decision becomes their own, it’s much more meaningful and it comes back to the quickest versus the most sustainable change. A lot of patience has to be involved.”

“The most successful people I’m around have an aura of confidence but also a paranoia of what am I missing,” Haines said about how doubt plays into a good player development process. “If you start thinking you’ve got all the answers, you’re starting to fall behind.”

The most improved pitchers of 2019 

The All-Star Game is only a few weeks away, and baseball’s top starters have thrown nearly 100 innings apiece. It’s far enough into the season that we can take a look at which pitchers have taken a huge step forward from last year, and more important, try to figure out why. (We did this last year around this time, identifying Justin Verlander and Tyler Glasnow at the top of the list.)

Since we’re trying to get at underlying skills here, it’s not good enough to look at ERA, which can be negatively affected by one terrible start or poor defense or relievers. (Look no further than Max Scherzer for that; he’s held his strikeouts steady, lowered his walks and homers ... and has seen his ERA increase.)

Instead, we’ll look at the Statcast Expected wOBA metric. The short version is that it looks at quality of contact (exit velocity and launch angle) and amount of contact (strikeouts and walks) in an attempt to get to a defense-free measure of how a pitcher is performing, outputting a number on a scale similar to on-base percentage. For context, the 2019 Major League average is .322.

Developing More With Less: Does Efficiency in Player Development Lead to Success? - Driveline Baseball

Another interesting article from Driveline.