“They sat me down and they put up all these x, y charts and all this other stuff,” Pressly says. The Astros, Pressly learned, had a plan for him to be better, and the analysts launched into the details. In attendance were Astros pitching coach Brent Strom, bullpen coach Doug White, and multiple analysts from the front office. No more than fifteen minutes after he finished unpacking in the clubhouse, Pressly was summoned into a meeting.
ASTROS PLAY BY PLAY SERIES
He flew to Houston and arrived at Minute Maid Park in time for the following day’s Lone Star Series game against the Rangers. He was also upgrading from a 1.2 percent chance to qualify for the postseason to a 99.9 percent chance, according to FanGraphs’ playoff odds. The Dallas native was returning to Texas. But no one was expecting second-half heroics from a twenty-nine-year-old, generic right-hander.Īlthough the trade was disorienting for Pressly, there were benefits to being uprooted. Pressly’s first half of 2018 was much stronger, and through July 26, he trailed the major-league leader in appearances by a single game. His 2017 season had started so disastrously (19 runs in 18 innings) that he’d actually been demoted to Triple-A. Over the same span, Pressly’s ERA was 3.81. From 2013-17, the first five seasons of Pressly’s career, MLB relievers recorded a collective 3.80 ERA. Twins reliever Ryan Pressly was at best the fifth-most-famous of the six major leaguers traded on July 27, 2018, the day he joined the Astros and his trajectory changed. What follows is a condensed excerpt from a chapter about the Houston Astros, who have used new techniques and technology to maximize players’ potential. The book tells the behind-the-scenes story of the players, coaches, and teams that are driving baseball’s current revolution in player development, which is transforming the sport from the Moneyball model of finding preexisting talent to one in which teams are competing to create talent. It’s called The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players, and it comes out Tuesday, June 4. We’re Ben and Travis, and we wrote a book.
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