SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – The late, great Stephen Hawking once defined intelligence as the “ability to adapt and change.”
Yet, there are few things that human beings—often described as creatures of habit—fear more.
We all need our routines, but ballplayers need them only slightly more than they need air to breathe. It is an essential part of their existence. So, while for most of us change is scary, to them it can be downright haunting.
In a broader context, the game of baseball itself has gotten used to its own routines after 150 years of the game being played professionally. If ever the phrase “it’s all been done” would apply, you would think it would be in the game of baseball.
But, it turns out, we all still have a lot to learn about this game.
Trevor Patch, the Colorado Rockies Manager of Research and Development is charged with the task of discovering and then communicating to players new ways to think about and play this ancient game.
You can see the results of his work on the field in the way Colorado has toyed with different shifting and baserunning philosophies. And you can see it on the roster, especially if you take a close look at the type of pitcher the Rockies have gone out of their way to acquire in the last half-decade.
BSN Denver sat down with Patch for an exclusive interview to learn a little bit more about the man behind the data.
“I grew up in Louisville, CO, right outside of Boulder,” Patch started. “Went to a school called Peak to Peak Charter school. That’s a K-12 in Lafayette. If you believe all the rankings, it’s one of the best schools in Colorado, top 50 in the nation, you know, all the things they tout. But it really was a very impressive group of people that went on to do a lot of cool stuff.”
Patch is clearly among the group that qualifies as impressive people who is currently doing some pretty cool stuff.
His day-to-day activities include crunching numbers and analyzing systems, sure, but it’s much more than that. After all, what good does it do to have all the best information in the world if you can’t convey it to those who need to act upon it?
“We have to be able to communicate our ideas and then have discussions about them,” he said. “We have a lot of great discussions with our scouts, our coaches and our players, the people in our front office that we learn from and build different models and are like, ‘Hey, I didn’t think about that,’ or, ‘That’s a cool idea, let’s put that into our models.’ And then there’s tons of stuff that we’ll never be able to quantify in our models. So, it’s a lot of give and take, but we try to build as many and as strong relationships as we can all across the organization, not only to learn from them but also get ideas on what we can look at next.”
This kind of give and take and recognition that there is plenty that Patch and his team of wizards will never fully quantify flies in the face of the overwrought narrative that statistical analysis stands in polar opposition to a more traditional way of looking at the game.
It helps that going back to before he fell in love with numbers, he fell in love with sports.
“Was always interested in baseball,” Patch said. “Started playing baseball in elementary school. Also played hockey. Was probably a better hockey player growing up, and played that for most of my life. I was a pretty good hockey player and then I got into middle school and really fell in love with baseball.”
Like most of us, his priorities would evolve over time, but athletic competition would remain the constant.
“I dropped hockey so I could play golf, basketball, and baseball in high school,” Patch explained. “Then, went on to school to play golf at College of Wooster, which is in Wooster, OH, about an hour north of Akron. I wanted to get a good education, but I also wanted to play sports somewhere. It’s D-III golf, so, I could’ve played D-III golf or baseball, decided ‘Hey I’m not really going to do either of these professionally,’ and golf was a little more fun and a little more relaxing, outside of school.”
Whether it’s baseball, hockey, or golf, Patch has always been comfortable swinging a stick. And he’s not alone.
“I think everyone that works here has some love for sports,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of people that are here just for the love of data or stuff like that. There’s a lot of other companies that are solving a lot of really cool problems but if you’re here working for us, you probably have a love for baseball. That’s why we get a lot of really good athletes, even in these non-athletic parts of the organization. Obviously, we’re nowhere near the athletes the players are, but we still get out there and mess around, playing whiffle ball or football, those sorts of things.”
We’ll be the judge of that. Senior Director of Player Development Zach Wilson certainly showed off some wicked skills on the way to winning the team’s ping-pong tournament this spring:
The Rockies take playing ping pong very seriously pic.twitter.com/cj0YJLjVP9
— Baseball Bros (@BaseballBros) March 22, 2018
These kinds of competitions can be great fun for fans and media, but they are also an opportunity for the members of the organization who fight hard every day for wins—but never take the field—to pump their fists in celebration.
“I think we’re all competitive with each other,” Patch said. “Another reason people work here is the competitive nature of this game. We always talk about how there’s someone doing my job at 29 other clubs, and if we’re going to be the best, then I need to be better than those 29 other people. We have basically four other people—Jamie, Hank, Evan, and Bryce in our department and if we’re going to be the best, then they need to be better than their counterparts at the other 29 clubs, as well.”
This is just one more reminder that working for a pro sports team is not like any other job. If I write a great article, that doesn’t mean that someone else out there will publish something terrible. It doesn’t work that way. But in sports, every time someone wins, someone else loses, and getting used to the dynamic is vital if Patch and his team are going to help push their baseball club into a special place.
“It breathes into competition with each other,” he said. “Not about work, but if we’re playing ping pong or playing whiffle ball, we’re here to win. And we’re here to get each other better, but specifically, when it comes to whiffle ball, we’re here to win.”
Take no prisoners.
So, with all the competitive spirit and a background as an athlete, how did Patch end up as the guy whose caricature is of some nerd sitting behind a computer?
“I started out pretty gifted at math,” he explained. “Not compared to some people, but I was always a couple years ahead in math. By the time I got to high school, I had been pushed pretty hard and into calculus my freshman year, and I was pretty burnt out. I had been passed by a lot of people and was like ‘Wow, these people are way, way smarter than me and I don’t really have an interest in math. I’m going to go do something else.”
Like baseball, maybe even more than baseball, math can break you down. It’s why I stay so far away from it. But Patch found that he couldn’t do that for very long and the Fates would have it no other way.
“Later in high school, I got into a stats class and AP physics and it really reignited that feeling for me in like, ‘Hey, math is there to do things with, not there as a theoretical exercise!’ It’s there for that too, but it’s there to solve problems. Operations research, stats, the physics side. There’s a lot of really cool applications I can use math for.”
Of course, we all know one very specific application of it. But, most people reading this have spent a day or two—or far more than we would like to admit—crunching numbers on spreadsheets to try to figure out the best way to construct a lineup that will very much be constructed by someone else. So, what was different for Patch?
“I was the guy wearing QB wristbands in high school baseball with all the stats I could find about other teams. Some of the QB wristbands that our catchers wear now. I got very lucky that probably the most influential teacher in my life was also my AP stats teacher, who was also my assistant coach in baseball. So, he kind of drove me to saying, ‘Hey you can do this. You’re good at this. If this is something you want to do, you can do it.”
Coach nailed it.
Back in the classroom, all the pieces were coalescing into a clearer and clearer picture.
“Stats are often taught with a lot of baseball examples right around the birth of Moneyball and it all kind of came together,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to work in the front office of a baseball team. That was my ticket in. So I focused on that, to develop those skills to try to get a job in baseball, knowing that math was kind of my way in.”
For those of us who were never going to get to lace them up and take the field, but have an unending love for the game, it’s all about finding that way in.
Patch’s talents were recognized by the baseball club he grew up just down the highway from in March of 2012 when he was hired by the Rockies in the Promotions and Special Events department. He was a statistical analyst by August and quickly became an invaluable member of baseball operations.
Now, he is the man for Rockies R&D, working on the cutting edge of human understanding of the game of baseball.
And his timing couldn’t be better. We are living in a golden age for baseball analytics, and we may barely have scratched the surface to this point.
“That’s hard to say, for sure,” Patch said. “Baseball has come a long way in a very short period of time. Numbers have been a part of baseball since the 1800’s. Even reading about the forefathers of numbers, even back to Branch Rickey who had a type of wOBA calculation that included on base and slugging elements into one number. Baseball always lends itself to this because, at the end of the day, it’s kind of a one-on-one matchup. So, I think we have definitely moved forward in the last 25 years, and then specifically the last 10, but we definitely have a lot more to learn. It may be less on the day-to-day data side and more on teaching or empowerment of other jobs around the organization we can help out with.”
It’s not all about more and better numbers, it’s about finding the best ways to accurately understand the game and then to act with that added understanding. And a big part of this evolution could be bridging the gap between a perceived conflict between those who see the game through the lens of statistics and those who do not.
“I think it comes down to every person’s personal relationship with the game,” he said. “I think numbers will help some people enjoy the game more, but at times they can make people enjoy the game less. Me watching hockey now, I don’t get into as many of the stats because I kind of have fun watching the game without knowing some of that stuff. So I think as a fan, you have to decide how much you want to interact with those numbers. They’re there to help the fans understand who’s good and who’s bad. But, baseball has stood the test of time for a long, long time as a great game. Just experiencing it is what fans are there to do.”
It was Nelson Mandela who said: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” While they will stick to the realm of baseball, Trevor Patch and his team are using their ongoing education in order to change the way we think about the Colorado Rockies.
