A Numbers Guy Left the Front Office to Coach Prospects. Here's What He Learned.

Mejdal, 52, has been with the Astros since 2012, when they were the majors’ worst team. Now they are World Series champions, a status that presents a new challenge to their front office, the most unapologetically progressive one in baseball. Instead of trying to build a winner, the Astros must sustain their success in an era with so many rivals copying their old blueprint of tearing down the present to build for tomorrow.

The answer, the Astros believe, is in the seamless transfer of analytics from the iPad to the diamond, a full-scale data immersion from the lowest levels of the minors to Minute Maid Park. Every team now values advanced metrics. Not every team has sent its top analyst to spend a summer as a first-base coach on the bottom rung of its farm system, as the Astros did with Mejdal last season.

“A lot of clubs have really good ideas,” Luhnow said. “I think what will separate some from others is the ability to react and utilize, implement and sort of institutionalize programs out in the field.”

In doing so, the Astros have found that entry-level players now yearn for the kind of information that tech-savvy teams can provide. Most of these players were born in the mid- to late 1990s, which means that, by their formative amateur years, modern metrics had been normalized. This is not their fathers’ game anymore.

“I honestly had no idea, when they drafted me, the types of things they were doing,” said Colin McKee, an 18th-round draft pick in 2016. “I have a hard time explaining it to my parents. They’ll be like, ‘Oh, how was your day at spring training?’ I’m like, ‘It’s mind-blowing stuff.’ For people who don’t see it, it’s kind of hard to explain to them — and it’s hard for them to believe that much stuff goes into baseball.”

McKee played last season in Troy, New Yorik, for the Class A Tri-City ValleyCats of the short-season New York-Penn League. Mejdal (pronounced my-dell) was the team’s development coach, his first time in uniform since his last year of Little League. He rode the buses, scrounged for meals and learned how to use a thin-handled fungo bat to warm up the fielders. (The trick is a consistent toss.)

“There were definitely moments like, ‘What the heck is he doing?'” said Jake Meyers, a center fielder who played last season in Troy. “He could be sitting in an office, and he’s traveling with us to all these crazy places. But it was kind of a respect thing. You’ve got to respect a guy for wanting to go on the road and do what we do for a couple of months, just to see how it is and how it can get better.”

Mejdal assisted in any way he could, throwing batting practice or feeding a pitching machine, shagging balls in the outfield, doing the grunt work to allow manager Morgan Ensberg and his staff more instruction time for a raw 35-man roster.

Ensberg, an All-Star third baseman for the Astros in their run to the 2005 World Series, was grateful for the help. The Astros have development coaches at every level, but Mejdal’s research background set him apart.

“There was one team last year that got to live in the future, and that was the Tri-City ValleyCats,” Ensberg said. “We got to experience what a major league bench is going to be like in a few years. There’s a bunch of information that I couldn’t possibly know.”

To take advantage of it, Ensberg said, he would consult Mejdal at least five times a game, asking what the numbers suggested in a given situation. He would also ask his hitting and pitching coaches for their input, then weigh his options and make a decision.

Players, likewise, sought out Mejdal to dig deeper on their performance.

“They ate this stuff up,” Mejdal said. “There was no surprise or skepticism. It was like: ‘Wow, really? You guys can measure that? I didn’t know that.'”

McKee said he benefited from the sophisticated reports on pitch usage and hitters’ tendencies. After a rough pro debut the year before, McKee had a strong season, allowing only 19 hits in 41 innings. He was promoted this season to the Class A Quad Cities River Bandits, like Meyers, who said the Astros’ emphasis on video — especially in spring training, where cameras ring the practice fields — also helps.

“We can pretty much see anything we would want to see throughout the whole day, whatever it is,” Meyers said. “There’s always eyes watching with cameras. There’s always a way to get better.”

The ValleyCats finished 34-39, but that was largely irrelevant to Luhnow’s goals. By learning from Mejdal’s experience in Troy, he hoped to give the Astros a better chance to turn their concepts into reality. Front offices everywhere now teem with well-educated executives who have backgrounds outside baseball. Luhnow, who has an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern, wondered how the Astros could get more from theirs.

“There is an ivory tower effect, if you will, where great ideas are being thought about and discussed at headquarters, but until you roll them out into the field, you don’t realize all the challenges involved,” he said. “Amazing ideas find all kinds of issues when you try to roll them out with human beings because that’s all we are, a collection of human beings trying to do things to help players perform on the field.”

In past years, Luhnow found, it was easy for executives to visit a minor league affiliate for a week but difficult to form more than a surface-level bond with players and staff members. In Mejdal, whom he had first hired with the St. Louis Cardinals in 2005, he had a trusted confidant with intimate knowledge of the Astros’ culture.

“I wanted someone from the front office who understood all the stuff that we’re doing,” he said, “but also had context from where we’ve come and where we’re going.”

The experience sharpened Mejdal’s baseball acumen, highlighting nuances of the game he had never noticed before: the footwork of catchers, the acceleration technique of base runners, the drop steps of outfielders. As for specific ideas he passed on to Luhnow, Mejdal would rather not say, beyond greatly improved food options for players.

The Astros still work with something of an outsider’s edge. Even after the team won a title — validating its patient, deliberate overhaul — Mejdal said he sensed resentment in the way others view the organization.

“We get strange looks,” he said. “I’ve noticed that. I bet we’re the most disliked organization, if you were to survey experienced baseball people. I think we have the Yankees beat — by a healthy margin, maybe.”

The feeling is understandable for the Astros, who host the New York Yankees on Monday to start a four-game series. The Astros were the victims of a crime in 2013 and 2014 when Chris Correa, a Cardinals executive who had worked with Luhnow in St. Louis, hacked into their proprietary database. Correa, who has since been barred from baseball, pleaded guilty in 2016 to five counts of unauthorized access of a protected computer and is serving a 46-month prison term.

“Jeff has been through it all, and he’s got a pretty thick skin,” Mejdal said. “Those early years were so unpleasant in many ways, but our minor leaguers were doing well, and you could see the future coming.”

Now that the future is here, the Astros must continue to develop productive players despite drafting much lower, and having less to spend on amateur talent, than they did at the start of Luhnow’s tenure. To Mejdal, who is roving among several minor league affiliates this season, that goal has become more personal than he ever could have imagined.

The players seemed so likable last season, he said, and their youthful vigor so endearing, that he found himself not just rooting for them, but feeling for them. It is their job to play, and Mejdal’s to know the numbers, including the discouraging odds against a long and lucrative major league career.

“It’s like you know a secret that’s going to rock their world — not next week, but maybe next year or two years from now,” Mejdal said. “And when you care about them, it’s just this ominous future disappointment to many of them.

“The responsibility that we’ve always known we have to these players, as front-office people, is more salient now after being there for the summer. It’s grown men playing a game in the dirt; it’s not curing cancer. But it is still something to take very seriously. It is players’ dreams.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

A Numbers Guy Left the Front Office to Coach Prospects. Here's What He Learned.

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