We will hear more from new Mariners manager Jason Kanzler later today in a press conference, but for those of you who want a sneak peek, I found a podcast appearance he did back in 2020 on the podcast “Ahead of the Curve” with Jonathan Gelnar in July of 2020. Kanzler, then with the Astros, appeared as a guest on Gelnar’s podcast to talk about using data in evaluating players (primarily hitters) and coaching in general – an hour-long conversation that gave me a much better sense of who Kanzler is as a coach and a thinker (and hopefully some more focused questions to ask today). If you have the spare time and interest, I definitely recommend giving it a listen – and you can also hear interviews with current Mariners staffers Justin Toole, CJ Gillman, and Jake McKinley there, too (as well as a spate of former Mariners coaches). If you don’t have the time or inclination, I’ve summarized a lot of what he says here, because Service Journalism means I will listen to a 70-minute podcast from six years ago for you and transcribe it.
The caveat here, obviously: this is a six-year old conversation after Kanzler had been in the Astros organization for just a year; he himself calls himself a “young coach” in answering one of the questions. At this point, his experiences were still very tied to his time at the minor-league and amateur level – although as you’ll see, he also shares some insights about the difference between big-leaguers and minor-league players – so it’s safe to assume some of these ideas have been refined. Context matters, here, too; this is a peer-to-peer conversation – Gelnar is a former college baseball player who was hired to coach the Frisco RoughRiders in 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of the minor-league season – so the focus of the conversation is often on empowering players to take the next step to advance their baseball careers.
The first interesting thing I learned in this podcast was that when Kanzler was teaching high school physics and chemistry, he was actually teaching remedial courses – or teaching students who often didn’t want to be there, were struggling with the material, or had some other block. What Kanzler learned from that is that one can’t just “pull rank and rely on the authority of the title given by teacher” – a dynamic he said was familiar when he started coaching at the professional level. Kanzler emphasized the importance of trust, not titles, and also knowing how to pick your spots: delivering content when it’s appropriate and when the student is ready for it.
“It’s not about lecturing a waterfall of information,” said Kanzler. “It’s more about facilitating and understanding and really leveling the playing field between the coach and the teacher or the learner and the student and facilitating some kind of progress or learning.”
Having coached at both the minor-league and major-league levels at this point, Kanzler acknowledged that the power dynamics are very different at each level; there is a bigger power imbalance between minor-leaguers and their coaches, who often hold sway over a minor leaguer’s career in a way that’s completely inverted at the big-league level, where a franchise player can easily outlast several cycles of a coaching staff. The relationship has to be different, but Kanzler says he appreciates that big leaguers have learned it’s their career and take ownership over it, which actually makes it easier from the coaching side, as long as the relationship is built on trust.
“You need to connect with them on a deep level because you cannot rely on a title.”
Kanzler went on to talk more there about how players have access to so much data today that the job of the coach is to be a translator of the data, a facilitator but also a filter, “delicately filtering out” what isn’t helpful for a player to hear. One of Kanzler’s primary coaching mentors is Tommy Weber, longtime coach and current professor, who is fond of saying “silence is a sound” – a concept Kanzler grasped onto early as a reminder to not be afraid of silence, and to not speak just to hear himself talk. Kanzler says he tries to put himself into a player’s shoes: what would they want to hear? And what would break their trust to hear?
“The job is more about reducing the noise than enhancing the signal.”
In order to act as a translator, says Kanzler, it’s imperative that coaches have complete facility with that data; the player’s job, he says, isn’t to understand the data, it’s to perform on the field. They don’t need to know how to take apart and rebuild the engine, they just need to know how to make it go. It’s the coach’s job to take that data and make a user’s manual out of it, which starts with a deep understanding of the data itself.
“We need to have a very deep understanding of what the data we’re working with is because if we don’t have a deep understanding, our translation will not be sufficient and it’s going to be a pretty bad game of Telephone. And we’re going to wind up delivering poor messages or obfuscated messages that aren’t translating into anything simpler.”
However, when evaluating an athlete, Kanzler actually prefers more subjective measures before digging into the data, looking for the classic “rhythm, tempo, and timing” – to see how an athlete moves through space, looking at more subjective or global indicators vs. granular data.
“I’ve just let it become intuitive. A quality mover is someone whose movements look smooth – there’s nothing saccadic or syncopated about it. It seems effortless, given the outputs…For a swing, things seem to link up in good sequence, there doesn’t seem to be any disconnections between any body segments, there seems to be good intra-muscular coordination, the muscles seem to work at the right timings relative to each other. Those sorts of things.”
Is this just a lot of words to say “the eye test”? Maybe, but Kanzler – who earlier in the podcast says the best tech to invest in is “paper and pencil” to track hard-hit line drives – is a fan of eyes.
“Your eyes are a biological piece of technology. They are incredible, and your brain is incredible at doing things that no computer on the planet can do yet.”
The thing to keep in mind about data, says Kanzler, is that data is morally neutral: data isn’t inherently good or bad, it’s a tool, which can be used in helpful or unhelpful ways. For example, as far as swing changes or mechanical changes, Kanzler seems to deeply understand how much a swing, for example, can be part of a hitter’s identity – the thing that’s gotten them to where they are – and he talks about the need to develop trust with a player before you ever try to make a change. And ideally, says Kanzler, the coach isn’t the one who suggests the change:
“I think framing questions and having lines of questioning that would allow them to hopefully get to some realizations themselves is a powerful way to at least start the conversation of change. I want to avoid telling them to change; I would much rather have them feel like it’s their idea, their realization that perhaps they’re going to need to change for future success at the major-league level.”
That’s part of the art of coaching, Kanzler says: each side giving up a bit of identity in order to get to a better place. And the relationship goes both ways; it shouldn’t always be the players surrendering, and the art of coaching is knowing how to balance a player’s long term needs against their short term needs.
“[You have to know] when to take a loss for the greater good. Sometimes you have to concede things for the players and you have to balance a player’s emotional state in that moment vs. maybe a long term goal you have for them vs. a long term emotional state vs. what’s happening currently with their performance.”
“There’s a lot of variables that can’t be codified. There’s no handbook for it, because each player is a singular N=1 case study. So the art is navigating each player as a true individual in the moment.”
Finally, for those of you who want to know what Kanzler looks like as a manager in a more granular sense, he walks Gelnar through an entire series at around the 45 minute mark of the podcast – starting with the advance scouting and how he distributes data, to pre-game routines, to his presence in the dugout during games and how he interacts with players. He also walks through, step-by-step, how he goes about helping struggling players (step one: be sure they want help). If you’re short on time I might suggest skipping to that part of the podcast and just listening to the last 20 minutes or so, as it really helps to envision what Kanzler might look like running this team from the top step of the dugout with more specificity than some of the quotes I’ve pulled here. But if you can, do give the whole thing a listen; I came away with a much deepened sense of who Kanzler is as a coach and a person (even if it’s six years out of date) and also a fun new vocabulary word (saccadic!).
Source: www.lookoutlanding.com
