Communication key for motivating baseball’s millennials
Ron Washington signed his first baseball contract in 1970. He played his final major league game in 1989. He became a coach in the 1990s. The Texas Rangers hired him to manage their team in 2006.
He persists in this, his fifth decade in the sport, as a coach for the Atlanta Braves and a sage noted for connecting with players.
Earlier this year, Washington turned 67. He is a baby boomer surrounded at the ballpark each day by millennials. He traverses the generational gap by seeking to impart wisdom and unlock the potential of his pupils.
“Today, they don’t know what work ethic is,” Washington said. “They don’t know what consistency means. And consistency means you’ve got to go on the field and work at your craft. We worked at our craft consistently back in those days.”
The rhetoric espoused by Washington has been echoed throughout the industry.
During this decade, the landscape of advanced metrics has flattened; all 30 teams employ analytics departments. The latest advancements focus on player development rather than talent procurement. The best organizations strive to optimize their players. To do so requires communication above all.
So as baseball wades deeper into its information age — a time of Rapsodo and Trackman, launch angles and spin rates, pitch tunneling and catch probability — managers, coaches and executives are confronting a comprehensive challenge: how to talk to these dang millennials.
“You really can’t make a lot of these guys do anything,” said Dave Mckay, the 69-year-old first-base coach for the Arizona
Diamondbacks. “You have to find a way to convince them to play hard for you.”
Washington and Mckay may sound anachronistic, but they remain employed because of their affability and open-mindedness. They present themselves as allies to the players rather than pedagogues. Washington spoke without rancor or bitterness. He did not rage about sabermetrics or iphones. He insisted he does not blame younger players for their attitudes. They just don't know any better.
“That’s just the generation they’ve come up in,” Washington said. “They’ve been coddled. They’ve been always directed. They’ve always been told to go over here to the right … and then take two steps to the left. They don’t get a chance to figure that out for themselves.”
The average age of a major leaguer in 1999 was 28, according to Baseball Reference. In 2009, it was 28. The number remains 28 in 2019. But this crop of 28-year-olds came of age during an era of text messages, Youtube and an education system built around standardized testing — a millennial generation defined by the Pew Research Center as those born between 1981 and 2000.
The difference between the generations can be stark, said Ned Yost, the 64-yearold manager of the Kansas City Royals. Take the cinematic cliche of a skipper berating his team.
“The manager would come in, scream at you, and it was like water off a duck’s back: Who cares?” Yost said. “Now, you scream at them, they’re butthurt for two weeks.”
Gabrielle Bosche runs a consulting company called the Millennial Solution, which demystifies their behavior in professional settings. She outlined “the three core tenets of millennial motivation”: setting expectations, providing explanations during instruction, and connecting tasks to a larger goal.
Those tenets are now part of baseball’s business model. Teams text players the next day’s lineup the night before a game. This season, the Chicago Cubs have issued the lineups before every series so the players can plan their week.
Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts canvasses his clubhouse on a daily basis hoping to speak with each player. This task arises in part from his upbeat disposition. But he also considers the consistency vital.
“If there’s not constant communication, then there’s a lot of ‘I was told this,’” Roberts said. “For me, millennials, being flexible, it seems harder.”
Roberts was born in 1972, a member of Generation X. His father was a Marine. Roberts considered instruction from superiors to be sacrosanct. When a coach directed him to perform a task, Roberts said, he rarely asked questions.
The current crop of players reacts more casually to authority, Bosche said.
“Keep in mind: Millennials were parented in a very democratic way,” she said. “Parents were like, ‘Where do you want to go on vacation?’ My parents’ generation got in the back of a station wagon and went where dad wanted, and watched whatever dad watched. So our relationship to superiors is much more relaxed than past generations.”
Earlier this decade, coaches absorbed information from the front office and distilled it to the players. As the numbers became publicly available, players began to concoct ideas of their own. Some grew up taking batting practice with swing sensors and studying data about their release point after bullpen sessions.
The two-way flow rewards coaches who engage in dialogue. That skill is what appealed to the Dodgers about Dino Ebel, 53, who was hired to coach third base this offseason after more than a decade coaching with the Los Angeles Angels.
“I have the information, and while you’re talking to them, in the conversation, you include the data,” Ebel said. “You make it into a conversation. You hear what he has to say. What I found out is if you let them talk, it works.”
The Dodgers added a millennial to their staff this winter when they brought on 36-yearold former catcher Chris Gimenez as a game-planning coach. Throughout the industry, teams have begun to surround youth with relative youth.
After a losing campaign in 2018, the Minnesota Twins deposed manager Paul Molitor, a 62-year-old Hall of Famer. In his place, chief executive Derek Falvey (36) hired Rocco Baldelli (37), whose coaching staff also reflected the shift.
When searching for a pitching coach, Falvey opted for Wes Johnson, who had been at the University of Arkansas.
Johnson had never played professional baseball or coached at the pro level. But he had studied biomechanics while coaching at Central Arkansas and learned how to use the pitch-tracking device Trackman with Dallas Baptist University. He could speak the language of younger pitchers.
“These guys are used to using that stuff before they even get into pro ball,” Falvey said. “So now a coach is required to know a little about that to help the player. Because he is going to use it.”
Baseball used to be more rigid. Dodgers veteran Rich Hill, born in the spring of 1980, is one of only five current major leaguers who is also a member of Gen X. He debuted with the Cubs in 2005 — an era that already feels distant, he said.
“Coming up, it used to be like ‘Why the hell can’t you throw strikes?’” Hill said. “Not with everybody, I’m not going to blanket-statement all coaches. But now, the environment of major league clubhouses, when a guy gets called up, is much more conducive toward productivity out on the field than it used to be.”
The change has been subtle and incremental. The culture did not shift from cruelty to kindness overnight. But as teams seek to gain the advantages at their disposal, they learned to divest themselves of dogma and unproductive tradition.
“All I’m doing is trying to pass on what I know to be a fact to these young kids,” Washington said. “They need people like me. They need people like other coaches who have been through it, and can understand how to arrive at what they want to do in life — and that’s be a tremendous baseball player.”