Giants Feel Whole Lotte Love for Josh Herzenberg
We interrupt the There R Giants Top 50 for some breaking news! Oh, no, not breaking news from Florida, where the MLB owners seem to be gleefully watching their own personal Doomsday Clock count down to zero. Other voices have you well covered on that sad topic.
Still, in our little corner of the world, there is some news to dig into — and happier news, as it happens. As February has begun to slip away, it’s been increasingly noticeable that the Giants have yet to name their 2022 Development Staff (last year’s announcement, by comparison, came in the first week of February and three years ago, the staff was publicly announced in late January). With minor league spring training set to officially open this weekend, one would imagine having the full development staff in place ready to work with the full contingent of minor league players is high on the organizational To Do list.
One possible reason for the delay is that the club was still working to fill a role or two and, if so, the news that came over the Twitter machine on Saturday night suggested a big one has been filled:
Josh Herzenberg, who has spent the last two years with the Lotte Giants in the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO), is joining the organization as Assistant Director of Player Development, working under Farm Director Kyle Haines. Under David Bell’s short-lived tenure, the Giants Farm structure had four different Assistant Directors, including Haines himself, who held the role of “Assistant Director of Player Development, Instruction.” However, over the last few years, the organization’s inventory of Player Development ADs has dropped down to just one — Eric Fleming, who handles Administration. With the PD staff also losing Hitting Coordinators Dave Hansen (after the 2020 pandemic) and Michael Brdar (who is joining Bob Melvin’s major league staff in San Diego), it does seem the like a fresh influx of minds, hands, and talents is appropriate.
In Herzenberg, the Giants are definitely getting a fresh mind with a lot of talent. In his two years with Lotte, Herzenberg filled several roles, originally working as the team’s pitching coordinator and quality control coach before taken over as the Director of the team’s R&D Department — a move that he has compared to “joining a startup" and building an analytics department from from the ground floor, up.
Though barely past his 30th birthday, Herzenberg comes to the Giants with an extremely well-rounded set of baseball experiences. As a left-handed pitcher for a small college in Oneonta, NY, he underwent the ubiquitous Tommy John surgery and went through the struggles of injury, pain, and long rehab. As he recounted in an interview in Korea, it was during that long rehab — with its forced inactivity — when he began to satisfy his baseball jones by reading Fangraphs, Baseball Prospectus, and other analytically-inclined websites. His dive into advanced statistics opened up the game to him like never before, and opened up his mind to a whole new way of seeing the action on the field. After getting a Master’s Degree in Sports Management at Georgetown University (following an undergrad degree in Economics), he was able to secure an internship with the Washington Nationals.
From there, Herzenberg bounced to the Arizona Diamondbacks and finally to the Los Angeles Dodgers, where he spent several years as both a minor league coach and area scout (Herzenberg was the scout who officially signed Dustin May). He’s also written scouting articles for Fangraphs.
Through it all, what he’s done mostly is learn. Herzenberg’s career in MLB began in 2015 — a propitious time to start a career in baseball, as that was the first year of what we now think of as the Trackman or Statcast era. New information began pouring in in astounding quantity and baseball teams needed to be able to manage all of that data and plum its insights. Herzenberg’s career in baseball has run parallel to the incredible run of technological, analytical, and biomechanical advances taking place in the game. He’s been a scout and on-field staff, he’s sat in dugouts and overseen a biomechanics lab. He knows how to code and he knows how to communicate.
While with Lotte, Herzenberg helped a team that was last in pitching, last in offense, and last in the standings in 2019 take strides towards respectability. Following a dismal 48-93 record in 2019, they came as close to a non-losing record as possible the next year, going 71-72. Their offense, which had scored a league worst 4.01 runs per game in 2019, moved to a middle-of-the-pack 5.21 in 2020 and was third in the KBO in runs in 2021. The pitching had a KBO-worst 4.89 ERA in 2019, but improved to 6th in a 10 team league the following year (uh…don’t ask about 2021). Much of that improvement came with the help of former A’s and Marlins pitcher Dan Straily — who in 2020 with the Lotte Giants was the only professional pitcher in the world to record 200 strikeouts. Straily and Herzenberg developed a close relationship, showing how fulfilling and effective a true collaborative process with a player could be.
“We talk every day,” Herzenberg told Yonhap News Agency, “a little less about pitch design but more about pitch execution in terms of sequencing and location, and when and where to get more aggressive in certain counts against certain hitters.”
Thanks to that relationship, and others, Herzenberg knows that good ideas don’t have to come Top Down from R&D → Staff → Players. They can come from players, they can go to players, they can come from staff, and often they come from that fruitful mixture of water cooler conversations between all parties. As Herzenberg says during the course of this wonderful hour long Q&A with Alex Fast of PitcherList.com, “I’m not a stay in your lane, guy,” — good ideas can come from anywhere. He also was exposed to a very different playing style in Korea, so he understands that “good ideas” are defined by their context — data doesn’t lead to one-size-fits-all solutions, it reflects its given environment.
If you have an hour to spend, this entire conversation is incredibly insightful. But my favorite part of it came when Herzenberg was asked a question about how to communicate complex data in a way that is helpful to players — how to be a conduit of the information in a way that facilitates real knowledge transfer and implementation. His answer cut to the heart of the modern game — the real power of big data comes in person to person communication:
Athletes have a lot on their mind and the game moves at an incredibly fast pace, so you’re trying to be efficient because you’re not trying to cloud the mind and not trying to make them think about things that aren’t relevant on the field…. We’re at the point now in the industry that that’s the market inefficiency, that’s the competitive advantage. We all have the information. The advanced concepts and the data and the raw information is …. everybody has it. It’s a matter of who can best implement it and who can communicate it.
Does this all sound like a perfect fit for the kind of player-oriented model of development that the Giants are espousing at both the major and minor league levels — because if it doesn’t, I’m not describing him correctly.
You could argue, perhaps, that there’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary about Herzenberg’s hiring — he worked as a scout and coach with the Dodgers under and with Giants President of Baseball Operations Farhan Zaidi and Manager Gabe Kapler. He had useful connections and an understanding of the types of processes and systems the Giants are working to erect.
But that view is too limited, too pat. To my view, bringing in the Director of R&D of a KBO team is yet another example of the Giants ability to find talent and creativity in out of the way locales. Herzenberg fits in with a pattern of hires the Giants are making in their Player Development area this winter.
Though the entire picture hasn’t yet been made perfectly clear, other apparent hires include:
Robert Riggins, Co-Founder of a Baseball/Softball Hitting Development facility in Amarillo, TX, called Heavy Mettle Player Development. Riggins is taking the knowledge he’s built working with young amateurs at Heavy Mettle and applying it to the Giants’ young DSL Hitters, where he’ll be the new Hitting Coach.
Jacob Cruz, the Giants 1st round pick from 1994 is reported to have joined the Giants as Assistant Hitting Coordinator (though he himself hasn’t added this to his twitter bio yet). In addition to work in the Pirates and Brewers organizations, Cruz is the inventor of the LineDrivePro Swing Trainer, which provides visual feedback data to help players develop proper swing mechanics.
Greg Tagert, longtime manager of the Indy League Gary SouthShore RailCats. A native of Vacaville and alumnus of San Francisco State, Tagert has been a scout for the Detroit Tigers and a coach at the University of New Mexico, but most of his baseball teaching has come at the bottom rung of the professional ladder, in Indy Ball. Tagert spent nine years managing five different clubs in the Frontier League (where 2021 Eugene Emeralds Manager Dennis Pelfrey also cut his teeth) before moving to the American Association to helm the RailCats. Among the many who played under his tutelage there is Giants Farm Director Kyle Haines.
We can begin to see the types of talent the Giants admire. They look for well rounded baseball minds with a wealth of different experiences at all levels of the baseball world. They like people who use data to help inform their player development techniques and theories in iterative processes that change and evolve as the feedback directs. They look for people who take different paths and are, perhaps, less beholden to conventional thinking or stultified management systems.
And they like people who can connect with other people, who can communicate effectively and efficiently — people who know how to teach and support.
Which gets me to one last point I’d like to make about Josh Herzenberg’s time in Korea. For two years, he went through the dislocations of navigating an unfamiliar culture. He had to learn new cultural norms, habits, foods, and forms of communication — all without being able to speak the language of his new home. He lived, in other words, an experience that is very familiar to a significant percentage of the players who he will now be tasked with supporting and developing.
It’s one thing to know, intellectually, that the players coming to the U.S. from various Spanish-speaking countries have greater transition challenges than the U.S.-born players do — but it’s an entirely different thing to have lived those challenges oneself. Herzenberg’s lived experience should give him a heightened sense of empathy and emotional intelligence for what kids like Marco Luciano or Adrian Sugastey, or perhaps in the coming months, Yeison Lemos and Mauricio Pierre are going through.
In a role that is all about supporting other human beings, empathy might well be the most cutting edge competitive advantage of all.
And, hey, the Korean scouting tips he might bring with him can’t hurt either!
I’d guess the full staff announcement should come in the next day or two as the Giants prepare to open their full minor league spring camp to some 180 players. I’ll get us all up to date when it comes out.
In the meantime, we’ll get back to the final 11 players on the There R Giants Top 50 — starting with a player whose stunning conclusion to 2021 left fans excited to see what comes next.
This was a Free For All There R Giants post. There aren’t too many of these in the winter, so if you liked what you saw, you might want to subscribe to get all of my Giants prospect-related posts delivered advertisement-free, right to your Inbox.
Herzenberg seems like a great addition … was hoping the Giants would sign Strailey.
Good report - thanks, Roger.