When Justin Stone got home after his first day in the office as a full-time employee of the Cubs, his wife asked how his day went.

“I put in for a million dollars in tech,” Stone told his wife, suddenly realizing how big of an ask he’d made.

Earlier in the day he had been asked what the organization needed to get his operation up and running to its fullest potential. Stone and assistant director of player development Bobby Basham put together a list. He knew they weren’t going to get every request, but in his mind he was thinking, “Let’s shoot high, right?”

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A month later, a Cubs research and development analyst came to Stone’s Elite Baseball Training facility about a mile west of Wrigley Field to let him know that they’d acquired one of the expensive pieces of technology Stone had been pushing for.

“That’s it motherfucker, that’s what I’m talking about!” Stone said as he gave an emphatic high five to the stunned analyst.

It’s clear that baseball is Stone’s passion, and he wears his emotions on his sleeve.

As part of a complete restructuring of the player development department spearheaded by team president Theo Epstein, Stone was named the Cubs director of hitting in mid-October. Stone isn’t just part of a reshaping of the Cubs front office. In truth, he’s at the center of a revolution that’s occurred over the past five years in baseball.

While teams like the Houston Astros, New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers lead the way in utilizing cutting-edge technology and employing people who truly understood how to use it, other organizations are now following suit. This fall, the Cincinnati Reds added Driveline founder Kyle Boddy as their pitching coordinator/minor-league director of pitching initiatives.

While Boddy has become renowned for his disruptive approach to changing the landscape of pitching development, Stone is viewed similarly in the hitting world.

Stone was a two-sport athlete at Eastern Illinois in the late ’90s, playing both football and baseball. After his graduation in 1998, he coached infield and hitting at Indiana State University while working on his master’s in kinesiology. At first, he was just like any other coach of his time.

“Coming out of college as a 22-year-old full-time coach, you think you know something about everything,” he said. “Looking back, you know next to nothing. So I taught the way I was taught. And it was largely in error.”

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As Stone’s career progressed, he tried to keep pace with new technology, adjusting his methods as he went. While working on his master’s, Stone delved into 3D motion capture imaging. At the time, it was done on a two-dimensional platform and he had to digitize every frame from a 60-frame-per-second video on VHS. One swing would take about an hour to work though, a process that now takes around five seconds.

As digital photography took off in the late ’90s, Stone’s process adapted. Instead of using VHS tapes, all the data was stored on a camera. It wasn’t as easy as using today’s high-speed cameras, but he could analyze video much quicker and easier.

The early 2000s brought the ability to do side-by-side analysis with software. He could look at some of the players he was working with and easily compare them to the best of the best.

“It was a game-changer for me,” Stone said. “It was like, ‘Oh shit, the best people in the game aren’t doing what I’m picturing.’ I think it was an obsession with me maybe more than a passion. I didn’t have kids at the time, my wife was at a big firm as an attorney, so I just wanted to work. So I worked my ass off, 14 to 16 hour days, no problem.”

Stone’s brain rarely shuts off when it comes to baseball. While in Los Angeles with his family recently, he watched as his daughter got on a merry-go-round with some friends at a local park. Stone handed his phone to his wife and told her to record him spinning them around on the playground equipment. He wanted to tweet out a video example of linear velocity versus angular velocity.

Angular velocity vs linear velocity:

I find myself explaining this a lot for coaches when comparing K-Vest data (which measures in angular velocity) to bat sensor data (which measures in linear velocity)…
CONT

— Justin Stone (@elite_baseball) November 17, 2019

For most of his post-college career, Stone remained on the periphery of professional baseball. After finishing at Indiana State, he spent a few years as a high school football and baseball coach in St. Louis, then some time as the head instructor at a baseball school. From 2004-11, he worked at the White Sox Training Academy as the general manager. In January 2012, he started Elite Baseball Training.

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Throughout, he remained in contact with friend and former EIU teammate Andy Haines. Having started his career in the Marlins organization, Haines was named the Cubs minor-league hitting coordinator in 2016. He became the big-league club’s assistant hitting coach in 2017 and has been the hitting coach in Milwaukee for the past two seasons.

When he first joined the Cubs organization, Haines knew Stone could help and pushed to bring him in as a consultant.

“My mind kept going to, ‘What is in front of me in this industry and what do I need help with?’” Haines said. “These tools kept becoming available and I knew the next five years would look very different than the previous five. You could just see it coming. And I couldn’t stop thinking about Justin.”

In his office in Mesa during his first spring with the team, Haines invited Stone and the two scribbled ideas on napkins. Stone took the plans they came up with and sought out people who could actually put them in place with real technology. By the fall instructional league, Stone had purchased a $50,000 force plate and the two spent time figuring out the best way to use it.

“That just shows you who Justin is, he’s going to find a way,” Haines said. “I could totally rely on him. At that time, we got him in the door as a consultant. We kind of did it where he was behind the scenes. We were a little incognito with it. We didn’t want to spook the staff because it was also my first year. So it was a little tricky.”

Haines said that during his time with the Cubs, Stone did a lot of work that was rarely, if ever, publicized. The divide between old-school and new-school remains to this day, so Haines knew he had to ease Stone in. He went out of his way to let other coaches and coordinators know Stone wasn’t a threat to their jobs.

“When Justin first came aboard as a consultant, I had a talk with him,” Haines said. “I said, ‘Hey, you’re the smartest dude in this room. But you can’t act like you’re the smartest dude in this room.’ I needed him to tread lightly. I needed him to educate these guys, but he was the man behind the curtain. Behind the scenes, let’s go all out, but in front of the group, it’ll take a little time. That he’s emerged from behind that curtain and is getting the recognition he deserves, it’s a credit to him and to their front office for recognizing what he’s capable of.”

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It’s early, but Stone hasn’t felt any pushback since starting as a full-time Cubs employee. A new director of hitting could be seen as a threat to minor-league hitting coordinator Chris Valaika or any of the other hitting coaches throughout the minors. But Stone has no interest in taking their jobs. He’s hired people to supplement the Cubs’ traditional coaching infrastructure, not replace it.

“When I had these calls with coaches, I made it clear right away that I have no interest in coaching,” Stone said. “I’m in the job that is suited for me. I want to know what their coaching goals are and I want to help them check off some of the boxes that maybe they don’t right now and help them advance their career. Whether that’s with us or another team, they’re going to need to have certain areas in their skillset that they may or may not have right now that they’ll have to be proficient in.”

The week after Thanksgiving, several members of the organization will visit Stone’s North Side facility. The group will include new manager David Ross and hitting coach Anthony Iapoce, along with all the current coaches and instructors throughout the organization and new head of player development Matt Dorey. This meetup will help reinforce that this is the direction of not only the organization, but the entire industry.

Last Friday, the Cubs announced several new coaching hires, from the Dominican League up to Double-A Tennessee. The new hires all have a strong technology background and each was named as either a fourth coach with a focus on hitting and development or the actual hitting coach. Chase Spivey, formerly the hitting coach for the Cubs at the Arizona League, will now fill the data-centric role at Triple-A Iowa.

There will also be a coach with a research and development background at each affiliate. Their role will be to collate data and help with player reports.

“Oftentimes, the way I’m pairing these people is that one person on the staff is going to have a strong technology background and one person on the staff is going to have a strong, traditional playing and coaching background,” Stone said. “And I want them to feed off each other. It’s not about, ‘This is just your job and this is just yours.’ No, we’re working hand in hand.”

It may sound a little overwhelming — what’s happening with the Cubs is no small undertaking. Stone never planned on being here.

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When he started Elite Baseball Training in 2012, that was his dream realized. He loves what he does at the facility and is passionate about teaching. He was able to do it while remaining an engaged dad, working just down the street from his home. A director of hitting role didn’t exist until recently and other jobs in the industry just didn’t fit his lifestyle or match his goals.

But when different opportunities around baseball presented themselves this past July, he realized the possibilities. The responsibilities of a director of hitting aligned nicely with what Stone had already been doing for years at his facility with all the instructors who were working under him — three of whom he hired as coaches with the Cubs.

There are still doubters, of course. But Stone has always been good at drowning out any noise.

“It could be a personality flaw, it could be a good thing, I don’t know,” Stone said. “But I never had sleepless nights caring about what other people thought about what I was doing. And social media can be that way, people taking digs and trolling you. My thought process was always, ‘I’m working my ass off and they’re spending their time worrying about what I’m doing or looking over their shoulder at what I’m doing.’ That tells me I’m way ahead of them. That’s the way I look at it. I’ll keep my head down, I’ll keep moving forward. Something I said in the interview process was that I want to put my foot on the gas and go.”

The Cubs are doing that now. But that doesn’t mean results will come immediately. Stone admits that things have gone quicker than he expected, as regularly working in person directly with others in the front office has allowed them to brainstorm. They’re further along at this point than hoped. But these changes aren’t a quick fix. They’re a part of a long-term project that Epstein hopes builds a healthier organization that consistently produces quality major-league talent from their minor-league system.

“We’re making necessary moves that are advancing the organization,” Stone said. “It’s going to be a process. It’s going to be a two- or three-year rollout for everything we want to do. The first year, we’ll make individual strides with players because we’ll be a little better at getting to the individual needs of every player in a more streamlined way. That was the idea and direction, more streamlined systems. But this is a macro level change that we’re making. It’s going to take some time.”

(Top photo courtesy Justin Stone)