While there was no Ke’Bryan Hayes update to come out of Ben Cherington’s Sunday radio show, the Pirates’ general manager provided an interesting look into the new processes for player development.
Cherington described a new “pitcher’s playground” at Pirate City in Bradenton, and an effort to better simulate game-like situations for hitters. But on top of any positional focuses, the organization wants to drill the fundamentals into prospects at an early age.
“Maybe some of the nuances inside of the game, they're just not getting quite as many reps with,” Cherington told 93.7 FM. “We also want to be developing just a feel for the game.”
The minor league season is set to begin in 10 days, and Cherington said that they’ve nearly completed the roster construction for their affiliates. But before that season starts, minor league spring training looked at things a little differently than in years past.
On the pitching side, while there will always be work put toward refining and improving specific pitches and planning an attack against a specific lineup, Cherington and the Pirates’ player development staff wanted to reverse engineer their development.
“How are they developing as athletes? How are they moving? I don't even mean off the mound, necessarily,” Cherington said. “How are they learning to throw? What does the arm pattern look like?”
The folks in Bradenton actually rearranged the pitcher’s facilities to better work on building these foundational skills. The look and feel of the practices changed under minor-league pitching coordinator Josh Hopper as prospects are putting an extra focus on simply helping their bodies move in a more athletic way.
“We're really trying to think about pitching development holistically in that way. Kind of every piece,” Cherington said. “To some extent you can work on all of that together, but there is a bit of a continuum. So, I think what we're seeing is certainly a lot of pitch design related work. But there's just as much, if not more work around really helping our minor league pitchers move well.”
For the hitters, Cherington thought it was interesting that the entire industry faces the same problem, but there hasn’t been much done to specifically nail down a solution.
“We're trying to create hitting practice that equates to the challenge of hitting in a major league baseball game or hitting against professional pitching,” Cherington said.
There will still be tee, soft toss or slower-speed batting practice in place at the Pirates’ minor league facilities. But before they even get into situational hitting and preparing for actual games, the Pirates’ hitter prospects have hit full speed against machines, or against coaches throwing full speed and breaking pitches from short range.
Much like the plan with the pitchers, the Pirates are also challenging the hitters’ physicality, playing them at other positions, among other things. The implementation of these efforts requires a collaborative effort from strength and positional coaches.
“So much of that stuff that I talked about really involves expertise from all of those areas,” Cherington said.
MORE FROM CHERINGTON
• In terms of their rebuild, Cherington has long maintained that developing players already in the system is the best way to improve in both the short and long term. JT Brubaker has been a success story for players like that.
Cherington made note of Brubaker’s ability to know himself better, figuring out a routine between starts, doing what’s necessary to take care of his arm and body and studying what did and did not work after an outing.
“He's always had really good stuff, and really good command and feel for what he's doing with it,” Cherington said. “I think what he's been able to improve on really in the last two years, he had a really good idea of how to use that stuff. Where he can go in different counts. He has the ability to use all of his pitches to both sides of the plate. Work up and down.”
• Don’t expect Cherington, or any GM really, to talk about specific players before a draft. But Cherington mentioned that there are several players the Pirates are considering with the No. 1 overall pick in July’s draft. The club had a midpoint meeting a couple weeks ago to reassess a list of 60-80 players with which there will be a specific focus headed into July. After losing almost all of their scouting opportunities to the pandemic ahead of last year’s draft, Cherington was excited that that process has mostly returned to normal.
“We've got a group of players that we think will be at sort of the top of the draft board that we think are really talented and exciting, and you can envision them making an impact on the Pirates,” Cherington said. And it'll be up to us to make the right choice.
• Ka’ai Tom should join the Pirates for the start of their two-game set against the Royals on Tuesday at PNC Park. He would be just the third natural outfielder on the roster after the club designated both Anthony Alford and Dustin Fowler during the road trip.
“We're looking forward to seeing him, and giving him the chance to play,” Cherington said. “[Tom] hasn't really gotten any opportunity yet at the major league level, so he's going to get a little bit of one, and we're looking forward to seeing that.”