BRADENTON, Fla. -- For years, the Pirates’ minor-league pitching development was defined more by who got away rather than the successes. And for a team that is waist-deep into a rebuild and banking entirely on the fact that they will grow quality major league pitchers from its farm system, the stink of letting players like Tyler Glasnow and Gerrit Cole go and find another level elsewhere will linger until there are some success stories.
It’s a challenge for the organization’s new player development leaders, including pitching coordinator Josh Hopper, who wasn’t told the stories before he took the job one year ago.
“I wouldn’t say I was that aware of it, but you guys have made me a little more aware of it in the last year,” Hopper joked when posed with the question at Pirate City on Friday, the one-year anniversary of the team announcing his hiring.
“For me, I like to see people at face value,” he continued. “I came in with, ‘Where are we? What’s been laid?’ When you looked around, there was a really good foundation as far as building men, building baseball players and building trust that was neat. With the players, there was a trust there that was good. Now, what do you do to build on top of that?”
For that new leadership, the focus has been making it a more collaborative process where player input is encouraged rather than having pitchers try to fit a certain mold that may work for some, but not for all.
“It’s player-first,” Jared Jones, a 2020 second-round pick, said. “If you want to work on something, you go to a coach, make a plan and attack it from there.”
“They're taking an individual approach with it,” Logan Hofmann, a fifth-rounder in that same draft class, said. “Which is great because they tailor your exercises to what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, what you can work on and that kind of thing.”
That can be seen at the pitcher development camp the organization held at Pirate City this month. The Pirates took several dozen of their top pitching prospects and divided them into one of five bucks to primarily focus on. One was a general group for recent draft picks and rehabbing players. The others focused on adding velocity, improving body movement, working on pitch design or improving command.
There is some overlap in what those individual groups do, and if players in the command group want to focus on just fastball command, for example, for a couple days, they can.
“You have to meet guys where they’re at,” Hopper said. “You have to find what matches for them. If a man needs to do a job [and] he needs a hammer, and you hand him a screwdriver, we’re probably in trouble. We’re trying to match the tool for the actual athlete and what ticks with him or what resonates with him.”
VELOCITY
The appeal of adding a few couple ticks on your fastball goes without saying.
“It’s funny. Our whole velo group that’s in camp right now can really pitch,” Hopper said. “If you see the names and you match their stat lines, you realize it’s kind of like, ‘What are you doing with them? Don’t mess with them because they’re kind of doing a good thing.’ We’re trying to give them a little bit more room for error by cutting down on the reaction time of the hitter. Because all of those guys are either average or slightly below average for major league velocity … but can really pitch. If we can add that element on top of being able to pitch, I think you have an animal.”
Getting some extra velocity may make or break a prospect like Cam Alldred. The lefty recorded a 2.18 ERA over 66 innings across Class AA Altoona and AAA Indianapolis last season, and while he improved his mechanics during the COVID-19 shutdown last year, it came at the cost of some velocity, usually sitting in the 87-90 mph range.
Hofmann is in a similar boat. Listed at 5’10” 190 lbs., he doesn’t have the frame of some other pitchers, but got on the draft board because of his offspeed and breaking stuff. In spring training this year, though, he was consistently in the mid-90s, but that gradually declined back down to 88-92 mph at the end of his season with Class Low-A Bradenton.
“I’ve just got to learn how to maintain my body better, my arm better,” Hofmann said. “Those are things you learn in your first season in pro ball.”
In the pitching camp, there were several drills focused on adding some velocity, including what Hofmann referred to as “skater jumps.” It’s a jump to the side where the player tries to stick the landing on the leg they push off of the rubber with, creating a more explosive push off when they get back on the mound.
They also work with aqua bags and reps with medicine balls to focus on core strength. While they didn’t radar throws with a baseball this week, they have monitored the throws with the medicine ball.
According to Alldred, everyone has seen a week-to-week jump.
BODY MOVEMENT
There has been plenty of talk about competition surrounding the Pirates the past two years, it only makes sense that there were some friendly competitions going on when you get a bunch of young pitchers together.
But a competition doing body movement drills? How do you do that?
“Let’s say we’re on the mound and we’re doing a step-up drill,” Greensboro pitcher Tahnaj Thomas explained. “We’re stepping up and we have a target, and we’re setting a target and we’re doing it as a count with the hitter. So we’re trying to strike that hitter out, with implementing that drill at the same time. So it’s still a competition and you’re still getting the work in.”
It’s a fun way to break up any potential monotony while still getting the work in. During that, edgertronic cameras capture frame-by-frame looks of each step of someone’s throwing motion, allowing coaches and the movement team break down each part of a delivery.
“We’re not trying to cookie-cutter them,” Hopper said. “We want to see what makes them tick, who are they – because if you go watch [Anthony] Solometo throw, you immediately know that, ‘OK, that’s different.’ We need to take time to learn him so that we can do the best job of making decisions that are not going to hinder or paralyze him but actually hopefully make him flourish.”
PITCH DESIGN
Those same tools can be used when shaping pitches.
Hartman may have been in the rehab team while poking his head into the command group, but he owes a lot to pitch design and shaping, which is more analytically driven. He threw himself into those metrics when converting from being an infielder to a pitcher in college and found some high spin pitches as a result.
"Just being a new pitcher, I was open to anything,” Hartman said. “…I was just an open project, and it worked out pretty well I think."
Shaping pitches can come from reading Rapsodo data reports on pitches, monitoring spin, efficiencies, movement and tilt angles. To apply it in practice, it can be as simple as two people playing catch with a pole right down the middle. Shape a slider that will wrap around it and get to your throwing partner.
Hartman was an extreme example, someone who didn’t pitch who went down the analytical rabbithole. More times than not, it’s a way to build off strengths.
“We try to identify their unicorn, the thing that makes them stand out,” Hopper said. “A lot of these guys will have a fastball that really plays or [Bradenton right-hander] Luis Ortiz has a wipeout slider, and the fastball is not bad either. Luis, we noticed, the slider really plays. He creates tremendous spin on the fastball. But with the spin that he creates, the spin he was creating on the tilt he’s creating it, the movement he’s getting is not matching up. So the efficiency of the spin is not good enough. We set out to clean up the efficiency of the spin to complement the piece he already had, so the slider we know is really good.
“We start with his movement. Is there anything we can do to put him in a better spot at release? Now, let’s actually get Edgertronic footage of [his] release. How’s the ball leaving our hand? How’s the seam orientation? Is the seam orientation giving the ball a chance to carry out the flight that we want and get the movement we want?”
PITTSBURGH PIRATES
Jared Jones.
COMMAND
Jones is a member of the command group, and he described a drill in which he picked up a ball at random, ranging from a baseball, to a weighted ball, to a softball or lacrosse ball to a CleanFuego ball, and threw it at a target. Sometimes the coach would call out the target, sometimes the player would pick one before the motion.
"The philosophy behind that is if you can throw any four of these different things where you want to throw it, it should be no problem with a baseball, which makes a lot of sense," Jones said.
Hartman described a series of rapid-fire drills where they will throw different weighted and sized balls at targets while running down a slope.
“It’s pretty crazy,” Hartman said. “But there’s a method to the madness.”
“Doing simple better is a big deal to us,” Hopper said. “How can we take and simplify it in as few words as possible or simplify it where we go, ‘Hey, throw this softball.’ We let the softball do the work versus us verbally saying, ‘Hey, you need to fix this or you need to fix that.’ We’re trying to find ways to simplify the process through intrinsic learning and also through the simplicity of how we describe it.”
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Hopper wanted to make something clear: He wasn’t running this camp. The organization’s pitching coaches, strength staff, analytics people and performance staff were.
“We talked and we planned and we made sure everybody was on the same page, and then now they’re just getting to show off their talents,” Hopper said. “Probably the biggest thing that has helped me is having good people. I know that sounds like a very cliché-ish answer, but it’s actually the truth. It’s awesome. It’s really awesome to stand back and watch them work and watch our guys take to them.”
It’s more collaborative and individualized, something that previous regimes had failed to do. Take it from a farmhand who has seen how things have been run under two leadership groups.
“It wasn’t [like this]. I’ll leave it at that,” Quinn Priester said. “I feel like we’re definitely going in a really good direction from a goal-setting standpoint and actually talking and sitting down with the players and seeing what works for them, what doesn’t and taking that feedback and adjusting the plan to achieve the goals based off of what each player needs. It’s definitely very progressive."
Therein lies the biggest change with player development, one that has come up many times when talking to players and coaches in the organization. It’s based on communication and building ideas together. One impact of the COVID-19 shutdown on minor-league players last year was just about all of them found a facility to train at. Players came into this year with new ideas.
Now with a chance to experiment and build, it’s about taking what they’ve learned and applying it and unlocking, as Hopper said, that “unicorn.”
“There’s a lot of different training facilities and plans out there that are like, ‘Our way is the best,’ ” Hopper said. “The fact is, if their way was the only way, then only their school of thought would be having success.
“When you see that’s not the case, then hey, we need to be flexible and meet them where they’re at and have them take ownership over their own career -- because it is their career. But let’s be the guard rails to make sure they’re going in the right direction.”
