More player buy-in? More change? How development keeps morphing

BRADENTON, Fla. -- It was arguably the best trio of players that could have participated in a live batting practice.

Quinn Priester was pitching. Henry Davis was behind the plate. Matt Fraizer was at the bat. Three of the organization’s top prospects, and arguably the top at each of their respective positions.

Priester would end up winning round one in four pitches by getting him to chase breaking stuff in the dirt. In round two, Fraizer would draw a simulated walk after battling. They were a pair of quality battles, and unless they were in another field or bullpen doing your own live BP, just about everyone outside at Pirate City was watching that matchup.

That included John Baker, the Pirates' director of coaching and player development. Now entering his second minor-league season in that role, that trio of players is emblematic of what the organization is trying to do in player development. Priester and Davis are always looking for ways to get better, and Fraizer is the organization's reigning minor-league player of the year after he broke out under the tutelage of their more player-driven, individualized development plan.

On Tuesday, Baker met with traveling media in Pirate City to talk about the direction of the team’s farm system and how they will try to continue to evolve. Below are the transcripts (with some light editing in answers and questions for clarity in some cases) of seven ways player development will be defined in 2022.

This is now year two of the new player development. How do you think it has gotten better? Is there more player buy in?

I think that it's much easier to get buy-in when you have data to support your claim. So we have a season now of pitch data and statistics. We had end-of-year meetings with everybody and we identified our new CBD R&D [research and development] department… they identified specific ways forward for guys. And then we gave that information to our subject matter expert staff, who went through and said, ‘Okay, this is the target. This is the outcome goal we're looking for. This is the way that we're going to get there. And this is why and this is what makes you a major league player.’ 

I think when you present that to people and players and they think that you are, they believe that you've been thoughtful about their plan, and they trust you, then it's much easier to get by. It was harder last year because everything wasn’t new, because it was the same personnel, but we were going through a transition or evolution of training methodology of how we were going to approach what our uniform looked like. So there were little tweaks that took place across the organization, it's tougher to get by. Change is hard for everybody generally; that is why you don't usually use that word very often.

It’s more an evolution of what the good that was already here and to what we see as a group is the best way to do things culturally. It’s much easier to put information in front of somebody and say, ‘This is the path we think that you should take.’ You’re much more likely to get buy-in when you give the person on the other end of that exchange choice.

Why is it important to have that player-centric approach?

Accountability is this buzzword that people like to throw around. College football coaches and guys that have mustaches like me like to say something like that. But the question I always have that that is, ‘Accountability to what?’ I think it's much easier for us as an organization to support you as a player if we can hold you accountable to what you say. Because me trying to hold you accountable to what I say or what I think is the best thing for you, that's a much different proposition and it's a lot harder to do that.

Being person- or player-centered means hearing what the player has to say and seeing how that lines up with our ideas. When they do line up, as most of the time they do … because the evidence is pretty clear, holding them accountable to their plan to get to where they want to go because it's their plan. I think it's really important. That's how I think we get authentic accountability.

Will there be more minor-league promotions in 2022 than there were in 2021?

I think that, two parts that I'm hearing. One, it's always easier to make a decision with better information, but I don't know how that's going to affect the speed of promotions. We have a lot of really good players that we've got to be thoughtful about. Sometimes the downside of being player-centric is the speed of decision making is going to suffer because we're trying to be as thorough as possible because players get more from their career. When you have this many good players, trying to be thoughtful about all of them is challenging, especially when you're always asking the question of what's best for this person. That's really how we think about promotions. The meritocratic view of, well, there's six weeks of statistics that indicate that this person should maybe go to the higher level' is almost like looking at it out of context. Just pulling it aside and saying, '.330! Nine homers! 37 RBI! This guy should be in Indianapolis!' But there's many more layers to the onion of the person.

… That's the not the traditional, statistical view of meritocratic promotion. That's, 'what's best for [this player].’ Sometimes it's important for [small groups of players] to be together. Because man, do they play hard and they hold each other accountable. They have the great relationship. It's not gonna speed up any promotions, per se, but it's going to make it a lot easier for us to judge players against how they've done in the past. We have a baseline.

There are plenty of good pitching prospects in Altoona. What’s your thought process for how you build that rotation?

What's going to go into my thought process? Probably a lot of Advil. Sitting up at 3:30 in the morning. Not feeling prepared to make the best decision for everybody.

A lot of thought is going to go into that. We can try to be as creative as possible. It's the challenge of abundance. We have too many good players and not enough spots, and what a wonderful thing to say. A lot of collective voices. We will do our best to be as reasonable and logical as possible, but that means bringing in voices for the Pittsburgh front office, bringing in people from infomatic and R&D to weigh in, representing external positions. And then talking to coaches and coordinators and the people who are on the ground and on the field and making a collective decision. We did it a couple days ago on Sunday and we'll do it again soon, but we're constantly in the room with lists on the board, trying to do what's best for those people that are represented by those names.

Many pitchers here have talked about wanting to throw their best stuff in the zone more. Is that more of a pitching concept or a mental approach?

That is the ethos of Hopp [pitching coordinator Josh Hopper], about pitching and competing. Every pitcher that gets to professional baseball has something that makes them unique. It's our responsibility to build things around that uniqueness, whether that be pitch design or adding velocity or fixing mechanical flaws so people stay healthy. At the end of the day, when the pressure's on and the lights are on, there isn't really a right or best pitch to throw in any situation. It's the pitch that the pitcher believes in and is the most convicted in. That's generally his best stuff, and we want it to go in the strike zone.

But I think it's important too to have simple messages for pitchers to really understand, because there's so much information now that surrounds baseball. This much break, this much spin, seam-shifted wake. There's all of these terms that we can use, and the more terms we can put in somebody's head about what they're trying to do, the more things they can think about when they're out on the mound. So trying to simplify it, give people the information that they can develop and appropriate language so they can understand and apply it. It's one thing to know all about stuff. It's another to apply stuff. I think, generally, when it comes to sports in particular, we don't want people thinking about what's going on. We want them locked in, focused on a simple goal because we feel like we can rely on that when the pressure's on. When the pressure's on, best stuff in the zone.

At the Get Better At Baseball Camp, you said that if next year’s camp looks exactly the same as this, you’ve failed because you’re looking for new ways to try to get better. How has that camp and the pitchers camp in December influenced minor-league spring training?

With pitching, we spent a lot of time, and this is Hopp and [special assistant to player development] Scott Elarton and [special advisor of pitching development] Dewey [Robinson] and [minor-league pattern and throwing coordinator] Vic Black, it's been a lot of time thinking about how we can utilize technology more effectively. That's something you see now if you came out in the bullpens. You see some different pieces of technology being utilized. Immediate feedback and knowledge of [the] result, like of how much a pitch moved so we can be better at pitch design with our players that we feel are ready for pitch design opportunities. I've already been out here for awhile now and I've already seen drills and machine set ups on the field that we hadn't seen at GBAB. Continuing to provide an opportunity for our coaches to be innovative and creative in this goal-directed orientation means that it always has to change. 

It always has to change. It always has to evolve. It always has to be a little bit different. There's things that always look the same. There's guys out playing catch, getting loose. There's not much variation or variability that you can put on that. But when it comes to taking live reads off the bat or how we organize pitching machines or should we be throwing downhill off of the slope when we're this close or off of the grass? Those are questions we're always asking, trying to challenge our assumptions. Doesn't sound great, but we like to do a lot of arguing about what we think is best.

Bonus: So who does the arguing?

Everybody. We operate under this disagree and decide model. If we're all doing group think and we're all saying the same things and nobody's willing to put the red hat on and stand up and say, 'well, what about this.' I think we get better by just bringing in a diversity of perspectives. So we've brought people in from different organizations. We've brought in people that are unlikely coaching candidates in the past, and we listen to those voices as much as they listen to my voice when we're having a discussion. It's not about who is saying it. It's about what information is supporting that and is the reasoning or the logic good enough for us to make a decision in that direction.

It doesn't matter where it comes from. Something I definitely learned from Theo Epstein. I'm sure Ben [Cherington] would say the same thing for Theo. If you have a good idea, it doesn't matter who you are. We'll find a way to implement it.