Building a System: Developing Pitchers in the Modern Age
By: Max Greenfield
Think about pitchers from five years ago. The high-four seam fastball revolution was beginning, the term sweeper had not been created yet, and the beginning of the modern age of pitching development was coming to fruition. Yet, the people paying attention were beginning to build systems that would create reliable arms out of nowhere. Teams like the Houston Astros, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Tampa Bay Rays were early adopters and saw huge dividends early. Organizations like Driveline and Tread Athletics paved the way for baseball to evolve in pitching development.
Now, come back to 2023; if you’re an organization that isn’t using methods from any of the organizations listed, you are behind, and you live in a different age. You can go onto a broadcast, and you’ll hear television commentators like David Cone talk about spin, pitch shapes, and other movement metrics. The world of pitching has changed in the past five years and will only continue to do so as we move forward. I recently tweeted a joke (though admittedly, I am striving to work in professional baseball again) about running the St. Louis Cardinals pitching department. A friend asked me how I would build the Cardinals’ pitching system. I realized I couldn’t answer his question in less than a couple thousand words, so here is the piece about creating a system that can maximize the potential of the most pitchers as possible.
Defining the Culture
The first step after defining the idea that will be the focal point of your organization is to create a culture that can back that idea up. This is arguably the most challenging part of building a system. Many organizations across all industries will ignore culture or say they care but do not do any work to install it. What does culture mean, and what are good and bad examples of culture?
In this case, culture can be defined as “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterize an institution or organization” (Merriam-Webster). Essentially, culture is the characteristics of your organization, both positive and negative. When people ask what it’s like to work at your company, how they describe the job and the workplace reflects that company’s culture. How do you create culture in the company? It starts from the top of the organization. While it is not necessarily possible to go above you when you’re the director of pitching, you can create a culture that your coaches and players will emulate.
A foundational part of a good culture in baseball is the quest for knowledge. A phrase you’ll hear often is “growth mindset.” Relate that back to the beginning of this piece. Think of where we were five years ago and where we are now. It isn’t reasonable to think we won’t know more in five years than we do now. Finding people in your organization who are continuously looking to improve is a foundation for a strong culture in baseball.
Open communication is another vital facet of building a strong culture. To be a good leader, you want to be able to tell you how they feel and when they disagree with you. Allowing people of all levels to express their ideas about the team’s direction and how everybody will help. This concept enables you to check egos and put priority on the most important thing: winning. Ultimately, you must avoid having egos leading the way to create a good culture. People will respond better if they feel their concerns are listened to and responded to. You can’t just let people voice their opinion and not do anything about it. Show actionable change in response to recommendations and criticisms. Again, stand on your beliefs, but show your team that you care about them.
The Right Coaches
You must understand one of the first things about being a coach, teacher, or leader. Everyone you lead is different, and you can’t be good at your job if you group people up and make them all strive to be the same. Let pitchers play to their strengths and improve their weaknesses would be best. How do you do that? By understanding pitch shapes, how the player moves in space, changes you can make that might work for them, and the ability to constantly learn and tinker. Finding coaches who not only have an understanding of ways to create unique pitches and optimize movement down the mound but can communicate it is what will help create a system for pitchers to thrive. As Alex Wood said, coaches are the secret sauce that technology provides.
It’s an essential part of being a coach in the modern age to understand technology and interpret the data from it. The coaches who are effective at communication and ideas are the best in the sport. See people like Brent Strom and Matt Blake. Blake, who didn’t play professional baseball, is lauded throughout the industry for his ability to communicate complex ideas in ways players can grasp and understand. Strom, who does have some playing experience, is praised for his ability to constantly learn about the game despite how long he has been around. If you listen to them talk, you could grasp some interesting concepts in baseball just like you were a player. That’s the standard you want in relaying information to the players.
The phrase, buy-in, is the ultimate idea that you’re looking for throughout this process. It can only be accomplished if it is done well. New Red Sox POBO Craig Breslow had a good quote in his introductory press conference.
“The most important takeaway that I’ve found, and I think it’s true of pitching development, I think it’s true of any discipline, is that given the size of today’s offices, given the ubiquity of information available, it’s really easy to get caught up in trying to find the newest, the rightest, the most current information when it turns out that getting an organization directionally aligned behind something is far more powerful.” -Craig Breslow
This is why coaches are so important at every level. As a director of pitching/pitching coordinator, you must find coaches who will implement your ideas and put the players first. It seems simple, but you need good coaches who can listen to the players about their game. There are times when coaches should stand their ground and vice versa on specific topics, but it’s a collaborative effort. Players will listen to coaches willing to listen to the player about their career because it builds trust. Players will slowly buy into the system you’re making because you have coaches who can effectively communicate the ideas you are promoting.
There is one ultimate way to create buy-in: show the players results. It’s a process-driven industry but only gets buy-in if players can see results. In pitching, it’s easier to produce results because you have instant feedback. Working on pitch design? Using Trackman/rapsodo data will give you instant feedback if the pitch will play for what you want. Working on velocity? Going through your velocity program, you’ll see the benefits of it by seeing your velocity slowly tick up throughout the process. Now, all of that is well and good, but the thing that ultimately matters is performance.
Building a Pitcher
Lastly, we are discussing building a system that can create the best pitchers possible, and I have yet to discuss the best ways to do that. Now, this is not going to be a step-by-step guide on how to create a pitcher. This will also not be a model program on off-season or in-season throwing programs. Instead, this is a discussion about the ideas, the mentality, the work, and the characteristics that help create the best possible version of a pitcher. One reality must be accepted: you will fail at this often.
When creating the best version of a pitcher, it will take a lot of failure to get there. There will be trial and error on everything. There will be lots of peaks and valleys in this. The pitchers will question themselves, and you will, too. Trust yourself. I tell the pitchers I work with, “You are pitching in the situation that we put in because we have confidence in you to perform.” The same thing can be said for the coaches; they are there for a reason. As long as you and your staff feel that you are doing everything possible to help as many players as possible, you are doing everything you can. But now, let’s dig into a couple of the main points when trying to help pitchers improve.
1. Operating in Space
What does it mean to operate in space? If you’ve listened to some pitching coaches talk about how pitchers move or their mechanics, you’ll hear the phrase “operate in space.” The goal is to maximize efficiency down the kinetic chain and to the plate. This is a fancy way of saying you want to ensure you’re moving well down the mound. Are you creating a solid lead leg block (stable plant leg), hinging into your back hip, rotating, not pushing down the mound, creating a solid trunk stack, etc. All of these questions apply to the idea of moving in space. There are a lot of adjustments that can be made in the way people move down the mound in plyo drills, catch play, and bullpens. For example, one of my favorite drills is pivot pick plyo drills, which can help with a multitude of issues but really helps with arm path issues and shoulder stability. You can also fix movement issues in the weight room, and being well-integrated with your strength and conditioning side will be very important.
2. Start With the Stuff
While working with pitchers on how they move, which will require constant work to maintain and improve performance, the goal is to make the pitcher’s stuff as good as possible. Some people will say there are benchmarks on movement metrics that you’re trying to hit. Still, the reality is that it’s very dependent on the pitcher. While someone may be in the dead zone with a fastball (near equal parts vertical and horizontal break on a pitch), it may work if they can either throw it really hard (Hunter Greene) or throw from a unique slot (Edwin Diaz). While someone’s curveball or slider may not move a ton, they could throw it at a faster velocity or unique enough of a slot. The goal is to design unique pitches from the pack. Here’s a good thread on what good coaches can do in this area.
3. Going Deep
While many will say modern baseball is killing the starting pitcher, which may be true, the goal is still to create as many quality starting pitchers as possible. Starters are more valuable than relievers, so it’s obviously in the team’s best interest to develop high-quality starting pitchers. Look at what the Dodgers, Astros, and Rays have done. Now, the easy response to this is that pitchers are getting hurt at a higher rate in this quest for velocity. That is true. It’s also true that for every hour spent on gaining velocity, several more are spent on keeping them healthy. The organization aims to maximize a player’s potential; creating as many starting pitchers as possible is the best way to accomplish that. Allow them the chance to fail at going deep into games, learn from that, and use it going forward. This is a time when you need to use feel. Third-time through penalties are very real, but there are times to push a starter, and you want them to be prepared.
4. Be Aggressive and Compete
One of the best performance indicators for pitchers is In-Zone-Whiff%. The more swings and misses you can create in the strike zone, the more likely you’ll be effective. Pitchers with great stuff should live in the strike zone. If you are a finesse pitcher, sequencing and avoiding the middle of the zone are important, but you don’t want to nibble. Go right after every hitter you face until the situation doesn’t call for it. I’ve told my pitchers that if you’re facing great hitters, you have a 70% chance of getting them out every time you throw a pitch. That’s a very simplistic and mathematically incorrect way of looking at it. Still, the point is that the pitcher has the advantage. Don’t be afraid to leverage it! When a pitcher is out there on the mound, the thoughts of pitch design and movement go away. Find a couple of cues that work for that guy, and then focus on going and dominating on the mound.
5. Track It
Track everything you can at all times. Velocity, strikes, whiffs, types of contact, biomechanical information, if you think it can be measured, track it. This isn’t just in-game; track everything in bullpens, sim games/live ab’s. Find the metrics that matter to you and build around them, but track everything you can. Use the data to inform what you see with your eyes and then build around that. Earlier, we discussed how players will respond to tangible evidence you can show them. Thus, it creates an incentive to track as many things as possible. To be clear, you cannot fall in love with the numbers and focus solely on that, but if you have numbers to back up your arguments, they become much more potent. One of the most significant points to stress to everyone is having objective information to defend your views. To do that, you should track everything you can.
Building a solid system for developing pitchers takes time, effort, patience, accountability, humility, and trust. There will be important things I should have considered/valued. That’s ok! There is no one way to do any of this, as I hope has been made clear. I look into some of the concepts, ideas, and processes that go into how I think about developing modern pitching. Let me know what you think in the comments below.
