Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three San Diego Padres pitchers — Joey Lucchesi, Logan Allen, and Chris Paddack — on how they learned and developed their change-of-pace pitches.

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Joey Lucchesi, San Diego Padres (The Churve)

“I started off in a community college throwing a circle change. It was a regular changeup. Then I started throwing harder. I got stronger and my hands got bigger. As I went on to [Southeast Missouri State], I started developing it in a way that it moved differently. I hold it like a circle change, but it spins out like a slider and kind of drops like a curveball.

“Once I got to the minors, Eric Lauer and I played catch every day. We decided to give it its own name. It wasn’t like a regular changeup, so we called it ‘The Churve.’ I’ve stuck with that name for three years now. Read the rest of this entry »

Boston Globe sportswriter Nick Cafardo died tragically on Thursday at the age of 62. He was a friend — Nick had countless friends throughout the baseball community — and his Sunday Baseball Notes has long been a must-read. This column is dedicated to his memory.

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Aaron Loup has forged a solid career since being drafted by the Blue Jays out of Tulane University in 2009. The 31-year-old southpaw has made 378 relief appearances — all but four with Toronto — and put together a 3.49 ERA and a 3.49 FIP. Seven years after making his MLB debut, he’s now a member of the San Diego Padres.

Had he not changed his arm slot, he probably wouldn’t have made it to the big leagues.

“I wasn’t getting it done over the top,” admitted Loup, who dropped down in high-A. “For whatever reason, my stuff went away. It kind of sucked. My sinker flattened out. My breaking ball became a dud.”

When you’re getting hit around in the Florida State League, you listen to suggestions. Especially strong suggestions. The lefty recalls being told by then pitching coordinator Dane Johnson, “Give it a chance, because what you’re doing now isn’t working.”

Sidearm worked. Not only that, it worked right away. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Milwaukee Brewers inked Josh Tomlin to a minor league deal earlier this month, they acquired more than a 34-year-old right-hander coming off a train wreck of a year. They brought on a pitcher with a new and better understanding of his craft. His career badly in need of a jumpstart, Tomlin trained at Driveline from January 8-17.

Train wreck is a fair description of his 2018 campaign. As always, he threw plenty of strikes — Tomlin’s 1.24 walk rate is the lowest in baseball over the last eight years (min. 800 innings) — but far too many of them got whacked. In 70.1 tumultuous innings with the Cleveland Indians, Tomlin posted a 7.16 FIP and was taken deep 25 times. Cut loose at season’s end, he knew that something needed to change if he had any chance of returning to a big league rotation.

His visit to Driveline could prove to be a panacea for his troubles. Tomlin not only learned how his delivery had gotten out of whack, he discovered that he’d been underutilizing what might be one of his best pitches. As for the analytical data he’s seen in recent seasons, let’s just say that it’s no longer just a bunch of numbers and dots arranged on a chart.

Tomlin talked about what he learned, and what it could mean for his career, prior to throwing a bullpen session yesterday morning at Milwaukee’s spring training facility in Maryvale, Arizona.

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Tomlin on correcting a delivery flaw: “I went to Driveline first and foremost to get a bio-mechanical assessment of my body. They put all of those electrodes on you, those little dots that tell you exactly how your body moves. I wanted to grade myself out. I wanted to grade how my body was moving down the hill. Once we got [the data] back, we could address the things I wasn’t doing well and try to correct them.

“I wanted to go through having cameras watching me from behind, to see exactly how my ball was spinning. When I got the assessment, I learned that the axis was creating more run — more lazy run — than anything else. I needed to work behind the ball a little better, to try to get more hop, more carry. Read the rest of this entry »

In an interview that ran here in March 2017, Dick Williams went in depth on innovation, infrastructure, and the rebuild his team had begun a year-and-a-half earlier. The Cincinnati Reds’ then GM — he’s now the President of Baseball Operations — told me, “In another couple of seasons, we expect to be competing again.”

The timeline was met. Baseball’s oldest professional franchise, as suggested by moves they made over the offseason (and confirmed by Williams), is no longer focusing primarily on the future. The focus is on the here and now.

Williams expounded on the moves the team has made, and on what it takes to build a sustainably strong organization, at the onset of spring training.

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Williams on moving on from the rebuild: “We’re now in a period of payroll growth. A few years ago we stepped back and looked at which areas of the business we needed to invest in away from major league payroll, and we were able to accomplish a lot of those goals. We significantly increased the resources we were providing to player development. We added coaches. We added new roles in analytics. That had been the focus. Now we’re ready to really focus on the talent we’ve got at the major league level.

“We obviously have a lot of room for improvement coming off of last year, but we knew that we were going to have some payroll to spend, and the farm system is stronger. We anticipated going into this winter with a focus on adding talent to the major league level, to help us compete. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives and careers. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Ray Black, Tanner Scott, and Matt Strahm— on how they learned and developed their sliders.

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Ray Black, San Francisco Giants

“When I was in high school, I had the privilege of working with Andy Ashby, who is pretty much a legend around Wilkes-Barre. We messed around a little bit with a slider at the time, but I really started developing it more coming back from my Tommy John surgery. I blew out my senior year.

“My curveball was too big, too loopy, and easy to distinguish. I think I was throwing it almost 20 mph slower than my fastball. When you’re younger, you see this big breaking ball, somebody is diving out of the way, and you’re like, ‘Man, that’s nasty.’ But when you get up to the higher levels, you realize it’s more deception; it’s not just movement. I tried to develop a slider like a cutter. That’s what I think when I throw my slider: cutter. If I don’t, I always end up trying to make it bigger than it should be. I need to try to keep it tight, keep it small. Read the rest of this entry »

Taylor Williams is a tad shorter than the 5-foot-11 he’s listed at in the Milwaukee media guide. But as the saying goes, size doesn’t matter. His fastball averaged 96.1 mph, and ticked up even higher, in his 2018 rookie season. More importantly, he consistently recorded outs. In 56 appearances out of the Brewers bullpen, Williams fanned 57 batters in 53 innings, and fashioned a 3.95 FIP. All in all, it was a successful campaign for the 27-year-old right-hander who hails from Camas, Washington.

He faced a speed bump on his way to Beer City. Seemingly on the fast track after a stellar first-full professional season, the 2013 fourth round pick suddenly began feeling elbow discomfort. Rest didn’t help, nor did a platelet-rich plasma injection. He underwent Tommy John surgery and missed all of the 2015 and 2016 seasons.

He barely missed a beat after returning to action. Williams pitched well enough at Double-A Biloxi to earn a five-game cameo with the Brewers in September 2017. Then came last season’s further step forward, which portends a continuation of what could arguably be called a David-slays-Goliath career.

The undersized — but by no means underperforming — hurler discussed his path to the big leagues midway through last summer.

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Williams on being drafted out of Kent State: “I was originally at Washington State, but decided that I didn’t want to go back. This was after after my freshman year. I transferred to Mount Hood Community College, in Oregon, in part because I didn’t want to have to sit out a season. I finished my associates degree at Mount Hood, then transferred to Kent State.

“I’d played summer ball with some Kent State guys after my freshman year. That was up in the New England Collegiate Baseball League. The team I was with played out of Keene, New Hampshire. The NECBL is a good league. Our All-Star team actually beat Team USA that year. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cincinnati Reds did more than hire a new manager over the offseason. They also revamped their coaching staff. Two of the additions will be entrusted with optimizing the offense. Turner Ward, formerly with the Dodgers, is now the hitting coach. Donnie Ecker, who came over from the Angels, will serve as the assistant hitting coach. Neither will be faced with the challenge of helping Billy Hamilton turn a corner. The Reds non-tendered the enigmatic speedster, who subsequently signed with the Royals, back in November.

I recently asked Dick Williams about the decision to cut ties with Hamilton, who slashed .245/.298/.333 in his five seasons as Cincinnati’s centerfielder. Before we get to that, here is the team’s President of Baseball Operations on Ecker:

“We’ve had some really interesting sessions the last couple of days, where coaches have gotten up and talked about their areas. Donnie Ecker is a movement specialist. He has a bio-mechanical approach to the swing. We had some great hitters in the room, like Barry Larkin and Eric Davis. Donnie gave a bio-mechanical explanation of some of the things he sees in hitters, using descriptions and examples that all of us could understand.”

Would Ecker, along with Ward, have been able to transform Hamilton into the productive hitter he’s thus far failed to become? Read the rest of this entry »

Rocco Baldelli knows Charlie Montoyo well. Not only did they spend the last four seasons together on Tampa Bay’s coaching staff, but Baldelli once played for the 53-year-old Montoyo in the minors. Minnesota’s new manager counts Toronto’s new manager as both a mentor and a friend.

Not surprisingly, Baldelli was effusive in his praise when I asked him about Montoyo. Citing his experience and leadership skills, he opined that the Blue Jays are getting “a tremendous manager and a great person.” Fittingly, Montoyo was hired on October 25, the same day his 37-year-old protege was tabbed by the Twins.

Baldelli wasn’t caught by surprise when he heard the news from north of the border. He knew that Montoyo had interviewed with the Cincinnati Reds, and that he would soon be doing the same with Toronto. The second of those sit-downs obviously went well. Mere days after meeting with him, the Blue Jays announced Montoyo’s hiring.

All told, five candidates went through the interview process in Toronto. Baldelli didn’t want to go on the record as to whether he was one of them, but he did allow that his post-season vacation plans were put on hold for a period of weeks. Multiple teams met with him about their openings. That was to be expected. The “future-manager” tag was assigned to him by myriad members of the media over the course of the 2018 season. Read the rest of this entry »

Dustin Fowler may need to make an adjustment. The 24-year-old outfielder is coming off a rookie campaign that saw him slash an anemic .224/.256/.354, with six home runs, in 203 plate appearances. The Triple-A portion of his season was encouraging — a .310 BA and an .817 OPS — but his performance against big league pitching fell short of expectations. He went into the year ranked as Oakland’s No. 4 prospect.

He’d already made a notable adjustment. Prior to being acquired by the A’s in the 2017 trade deadline deal that sent Sonny Gray to the Yankees, Fowler had lowered his hands at the urging of then hitting coach, P.J. Pilittere. The reason was twofold: the team that drafted Fowler out of a Dexter, Georgia high school felt it would help him tap into his power. Every bit as importantly, his left-handed stroke wasn’t consistently catching up to high-octane heat.

Fowler talked about the 2016 adjustment midway through last season.

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Dustin Fowler: “I hadn’t had much coaching growing up, so I was very raw. I’d just had small-town coaching — not the big coaching I needed — so going into pro ball was the first time I got some real one-on-ones on how to hit.

“I was very tall in my stance. I was upright, and my hands were over my head. Ever since grabbing a bat, I’d put them up there. My hand-eye coordination was good enough to make it work against pitching that wasn’t as good — slower pitching — but it worked less and less here. There’s a big difference from high school to pro ball. The pitches here harder, and I wasn’t catching up to balls. I was just fouling them off, or making fly-ball outs. Read the rest of this entry »

Fans of prog rock are well familiar with Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Karn Evil 9.” The song, which is on the seminal 1973 album Brain Salad Surgery, includes the line, “Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends.” Nearly 30 minutes long, Karn Evil 9 has been described, thematically speaking, as a battle between humans and computers.

Which brings us to the first major league free agent signed by the Orioles new-and-geeky front office regime. On Thursday, Mike Elias, Sig Mejdal and Co. welcomed Nate Karns back to The Show, inking him to a reported $800,000, one-year deal.

Karns has been a good pitcher when healthy. He hasn’t been healthy very often. The righty had labrum surgery back in 2010, and more recently he’s had thoracic outlet surgery and elbow issues. He didn’t pitch at all in 2018, and in 2017 he was limited to just 45-and-a-third innings. In the two years preceding the more recent of those, ahem, evil injuries, he showed plenty of promise. Pitching with Tampa Bay and Seattle, he went 13-7 with a 4.25 ERA and a 4.17 FIP.

My colleague Rain Watt will have more on Karns’s comeback tomorrow, so I’ll keep the rest of this look contained to the 31-year-old’s curveball. It’s his primary secondary, and a pitch he refined while going through a shoulder program after having his labrum repaired. Read the rest of this entry »