When I first met Drew Storen, his train had yet to reach Big League Station. The Stanford product was 22 years old and pitching in the Arizona Fall League, his Nationals debut still six months away. Since that time he’s ridden a roller coaster.

The 27-year-old right-hander has a 43-save season on his resume, but also an elbow injury and a crushing post-season loss. Briefly demoted to the minors in 2013, he bounced back to the tune of a 1.12 ERA in 65 games last year. With everything that’s transpired since our initial conversation, a glimpse in the mirror was in order.

“You try not to reflect when you play,” said Storen. “It’s human nature to do so, but you try to go day-to-day – every cliché possible – in baseball. You have to go forward, because the train is moving.

“But it’s been a good journey. There have been challenges, and good times as well. I feel I’ve grown as a pitcher. Trying harder is not always trying better, and I’m not as pedal-to-the-metal as I used to be, When I came up, I was more of a bar-fighter than a boxer. I’ve learned that you need to be a tactician; you can’t just go out there and out-stuff people.”

Analogy aside, Storen has never possessed a troglodyte mentality. He was already familiar with PITCHf/x when I interviewed him five-and-a-half years ago. He still utilizes the tool, typically to review his release point, and relies heavily on video to “make sure everything is in tune.”

Monitoring his mechanics and the depth he’s getting on his deliveries is an off-the-field endeavor. His mind’s eye is equally attentive on the mound. Read the rest of this entry »

Casey Fien has found his niche. Primarily fastball-curveball when he broke in with the Tigers, in 2009, the Twins reliever has since added a cutter and learned how to pitch. As he told me a few weeks ago, “Now I know what I can get away with and what I can’t.”

Last summer, Fien didn’t get away with a pair of misplaced pitches at Fenway Park. Protecting a 1-0 lead on a scorching afternoon, he surrendered back-to-back tenth-inning home runs. The gophers left a scar.

“It hurt a lot,” said Fien. “I think it still hurt at the end of the season. As a reliever, you never focus on your good games. Ever. You always look back at the negative ones, and I didn’t get a pitch far enough inside to David (Ortiz) and he wrapped it around the pole. Against (Mike) Napoli, I thought I made a pitch, but he popped it to dead center.”

Fien didn’t watch it go out. Knowing it was gone, he simply put his head down and walked to the dugout.

His big-league debut is a more pleasant memory. Facing the White Sox at Comerica Park, he pitched two-and-a-third scoreless innings, allowing a lone walk. The first out he recorded was an inning-ending pop-up, immediately proceeded by a startling revelation. Read the rest of this entry »

Hanley Ramirez is a good case study for Xander Bogaerts. The early-career personalities differ – Hanley was aloof and Xander is humble – but their profiles have a lot in common. Each came up through the Red Sox system with “Wunderkind” stamped on his forehead and nascent hitting knowledge under his helmet.

A notable difference is their rookie results. Ramirez captured NL rookie-of-the-year honors after being dealt to the Marlins. Bogaerts struggled to find his stroke and, relative to expectations, bombed in Boston. Before drawing too many conclusions, consider that Hanley was 22 at the time, a full year older than his counterpart was last season.

Contextually, Bogaerts was better as a 21-year-old than Ramirez. The youngster’s 2014 numbers weren’t enthusiastic — .240/.297/.362 with 12 home runs – but they came against big-league competition. At the same age, Hanley hit .271/.335/.385 with six home runs in the Double-A Eastern League.

Back when he was a Portland Sea Dog, the 31-year-old slugger had a rudimentary approach. “I like to stay through the middle and hit the ball at the pitcher’s head,” Ramirez told me in 2004. “I like to see what they throw and then react to their pitches.”

A few weeks ago in Fort Myers, I asked him what has changed since our decade old conversation. Read the rest of this entry »

Randal Grichuk demurred slightly when I asked if he identifies as a power hitter. The St. Louis outfielder hesitated, then said “I’m a guy who is gap-to-gap and can also drive the ball out of the yard.”

In the opinion of a teammate and his hitting coach, Grichuk was guilty of underselling his greatest strength. Infielder Mark Reynolds told me Grichuk “hits balls 500 feet, and at the end of the day, that’s who he is.” John Mabry said, “He’s a power hitter. There are plenty of things he does right, and that’s one of them.”

The 23-year-old former first-round pick did enough right in the Grapefruit circuit to earn a spot on the Cardinals’ opening day roster. His strong spring followed a season in which he catapulted 25 home runs in Triple-A and five more in the big-leagues. Two of the latter came in post-season action.

The Cardinals knew they were getting a potential impact bat when they acquired Grichuk (and Peter Bourjos) from the Angels in exchange for David Freese and Fernando Salas in November 2013. They also knew the player drafted directly in front of Mike Trout was a work-in-progress. Despite being on the doorstep of a breakout, he remains in search of an identity. Read the rest of this entry »

Glen Perkins and Anthony Varvaro have reverse splits – specifically with regard to allowing runners — for distinctly different reasons. The Twins southpaw attributes his to spatial relationships. The Red Sox righty points to a swinging gate.

Before we get to their thoughts on the subject, let’s look at the numbers.

Last season, left-handed batters hit .284/.324/.448 against Perkins, while right-handed batters hit .249/.278/.422. Two years ago, lefties hit .236/.271/.273, righties .183/.251/.317.

Right-handed batters were .274/.341/.376 against Varvaro in 2013, while left-handed batters hit .207/.267/.281. Last season, righties hit .273/.314/.406, lefties .198/.284/.481.

Varvaro, who was acquired by Boston from the Braves in December, has been queried about his reverse splits countless times. He doesn’t have a definitive answer – at least not a comprehensive one – but he does have theories. Read the rest of this entry »

Travis Snider is a breakout candidate. Sound familiar? He’s owned the label for years, and maybe – just maybe – this will be the season he finally explodes. It’s not implausible. Somehow, Snider is still just 27 years old.

Skeptics will surely scoff at the idea, but the 2006 first-round pick feels ready to come into his own. Acquired by the Orioles in the off-season, the former Toronto and Pittsburgh outfielder is settling into his swing after nearly a decade of trying to reinvent the wheel.

‘I think I’ve had about eight different swings in eight years,” Snider told me on Friday. “In the last two years, I’ve been working toward recreating the same swing as much as possible.

“It’s about trying to create a consistent swing through the zone that can cover pitches in different quadrants, and not just be a low-ball hitter, or an inside hitter, or an outside hitter. Understanding, and being able to adjust to, the way pitchers are attacking you is often more important than mechanics.”

Mechanically, Snider said he’s concentrating on allowing his hips to clear and his hands to flow through the zone. He cited Miguel Cabrera as a hitter who can generate torque with his lower half, thus allowing his top half to uncoil. Snider admits to sometimes falling into the habit of trying to use every muscle in his body instead of taking a smooth, effortless swing. Read the rest of this entry »

This past Sunday, I wrote about how Adam Ottavino is studying Garrett Richards‘ pitch usage in hopes of improving his performance against left-handed hitters. Not included in the article were details about his signature pitch, which is actually three pitches in one. The Colorado Rockies reliever throws his slider from two arm angles and with two different grips. As a result, the shape varies, as does the velocity, from 80 to 87 mph. Ottavino explained this to me – and touched on related subjects – last week in Phoenix.

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Adam Ottavino on release points: “I was recently looking at my release point charts on Brooks Baseball – all four years of data they have on me – and it’s interesting to see that the data is consistent with the mechanical adjustments I’ve made. You can see when I’ve moved over on the rubber. It’s interesting to look at how I’ve evolved over the last three years, and how the things I tried to do, I actually did do.

“On both axis, my release point was the most consistent in 2013, which is actually the year I had the most success. Last year it was a little less consistent, but that’s partially because I was changing my arm angle slightly on breaking balls. I was doing that intentionally to affect some sort of different view from the hitter’s perspective.”

On his slider variations: “I throw sliders multiple ways. They all read the same – they read as sliders on PITCHf/x — but they are three different pitches. There’s more of an up-and-down, more of a slurve, and one with more of a straight lateral break. I do that with two different grips. As a pitcher who throws such a high percentage of breaking balls (47.3% in 2014), I don’t want to make them all exactly the same, Even if the hitter reads slider out of my hand, he can’t be totally sure where it will end up.” Read the rest of this entry »

Will Middlebrooks is between a rock and a hard place when it comes to explaining his unfulfilled potential in Boston. The 26-year-old third baseman is hesitant to blame injuries – no one wants to be seen as an excuse-maker — but there’s no denying his familiarity with the trainer’s table. Wrist, finger, leg, back – he’s been on the disabled list four times in three years, and on numerous occasions has played hurt.

Middlebrooks is a Padre now, having come to San Diego in exchange for Ryan Hanigan this past December. He’s also – at least for the moment – unencumbered by malady. I asked if injuries were the root cause of his uneven performances in a Red Sox uniform.

“No, of course not,” responded Middlebrooks. “That hasn’t been the only thing. There’s a big learning curve when you’re a young player. You’re learning pitching. There are guys adjusting to you and figuring out your weaknesses. It’s that cat-and-mouse game we always talk about.”

It’s hard for a cat to catch a mouse when he’s hobbled, and Middlebrooks has a plodding .695 OPS in 232 big-league games. He has the potential to do much more, particularly in the slugging department. Prior to his 2014 power outage – just two dingers — he had 32 home runs in 660 at bats. A mechanical adjustment may help him invigorate his long-ball stroke. Read the rest of this entry »

Cla Meredith’s MLB debut was inauspicious. Actually, it was an abomination. Called up to Boston less than a year after being drafted out of Virginia Commonwealth University, Meredith came out of the Fenway Park bullpen in the seventh inning of a tie game. The Seattle Mariners had one on and two out.

He walked Randy Winn. Then he walked Adrian Beltre. The third batter he faced, Richie Sexson, hit a fly ball to right field.

“When the ball left the bat, I took a few steps toward the dugout,” remembers Meredith, who threw the fateful pitch on May 8, 2005. “I thought I was out of the jam, but the ball just kept drifting and drifting, and pushing and pushing, and doink, it went right off the foul pole.”

Grand slam. The fact that it was a wind-blown fly ball that traveled little more than 320 feet was of scant consolation to the shell-shocked rookie.

“I wanted to dig a hole and climb in, man,” Meredith told me. “I felt overwhelmed. The weird part was, on any other day, with the weather different, and in any other ballpark, it’s a can of sh__ in Trot Nixon’s glove. If that ball is caught, it probably changes my career.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ellis Valentine knows what Josh Hamilton is going through. Valentine battled substance abuse during his playing days, in the 1970s and 1980s, and now works as a certified drug counselor. Hamilton – assuming the reports are true – recently suffered a relapse in his own struggles with addiction.

Valentine has been clean for nearly three decades, and he’s been helping others fight their demons for nearly as long. He’s offered to help the troubled Angels’ slugger, but Hamilton’s handlers have kept him at arm’s length.

“People come to me all the time and ask, ‘Why don’t you work with Josh Hamilton?’ Valentine told me. “I say, ‘I’d love to try — I have tried — but I can’t get close to him.’ I have a lot of compassion for Josh, but the people surrounding him don’t want me around.”

Valentine works out of Dallas and tried reaching out to Hamilton multiple times when the outfielder played for the Texas Rangers. Repeatedly rebuffed, Valentine actually wrote a letter to himself, in 2010, chronicling his failed attempts to lend assistance.

If Hamilton were to allow Valentine the opportunity, he’d receive some tough love. The erstwhile Expo – he represented Montreal in the 1977 All-Star game — was passionate when offering an opinion on what Hamilton has to do. The advice was shaped by personal experience as well as clinical training.

“Somewhere along the line, Josh Hamilton has to grow up,” said Valentine. “I was 31 years old before I filled out my first tax form. I was making hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I had attorneys, my agent – I had all these people to do things for me, so I was allowed to just go out and get high and be in la-la land. Read the rest of this entry »