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TAMPA, Fla. – Most pitchers try to avoid having Tommy John surgery at all. Sean Burnett wanted it a second time.

The former Pirates first-round pick went to see Dr. James Andrews again after he dealt with elbow pain early in 2013, nearly 10 years after the first surgery on his left elbow. Said Burnett to Ryan Lawrence of PhillyVoice:

“They went in to fix the flexor tendon and Dr. Andrews said it was the ligament. It wasn’t torn, but it was completely stretched out and looked pretty beat up. It was 10-years old (from the first surgery). He wasn’t going fix it, hoping that the surgery for the flexor issue would do something, but the first day I threw after four months I knew it was still a problem.”

Burnett knew his left UCL wasn’t right so he did something you hear few, if any, pitchers attempting to accomplish: he tried to tear it. He went back to the Legacy Golf Club room at which he was staying while rehabbing in Tempe, Arizona, stacked pillows up against his bed’s headboard, and started throwing baseballs with as much violence and velocity as he could into them. I asked Burnett about this bizarre strategy earlier this week.

“I needed to pop it until he would fix it, so I tried to pop it in the hotel room each night,” Burnett said. “It didn’t work but maybe it sped up the process a little bit.”

Did he disturb any neighbors?

“I don’t throw hard enough,” Burnett said. “I had enough pillows up there.”

In May of 2013, Burnett “finally” felt his ligament “pop” in an outing against Seattle.

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LAKELAND and PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. — We know the immense value teams have derived from applying PITCHf/x, Statcast and other new-age data tools to decision-making. We know this information has helped enlighten the public, including journalists and bloggers, to better understand performance. But I suspect we’re just really scratching the surface with how the big-data age is going to help players.

We know a number of pitchers have used the data to make real changes to pitch type, release point and location. Hitters have tools to better understand their quality of contact. There could be enormous benefits to injury prevention and on-field efficiency from the data being collected. But there is a practical daily use all players could and perhaps should glean from the avalanche of information that has poured into the game right now: the keeping of sanity and reduction of the duration of slumps.

Baseball is often characterized as a game of failure. This is particularly true for hitters, of course: even the best of hitters are unlikely to reach base in a given plate appearance. All players must battle through slumps, through challenging periods. And for all the game’s history leading up to the PITCHf/x and Statcast eras, players were often making adjustments with only anecdotal, observational feedback.

Think about the player who, in the midst of a slump, alters his batting stance; the pitcher who searches for a new arm slot or grip. Even with these minor adjustments, players might be making needless changes that are detrimental and could deepen a slump. For much of the game’s history, performance and skill was only quantified through box scores. We know now, though, how much of that performance is dependent on teammates and opponents, fortune often tied to the BABIP Gods.

One criterion for assessing the value of the data and technology available today is whether it helps players make rational adjustments — and whether an adjustment that has been made is working. J.D. Martinez has been in the news lately as an outspoken early adopter of the fly-ball philosophy.

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PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. – When we think about Tampa Bay Rays pitching over the last decade, the image of opposing hitters flailing helplessly over the top of changeups — offerings with velocity separation and depth — is likely one of the first to come to mind. That’s what comes to my mind. I think about hitters whiffing at Rays’ changeups, even on occasions when they’ve anticipated the pitch. I think about pitchers who have possessed pedestrian velocity and breaking stuff, who may not might have otherwise had much of a major-league career without the pitch. I think about a pitcher like James Shields, a founding father of the Rays’ changeup philosophy and track record.

Since 2010, the Rays lead baseball in runs produced above average by means of the changeup, according to FanGraphs pitch-type linear weight (174.8). The next closest club is the Mariners with a mark of 108.0. The Rays lead baseball in changeup usage (14.7%) since 2010, as well.

When I traveled to Rays camp last week to write about the Rays’ high-fastball philosophy, I also wanted to ask longtime Rays pitching coach Jim Hickey about the club’s changeup philosophy. My assumption was that Rays coaches teach the pitch well, that it’s part of an organizational philosophy. And while Hickey and the Rays value the pitch, he said philosophy alone doesn’t explain the club’s success with the pitch from pitchers like Shields and David Price, to Alex Cobb and now Jake Odorizzi.

“It’s not so much a philosophy as it is a lineage,” Hickey said.

Hickey said what explains the club’s success with the pitch isn’t so much a product of organizational philosophy, or coaching, as it is the result of pitchers with effective changeup grips passing along their craft to teammates.

“James Shields was arguably the best pitcher I had at the time [when Hickey arrived in 2006], and what Shields had was a really, really good changeup. And without the changeup he’s probably a major-league pitcher, but he’s not a 10-year, 225-innings-a-year guy,” Hickey said. “And here comes a guy like Jeremy Hellickson, who, without his changeup, is a pretty good minor-league pitcher. What happens is guys start to mimic each other. When David Price came in, he didn’t even possess a changeup. He threw a four-seam fastball and a slider. He’s watching Shields do his thing. He’s learning a changeup. He comes back with a pretty good changeup. Just like with Cobb and Odorizzi. They kind of mimic each other and teach each other.”

And for that reason, perhaps clubs should place a premium on pitchers who possess elite pitches and are able to share and articulate their grips and practices.

Pitchers also know each other’s stories. Shields credited the changeup with saving his career, according Joe Smith to of the Tampa Bay Times:

When he “lost” his curveball in the minors, he lived off his changeup, a pitch he said can be easier to throw for a strike than a breaking ball. In one minor-league game, Shields remembers 65 of his 85 pitches were changeups. “At that point I was on the brink of release,” he said. “I was trying to do anything to be successful.”

Eno Sarris has documented the changeup grips of Cobb and Odorizzi, and it was to Cobb where Odorizzi turned when looking to add another pitch. He had struggled with more conventional changeup grips in the past. Cobb has an unusual split-changeup grip. As AL East batters know well, the pitch has excellent depth and movement.

“I could just never take enough off a changeup,” Odorizzi said. “The grips never allowed me to have that separation. So I go and try [Cobb’s grip] through a normal arm speed, and it was more about movement than speed differential. Sometimes it’s 5-6 mph differential… I need the movement.”

Owen Watson wrote about the evolution of Price’s changeup last offseason.

The Rays have handed down elite changeup grips and philosophy from one rotation arm to the next. While there was a dip in the club’s effectiveness with the pitch the last two seasons — in part because of Cobb’s injury — Rays’ pitchers have generally become more effective with the pitch since Shields arrived at the major-league level. Even after the departure of an arm like Shields, the changeup forebear who was traded after the 2012 season, the Rays have continued to changeup well:

Now, of course, Rays coaches and officials certainly encourage use of the pitch. They’ve identified pitchers with plus changeups to acquire like Jose De Leon.

“I’ve always been a huge advocate of changeups,” Hickey said. “I like changeups because it’s the easiest pitch to throw in the strike zone [amongst] non-fastballs. If you have a nasty curveball, that’s great. But if it gets to a 3-1 count, and the bases are loaded, and you don’t want to walk that guy in, you are probably not snapping off a hook. Hellickson is a great example. I remember one time it was bases loaded, it was 3-1, and he threw three consecutive changeups and struck the guy out. That’s why I like it.”

Here’s another example of Hellickson throwing a full-count changeup with the bases loaded back in 2012:

“When I personally became a huge advocate of the changeup is when the strike zone shrunk. I really think the strike zone shrunk after Camden Yards opened, and the PED era, and everybody is hitting 50 home runs,” Hickey said. “We used to joke you had to throw it in a damn shoebox. You couldn’t do that with a lot of offspeed stuff. You don’t see a lot of fastball-curveball starters. It was fastball-changeup-slider starters.”

And while the strike zone grew every year from 2008 to -15 according to PITCHf/x data, it shrunk last season.

“Another reason I’m a big advocate of it is there is nothing to identify it,” Hickey said. “A curveball might have a little hump to it, have some spin to it, a slider might have some spin to it.”

Hickey also believe it is the “easiest pitch to physically teach.”

And the Rays pitchers have taught the pitch to each other as well as any club in the sport. It makes their story less about an organizational philosophy, and more about the importance of handing down a skill from one generation to the next, having a master craftsman teach an apprentice.

A team can’t make their season in March, but they can lose their season before it begins. Last week was an awful week for the Rockies.

At the moment, the Rockies and the baseball world aren’t concerned about when Chad Bettis will pitch again. They just want him to be healthy, after the 27-year-old starting pitcher learned last week that his testicular cancer had unexpectedly spread. Bettis was declared cancer free back in January.

From Nick Groke’s story in the Denver Post:

His prognosis for a healthy recovery is good, in the 90 percent range, he said. Bettis will start chemotherapy treatment in Arizona sometime soon. And he and his wife Kristina are expecting their first child later this month.

But Bettis’s return to baseball this season is in doubt. “Optimistically? This year,” Bettis said. He was given a broad timeline of potential outcomes.

“You never know how these things will unfold. From our standpoint, we’ll have to make some adjustments,” Colorado manager Bud Black said. “We feel good about what will happen. He will keep his chin up and his chest out and press forward.”

There’s no certain timetable for Bettis’s return, but he’s likely to miss a significant amount of time.

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PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. – When Jake Odorizzi arrived to the Rays’ spring headquarters in February of 2013 following Tampa Bay’s trade of James Shields to Kansas City, he was summoned into a conference room at the Rays spring training facility, which rests in a rural and remote part of southwestern Florida. Present in a conference room were then-general manager Andrew Friedman and pitching coach Jim Hickey among others. Odorizzi remembered the meeting was informal and relaxed, but there was an important message presented, one Odorizzi had never heard in his professional career.

“They said ‘We like what you do. We like your stuff,” Odorizzi recalled to FanGraphs in the Rays’ clubhouse last week.

For years, Odorizzi had heard from coaches and others in the Kansas City and Milwaukee organizations that he needed to make significant changes to his pitching philosophy. Odorizzi felt his fastball played better in the upper reaches of the strike zone, but the Brewers, who selected Odorizzi with the 32nd overall pick in the 2008 draft, and later the Royals — where Odorizzi was traded as part of the package for Zack Greinke — informed Odorizzi he must pitch in the lower part of the zone.

“When I was with Milwaukee early on, and with Kansas City in the lower minor levels, I was never really a lower-in-the-zone type of guy,” Odorizzi said. “When I was in Milwaukee, they kind of told me in a roundabout way ‘Well, if you don’t learn to pitch down in the zone, you’ll never make it to the big leagues.’ This was in 2008, 2009 which was, shoot, nearly 10 years ago. Pitching up in the zone consistently, purposefully, was unheard of. You pitch down in the zone, you get ground balls. I could pitch down in the zone, but I had more conviction when I did not consciously think about it and let [the fastball] do its own thing, let it take off a little bit.

“It was comforting for me to finally have an organization [the Rays] say ‘We like what you’re doing.’”

Odorizzi is an interesting pitcher at an interesting point in time. In recent years, the ground ball, and pitching down in the zone, has become more and more valued as shifts have increased dramatically and proliferated, as teams try and better avoid extra-base hits. The top five ground-ball seasons on record at FanGraphs have all been posted in the past five seasons. But the philosophy has become so common that hitters like Josh Donaldson and J.D. Martinez have begun to adjust and preach a get-the-ball-in-the-air philosophy, which can be an effective counter-punch to the popular two-seam pitching approach.

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BRADENTON, Fla. – Gerrit Cole was really never himself last season, certainly never his 2015-self — his best self — when he finished fifth in NL Cy Young voting.

The trouble started early when Cole sustained an injury while working out in the offseason, rib inflammation which disrupted and delayed the beginning of spring training for him. From that point, as he tried to play catch up, his season was interrupted three times by trips to the disabled list.

After a healthy 2015 during which he reached 200 innings for the first time in his professional career — a season in which he recorded a 2.60 ERA, 2.66 FIP and 5.4 WAR — Cole landed on the disabled list on June 11 for a strained right triceps. He returned to the DL on August 25 for right elbow inflammation and was placed on the DL again on September 13 with right elbow posterior inflammation after lasting 13 batters in his return from the DL. His season ended with 116 innings of work, 2.5 WAR and a 3.88 ERA. It wasn’t until the newly married Cole was honeymooning in the Caribbean in November — Cole is married to the sister of former UCLA teammate Brandon Crawford — that he said he felt healthy again.

“I did everything I could,” Cole said. “That was the frustrating part. Scratching and clawing to find answers and not getting them. I was just determined [this offseason] to put myself in the best position I could this year. I just started attacking things from Day 1. I was pretty beat up all year, and out of shape toward the end of the year. I figured I’d take every single day we had [this offseason] and try to get better. I started with small stuff initially and built from there.”

I’ve chronicled Cole’s career closely. He was handled carefully as an amateur, not permitted to throw year round like other Southern Californian kids, in part because his father read about the Verducci Effect. While the merits of the Verducci Effect have since been refuted and challenged, the general premise that overworked young arms are at greater risk of injury is generally accepted. As a professional, Cole has explored just about everything that might keep him healthy, from wearable technology that monitors stress levels and energy usage to the ancient Eastern practice of “cupping.”

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BRADENTON, Fla. – Jose Bautista has always played with an edge.

He has often defied expectations since his age-29 breakout with the Toronto Blue Jays.

So on Wednesday, after a World Baseball Classic tune-up game for the Dominican Republic against the Pirates — the organization with whom he began his career and a club towards which he still bears some resentment — I asked Bautista outside of the visiting clubhouse at LECOM Park if his edge has heightened this spring. His doubters have grown in number as he nears the twilight of his career, and I was curious to learn how the 36-year-old plans to continue to defy odds.

A spring earlier, Bautista was reportedly seeking a six-year, $150 million contract extension. This offseason, coming off a down year, an injury-plagued year, he settled for a one-year deal with an option in his first test of free agency. That he did not have more of a market had to bruise Bautista’s ego. The market spoke to the doubts of the industry about an aging star in an era when every team uses some sort of aging model to guide decision making.

While I visited the topic of Bautista and the defiance aging curves back in January, I wanted to speak to the man himself and and better understand why he believes he a good bet to age more gracefully.

ZiPS is forecasting a modest bounceback, a 132 wRC+ and 2.7 WAR season in 117 games. PECOTA predicts a three-win campaign and .255/.374/.498 slash line in 2017, but suspects he’ll fall off to become a 1.4-win player in 2018.

Should we expect Bautista to beat those forecasts, though? Should we toss away our aging models in deference to the 21st-century athlete, as innovative Pirates trainer Todd Tomcyzk has suggested?

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Brett Lawrie isn’t quite ready to sign with a club, according to a report by Jim Bowden from Wednesday afternoon. Lawrie is still working through a soft-tissue, lower-body issue. Teams like the Blue Jays, Mets, Rays and Royals reportedly have some level of interest in Lawrie after he was released by the White Sox.

What kind of role Lawrie can expect to land is unclear. And what we can expect from a player who was once one of the more exciting prospects in the game — who was once selected 15th overall in an ESPN franchise player draft in 2012 — a player whom Bowden himself once predicted would become a batting champion, is uncertain.

After he burst on to the scene with a .293/.373/.580 slash line in a 43-game span as a rookie, Lawrie averaged two wins per season from 2012 to -14. But in what was supposed to represent the beginning of his prime years in 2015 and 2016 — i.e. his age-25 and -26 seasons — Lawrie’s performance continued to decline. Most notably, what was once a strength, his bat-to-ball skills, began to erode.

Perhaps we can pinpoint the beginning of the issue. It’s difficult to have a tougher day than Lawrie endured on April 7, 2015, for the A’s against the Rangers. Over the course of four plate appearances, all of which ended in a strikeout, Lawrie saw 12 pitches: eight sliders, three curveballs, and just one fastball. For posterity, the following footage documents those 11 breaking pitches.

His first at-bat versus Colby Lewis:

His second at-bat versus Lewis:

In the seventh, against Keone Kela:

And in the ninth, to end the game, against Neftali Feliz:

That was not the look of a player who appeared comfortable. Lawrie takes for called strikes almost all the breaking pitches in the zone. He swings, on the other hand, at all the pitches that fall out of it. He also appears to be anxious or over-hyped before triggering his swing. He’s a high-energy player. Perhaps, too high-energy.

It was just one game. But it was a most unusual performance. And it was that second game of his 2015 season that perhaps created a template for other teams to follow, which explains why Lawrie’s ability to make contact – once one of his strongest skills – has eroded as teams have attacked him with more breaking stuff each of the last two years.

Teams have increased their curveball and slider usage against Lawrie. Only 6.8% of pitches Lawrie faced in 2014 were curveballs. Last season, that rate had nearly doubled, to a career-high 11.3%. In 2014, 16.8% of pitches Lawrie saw were sliders. That jumped to a career-high 22.4% in 2015, and 19.2% last season.

Correspondingly, Lawrie’s swinging-strike rate has jumped, from 8.8% in 2014 to 11.9% in 2015 and to a career-high 13.2% last season. His contact rate with pitches in the zone has declined each year from a career-best 90.5% in 2012 with the Blue Jays, to a pedestrian 80.9% mark last season.

The book appears to be out on Lawrie, as seen in this Brooks Baseball chart:

What’s troubling about Lawrie’s career trend is that often, when we think of a hitter losing contact ability, we think — or hope, for his sake — that there ought to be a corresponding improvement in power. This is especially true for a player in his 20s. But not only has Lawrie seen his ability to make contact erode, his isolated slugging has declined from its 2014 level.

I asked Sean Dolinar for help in researching hitters who have had two-year contract trends like Lawrie, combined with loss of power. Among the sample that includes all qualified hitters since 1950, Lawrie has the ninth-greatest increase in strikeout rate.

Of the top-12 players here, Jones produced four total wins over the next four seasons, the final four of his career. Morneau remains unsigned this spring. Napoli’s struggles continued into 2015, though he enjoyed a 34-homer season last year on a one-year deal with Cleveland. McGwire’s final season was in 2001. Kubel last played in the majors in 2014.

Of course, all of them were all over 30.

Some good news for Lawrie: Clark rebounded to post five consecutive seasons of wRC+ 129 or better.

As for the 30-and-under crowd, Langerhans never again received more than 139 plate appearances in a season. Weis was a reserve middle infielder who finished with a 61 wRC+ for his career. Kemp received just 59 more plate appearances in the majors. Johnson is one modest success story: he went on to post four seasons of wRC+s 108 over his career.

Two other significant success stories that suffered similar contact collapses include Dave Henderson, who rebounded at age 29 and posted three 125 wRC+ seasons through age 32, and Mike Stanley, who improved in his age-30 season and produced seven straight seasons of 117 wRC+ or better. But they did not suffer isolated slugging losses.

Lawrie’s No. 1 PECOTA comp is Ryne Sandberg who, after a eight- and six-win seasons early in his career, went through an age 26-27 lull, before entering a five-year peak.

So there’s some hope mixed in with some concern.

In examining Baseball Reference’s top similarity scores for batters comparable to Lawrie through age 26, there are some troubling comps, like that of the most similar hitter, Gene Freese, who enjoyed only one more season (1961) with a starting job in the majors. Another, Russ Davis, produced a 92 wRC+ for his career and 0.0 WAR over over 612 career games.

Logan Forsythe and Justin Turner are two interesting names, appearing as the No. 5 and No. 6 most similar batters to Lawrie, though Turner needed to reinvent his swing to become a star. And perhaps Lawrie needs to make a significant swing adjustment to cut down on his pre-swing movement. The most encouraging name on the list of most similar batters through age 26 is Edwin Encarnacion, who posted a .790 OPS and 102 OPS+ with the Reds from 2005 to -09 and who has since recorded a .850 OPS, 124 OPS+, earning three All-Star invites in the process.

Beyond the bat, Lawrie offers defensive versatility: he’s been an above-average defender for his career (32 defensive runs saved) at third base and plays an acceptable second base. But it’s the bat that will make or break his career. History shows of those players who have endured a similar erosion of contact skills without a gain in power many never recover, though some do. There are even some stars in the group. While Lawrie’s collapse is a bit unusual, there are likely multiple career trajectories he could follow dependent upon health, adjustments and opportunity.

I’d like to believe this guy still exists:

But that walkoff homer from his rookie year is beginning to seem like a long time ago. While there’s evidence of similar players turning around their careers, Lawrie must show the league he has the ability to punch back.