Coaching Matt Bush

Once someone who’s erred has done his time, apologized, and satisfied society institutionally, there’s the matter of going on with life. This is true with every crime, however horrible, and the things Matt Bush did were horrible. He’s served his time — 39 months — and hopes we can forgive him. But that’s almost of secondary concern to him, at this point: life, and living, remains.

And Matt Bush, now perhaps the closer for the Texas Rangers, is doing his best to be a good baseball player because that’s the path in front of him. He believes any success he experiences in that role is due to the help he’s gotten. “Our pitching coaches are great, man, really great,” he suggested multiple times in our talk before a game against the Athletics this week.

It was his coaching staff that decided what his role would be. That noise about stretching him out and starting? “That was just offseason chatter that the media got a hold of,” said Bush, noting the difficulties of “going from a position like shortstop to starting pitcher.”

A quick scan at two-way players confirms how rare it is to transation from position player to starting pitcher. You have to go back to Hal Jeffcoat in 1957 to find a player who was a position player in the major leagues first, and then started as many as five games in a subsequent season.

Of course, Bush never made it to the majors as a shortstop, but he was sure he wasn’t going to be a starter. “Starting is something I feel like you need to do in high school and college,” the Rangers reliever said. “You can’t just jump into starting at a high level. It’s a lot to ask of the arm. Guys arms who are starting have been conditioned since childhood.”

It was his coaching staff that pointed out the maybe he should throw more curves than sliders this year. “The curve is best based on the numbers,” Bush said of results he discussed with his pitching coach, Doug Brocail. “The slider gets away from their bats but there’s a little more contact and I don’t always want that.”

In the early going, that’s fluctuated some and he’s actually throwing the slider more after another appearance. But it might also be a result of a focus on the fastball, which is his best pitch. It’s got top ten velocity among qualified relievers, paired with top-twenty spin rate (minimum 20 four-seamers thrown), and an extra inch or so of ride that has played well up in the zone, so Bush has gradually thrown it there more over time. Guess who coached him in that direction.

Recently, some shoulder soreness has slowed him. Not literally — his velocity is still there, he wanted to point out — but figuratively. “A little bit of a weightlifting injury,” said Bush. “I was maxing out on a bench press a few years ago… I had a little bit of heaviness feeling up top at the end of the year last year and had a cortisone shot.” When it lingered over the offseason, the pitcher had another shot.

His pitching coaches once again hope to help him through this. They told Bush he was “leaking.” He tried to explain: “I was falling down the rubber and my delivery wasn’t sound. All about the timing. I started leaning down the mound, and if you do that, your arm drags and you rely on all that arm strength. I worked on my front leg, when it comes up. I was straight up before, and as I would come up, I would start going forward down the mound instead of coming up first and staying back. Now I’m staying back, and getting my knee a little higher and back.”

Maybe we can see it. He demonstrated that he was taking his front knee back towards his back shoulder, higher and further back, so that his arm would match up better with his footfall, so focus on his front knee if you can see it.

Here he is late last year in Seattle:

Here he is in his last appearance in Seattle:

If it’s hard for us to see, that might be because we don’t have the right viewpoint, or that we are talking about inches. Or because we aren’t pitching coaches. Thankfully, Bush has good ones, and he ended on that note. “People always told me my mechanics are great, you’re perfect,” he shrugged. “It happens in pitching. You fall out of it a little bit. I fell out of a little bit, and the pitching coaches here are great, and they pointed it out.”