Three Executives on Developing the Next Kyle Hendricks

Kyle Hendricks announced his retirement as the GM Meetings were getting underway earlier this week, which presented a good opportunity to get learned perspectives on how “The Professor” pitched effectively at baseball’s highest level despite a fastball that rarely exceeded 90 mph. Moreover, it provided a chance to ask if teams should be trying to develop more pitchers like Hendricks, rather than focusing so heavily on power arms.

Three executives at the just-completed meetings struck me as likely to have especially good insight into those subjects. Here is what they had to say about both the Dartmouth College product, and how difficult it is to develop pitchers who can succeed in the way that he did.

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JED HOYER — CHICAGO CUBS

Hendricks spent 11 of his 12 seasons with the Chicago Cubs, all with Hoyer serving as the team’s general manager or president of baseball operations. The first question I posed to the longtime exec was this: To what extent can, or should, teams try to develop more pitchers like Hendricks?

“That’s a great question,” replied Hoyer. “I think you’ll wait a long time before you get the next Kyle Hendricks. His command was exceptional. His changeup was exceptional. If you go back and look at his strikeout rates — I don’t know exactly when it fell down a little bit — but I would say that for six, seven years of his career, he wasn’t a power pitcher in terms of strikeout rates, but he wasn’t a finesse pitcher either. Along with not walking guys, he struck guys out. He just did it in a different way.

“Developing guys with exceptional command isn’t usually a goal, but I don’t want to minimize how talented Kyle was,” Hoyer added. “It’s hard to develop that. It’s going to be a while before another guy has that kind of career without breaking 90 very often.”

Missing bats is optimal, but what if you can pitch to contact while also suppressing power? That could likewise be a recipe for success.

“The goal is run prevention, right?” Hoyer replied to that idea. “However you come into it. But it’s easier to prevent runs, in theory, if you take the luck out of the game. Strikeouts take the luck out of the game. When you’re inducing soft contact, some soft contact ends up being hits. It would be very difficult… if Kyle was striking out 16% of batters early in his career, I don’t think he would have had the success he did. He was in the low 20s [for strikeout rate] for awhile, and at that level, he was very successful. I think it’s very hard to have completely sustained success when you’re not missing any bats. You have to be able to miss bats and get strikeouts, and take the randomness out of the batted ball.”

Even so, I noted that there have been pitchers who were able to suppress power without having a lot of swing-and-miss.

“Normally guys who have a really good sinker, or an exceptional four-seam that gets a ton of popups,” Hoyer said to my old-school, pitch-to-contact counter. “But you’re going to have to live at the extremes if you’re going to suppress power consistently while not missing bats.

“Again, I don’t want to minimize Kyle’s talent,” he continued. “Kyle’s ability to repeat his delivery, to read hitters, to pitch to a game plan — to do all those things — was really exceptional. So, absolutely, pitchers can succeed the way he did. But I think his skill set was as rare as someone who throws over 100.”

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BRANDON GOMES — LOS ANGELES DODGERS

I asked Gomes, general manager for the Dodgers, the same initial question I had posed to Hoyer.

“It’s not as binary as that,” answered Gomes, whose team has advanced a lot of power arms to the majors in recent seasons. “I think what Kyle was able to do… there aren’t many pitchers in the world who have that level of command and finger dexterity. There is something innate in the ability to command the baseball that way, and to manipulate it. We would all love to have the guys who can command the ball like that, but I’m not sure there are many of them. I think it’s easier to teach people how to throw hard than it is to teach them how to command the ball like he did — the consistency of movement and knowing exactly what it’s going to do. Kyle was able to shape his changeup in different ways. That is a unique skill that we kind of discount.

“Teaching command is something we don’t do very well as an industry,” continued Gomes. “We just teach them to miss bats. Command skills, I think, are something innate that we could help improve, especially in a world where there are only so many bullets in your arm to practice. But it’s a steeper curve to get to that level of command than there is to teach somebody to throw really hard.”

Is it too difficult to develop a high level of command while also training velocity?

“It’s harder to do, right?” Gomes said of training command. “There is that delicate balance. If you throw hard and then you take a step back to get better command, and the command isn’t quite good enough, and the stuff isn’t quite good enough, that’s not a very good pitcher. In an ideal world everybody is [Yoshinobu] Yamamoto, with great stuff and 80 command, but not many people can do that, so you have to figure out the skill that you want to lean into. And it’s harder to lean into the elite command guys, because it’s harder to teach, and more of an innate skill.”

As I did with Hoyer, I suggested that the ability to suppress power could be a recipe for success for pitchers who are short on swing-and-miss.

“It’s a matter of how you get to that level,” replied Gomes, who pitched for the Tampa Bay Rays from 2011-2015. “Limiting and suppressing slug, the ability to do damage to the baseball… there are certainly some guys who do it far better than others. It just takes a little while to be like, ‘OK, I actually believe this.’ If a guy coming up through the minor leagues is doing that, but not missing a lot of bats, you don’t know how it’s going to play at the next level. Some guys can pull it off, but some guys may not because they’re just not unique enough to do it. What are you willing to place your bet on? That’s the challenge we have as an industry, leaning into the ‘this guy limits contact with elite command.’ We really like those guys, but again, how much can we lean on that in the major leagues?”

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CHRIS YOUNG — TEXAS RANGERS

Chris Young’s perspective on the subject at hand is flavored by two-fold knowledge. Prior to becoming the president of baseball operations for the Texas Rangers, the erstwhile Princeton Tiger pitched 13 big league seasons. Moreover, he was similar to Hendricks in that he got by on guile more than on gas.

I began by asking Young about one of his club’s promising pitching prospects, 23-year-old right-hander David Davalillo.

“Under the radar,” Young said of the Ocumare del Tuy, Venezuela native whom the Rangers signed as an international free agent in 2022. “He has really unique characteristics. Competitor. Fighter. Really good feel for his slider and spinning the ball. He had a great year and has put himself on the radar.”

The youngster definitely had a great year. Pitching between High-A Hub City and Double-A Frisco, he forged a 2.44 ERA, a 2.81 FIP, and a 29.6% strikeout rate over 107 innings. Those numbers came despite Davalillo featuring a fastball that Eric Longenhagen assigned a 45 present and 50 projected value on the scouting scale earlier this summer.

“The velo is lower, but it plays up a little bit,” Young said of the prospect’s low-90s heater. “We can also add to that. Velo is something where, as guys get older, you can see it tick up. But he’s proven that he doesn’t need elite velo to have success.”

Which brings us to Hendricks. How difficult is it to develop guys with a skill set similar to his or that of the newly retired right-hander?

“That’s a great question, because stuff kind of gets you in the door,” Young replied. “You need to have something that opens up eyes for scouts and gets you into that door. Once you’re in the door, if there are characteristics, or pitchability, that make a player unique, then you don’t have to chase the stuff as much.

“To your point on guys like Kyle or me, you have to be able to really manipulate the ball, or command the ball, throw it where you want, to have success,” he added. “Stuff gives you a margin for error, but it doesn’t guarantee success. When you have the combination of both — pitchability and stuff — those are the elite guys, like [Jacob] deGrom.”

As for whether the qualities that he and Hendricks possessed can be developed, his response was more bullish than the thoughts expressed by Gomes and Hoyer.

“They can definitely be developed,” the pitcher-turned-executive told me. “We see it a lot with guys who haven’t pitched much, or they’re late bloomers and great movers, they’re athletic and just naturally take to pitching. They can definitely be developed, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.”