Port Saint Lucie, Florida: Last October, pitching staff members around the Mets organization began their offseason regimen by changing into their skivvies.
The Mets dispatched as many of their pitchers as they could to participate in a 20-pitch bullpen session at the organization’s pitching lab, which is housed at the spring training facilities at Clover Park, as the professional seasons came to an end. Additionally, having a lot of clothing in the way makes it impossible to obtain the best motion-captured data. Pitchers had to toss while only wearing their helmets and compression shorts.
“Throwing a baseball in my underwear is weird enough,” said Dominic Hamel, “and now you’ve got all these sensors on me.”
“You feel vulnerable,” reliever Drew Smith joked.
Wait, the hat stays on?
“They don’t want to glue the dots in your hair,” said right-hander Eric Orze.
The pitching lab, which debuted in June of last year at the Mets’ spring training complex at Clover Park, is the most obvious indication of the team’s increased investment in analytic technology. The Mets fell more and farther behind a rapidly changing business over fifteen years. The lab is a long-overdue step in the right direction.
“Basically it’s one tunnel,” righty reliever Grant Hartwig explained. “Force plates in the mound, force plates in the box, cameras everywhere.”
“It looks,” Triple-A starter Mike Vasil said, “like a pitcher’s playground.”
The result of a bullpen session is essentially a silhouette of a pitcher’s delivery, with the force plates measuring the transfer of power through that motion.
“They’re able to see everything with that — how your force is into the ground when you’re pushing off, if you’re coming up on your toe a little bit, if your back knee is being encaved,” said Christian Scott, the Mets’ top pitching prospect. “There’s a lot of factors that go into (a delivery), and you don’t obviously want to reinvent the wheel but if you can maximize something you want to do that.”
After a while, the gamers were given a file including information about how every body part moved throughout the delivery.
“Basically the numbers we dove into were just kinematic sequence,” said Hartwig, “the timing of everything, whether the arm’s getting out on time, how we’re transferring energy, if there’s a lack of efficiency anywhere.”
“I like to know the whys and the hows,” Orze said. “You have some science behind why you need to fix this in your delivery or where you’re lacking in mobility, strength, force output.”
“It’s cool seeing the dots on people and you guess who they are,” said the righty Hamel. “Everyone has a different kinetic chain. Seeing how it all builds and everyone’s peak force and peak torque, it’s really cool.”
Longer-term data collecting continues to be the major objective, as the Mets stated when the facility first opened. Pitching coach Jeremy Hefner once stated, “Data is always comparison.” With a greater collection of motion-captured deliveries, the Mets might eventually be able to draw more accurate conclusions about what works and what does not for pitchers with similar skills.
That is not to say that players did not gain any useful insights about mechanics from flinging in the lab. Smith’s experience in the lab supported his choice to resume using his previous distribution method.
“I learned that what I was doing last year just wasn’t it,” he said. “I threw my old slider in the lab, and we realized this is what I need to be. That gave me a template to work on all offseason.”
What did the data uncover? Each pitcher solved a different mystery:
Vasil: “What they did really well was taking the lab and applying it to my offseason training and throwing program. One of the things was how to load my back side a little bit differently and use my weight transfer on the mound. Is it going to make me throw a couple ticks harder? Potentially. Is it going to raise my floor where my average velo stays during the year when it’s at its peak? More than likely that will happen. That’s huge for me.”
Scott: “I was able to be more productive because they could see something in my lower body. Simply backing up a little bit more, occasionally inverting my ankle, other times not. Since we threw the entire bullpen in there, how can we improve consistency and identify what changed from throw one to pitch twenty?
Hartwig: “The biggest thing for me was just getting my posture a little bit more upright. I want to dip my upper half, and when I dip my upper half, it causes my head to come out a little bit. Obviously, if you’re moving your head, that window for error becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. We’re just trying to create more range for error.”
Lefty reliever Josh Walker: “It is large and displays how your weight is transmitted through force plates in the mound. My mistake was transferring too slowly and not covering my entire front side, which is where I could have been more explosive. To mimic my desired movement on the mound, I will use it into all of my movement preparation and medicine ball practice.
Orze: “A big thing for me had always been my upper body shifting forward early. The more I was doing this, the more it was like trying to muscle up and use my arm, so my shoulder was getting tired, my triceps were sore day-to-day. So seeing that and understanding there’s health benefits to fixing that mechanically, but also it’s just something that consistently I have to make a change to create a better habit, and it’ll make me a better pitcher.”
In order to gauge how pitchers’ mechanics differ at the beginning and conclusion of a season, the objective is for as many pitchers as possible to throw in the lab once more this spring. Reliever Reed Garrett remarked, “If things are going a little wrong, that way you have your baseline to go back and look at it.”
It is crucial to have coaches go through the statistics with each player, going into as much or as little detail as the athlete want because it might be daunting.
“It’s all good information,” Smith said. “You just have to pick and choose what works for you and what you want to work on.”
Employees of the Mets have, thus far, minimized the immediate influence that the lab can have in favor of what it can become in the future. However, pitchers from all throughout the organization value the investment—both what it says about the organization’s interest in them and in the lab.
“They’re giving us all the resources we can have,” Walker said. “It’s just up to us as players to take advantage of that.”
(Top photo of Drew Smith: Gregory Fisher / USA Today)
Leave a Reply