PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — For pitchers throughout the Mets organization last fall, the first step in their offseason program was stripping down to their skivvies.
As the season concluded at each professional level, the Mets sent as many of their pitchers as possible to throw a 20-pitch bullpen session in the organization’s pitching lab, located at the spring training facility at Clover Park. And, well, to get the best motion-captured data, you can’t have a lot of clothes in the way. So pitchers stripped down to their compression shorts and their hats to throw.
Advertisem*nt
“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.
Opened last June at the Mets’ spring training facility at Clover Park, the pitching lab is the most tangible sign of the club’s deeper investment in analytic technology. For a decade and a half, the Mets lagged further and further behind an industry swiftly evolving. The lab is an overdue step toward catching up.
“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.”
Eric Orze checked out the lab during the offseason and said he learned more about the ‘whys and the hows’ of his craft. (Jeff Roberson / Associated Press)
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.”
The players then eventually received a file full of data on how each part of their body moved through 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.”
Advertisem*nt
“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.”
The primary goal, as the Mets said when the lab opened, remains longer-term data collection. “Data is always comparison,” pitching coach Jeremy Hefner said, and a larger library of motion-captured deliveries should eventually permit the Mets to make better, more informed comparisons about what works and what doesn’t for similar pitchers.
That doesn’t mean there weren’t applicable insights around mechanics that players received from throwing in the lab. For Smith, his time in the lab reaffirmed his decision to switch back to his old delivery.
“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: “They were able to see something in my lower half to help me be more efficient. Just staying back a little bit more with my ankle coming inverted at some points and other times not. We threw a whole bullpen in there, so being able to see from pitch 1 to 20, what was different and how can we work on the consistency with it?”
Advertisem*nt
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’s big with the force plates in the mound telling you how your weight is transferring. Mine was transferring late and not getting everything over my front side where I could be more explosive. So I’ll take that and integrate it into all my movement prep, my medicine ball work, everything to simulate how I want to move on the mound.”
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.”
The plan is for as many pitchers as possible to throw in the lab again this spring, to get a read on how their mechanics look at the start of a season compared to the end. “If things are going a little wrong, that way you have your baseline to go back and look at it,” said reliever Reed Garrett.
The data can be overwhelming, so having coaches walk through it with each player — diving into as much or as little detail as the player wants — is critical.
“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.”
To this point, Mets staffers have downplayed the here-and-now impact the lab can have, focusing more on what it could be in the future. But pitchers throughout the organization appreciate the investment — the organization’s investment in the lab, and what it says about its investment in them.
“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)
Tim Britton is a senior writer for The Athletic covering the New York Mets. He has covered Major League Baseball since 2009 and the Mets since 2018. Prior to joining The Athletic, he spent seven seasons on the Red Sox beat for the Providence Journal. He has also contributed to Baseball Prospectus, NBC Sports Boston, MLB.com and Yahoo Sports. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBritton
