A humble blogger makes their case for the Giants using resources to improve their pitching situation.
In the aftermath of yesterday’s news that Bryan Price had stepped down as the pitching coach of the San Francisco Giants, Susan Slusser posted to Twitter/X that she’s “hearing” current assistant pitching coach J.P. Martinez will be elevated to the lead role. Hopefully, this opens the door for Baseball Ops to staff up a new pitching lab like they had when Martinez joined the organization in 2020.
If you’re a regular reader of the site, then you’ve likely noted in the comments calls for the team to bring back the role of Director of Pitching, something that’s been vacant since Brian Bannister’s departure last year. A combination of that plus the hiring of Bryan Price — whose heyday was before the advent of Statcast — put the Giants behind the curve a bit in terms of industry trends and perspectives.
The team’s success on the pitching front from 2020-2023 are self-evident. Their 3.72 staff FIP led MLB. Their 3.81 team ERA was 6th. It’s not so much that they “fixed” a bunch of pitchers like Drew Smyly, Kevin Gausman, Anthony DeSclafani, and Sean Manaea so much as they identified either tweaks that could be made to deliveries or pitches that could be adjusted and become the focus of an arsenal. Delivery changes tend to happen in the offseason and, at least in the past, through third party vendors like Driveline.
But teams like the Giants have started bringing a lot of that machinery in-house, developing their own methodology and hiring their own coaches. Gabe Kapler was one of the people staffing the lab. It’s reasonable to conclude that a lot of that infrastructure stayed in place even as the Humm Baby coaches came in, but it’s unclear how much of that was utilized. Certainly, Sean Hjelle’s uptick in velocity and competitive pitches suggests a marriage between the two methodologies or at the very least, some of that infrastructure got used.
There was also the development of Mason Black, Landen Roupp, Hayden Birdsong, and between last year and this year, Ryan Walker’s polish. Their team ERA of 4.10 was just 19th but it carried a 3.80 FIP. So, it was a slip to be sure in just a 1-year sample, but we also know that they had the Blake Snell and Alex Cobb situations upending a lot of the numbers and pressing into service pitchers who weren’t quite ready.
Of course, balanced against the success and the Snell-Cobb excuses, there were the notable setbacks for Camilo Doval — who was on the verge of entering “greatest closer in Giants history” but is now someone who has fallen off so much that his major league prospects look cloudy — and Kyle Harrison, who has been relegated to “back of the rotation”-type by most of the industry. A ridiculous label to give a 22-year old with just 159 major league innings under his belt, but that just means there’s an opportunity for growth.
We know that in order for Farhan Zaidi to pay for the $250 million major league payroll he had to reallocate the Baseball Ops budget. So, leaving spots in the pitching development program vacant to help pay for all of the team’s obligations makes some sense, but on the other hand, it really does seem like the team planned for the pitching development it had from 2020-2023 rather than project what kind of development it was going to get in 2024 with a diminished staff. A confidence that the program could capably patch over holes at the major league level. We knew right away that plan had failed, of course, and we were wondering in the offseason how that would even work.
An uninformed conclusion I’ve reached is that the minor league development process is refined and able to coach the players up but the major league coaching wasn’t able to tweak or sustain it against actual major league competition and a surfeit of injuries.
So, perhaps there is a disconnect — or, at least, there was. J.P. Martinez has been here since the team had a bigger pitching development imprint. He knows the technology being used to coach and train and he has an understanding of modern methodology. Logan Webb was “delighted” that he survived the changeover from the Kapler staff to the Melvin staff.
While there remains a stubborn and bellicose sector of fans who shout down anything that pairs the game with technology, it’s simply the case that this is how the game is played. These fans were able to lobby the franchise to shutdown the bullpen games and even got some policy language limiting platoons, but I’m hoping “funding the pitching lab” isn’t in their party platform this offseason and gives fans like me an opportunity to make the case that the Giants should staff up and fund the lab.
This is what the best teams do.
After Steve Cohen hired him to run the Mets, one of David Stearns’ first acts was to recreate the successful pitching lab he had built in Milwaukee. When the New York Post asked for a tour back in Spring Training, Stearns “laughed” because “the Mets do not want rivals knowing what they know. Around 10 teams are believed to have labs, including the Yankees and Stearns’ former team.” I suspect the Giants are one of these teams, too, if only because it would be a little nutty to build a state-of-the-art development complex at Papago Park and not build a pitching lab there or elsewhere in the organization.
The game has changed and J.P. Martinez is closer to the pitching coach teams have than Dave Righetti. To show the value of the Giants having a fully operational pitching lab, here’s an excerpt from a Tyler Kepner post that went up this past Spring Training (The Athletic sub required):
Few pitchers could throw like Webb if they tried. The story of his transformation is well known: After struggling as a rookie while throwing four-seamers from a high arm slot in 2019, Webb learned from a coach, Brian Bannister, to throw two-seam sinkers from a lower angle.
He’s improved ever since, with a sinker/changeup/slider mix that produced a major-league-best 62.1 percent ground-ball rate last season. Bannister, now the senior pitching advisor for the White Sox, said Webb’s stuff “moves as late as anybody in the world right now,” and comes from a right hand that stays supinated — turned slightly inward, toward the plate – instead of pronated.
Every pitcher pronates his wrist, Bannister said, but very few do so after releasing the pitch, like Webb. The seams hook the air and pull his sinkers down and away, the way the rudder of a boat leaves a wake.
“It’s one of those things that sounds backwards, but it’s actually like a genetic advantage,” Bannister said. “So when you’re trying to teach other guys, their wrist might be normal and therefore they can’t do what Logan can do.”
Martinez is quoted in the same article and sounds like he’s speaking the same language:
“The more we can fit grips and pitch types to how guys already want to move,” said J.P. Martinez, the Giants’ assistant pitching coach, “the more success we’ve seen.”
And none of this should be construed as a diminishment of Ryan Vogelsong’s involvement as a roving instructor. For one thing, he was hired by the last front office. The idea that all coaching is just data coaching is absurd. It’s about fusing the two approaches to help the players achieve peak performance. Maybe he could become the next Director of Pitching?
Bringing back the pitching lab at full strength seems like the obvious way to prepare the organization for long-term success. While the position player group has struggled to generate a new wave of superstars, the pitching group doesn’t have to be quite so focused. I want the Giants to have super pitching. Or have a SEAL Team of pitching gurus. I want them to use their money advantage to stockpile arms.
They could take the Dodgers’ approach and coach up only to burn out dozens of young arms with high velocity or they could coach up a group of average to average-plus guys. It is not easy to find average major leaguers, and making them isn’t as simple as a pitching lab, but with Oracle Park being the final destination for Giants arms, its not the path of least resistance, it’s the path of most importance.