The New York Mets’ best hope for avoiding another 2023 just opened up shop at their spring training complex in St. Lucie, Fla. It’s not Sidd Finch or Doc Gooden; it’s not a player or a coach or a person at all.
It’s their new pitching lab.
More than anything, the Mets’ 2023 season has been taken under by poor pitching. Through Sunday, their starters rank 16th in the majors in ERA, and their relievers rank 22nd. For an organization that prides itself on starting pitching, for a team paying out the two largest salaries in the sport to a pair of starters bound to be bronzed in Cooperstown, it’s been a bewildering disappointment.
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The lab, which officially opened at the start of June, aims to change that.
Occupying the space previously reserved for Barwis Physical Therapy, the lab, according to team officials and coaches, contains a single mound with force plates that can precisely measure the way a pitcher’s mechanics work and how he generates power. (The lab contains a batter’s box with force plates to measure the same things for hitters.) The hope is that a better understanding of a pitcher’s mechanics translates to better workout plans, better pitch design, and better health. The plan is to have as many pitchers as possible, both from the minors and majors, visit the lab shortly after the season to help establish a more refined and tailored offseason agenda.
“Every body, every movement, every delivery all has its own little uniqueness to it based on the physiological composition of the athlete,” general manager Billy Eppler said. “So we’re trying to capture everybody’s individual thumbprint.”
The lab can serve multiple purposes. The Mets hope it better allows them to get the most out of pitchers already in the organization.
“You want to coach from fact and be as objective as you can with accuracy,” said Ben Hansen, the Mets’ director of performance technology. “The lab’s critical. It’s a place for us to capture gold-standard data on a player and how they move and how they perform.”
Perhaps more importantly, though, it can over time help teach the team exactly how to do that. What factors in a player’s delivery are predictive of improvement in velocity, in stuff, in location? Which method proved over time to get the most out of the player?
“Really we want to get these guys under the microscope and get the highest quality of data possible and use that to help inform our decision-making process and evaluations,” said Eric Jagers, the club’s director of pitching development.
“When you can use extreme high frame rate markers and cameras and just capture movements down to a level that the human eye can’t capture, you’re just going to have more evidence behind your instruction,” Eppler said. “It allows you a little bit of experimentation but more guided experimentation.”
“We have a lot of smart people in this organization,” pitching coach Jeremy Hefner said, “and we may be able to find something within all of this that maybe someone else doesn’t have and create a competitive advantage.”
The truth is, however, that for the moment the Mets are mainly trying to mitigate a competitive disadvantage. “Best in class” is the phrase they like to use when describing their goal. They know they’re not there yet.
“I think I’ve been able to at least help some guys and see some things that we can adapt or change a little bit just from my experience in the game and being with Houston, and hopefully all these things add up and it helps,” Justin Verlander told The Athletic in July, before he was traded back to the Astros.
Verlander’s “constructive criticism” of the Mets’ use of analytics and technology, as he termed it earlier this month, may have made waves among the fan base, but it was an obvious fact to anyone in the sport. One team source chuckled at the idea of comparing the Mets to the Astros. New York, he said, was until recently several years behind the middle of the pack in adopting the latest trends in pitching development, to say nothing of how far behind it was behind industry vanguards like Houston and Tampa Bay.
Even Steve Cohen made that clear.
“Other teams had pitching labs six, seven, eight years ago,” the owner said in June. “And so we’re behind.”
“If it’s important to the owner,” Hefner said back in the spring, “it should be important to us.”
In October 2015, the National League Championship Series stood as a proxy war between competing developmental philosophies. In one dugout, the Chicago Cubs had used a spate of high draft picks on position players, complementing that core with starters in free agency and the trade market. In the other, the Mets had developed their starters in the minors while adding offensive pieces externally.
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The series was no contest.
New York steamrolled Chicago in four games, yielding a total of eight runs and leading after 32 of the series’ 36 innings.
That autumn was the culmination of a remarkable run of pitching development for the franchise. Matt Harvey debuted in 2012, Zack Wheeler in 2013, Jacob deGrom in 2014 and Noah Syndergaard and Steven Matz in 2015. We can quibble about how encompassing “homegrown” is when Wheeler and Syndergaard were acquired externally as well-regarded prospects. Nevertheless, over a four-year stretch, the Mets rolled out a quintet of starters who would combine to make more than 650 starts, win more than 230 games, receive Cy Young votes in eight seasons (with two wins) and accumulate more than 90 wins above replacement (according to FanGraphs) for the franchise.
That era officially ended when deGrom, the best of them, signed with the Rangers last winter.
Whatever forces produced so many quality starters in a short period of time dissipated swiftly for New York, and the story of the 2023 season can’t be told without diving into this specific problem. The franchise’s best homegrown starter who has debuted since that pennant-winning season is David Peterson, who has produced 2.6 WAR over four years. He hasn’t held down a regular spot in the rotation since the summer of 2021.
Peterson’s WAR ranks 68th among homegrown starters who have debuted since 2016 with the team that signed or drafted them. In the same time period, the Guardians and Dodgers have produced five homegrown starters apiece better than Peterson; Atlanta, Houston, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and San Diego have produced four each. The Rangers, Nationals and Diamondbacks are the only other teams producing as little from homegrown starters as the Mets over the last eight seasons — and they’ve all at least traded for young, controllable pitching (Dane Dunning in Texas, Josiah Gray and MacKenzie Gore in Washington, Zac Gallen in Arizona).
The lack of legitimate internal options is what forced the Mets to pay exorbitant prices for the likes of Verlander and Max Scherzer; the lack of any game-changing pitching prospects on the immediate horizon made it logical to trade those arms and set the club’s sights of serious contention further into the future.
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It’s not just starting pitchers, of course. The Mets entered last winter needing to replace nearly their entire bullpen, with nary a homegrown option as part of the mix. Seth Lugo is the only homegrown reliever to debut since that 2015 pennant who has produced even a single win above replacement for New York. Robert Gsellman is second on the list, and Colin Holderman is third. Holderman threw 17 2/3 innings for the club before being traded last summer.
“When we look at our pitching today,” Cohen said in June, “we’ve had to go out in free agency and get pitchers the last couple years. We haven’t really developed that many pitchers, which is actually pretty shocking. We’re certainly capable of doing it. We may not have had the right infrastructure in place.”
“You see the successful teams in our game: They’re churning out four-win starters and two-win relievers,” Hefner said. “If you’re doing that, you’re really setting yourself up for success.”
In Cohen’s first year of ownership, in 2021, the Mets thought they hit the ground running. They spent the spring discussing their blueprint for “a pitching powerhouse.” They made hires to expand their staff, all with the aim of constructing a pitching lab in St. Lucie that would be state-of-the-art.
By the end of the season, almost every one of those new hires had departed the organization. The lab hadn’t gotten off the ground. Toward the end of that season, one team source lamented the lack of progress.
“We need to be realistic with how far away we are,” he said.
That offseason, the club signed Scherzer for three years, ostensibly to bridge the gap to the next generation of pitchers.
This isn’t to say the Mets haven’t made strides of late. Both Hefner and Jagers pointed to a developmental foundation put down in 2021, even as the initial goals had to be postponed. And even before Cohen bought the team, the Mets started implementing more advanced technology at home, on the road, and at their minor-league parks, coming around on camera technology like Edgertronic, TrackMan and KinaTrax to better understand how pitches work. (Edgertronic cameras shoot as many as 500 frames per second, allowing pitchers to pinpoint how they release their pitches and tinker with that release to increase spin. TrackMan follows the pitch’s entire path to the catcher’s glove, measuring how the spin and movement work. KinaTrax provides markerless motion capture, helping break down a pitcher’s mechanics.)
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The Mets have used data gleaned from these sources to inform pitch design, teaching their pitchers how to develop more ride on four-seam fastballs or sweep on their sliders. It has become nearly impossible to talk to a professional pitcher about his repertoire without delving into numbers provided by TrackMan and the like.
“A lot of it was just learning what the numbers mean and how to create what we deem are good pitches or good stuff,” said reliever Grant Hartwig, a developmental success story given his rise from being undrafted in 2021 to the majors in less than two years. “Analytics for me were more so, how am I going to use my stuff? Where’s the best spot to throw it? We get heat maps on where to throw our stuff and how successful we can be using it there. I use that as an outline.”
Kyle Driscoll, one of the holdovers from the previous attempt at a lab who now serves as the assistant pitching coordinator and Triple-A pitching coach, has been an integral part of interpreting the data and communicating it well to players.
“It’s in a better spot now than when I came in,” said Peterson of the club’s pitching development. “There are a lot of pitchers who are very analytical and all they want to talk about is the numbers. And there are a lot of guys who couldn’t care less about what the iPad says. To have a guy who can relate to both makes for a really good candidate. … It’s almost like I see Hef in him when I go down there.”
Driscoll worked a lot with Hartwig, telling him to try throwing his sinker up in the zone — a counterintuitive notion. But his had a movement profile that suggested it would play well there; it has, allowing him to make his major-league debut earlier this summer.
“The drive for me in the offseason was not more so developing strength in the weight room, it was pitch design,” Hartwig said in the spring. “It got me a little bit more excited to go in there. Let’s go into the lab today and figure out what we can do, how we can move the ball, how we can shape it.”
Just as important as providing the technology is providing the proper interpretation of it, which is why people like Driscoll are critical to the Mets’ future. The organization has added significantly to its pitching development staff over the last few years. Jagers and Hansen aren’t just new hires in their first year with the organization; they’re both in positions that didn’t previously exist. As the director of pitching development, Jagers oversees the whole department. Hansen directs a new “performance technology” division that will help run the lab. Kyle Rogers was hired to be the “pitching and performance integration coordinator.”
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Both Jagers and Rogers had honed their skills at Driveline Baseball, which has spent much of the last 15 years altering the sport’s methods of pitcher development. Hansen was hired away from Intel after previous stints with the Brewers and White Sox.
“This is the chance to build something really special,” Hansen said. “Having the ability to do that was really tempting, and now we’re here.”
The Mets have spent so much of the last decade losing ground in the sport’s analytics arms race, and the result is as tangible on the field as ever. The overdue opening of the lab in St. Lucie aims to change that dynamic. With Cohen’s financial resources, the club is optimistic it can close the gap swiftly. They’ve already run pitchers through the lab and created reports for them. This offseason will amplify the impact the lab and other investments can have.
“We had to learn on the fly,” said Jagers about the first year in the organization. “There’s some trial and error involved, and our coaches have done a phenomenal job of doing that. We’re happy with the progress but we know we’ve got to keep going.”
“We all want it to be a quick turnover,” Hefner said. “It’s not necessarily one thing that’s going to say, ‘OK, now we’ve done it.’ It’s these small little things that continue to happen over the course of two or three years, and then you look up and Triple A is full of these guys and they just keep coming.
“We’re not there yet. But we’re leaving no stone unturned.”
(Photo of David Peterson: Dale Zanine / USA Today)
