For those of you who have never heard of the podcast, CC and co-host Ryan Ruocco interview athletes and celebrities and talk about a wide range of topics. This is my first time listening R2C2 because of my fascination with his two guests on his latest episode and it didn’t disappoint. One one side you have Trevor Bauer, who has been very vocal on social media about topics such as driveline, analytics, the MLB commissioner and the whole Astros situation. Next to him is Sonny Gray, who previously had a bumpy tenure with the Yankees before being traded to the Cincinnati Reds. Gray struggled in pinstripes pitching in 41 games (34 of those starts) with a 4.51 ERA and a 15-16 record over one and half years. Gray was able to find success with the Reds earning an All-Star appearance in 2019. Gray particularly attributes part of this his success coming with his reunion with Reds pitching coach, Derek Johnson. Johnson was the pitching coach at Vanderbilt for three of his collegiate seasons, and an integral part of Gray’s growth into a first round draft pick.
There’s a lot a great stuff in this episode, from navigating through social media, baseball’s new technology, how they feel on the Astros situation and their thoughts on the new postseason format suggestions. What makes this episode so important is that these are the thoughts and ideas straight from the actual players. A story you may have read about may be a little different from the point of view of the person who it actually happened to. There’s no bullshit, it’s how they truly feel. Plus I never knew how much of personality Sonny Gray had. The part of the video that fascinated me the most was when Bauer and Gray talked about how they used new pitching technology such a Rapsodo (A pitch flight analysis unit, that measures the impact of spin on every ball) and high resolution cameras to take their pitching game to new levels.
A lot of people believed that Gray just wasn’t cut out for the bright lights of New York when his tenure with the Yankees ended. Gray was able to find success with a Cincinnati Reds team, that left many wondering why he couldn’t have been that guy for the Yankees. We come to learn the answer to that may have been that the Yankees just weren’t technologically advanced enough in order to guide Gray in the right direction. He then struggled to find an adjustment without any of the data to help. This wasn’t a knock to Yankees long time pitching coach, Larry Rothschild, just a lack of being behind the times. Old school style of pitching was all about feeling it out with your body, what felt right at that moment and how can will I be able to repeat it. There’s a new generation of baseball that has come to see the benefit of analytics and using numbers to make adjustments in order to have better success. Important information such as what impacts ball flight, such as release and spin rate, have become important tools towards understanding how to become a more effective pitcher. Say a pitcher throws a bullpen and throws a a great slider, that has the perfect movement they want from it, they can look back at the video and see the exact spot of their release, where their hands were (down to the millisecond) and what the spin rate on that ball was. This is great because it can be on a pitch to pitch basis so you can make adjustments mid bullpen instead of waiting another three days to throw again and feel those adjustments. When you want to learn a new pitch, or make your ball move a certain way it’s all about trial and error. You throw that and say, okay that worked, how can I repeat it? Or that didn’t feel right let me try this. With these new analytics, say you want to learn how to throw Kershaw’s curveball. You can look at all the numbers and videos they have on him throwing and compare it to yours. You can look and make the adjustments needed in order to successfully throw that pitch multiple times the same way. Take a guy like Mariano who had perfected the cutter, to the point where that was the only pitch he needed, whose motion was was perfect on every release with the perfect spin rate every time. That’s what’s made him so successful, that he was able to repeat the same thing over and over again. Imagine Mariano started to get his cutter hit more and more, how could he figure out what was wrong? Well he could look back at video from when his cutter was successful and compare them.
We are in a new age of baseball where the feedback we get from this new technology is going to make guys even better. We see teams that are winning using this formula, so everyone will start to copy it. You can see this with the Yankees hiring of pitching coach, Matt Blake, a guy is heavily influenced by analytics. And as you can see with Sonny Gray, more and more young player want to be on teams that utilize all this technology because it’s only going to help them be smarter baseball players. If I explained the whole system terribly I’m sorry, click on the link below the photo at the top to watch the full podcast video. One of the first adopters of this technology was Trevor Bauer, so he knows the in-and-outs. Like I said, the whole episode is great for any pitcher or baseball enthusiast and I find this whole technological shift of smarter ball players so fascinating.
The Washed Up Athlete 