Why Cleveland has the best – and most futuristic – rotation in baseball
By
Jeff PassanJune 4, 2015
Yahoo Sports
Part of life as a small-market, low-revenue team like the
Cleveland Indians is experimentation. Papering over mistakes with more cash simply isn’t an option, so it forces creativity, ingenuity and, most important, unanimity. No organization in baseball embraces and applies new ideas quite like the Indians, and what’s already the richest starting staff in the game is bound to get better because of it.
With
Corey Kluber,
Carlos Carrasco,
Danny Salazar and
Trevor Bauer, who starts Thursday night in a series-wrapping game against Kansas City, the Indians have four of the most desirable – and rarest – commodities in baseball: hard-throwing, strikeout-producing, young, under-control starting pitchers. The single most misleading statistic of the 2015 season is the ERA of Indians starting pitchers.
Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder were to the 2000s, they can be to the 2010s.
“You’ve got at least four guys who are capable of putting up crazy numbers,” Bauer said. “You look at the staffs like Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz and the kinds of numbers they were able to put up. They’re considered one of the best staffs of all time. And the A’s staff, with Zito and Hudson and Mulder and [Rich] Harden. You start looking at those numbers and say, ‘Is that within the realm of what we can do?’ Yeah. Probably so. If everyone stays healthy, I would expect over the next four or five years, we have a chance.”
Cleveland’s devotion to pitching runs deep in the organization, where it has hired and unleashed player-development personnel whose philosophies don’t exactly run parallel to baseball’s deeply ingrained thinking on how to grow pitchers. Assistant director of player development Eric Binder came from the Texas Baseball Ranch, the pitching think tank run by independent coach Ron Wolforth, who helped fix Scott Kazmir and has grown more mainstream in recent years.
Binder’s use of weighted baseballs – regular-sized balls made with heavier material, up to 21 ounces – is pervasive among the Indians’ minor league affiliates. The idea behind weighted-ball use is to force the arm to pattern itself properly using heavier balls and build up additional arm strength and velocity along the way. Some programs include underweight balls, too – Bauer throws some as light as two ounces – to help pitchers emphasize deceleration of the arm.
Carter Hawkins, who started as an intern in the scouting department, oversees all player development and has allowed Binder to institute a full weighted-ball program among young pitchers. Ruben Niebla, the Indians’ minor league pitching coordinator, has made sure it’s being used across the affiliates. And Derek Falvey, the Indians’ director of baseball operations and, in the eyes of many, a future general manager, oversees the Indians’ whole pitching program.
The dedication trickles down on the field, too. Mickey Callaway, the Indians’ big-league pitching coach, went to Driveline Baseball, a Seattle-area training center where Bauer spends part of his offseasons, to understand how Bauer trained. During spring training, Callaway threw the weighted balls to understand what players might get from them.
“They actually believe you can develop players and that they don’t just develop by pitching in games and getting more reps,” Bauer said. “You can actually increase the development process. They’re always open and looking for new strategies, differing technologies, instead of shunning new ideas because that’s not how they did it 20 years ago.”
Bauer is, as he put it so well, “the whipping boy and the poster child at the same time” for neo-pitching philosophies. Much of the acceptance of weighted balls and other training devices like the Shoulder Tube –
a long, oscillating stick whose nicknames include “wiggle stick,” “cattle prod,” “javelin” and a number of unprintables – depends on Bauer’s success. And with a 2.97 ERA this season, backed by a FIP about a third of a run higher, the 24-year-old Bauer is holding up his end.
On occasion, the 25-year-old Salazar will ask Bauer if he can use the Shoulder Tube, which uses rhythmic stabilization to encourage stronger shoulder muscles while keeping range of motion. And the 28-year-old Carrasco – who, along with Kluber, 29, signed a long-term contract this offseason that locked him in with Cleveland through 2020 – is a regular weighted-ball adherent. Carrasco throws seven- and 14-ounce implements, just like Shaun Marcum, the Indians’ fifth starter.
“The team is very open minded,” Marcum said. “Obviously with Trevor. And introducing the weighted balls on the minor-league side. The guys I’ve talked with on the program like it a lot.”
During spring training, Marcum, Bauer and others wore
the mThrow pitching sleeve, which has an embedded sensor that sends kinematic data live to a computer via Bluetooth. While there were some snags with the device – Marcum said the battery died too quickly, and Bauer’s sensor slipped out of place – the Indians’ desire for more data and a better sense of what their pitchers are doing speaks to their principles.
“There are smart people who are constantly trying to learn,” Indians manager Terry Francona said. “Our medical staff and guys who are involved in pitching – we’re fortunate. We have some great people, and not necessarily all of them have to be in uniform.”
So much of the trouble with new ideas is the eggheads in the front office will dream them up only to see them die on the field. The Indians are committed to breaking that cycle. With shortstop Francisco Lindor and third baseman Giovanny Urshela, they’ve got two Gold Glove-caliber fielders primed and waiting at Triple-A. Their bats have come around enough to push Cleveland to the cusp of .500, which, in the American League, is plenty for wild-card contention. Now it’s up to the pitching, the crown jewel of the Indians’ organization, to do its best Maddux-Glavine-Smoltz/Zito-Hudson-Mulder imitation. It’s not the only chance a small-market club like the Indians have. It’s just the best.
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