‘A pitching powerhouse’: Inside how the Mets aim to revamp pitching development with their own lab (2024)

This summer, the Mets will finally unveil a statue for the late Tom Seaver at Citi Field. Seaver is “The Franchise,” a foundational figure for a team whose best years, ever since his arrival granted the Mets competence and a coronation with stunning speed, have been forged by great pitching.

In the nation’s capital on Thursday night, the first pitch of the 60th season of Mets baseball will be thrown by Jacob deGrom, presently the sport’s pre-eminent practitioner on the mound and a worthy steward of the franchise tradition.

Back in Port St. Lucie, Fla., the organization will be working on how to carry that tradition into the future. Since the Mets’ last wave of pitching talent propelled them to the pennant in 2015, perhaps nothing in baseball has evolved more than the process of developing pitching.

“World-class, industry standard — that’s what we’re after,” pitching coach Jeremy Hefner said. “We’ve been tasked to develop a pitching powerhouse.”

Heading into his first professional spring training in 2020, top pitching prospect Matt Allan’s main priority was developing his change-up as a third pitch. That was the blueprint laid out in Allan’s offseason lunch with new minor-league pitching coordinators Ricky Meinhold and Mike Cather. That task became significantly more difficult when, instead of spending an extended spring in Port St. Lucie and a summer throwing to professional hitters, Allan was living with his parents and searching for throwing partners.

When that spring was suspended, Meinhold stayed in touch, outlining a throwing program for Allan to stay fresh and coaching him through bullpen sessions over FaceTime.

“Ricky was my main point of contact during the whole COVID process, and he’s been my point of contact ever since,” Allan said. “I send him all my video, all my data, all my questions basically go right to him.”

Late last summer, Allan was invited to the Mets’ alternate training site in Brooklyn; he showed up with a viable change-up he could hone by throwing more and more to real live hitters then.

“It really excelled past my expectations,” Allan said of that pitch this spring. “It got way better, way faster.”

“It’s nice to know he cares enough about his career and takes enough ownership of his career to make subtle changes that can have big dividends at the end of the day,” said Meinhold. “That’s Matt Allan.”

For Meinhold and the Mets, it was validation for the way they approached an unprecedented season — and a sign that a new regime didn’t have to start totally fresh in development. Meinhold’s motto is “Serve the player,” and without a full spring training, without a game against another uniform, the Mets’ staff helped Allan fulfill his season goal of developing a third pitch.

“I just can’t commend Ricky, the Mets staff and trainers for how good of a job they did creating throwing plans,” Allan said. “It really set me up well this year to have a full, healthy season.”

New owner Steve Cohen and team president Sandy Alderson are the ones tasking New York’s pitching coaches with revamping their developmental infrastructure. Alderson identified player development as a weakness in the organization in November, and the day his hiring was formally announced, the Mets dismissed not only general manager Brodie Van Wagenen but also farm director Jared Banner.

They kept one of Banner’s most important hires, though, in Meinhold.

“The common thread among the staff hired by Brodie and his group is that a number of them are more contemporary thinkers,” Alderson said by phone over the weekend. “That was important and something we’ve tried to build on.”

Banner hired Meinhold before the 2020 season to revamp New York’s pitching development. Before coming to the Mets, Meinhold had spent seven years in the Cardinals organization, where he’d been a minor-league coach, major-league scout and pitching analyst.

“It was very clear to me soon as we sat down, that he was the right guy for the job,” Banner said last spring. “Ricky is very data-driven, but he’s also a very good connector with people. And both sides are equally important.”

“Ricky is a sharp guy,” said Paul Davis, one of Meinhold’s mentors in St. Louis. “He’s always been a fast learner and just very open-minded.”

In that regard, Meinhold and Hefner have been a great match for the Mets. Last year, Meinhold ended up running the club’s alternate site in Brooklyn during the day and contributing to the major-league team’s game plans for home games at night. He organically grew into a major-league assistant pitching coach, with that title formally added to his name over the winter.

“Last year forced us to have pretty strong communication,” Hefner said. “Just being in lockstep with him, that’s how our relationship grew.”

“Hef’s vision and my vision were basically in step from Day One without even knowing it,” Meinhold said.

That’s a critical step for the Mets’ organizational development.

“One thing that we’re all very focused on is wanting to have as little daylight as possible between what we’re doing at different levels,” said Ben Zauzmer, the Mets’ new director of baseball analytics. “Something we all really agree on and are determined to improve upon is to have this sort of seamless pipeline between what we’re doing in player development and what we’re doing at the major-league level.”

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With the phone in his back pocket buzzing all morning — it’s nice to be recognized on your birthday — Meinhold has been hustling all around the back fields of the Mets’ spring training complex. He’s setting up both major-leaguers and minor-leaguers for shirtless bullpen sessions with motion-capture technology, a tangible step toward advancing the organization’s technological database.

It is March 8, 2020.

“It’s been really nice to finally get face to face with these guys,” Meinhold said that day in his office. “Talking on the phone is one thing. Them seeing me live and knowing that what I said to him on the phone is happening day to day, that’s cool.”

Within the week, Meinhold would be flying home from Florida, the rest of spring training suspended due to the pandemic. The phone would go back to being his exclusive medium with his players — not just talking to them on the phone, but watching bullpens through the phone, coaching through the phone.

This spring, over the phone of course, Meinhold thought back to the tumult of last spring.

“You get your first year with a new organization, and you’re already having a little bit of a learning curve,” he said. “And then the world goes into a global pandemic. And I have to flip the script on everything I’ve been prepared for and try to do something completely different.”

Meinhold had entered 2020 aiming to set a foundation for better development in the organization. There were two key steps: connecting on a personal level with the players to individualize their plans and creating cohesive coaching to ensure players heard the same message as they moved up the organizational ladder.

When the world turned upside down, Meinhold had to improvise.

He set up Zoom calls with the pitching coaches throughout the organization to explain the sport’s emerging technology, all under the title of “Continuing Education.” One lesson might be on spin tilt, and how to help a pitcher without enough differentiation between his slider and curveball. Another might explain all the uses of Trackman radar.

“Just from a confidence standpoint, you’re able to give coaches more ammo and a better mindset to be able to attack a problem from a bunch of different angles,” said Cather, the assistant pitching coordinator.

“I didn’t have to compete with the day to day, with the struggle of the season, the problems that the season brings,” Meinhold said. “You could go from literally step one and build.”

And Meinhold and his staff still connected with players. They divvied up the organization’s roster to seven coaches, responsible with staying in touch with their charges on a weekly basis, if not more often. The pitchers’ throwing set-ups, their makeshift routines, their priorities and their questions throughout the whole summer were charted in a portal that could be shared among the coaching and training staffs, so no developments caught them off guard.

“You can talk about scouting, you can talk about player development and all that. But it’s about the person who can connect,” Meinhold said. “You can be the smartest guy in the room. But if you can’t connect with anybody, you’ve got no shot.”

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The most substantive aspect of the Mets’ investment into their development is the plan for a pitching lab in Port St. Lucie. As improvements in technology have made data feedback essentially instantaneous for pitchers, teams like the Cubs, Brewers and Yankees have constructed lab-like settings at their spring complexes to analyze pitchers.

The exact shape of that lab hasn’t been fully established. Hefner said a lab is “in the works,” but “not to the point where we can say it’s going to happen.”

“I wouldn’t say a lab setting right now,” Meinhold said, “but we’re getting a lot of technology that’s going to help us build that lab.”

In January, New York hired Brian DeLunas to be a special projects coordinator; in an interview for a minor-league coaching position, DeLunas instead pitched the Mets on creating a lab to evaluate and develop pitching talent.

“For me, the job really entails helping coach the coaches, making sure the information that we’re using and the systems we’re using are heading in the right direction,” DeLunas said. “The second biggest thing is going to be the actual hands-on work with our pitchers in a lab-setting scenario, where we can collect data, talk about player plans and help those guys really get headed in the right direction.”

DeLunas envisioned a lab decked out with mounds that provide ground-force feedback, portable Trackman and/or Rapsodo cameras for pitch-tracking data like vertical and horizontal break, and Edgertronic cameras that show in super slow-motion the way a ball comes off a pitcher’s hand. DeLunas mentioned spring 2022 as the goal, with the possibility of the lab being partially ready for the instructional league this fall.

Before spending the last three years working with big-leaguers for the Mariners, DeLunas had built his career outside the professional ranks. After years of successfully coaching high schoolers, he launched Premier Pitching and Performance (P3) in St. Louis, working to develop pitchers at all levels.

“The biggest thing with Brian is a holistic perspective on pitching and pitching development,” said Yankees pitching coach Matt Blake, who got to know DeLunas when the latter was working at P3. “He understands how the whole person needs to be developed, with the physical side in mind and not just the pitching skill itself.”

DeLunas will be assisted by Carter Capps, the former big-league reliever the Mets hired to be their Low-A pitching coach stationed in Port St. Lucie. If you remember Capps as a player, it’s probably for the hop in his delivery that Major League Baseball banned during his career. Capps’ search for a new, legal delivery inspired a deep interest in pitching mechanics and movement. After retiring, Capps spent a year working at Driveline Baseball in Seattle — the epicenter of pitching development’s recent evolution — to learn more about biomechanics.

“Good movers throw hard. Good movers are good pitchers, good movers tend to last longer than poor movers,” Capps said. “That’s the No. 1 focus: If we can get a guy moving well, the stuff is eventually going to start matching the quality positions we’re getting in.”

Like Hefner in the majors, Capps combines recent major-league experience with a firm background in newer pitching analysis. That allows him to communicate advanced concepts in a language players understand.

The goal of a pitching lab would be to capitalize on the explosion of readily available pitch data. What can the Mets do with all that data?

“I think the greatest value is in the rehab process,” Hefner said. “You get a feel for how he’s moving. And maybe he’s moving the same as he was before his surgery, you say, ‘Maybe we should go faster?’ Once we get the lab, we’ll have a way to quantify that.”

DeLunas envisioned pitchers who have endured an injury or underperformance taking a trip to the lab. He pointed to an example from his time with Seattle when starter James Paxton was struggling with his trademark curveball, the ball breaking more horizontally than he wanted. With the help of an Edgertronic camera, DeLunas could show him the way his index finger was clipping the ball as it came off his hand, causing the problem.

“It’s not necessarily rebuilding guys from the ground up all the time,” Capps said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, we noticed you’re moving a little differently. Let’s get you in the lab.’ You get buy-in from the players then because you’re not asking them to do anything they haven’t done. You’re just asking them to get back to where they were.”

As this technology proliferates to the next generation of pitchers, through independent facilities and colleges that have been far quicker to adopt it than many professional teams, players themselves have grown more fluent speaking an analytical dialect. This spring, Dellin Betances and Jacob Barnes have talked about improving their induced vertical break, which is measured by Rapsodo cameras.

“These kids are very smart. When you make a suggestion, they’re like, ‘OK, why?’ You have to have something to back it up,” Capps said. “I can show you the numbers: This is where you are, this is where the major-league average is. How can we push you in that direction? It’s guided decision-making, using the data.”

A lab would be a tangible sign of the Mets’ revitalized investment in infrastructure. For years, New York has lagged behind other major-league teams in its investment to modern technology and baseball analytics. Cohen and Alderson have vowed to change that. Already, Zauzmer’s department has been aggressively hiring both analysts and data scientists, doubling its size from eight last year to 16 this year, with plans to hire at least four more.

“What we’re hoping to do is create a situation where we can execute on existing ideas as well or better than anyone, and then potentially anticipate the next big idea,” Alderson said.

“It’s going to cost a little bit of money,” DeLunas said of a lab, “but we want it to be world class and to be industry leaders.”

Hefner, Meinhold and DeLunas all used the metaphor of pushing the needle. Development itself is an incremental process, and so is constructing the process of it. Every step they take is to move the needle in the proper direction.

“There’s a long list of steps in this process to be the best we can be,” Meinhold said. “And we’re only at the elementary level. We’ve still got a long ways to go to get our Ph.D.”

“We’ve made major strides in hiring personnel, in acquiring technology, and in putting a structure together and processes in place that allow the technology and the personnel to deliver quality information and instruction to our players,” Alderson said. “We’ve got lots of pieces now. We just need to put it all together.”

“It’s that perspective thing, right? Is what we’re doing at the 100-foot view positively or negatively impacting the 30,000-foot view?” Hefner said. “The little things and the attention to detail right now can have exponential impact 25 years down the road.”

Meinhold was excited when he thought back to what the Mets were able to accomplish in spite of last year’s obstacles, and what that means for a future without such hurdles.

“It’s just fun to be a part of building this because I think, when we look back 10 to 20 years from now, we can be really excited about the progress we’ve made,” Meinhold said. “And hopefully that turns into winning a lot of games and bringing championships to New York. That’s all we want to do here.”

(Photo of Jacob deGrom throwing this spring with coaches and teammates looking on: Mark Brown / Getty Images)