GONNA BE AN ARMS RACE!
Yankees pitching coach Blake has to figure out how to get staff ready
TAMPA — It was something like a dream. Matt Blake rose quickly through the ranks in Cleveland’s system and had just earned a promotion to director of pitching for the entire organization when the Yankees came calling. They wanted the 34-year-old as their pitching coach. It was his first big league job.
And then baseball shut down as the world and the United States tried to stop the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s like one of those like weird dreams right? You are about to do something cool and then you wake up and it wasn’t real,” Blake said Wednesday on a conference call. “Unfortunately because it’s not funny, because it’s a very serious situation.
“We were building, I felt like we were in a good rhythm in spring training. Guys were performing at a high level and were kind of coming together and getting a good rapport amongst the group. Then you kind of hit this hard stop.”
And suddenly Blake, who had never worked in a big league dugout before this spring, was trying to navigate the traditionally ultra-structured world of big league pitching in a time of uncertainty and change.
“Think we’re all kind of wrestling with what we should be advising them to do with no kind of timetable to work from,” Blake said. “Typically whenever you’re building a plan you kind of start with the end in mind. So whether that’s the first day of spring training or the first day of the season, right now, neither of those are open. So you are kind of guessing more than anything. I think you’re kind of idling them as much as possible and trying to find out a good rhythm for all of them, given their circumstances.” It is fascinating watching the most predictable and structured creatures in the game — pitchers — thrown out of their comfort zone and seeing how they are going to adapt. There has been over a century of tradition, knowledge and decades of data put into how pitchers need to prepare for a season. Suddenly, in his first year in the big leagues and with a whole new group of pitchers, Blake has to figure out a way to guide the
Yankees pitchers through this physically.
And he is trying to remember that the players are human too, thrown into the same uncertain, stressful and scary situation as any American right now.
“I think the challenging part right now is you don’t have your eyes on everybody and you don’t want to be burdensome because we want to give them a breather,” Blake said. “This is something very stressful for a lot of people and there are a lot of different circumstances and they’re trying to get home and take care of their families and make sure they’re healthy and then still focus on baseball,
“So I think that we’ve been trying to be sensitive to the idea that this isn’t normal. We can’t expect everybody to be throttled up the whole way for, April, May to, you know, whenever this goes until.”
The Yankees pitchers have had adapted workouts based on how they work, where they are working and what access they have to facilities. Blake has them cycling through high-intensity, low and moderate work. Some are throwing — check Instagram and you can see Aroldis Chapman, Clarke Schmidt and Gerrit Cole getting their work in — and some are working with weighted balls if they don’t have a throwing partner. They have a community check-in document where the Yankees can keep track of their work and pitchers can share ideas.
And eventually, when they get an idea of when the season will start and get the go ahead to begin spring training, Blake will have to guide them through what he considered a potentially dangerous ramp-up period. Getting pitchers back to their competitive intensity level always comes with the risk of injury. He feels they need at least three weeks to work their way back.
“I think that once we get them settled in those first seven to 10 days, it’s always kind of a danger zone in spring training,” Bake said. “I think once you get them off the mound and see how they look, and then you get them to face some hitters and a simulated situation for 15 to 20 pitches. Then that next thing is kind of a turnaround, where they bounce back and you get a sense of how sore they are or how they’re recovering from that.
“It gives us a chance to then gauge what their workload can be over the next two, three days and it’s really that first seven days where you’re kind of assessing everyone to see ‘Okay, who is ready to move forward, who needs that repeat, that same level of intensity and volume,’” Blake continued. “So, if we, if we have a three week build up I would imagine we could probably get guys to 55 to 65 pitches, assuming everything goes according to plan, it’s just a matter of, you know those first seven days will be a huge indicator for us of where we can go.”