Shaw’s foot placement may be key to better pitch placement

“Last season stunk.”

Rockies reliever Bryan Shaw actually used a stronger word to describe his 2018 season, but you get the idea. Now the question is whether the right-hander, who’s entering the second season of a three-year, $27 million contract, can salvage his career with Colorado.

As the Rockies opened spring training Wednesday at Salt River Fields, Shaw expressed confidence that he’s primed to rebound. That would be good news indeed for the Rockies, who lost primary set-up man Adam Ottavino when he signed a three-year, $27 million deal with the Yankees.

“Everything feels good,” Shaw said. “Body, legs, arm, mind. Everything is right there and ready to go.”

Manager Bud Black, who last season lost so much faith in Shaw that he quit using him in high-leverage situations and left him off the postseason roster, is hopeful Shaw’s issues were fixed during the offseason.

“The focus was on some delivery consistency that he’s worked on,” Black said. “He worked some on release point, where hand positioning needs to be repeated and consistent. I think we’ll see the difference. The early returns are optimistic.”

This winter, Shaw, lefty reliever Jake McGee and righthanded starter candidate Chad Bettis journeyed to Driveline Baseball in Kent, Wash., for a high-tech tutorial. A biomechanical assessment confirmed what Shaw and bullpen coach Darren Holmes suspected. In layman’s terms, the position of Shaw’s landing foot was off, causing his hip rotation to be off and his arm slot to be inconsistent.

Statistics paint the picture of the disaster: a 5.93 ERA, 1.793 WHIP, .313 batting average against, 4.6 walks per nine innings, and 1.5 home runs given up per nine innings. All of those numbers were career worsts.

“From the mechanics side, I think he got a little bit out of whack,” Black said. “Here’s a guy that has a very upbeat, aggressive, momentum-building throwing action, with a stride direction that is across his body.

“If you don’t sync it up and don’t have the consistent release point, your command and your ability to execute pitches is going to suffer. I think that happened with Bryan. And the more he tinkered with his delivery, tinkered with his stride direction … he couldn’t dig himself out of a hole. He was pitching in a lot of bad counts:1-0, 2-0, 2-1, 3-1. It’s tough to have success that way.”

The Rockies acquired Shaw because he was an effective workhorse for Cleveland. From 2015-17, he led the American League in appearances three times. Shaw also had an impressive postseason résumé, having posted a 2.45 ERA with 22 strikeouts and six walks in 22 career playoff innings. That included 14 postseason appearances in 2016-17.

When Shaw struggled with Colorado last season, there were concerns that the velocity of his cut-fastball — his primary weapon — was waning. According to FanGraphs, however, his fastball averaged 93.9 mph last season, down just a tick from 2017 (94.6) and faster than in 2015 (92.8).

“The silver lining for me is, he’s healthy and his arm felt good all year,” Black said. “His stuff sort of played out the same as far as radar gun readings and the life on (the fastball). He just didn’t locate the ball like he had in previous years.”

Another theory about Shaw’s poor 2018 performance was that he started overthrowing, trying too hard to make his cutter spin in Denver’s high, dry air. Thus, it threw him off kilter. Shaw’s ERA at Coors Field was 6.93 vs. 5.10 on the road; he served up five home runs at Coors vs. four on the road; and he had a 2.108 WHIP at home vs. 1.523 away.

Shaw, however, mostly discounts the Coors Field factor.

“The hits I gave up were hits in any ballpark and the home runs I gave up were home runs in any ballpark,” he said. “I just didn’t execute my pitches.”

Shaw said the trip to Driveline Baseball helped put him back on track — and will keep him there.

“I took stock of things, and I wanted to make sure nothing like that ever happens again,” he said. “The Rockies have the stuff from Driveline — the cameras and stuff — and I have all the data. If something gets out of whack, we can go back to the videos and make adjustments.

“So hopefully it’s a quicker fix. Rather than two or three months trying to figure it out, maybe it’s just a few days.”