Spring training gets going
Mets’ Callaway pleased with pitching staff
PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. – As the Cleveland Indians pitching coach, Mickey Callaway oversaw one of the best pitching staffs in Major League Baseball. During the team’s 102-win 2017 campaign, both its starting rotation and bullpen led the American League in ERA as pitchers on both ends of the staff ascended to superstardom.
And after his first official workout as manager of the New York Mets, Callaway did not mince words:
“This is the best group of arms and stuff I’ve ever seen, from top to bottom,” Callaway said Tuesday at First Data Field. “I’ve never seen anything like the amount of very good arms with quality stuff that we have here in this Mets organization. I promise you, nobody has that. And I’ve been around some pretty good arms. ... It’s really amazing.”
But few have recently doubted the raw talent on the Mets staff: The club earned a World Series berth in 2015 thanks to the spectacular pitching of Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, Matt Harvey and Steven Matz and followed it with a wild-card appearance in 2016 despite injuries to Harvey and Matz.
Everything collapsed in 2017. The staff ERA jumped from a laudable 3.57 mark in 2016 to a horrendous 5.01 as every starter but deGrom spent long stretches on the disabled list and battling ineffectiveness amid talk of mishandled injuries and general clubhouse discontent. After the campaign mercifully ended, the front office parted ways with longtime trainer Ray Ramirez and hired Jim Cavallini away from the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Command to become their first director of sports and performance science. And in Callaway, they added a first-time manager they hope will maximize their talent.
With new pitching coach Dave Eiland — who filled the same role with the Royals and was Callaway’s mentor dating to their time together pitching in the Devil Rays organization in the late 1990s — Callaway faces a slew of hurdles to get optimal performances from his pitchers. He hopes to clear them by employing pitching strategies that would’ve seemed radical just a few years ago but now reflect a shifting tide within the game toward better negotiating workloads and effectiveness.
During their 104-win season in 2017, the Dodgers found success in the starting rotation not by riding their starters but by limiting them. No team in the majors got a better ERA from its starters, and yet, counter-intuitively, no team less frequently allowed its starters to push past 100 pitches. Because the overwhelming majority of starting pitchers struggle more in their third time facing an opponent’s batting order than the first or second, the Dodgers showed that restricting starters’ workloads — even at the risk of angering them — benefited the team.
With a deep crop of viable starters, all currently healthy, Callaway suggested Monday that Mets pitchers might be managed similarly.
“I’ve talked to them and said, ‘Hey, when I take you out, you’re not going to be happy about it,’ ” the manager said. “‘I don’t expect you to be happy about it. But there’s going to be reasons behind it. I’m going to tell you the reasons. If you want to hear more, come see me. That’s just how it has to be.’
“Are we going to use information? Are we going to use the feedback from the players? Am I going to use the feedback from Dave when we’re making an ingame decision? Absolutely. There’s 50 reasons why we might leave a guy in or take him out the third time through, but the main goal is to prepare them to try and get through the lineup the third time.”
The manager stressed that communicating his expectations to the pitchers will be paramount. His plan calls for personalized pregame routines for every pitcher and position player to help better limit injuries and a commitment to pitching efficiently to keep pitch counts in check and drive innings totals up.
“Everything’s going to be a little more organized in our pitchers’ day this year, a little more laid out,” said starter Zack Wheeler, who missed all of 2015 and
2016 due to Tommy John surgery and ensuing complications, then most of
2017 with various arm issues. “They’re going to hold us more accountable, which is fine: We’re grown men.
“I did notice that they were talking about limiting pitchers, but if you go out there and you’re pitching solidly, I’m sure they’ll leave you in. That’s my goal this year: Keeping the pitch count down and throwing quality starts.”
Though deGrom, Syndergaard, Harvey, Matz and Wheeler — the long-heralded fivesome that has still never pitched a single turn, in succession, as the Mets starting rotation — appear the favorites to land roles on the starting staff, Callaway said that as many as 10 pitchers in camp will compete for starting jobs and hinted that he could turn to a six-man rotation at times in the season. And the club’s bullpen, too, will see a change in strategy.
The Indians’ ill-fated 2016 World Series run cast lefty setup man Andrew Miller as a pioneer of sorts, a rare “relief ace” who could and would willingly lock down any inning in which he was called — a departure from the era of tightly defined bullpen roles. His success called attention to the value of relying on matchups rather than prescribed assignments to dictate reliever usage.
“When you can use players’ strengths to the max, you’re going to win more games,” Callaway said. “And I think that’s why it makes sense to me. I compare it to thinking about when to use (utility infielder) Wilmer Flores, and what days he’s going to be playing. I’m not going to go, ‘You know what? I’ll play Wilmer Flores on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday,’ if I don’t know who’s pitching those days. I’m going to use Flores when he gives us the best at-bat possible against the starter who’s pitching. So for me to designate someone to pitch the ninth when I don’t know what hitters are coming up seems kind of silly.”
Callaway has already told his top relievers — Jeurys Familia, A.J. Ramos, and free agent signee Anthony Swarzak among them — to be ready to pitch in whatever inning they’re called upon.
“He said that in the offseason, so I could prepare for it,” Ramos said. “If you come into camp not ready for that, that’s on you. ... It’s not my job to define the roles, that’s his job. My job is to go put some zeroes up. That’s the trend right now.”
The Mets will enter 2018 hoping the latest trends in pitching strategy can help them back to the World Series. Negotiating a pitching staff so talented but so riddled with uncertainty will be a challenge, but Callaway believes he is prepared.
“We’re going to have to do our homework on every possible bit of information,” he said. “They’re going to face guys who they should be facing. If we can do that, we’re going to look up at the end of the year and everybody on our pitching staff is going to have had a solid season, because they faced who they’re supposed to face. If we can accomplish that, we’re going to have a successful season.”
“I think it’s time for a change,” Wheeler said. “What’s the definition of insanity? Keep doing the same thing over and over? So it’s nice for a change, some new technology, new ways of thinking and new ways of going about stuff.”