Data-driven Straily sees opportunity with Orioles
Advocate of technology lauds Brocail’s approach in striving for improvement
Dan Straily chose the Orioles as his late-spring free agency destination in part because of the opportunity presented here to step right into a starting rotation and the data-informed environment the organization seeks to foster under executive vice president/general manager Mike Elias and his top deputy, assistant general manager for analytics Sig Mejdal.
With the Houston Astros, an organization at the cutting edge of so much of baseball’s nascent pitching technology boom, Elias and Mejdal helped build a team at the bottom of the league into a World Series champion. Straily spent some time in Houston, and has long been an acolyte of such methods.
He has his own Rapsodo unit, which combines radar-readings and a camera to provide instant analysis on the spin and movement of a pitch, and he takes it on the road. He’s trained at Driveline, a playerdevelopment facility that touts itself as one of the most progressive in the game.
So when he says that no one wants to figure out what’s been keeping him from sustained success more than him, it’s also true that few might be as willing to invest as much as he has to improve.
Straily finished April with a three-start span that featured a 2.57 ERAafter his rocky Orioles debut week, but struggled again in May and is bringing an 8.51 ERA into Wednesday night’s start against the Yankees.
Straily spoke to The Baltimore Sun this week about how he uses data and technology to identify how to get better, his between-start routine that helped foment the turnaround he hopes and how pitching coach Doug Brocail has been a good conduit for balancing the data and the message it’s supposed to send. you can watch each pitch. everything.
Basically, all the information that you would need to essentially try to correct an issue. In the old days, you had guesswork. You had to just go up there and try to fix something and take it into your next start and see if it worked. Nowadays, we can pretty much hone into here’s what happened, here’s where you went wrong, here’s where this pitch was off that day. You can get that back on track quickly.
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