Keller wants to jump from prospect to pro
As Christmas music blared inside the Pirates clubhouse on the final day of the regular season, Mitch Keller was busy packing the contents of his locker and discarding what he no longer wanted.
When Keller, the club’s top pitching prospect, returns to PNC Park in the spring, he and his employer will hope he brings back much more than he took home for the offseason.
This is an important winter for Keller, 23, who threw a career-high 151⅔ innings this past season. Roughly a third of those came in the major leagues, where Keller experienced plenty of peaks and valleys over 11 starts. While Keller was dominant at times, he also has plenty on which to work.
On this morning, with the holiday spirit infiltrating September, Keller was looking forward to heading home to Iowa, to a place he shares with his fiancé, Clancy Haase, and watching a little postseason baseball.
“It’s tough watching those guys play, but it’s just going to push us to be better for next year,” Keller said. And a rotation spot? “That’s my goal,” Keller said. “I feel like I can earn it.
“I think I had some good outings up here that show I can do it; I just need to piece it all together. If I have that in spring, I think I have a pretty good shot at earning a regular spot.”
Having a solid spring and showing what he can do will mean a couple of different things for Keller, who went 1-5 with the Pirates with a 7.13 ERA and 65 strikeouts in 48 innings.
There’s obviously more to Keller’s season, and some of what the right-hander must improve is nuanced. But here are five easy-to-digest points of emphasis for someone who theoretically should get 30 starts next year and might offer the biggest available upside of any of the Pirates’ returning starters.
1. Stay away from big innings.
Those were an issue for Keller beginning with his MLB debut, in Cincinnati, where five of the first six batters he faced scored. Keller, nervous from having to watch the first game of a doubleheader in his hotel room and thinking entirely too much about the whole thing, never made key the pitches he needed to make.
The result was the first of four innings for Keller in 2019 where he allowed three or more runs.
The easiest fix to the biginning issue is simple: Don’t put guys on in the first place. But, if you do, great pitchers know how to tighten up quickly.
2. Better establish the changeup.
Keller threw his changeup sparingly, and that was probably a good thing given its ineffectiveness, with its vertical movement well below league average.
We’ll get to why that matters, but it should first be noted that Keller’s curveball and slider were extremely good pitches for him. Opposing hitters had a measly .133 average against Keller’s curveball. Keller also walked just 16 in those 48 innings.
But the changeup is important because it can keep hitters off Keller’s fastball. The arm motion involved in throwing a changeup should mimic that of a fastball. The pitch’s vertical drop should force hitters to top the baseball and pound it into the ground.
Keller, meanwhile, was coming at hitters with two weapons — speed and spin. In 2020, Keller should want to expand the menu.
“I feel like I’ve learned a lot about sequencing hitters, what works and what doesn’t work,” Keller said. “I just need to take that back home and get ready for next year.”
How bad were the numbers on Keller’s fastball? Well, they weren’t pretty.
Opposing hitters produced a .461 average and .719 slugging percentage against a pitch for Keller that should be among his best, a fourseamer that averaged 95.4 mph.
3. Similar to many young pitchers, Keller struggled mightily the third time through the order, perhaps because of what it takes to pitch at this level.
In the minors, pitchers can often cruise through the final three or four spots in the batting order. Outside of the pitcher’s spot, that doesn’t happen here.
And those at-bats, plus the energy young pitchers suddenly have to expend navigating them, can accumulate over time.
By the third time through the order, when Keller was occasionally running on fumes, opposing hitters had an OPS of 1.177. That’s … uh, not quite sustainable.
A focal point will be pace, and unfortunately one of the only ways to improve here involves actually doing it.
“Especially with two strikes, really executing my pitches, because if you leave it in the zone with two strikes, guys are good enough to hit it,” Keller said. “It’ll be about putting it where I want it and going off of that.”
4. When Keller encountered trouble in 2019, the symptoms often presented right away. Opposing hitters hit .571 on the first pitch against him, the worst such mark among Pirates starters.
Keller was actually among the better Pirates pitchers when it came to throwing first-pitch strikes, but too often this is when Keller made his mistakes, when he left a fastball out over the plate or hung a breaking ball.
Establishing strike one is obviously important for any pitcher, but there’s a difference between that and giving away an at-bat on the first pitch. A more effective fastball should help here.
Whether it’s early or late, Keller should also be able to miss more bats than he did in 2019. His swinging strike percentage (.118) was a middle-of-the-road number on the Pirates pitching staff.
5. Keller had some interesting home/road splits,
where he pitched to a 4.00 ERA in six starts at PNC Park and an 11.14 ERA in five on the road.
Some of that could be tied to the extended innings, as three of those four came on the road.
Bottom line, Keller likely will review his routine over the offseason, making sure he’s doing everything the same no matter where he’s at, and pitching well on the road is also something that’s helped along plenty by experience.
Even this past season, Keller said he started to grow more comfortable around the older players and came out of his shell a little bit.
“I feel more in routine, a little more comfortable around the guys,” Keller said. “Being able to be myself but still being the rookie, not out voicing my opinion or anything like that, just learning my role and going with that.”
Keller might’ve learned his role in Year 1. The goal in Year 2 will be earning more of a regular role.
“I honestly don’t know when I’ll start throwing,” Keller said. “But when I do, it’s going to be different than most years because I know I’m fighting for a spot in the rotation. I have to have that mentality coming in.”