Jarvis hoping adjustments will unlock potential
Diamondbacks right-hander Bryce Jarvis possessed a 95 mph fastball that he felt he had to hide. Not because he could not throw it for strikes. Because of what happened when he did.
Jarvis entered last year as one of the Diamondbacks’ better pitching prospects. He came out of it as one of the hardest-hit pitchers in professional baseball.
On its surface, his struggles were baffling. He throws hard. He has a deep repertoire, including a pair of swingand-miss secondary pitches. That is usually enough — even for a pitcher with below average command and control — to survive. For Jarvis, it wasn’t.
But Jarvis believes he knows why — and he believes he has corrected the problem.
The issue, he and the Diamondbacks believe, was with his fastball — more specifically, with elements of the pitch that effect how it plays beyond just its velocity and location.
First, Jarvis gets close to the least amount of extension on his fastball of any pitcher in baseball. That is to say, when he releases the ball, his fastball has farther to travel to get to home plate than that of the average pitcher, giving the hitter more time to react.
The other issue, they believe, is with Jarvis’ deception, with the way his delivery allows hitters to pick up his pitches and time their swings accordingly.
But Jarvis believes that after a handful of sessions at the Diamondbacks’ new pitching lab at Salt River Fields he has made adjustments that will help. His early results in spring training have been promising. It is evident from his
tone of voice that he can hardly wait for the season to begin.
“Last year, it felt like at times I had to sneak (fastballs) in there,” Jarvis said. “I had to throw a lot of offspeed and then it was ‘OK, here’s my spot I’m going to throw a fastball. Let’s hope they’re not ready for it.’ Now it feels more where I was in college. Where it’s just like, ‘I’m going to shove fastballs down people’s throat. They’re not going to touch it.’ Having that confidence on the mound makes a world of difference.”
Something had to change
Jarvis had long known he lacked extension. It showed up the first time he threw in front of a TrackMan pitchmonitoring device in college. But he did not think it was something to worry about. For one, he was having success and opening eyes on the scouting circuit. Another reason, he said, was that he liked the idea of being on the extreme end of the spectrum, something that would allow him to give hitters a different look.
But when his struggles last season grew more and more pronounced — he finished with an 8.25 ERA, allowing 27 homers in 106 2/3 innings in Double-A — he knew something had to change.
“It was pretty frustrating for a while until I sat down with some of the people here and we asked, why?” Jarvis said. “That’s kind of the ultimate question. Every cause has an effect, and we just kind of saw the extension and the perceived velocity wasn’t there. That’s kind of where all these changes are stemming from.”
Jarvis averaged 5.2 feet of extension with his fastball last season, one of the lowest marks in baseball. At times late in the year, he was under 5-feet. The average major league pitcher last year registered 6.3 feet of extension. That can have a huge impact on what a fastball looks like to a hitter.
“I think if I was throwing 96 (mph),” Jarvis said, “it could have been playing anywhere as low as high-80s or mid-80s, which is nowhere close to where it should be.”
Jarvis began working in the lab in January, going through trial-and-error adjustments with a slew of coaches, including major league pitching coach Brent Strom, in hopes of both adding extension and increasing deception.
Though a pitcher’s stride length would seem intuitively to be the driving factor in extension, there is much more to the equation. For Jarvis, he worked on keeping his front shoulder from getting too high at the start of his delivery and increasing his tempo from the start until the end, the opposite of what he had been doing, pitching coordinator Barry Enright said.
“Extension is such a hard thing to change,” Jarvis said. “It’s such an inherent piece of who pitchers are. It’s not something you really hear about people really tweaking that often because it’s so ingrained in your mechanics as a pitcher that it really takes a lot of stripping back layers and rebuilding to consistently have a change in extension, especially to increase extension.”
Jarvis averaged 5.8 feet in an outing earlier this week. Enright said Jarvis has gotten out into the 6.1 to 6.3 range in mound sessions.
As it turned out, many of mechanical adjustments they implemented managed to address both extension and deception simultaneously, changes they hope will keep the ball hidden, in the eyes of hitters, for a split-second longer behind Jarvis' body.
“It’s hard to quantify deception,” Enright said. “It’s hard to say this guy is so much more deceptive or not with a computer. You just have to see it or even feel it in the box. That’s what the hitters told us: they felt like it wasn’t 97 (mph). They felt like they could see the spin on an offspeed pitch early. A lot of that was because the more times you show them the ball, the more comfortable you’ll be as a hitter.”
Enright believes Jarvis might have made himself less deceptive over the years by chasing certain metrics in his throwing sessions.
“Sometimes it’s a product of, you go home, you train — it’s a good and bad thing — you train to a TrackMan,” he said. “How hard I throw, how nasty my pitches break. The TrackMan says your pitches are so nasty, you feed into that instead of the pitching aspect. It’s kind of our job to be able to blend both. I think he’s doing a great job of buying in.”
Good early results
During a Cactus League outing this week, Jarvis threw eight fastballs, all of them in the mid-to-upper 90s. Opposing hitters did nothing with them. They either watched them go by, fouled them back or beat them into the ground.
The lack of an event was itself an event. More than the two scoreless innings he threw, more than the swings and misses he elicited, it was the fact that the fastball wasn’t hit well that made his outing so encouraging.
“I think we’re going to figure it out,”
Enright said. “I think he’s on the right path. I think the process for us has been good; I’m hoping the results will be good for him. I think he’s confident right now and it’s showing to be better. It’s still really early. There are still adjustments to be made.”
Jarvis’ allowed a batting average of over .400 on his fastball last season. His change-up and slider limited hitters to batting averages in the .200 range while generating healthy whiff rates. He also got solid results on a curveball that he began to throw with more frequency.
“I have a lot of confidence in my offspeed, but in pitching you need a fastball,” Jarvis said. “It’s hard to go out there and not have that. I think having that confidence in my fastball helps everything play up and helps you attack batters that much more.”
When the Diamondbacks selected Jarvis out of Duke with the 18th overall pick in 2020, they felt they were getting a pitcher with all the attributes required to be a successful major league starter.
In addition to liking his pure stuff, they saw Jarvis as thoughtful, intelligent and well-spoken. They knew he was the son of a former big-league pitcher, Kevin Jarvis. It all gave the Diamondbacks confidence they were selecting a pitcher with the intangibles and the pedigree to succeed.
In the ensuing years, they have come to appreciate Jarvis’ makeup even more. When a pitcher struggles as badly as he did last year, teams will often pause a player’s season or demote them. But Diamondbacks farm director Josh Barfield said the club so admired Jarvis’ mental toughness that it opted to let him pitch through it.
“Knowing the individual, knowing how determined he was, we didn’t feel like it was going to break him going through this adversity,” Barfield said. “If anything, it would make him stronger going forward.”
General Manager Mike Hazen nodded when asked if getting Jarvis’ on track feels like a sort of litmus test for the organization’s pitching infrastructure.
“He has that kind of stuff,” Hazen said. “He has two wipeout secondary pitches and he throws hard. We should be able to continue to work and help him continue to progress. The other thing is, the makeup is great and he works hard. I don’t think there’s any reason why this isn’t going to work itself out with continued reps and development.
“When the raw ingredients are there, it’s not like you’re asking (coaches) to make the raw ingredients, they’re there, now we just need to help him execute.”