Pirates feed off fun-loving pitching coach,
Coach rebuilds careers after building trust
On a side field at the Pittsburgh Pirates spring training facility late last month, pitching coach Ray Searage smacks grounder after grounder at a group of pitchers. Searage maintains a reputation as a guru for his role in reviving the careers of a series of veterans acquired by the cost-conscious club, but here, unleashing an endless stream of oh-yeahs and attaboys and lunging awkwardly forward on every swing, the 61-year-old baseball lifer with a thick white mustache hardly seems lofty or unapproachable.
“Hey, that’s a birthday cake,” he yells after a bouncer takes an easy hop. “Whoa, a real worm burner!” he says after a firmer shot.
Punctuating his encouragement with a high-pitched and genuine giggle, Searage seems to have a nickname for every pitcher, a joke for every hiccup and a deep reserve of exclamations to follow slick plays. He even lets out a few “boomshakalakas,” and at one point, for reasons unclear, he shouts, “The inmates are running the asylum!”
The enthusiasm, Searage’s charges say, helps make him so effective. Like all big-league pitching coaches, he possesses a lifetime’s worth of knowledge to impart to his players.
“His positivity, I think, is the biggest thing that stands out,” says Toronto Blue Jays pitcher J.A. Happ, who performed as a below-average MLB starter for 41⁄2 seasons before joining Pittsburgh in a 2015 deadline deal, then won 20 games for Toronto in 2016. “Over there, throwing bullpens, he’s kind of screaming and hollering when you execute, and you start to feel good about where you’re at. He seems like he’s just as invested as you are in trying to get you where you want to be.”
“He cares greatly, and I think that’s the thing that people know and love about him,” says Happ’s teammate, Jason Grilli, another former Pirate. “He’s just a guy who’s always fun-loving, loves to have a good time. He’s a lefty. Just kind of injected a good vibe, and I fed off that energy, more than I did sitting down and talking mechanics or stuff like that.”
Searage, the club’s pitching coach since the end of the 2010 season, is hardly a Luddite. Travis Sawchik’s 2015 book, Big Data
Baseball, describes the lengths to which the coach goes to protect his laptop and explains the way he uses pitch-tracking data and video scouting to develop a game plan for his pitchers against any given opponent. He checks for consistent release points and provides reports to his pitchers that clarify pitch locations.
But Searage, anecdotally, appears to enjoy unique success in rejuvenating pitchers that underwhelmed or outright failed elsewhere.
Before Happ, live-armed but previously frustrating hurlers such as A.J. Burnett and Francisco Liriano delivered resurgent performances in Pittsburgh. And Ivan Nova showed a stunning turnaround in his first 11 starts after coming to the Pirates in a trade from the New York Yankees on Aug. 1.
“He’s very open-minded,” says Liriano, who’s also now with the Blue Jays. “If you have an idea, he’ll work with you, not just tell you, ‘Do this.’ He asks you what you feel comfortable doing.”
Available to Pittsburgh for only two unheralded Class A prospects to be named, Nova joined his new team after years of uneven and injury-plagued performances in the Bronx. Nova, who had walked an average of three batters per nine innings across his first six seasons with the Yankees, walked three batters total in 64 2⁄3 innings with the 2016 Pirates, striking out 52 and yielding a 3.06 ERA.
“He told me not to be afraid,” he says. “Trust the guy behind you, trust the catcher, trust what you have. When you’re not doing good, it’s hard. You start thinking too much, and you start trying to figure things out. You’ve got to build your confidence back and attack the hitters.”
Searage develops relationships with his pitchers before he worries about correcting any mechanical issues he notices on video.
“He lets them paint the picture, lets them tell him about themselves, and then he starts to watch them,” Pirates manager Clint Hurdle says. “And then he slowly shares with them what he sees, and as that relationship develops, there comes a point in time when the player decides to trust what Ray’s sharing. When you trust somebody, there’s nothing you won’t do for him.”
Says Searage: “The biggest thing is, you try to find the person, who they are themselves. You try to find out what their family is like, if they have kids, are they married, do they have a significant other, and then you start building a relationship that way. Pitching comes around, but you don’t try to force it.”
Asked about his success in Pittsburgh, Searage deferred credit to the pitchers.
“I just happen to be at the right spot at the right time, because they’re vulnerable and they’re looking for help, and it boils down to doing your homework, looking at video, watching them throw, and then coming to a conclusion,” he says. “And then you prove to them, by sitting down with them and looking at the video together, and then they can see what you see.
“The majority of the guys that come over here with us, the stuff will play. But the mechanics and the inconsistency in the release point from the mechanics causes them to not be able to execute pitches. We try to get them to be a little more fluid and at ease with the delivery, try to get them to keep it simple, and go from there. The baseball fairy’s not going to hit you on the top of the head and, boom, you’ve got it the next day. It takes a lot of work. It takes ownership on their part.”
A candidate to follow Nova as the next pitcher revitalized in Pittsburgh, 26-year-old righty Drew Hutchison, spent time tweaking aspects of his delivery with Searage before spring training and appears to have an inside track at a spot in the club’s rotation.
“He makes it very comfortable for you,” Hutchison says of his pitching coach. “It’s easy to understand why everybody likes him and why he’s so successful.”