This story begins April 22, 2019. As most Nick Burdi tales do.
Up to that date, Burdi's rookie season had been going very well. He was racking up strikeouts and establishing himself as one of the top options in the Pirates' bullpen. After years of struggling to stay healthy, he was finally fulfilling his potential.
That would change on that cool Pittsburgh Monday night. Working in his second inning, Burdi's 20th pitch of the game was a 97 mph heater just off the plate. Shortly after the ball hit the back of Elias Diaz's mitt, Burdi started to bend over. He dropped his glove and grabbed his right forearm. Within moments, he was crying and writhing in pain on PNC Park's mound.
The other symptoms started to come as time passed. He lost sensation in his ring and pinky finger. The same happened in parts of his neck. When he tried to rehab, there would be a sharp pain down his arm.
“There was always a little bit of a thought, thinking ‘Will this be the last game I ever throw in?’ " Burdi told me near the end of spring training.
Matt Hopkins didn't see the pitch live, though he had been keeping track of him that season. Burdi's wife, Rebecca, is from Rhode Island, and Hopkins wanted to support players who have ties to his home state. But he didn't see the video until it had gone viral on Twitter.
“It looked like he broke his arm," Hopkins told me over the phone.
Burdi didn't break his arm. Instead, he had a thoracic outlet injury which eventually required surgery. The rehab went well, and he shed those doubts about the end of his career. He knew he would be back, but he had to be more careful and take better care of his right arm.
Burdi's professional career has been a series of brief moments of brilliance and long rehabs. He was selected by the Pirates in the 2017 Rule 5 draft but had not spent enough time on the active roster to shed his Rule 5 status. That needed to change.
“It’s one of those things that just, at this point, kind of needs to get done," Burdi said during PiratesFest. “A full season needs to get under my belt.”
While finishing his rehab in Florida last year, Burdi met C.J. Dandeneau, a 2019 Pirates draft pick from Rhode Island. Burdi told him he was going to spend the offseason in Rhode Island since his wife was getting her doctorate. Dandeneau suggested that if Burdi was looking for a place to throw, he had a recommendation: Hop's Athletic Performance, a gym about 20 minutes southwest of Providence, run by Matt Hopkins.
Burdi ended up doing more than just throw there. That's where he made the mechanical changes that could keep him healthy for a full season.
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Hopkins knows what it's like to have arm injuries.
Before he started running the gym, doing physical therapy or serving as a strength and conditioning coach, Hopkins was a collegiate catcher. A pretty good one, too. He batted over .300 his sophomore year at Assumption College, but health issues ultimately held him back from reaching his full potential.
His collegiate playing career came to a premature end in 2007. He played for three different coaches his first three years at Assumption. The third decided he wanted his team to get younger, so Hopkins and all of the other seniors were cut from the team before their final year.
It turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as Hopkins went on to the University of Rhode Island to study physical therapy. But those injuries, and the outdated rehab he did to treat them, stuck with him.
“It was nobody’s fault, but when I think back to when I was in high school in the early 2000s, even into college, the stuff they had me doing, we have to get away from that stuff," Hopkins said.
After graduating from URI in 2010, Hopkins went to work on building his own facility. He felt Rhode Island's understanding of baseball was behind the curve and he wanted to help change that. Hop's Athletic Performance opened in 2011, and the 850-square-foot facility has since grown to 18,000-square-feet, but the extra room is only part of what the gym has to offer.
“My goal with Hop's was to have a facility [with] everything under one roof," Hopkins said. "A gym, strength and conditioning, physical therapy, pitching, throwing, hitting, all that stuff. And also taking the different technologies from the last couple years and have them in place.”
Hop's has all that, but you might not know it looking at its metal-sided facade. From the street, it looks more like a warehouse or a small-town storage facility than a gym with state-of-the-art technology.
Believe it or not, the look helped sell Burdi on Hop's.
“Those are the places I like to train at," Burdi said. "They have the blue-collar mentality, but they had everything I needed. We had the Rapsodo. We had the radar guns. We had Edgertronic cameras so we can break everything down.
“You showed up, put your head down and got to work.”
Burdi came ready to work, but it was uncharted territory for both. Burdi was utilizing new technology and ideologies, knowing mechanics changes were imminent. For Hopkins, it was the first time a major-league player came to work in his facility.
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Burdi and Hopkins first met in October, shortly after he completed his rehab and was about to take his offseason break from throwing. Before they got to work, they had to get to know each other.
Hopkins has an individual assessment with every new player who comes to Hop's. They talk about goals, what they had done in the past and injuries.
Oh, the list of injuries.
“With him, it was pretty significant over the last couple years," Hopkins said.
Where to begin?
Burdi's thoracic outlet injury stemmed back to 2016. His old team, the Twins, misdiagnosed it as a bone bruise, and he was sidelined for almost the entirety of the season. He also missed the majority of 2017 and 2018 after undergoing Tommy John surgery for a separate arm injury.
He even had problems in high school, sustaining a shoulder injury. The traditional physical therapy for such an injury was to move the shoulder down and back when throwing.
"Archaic thinking," as Hopkins would put it.
Actually, it might be worse than that. As pitchers grow bigger and stronger, that mechanical change could be detrimental, especially to a muscular guy like Burdi.
There were a couple parts of his delivery that were detrimental to his arm, elbow and neck, the most pressing being his release. Burdi's old motion came to an abrupt stop after the ball left his hand. There was no real follow-through.
To again steal a term from Hopkins, it was "a poor deceleration pattern."
"There was nowhere for his arm to go," Hopkins said. "You need room for it to slow down. It’s like trying to stop 10 feet away from a brick wall going 100 mph. If we can move that wall back a little more, that gives you more time to stop.”
So the focus became about moving the wall back. Hopkins noticed Burdi had a bilateral rib flare, making it more difficult for him to use his obliques while throwing and theorized that's why his motion abruptly stopped and why his arm was taking so much punishment.
The discussion went from his elbow, neck and shoulder to his pelvis, back leg and ribs. His new delivery would be focused on keeping that back leg and left pelvis "connected," or stabilizing and balancing his core while driving to the plate. They also focused on tucking in his left rib cage and moving his right shoulder over his left hip.
They worked on better breathing mechanics -- you read that right, breathing mechanics -- to help manage the rib flare while pitching. After his spring appearances, Burdi was sometimes seen walking off the mound holding his left rib, breathing slowly. He wasn't in pain. He was following through on his mechanics.
It was a lot of little changes, but Hopkins and John DeRouin, a 19-year-old college student who does most the Rapsodo work at Hop's now, had a plan for Burdi, and Burdi bought into their mindset. The priority was injury prevention. Athletic performance was secondary.
“I put a lot of faith in those guys," Burdi said. "I trusted what they were saying. I trusted the process and the philosophy they were putting together. The credit goes to those guys, because I really did take what they gave to me and ran with it.”
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Burdi started throwing again in mid-December. They had identified the changes Burdi needed to make. Now it was time to put them into action.
After one of their first sessions, Hopkins told Burdi he looked good and asked how he felt. Burdi candidly responded that it didn't feel good.
Now that enough time has passed, Hopkins can say it didn't look particularly good either.
“I can’t come out and tell him, ‘That was garbage, that was terrible,’" Hopkins said. "He’s in the majors. He can tell me to go pound sand.”
But there was also the mental aspect. Burdi had been through a lot over the past few years and was doing something new. There was a mental hurdle that needed to be overcome, and he didn't want to scare him.
They were using new tools to get better as well. Hop's has plenty. Rapsodo to track spin and break. HitTrax for batted ball peripherals. Edgertronic cameras to take thousands of photos a second and capture minute details that the naked eye can't see. And he's made sure to keep up to date in using this technology, reading articles across the Internet and taking the pitch design course on Driveline.
“It’s all well and good to say that we have technology and we use it, but you have to be able to interpret it and also know how to utilize it to make changes,” Hopkins said.
The Pirates had this problem in the past. They had Rapsodo and other tech, but the old coaching staff could not convey to the players how to use it.
Burdi had that trouble last year. His slider and fastball both spin considerably more than the league average. He was told that, but his thought was, “Great. I don’t know what that means.” The discussion did not go any further.
This time, working with Hopkins and DeRouin, Burdi got the hang of interpreting the data, reading how his pitches broke and what his spin efficiencies were.
"It was an easy transition when I came down [to Bradenton]," Burdi said about using the same technology in spring training this year. "When I get off the bump, I know what I'm looking for."
And with the aid of the cameras, they were able to track Burdi's mechanical changes.
Burdi continued to progress through spring training, which is why the three remained in contact with each other, sending video and pictures. It's one thing to successfully make the changes when you're in the facility five or six times a week. It's another when it's game situations.
Still, the reports were positive.
"Everything feels good," Burdi said. "It's still a work in progress, but the arm is recovering better and I'm feeling better, day in and day out."
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"Holy crap. He's throwing 100."
That was what Hopkins was thinking while watching Burdi pitch in Bradenton, Fla.
Burdi established himself as a flamethrower early on in 2019, consistently hitting the upper-90s on the radar gun. He never cracked triple-digits though, and he usually topped out at about 95 or 96 mph while at Hop's. He was told not to go full effort there though, so Hopkins expected him to add a little heat when he got into game situations. That's exactly what happened.
But 100 mph?
“Guys don’t come back from thoracic outlet [surgery] throwing 100 mph," Hopkins said.
There haven't been many TOS success stories. When players do come back, they usually lose a tick or two on their fastball. Burdi's mechanical changes may have been done out of self-preservation, but they also had a performance-boosting effect.
“Before, it was very max effort," Burdi said. "It’s still max effort, but I like to think the legs, core and hips are taking the blow now. The stress isn’t going on the neck, elbow, shoulder. The rest of the body is starting to work, and I think that’s why it looks better coming out of the hand.”
It's not just Burdi and Hopkins who have noticed a difference. Pitching coach Oscar Marin didn't get to watch Burdi live last year, but his right-hander sent him video of his work this winter to compare it from last year. He saw the progress and continued to see it through spring training.
"Looking at him now, that lower half being driven more by his back leg helping lead him into his pitches has really helped him out," Marin was telling me. "It's also helped the timing with his upper-half as well."
Burdi's preparation for the season was, of course, interrupted by the COVID-19 outbreak. He returned back to Rhode Island for the shutdown, and he and Hopkins are still doing what they can from their homes to make sure he is ready when action restarts. Burdi has been working with the stretchband and using a pitching sock to keep the arm loose. For the breathing exercises, Hopkins recommended blowing into a balloon.
Hopkins admits some of these exercises look silly, but they work. While getting objective results was always a driving force at Hop's, some could do similar exercises solely for the spectacle.
“There’s a lot of fluff out there," Hopkins said. "A lot of superficial or flashy stuff. You really need to understand how it all ties together and what’s going on underneath and how you can help the athlete.
“It gets the clicks and it gets the likes, but it’s not necessarily in the best interest of the player.”
Hopkins isn't looking for the spotlight. He likes the lower profile he has in Rhode Island. It makes life easier for him, his wife and their two daughters. He likes results, like with Burdi.
But Burdi thinks the spotlight might be searching him out before too long.
“It wouldn’t shock me if he was working with a big-league team in the next five years,” Burdi said.
