Welcome back to Mound Visit, everyone. Feels good to dust it off after being without major-league games for almost 10 months.
It's been even longer since we have seen Nick Burdi in a big-league game. The last time that happened was April 22, 2019. Watching him writhe in pain on PNC Park's mound that night, some probably wondered if that was going to be the last pitch of his career.
It wasn't, and on Sunday, he made his return by dropping a slider right on the black to Paul Goldschmidt:
Here come a bunch of gifs. Two pitches later, he got the perennial All-Star swinging:
In fairness, he missed the glove on that one. It was probably the only pitch of the outing that should've been hit.
Because this fastball that he got another All-Star, Paul DeJong, with sure isn't touchable:
Look at this pitch chart of what Burdi offered DeJong. They were all fastballs. He even had the advantage of going up 2-0. But the threat of a breaking ball -- and the fact that the two have such similar flight paths up to the point where the hitter has to pull the trigger -- made him have to commit as Burdi just kept going higher with his pitches.
PitchingNinja, do your thing and show exactly why DeJong had to chase that third pitch.
Nick Burdi, Filthy Slider & 100mph Fastball, Overlay (synced at release). ? pic.twitter.com/0z9odbFjym
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) March 2, 2020
There's been a lot of talk surrounding this club about how they are going to throw more high fastballs and try to have it tunnel with their breaking pitches. That's why. And that topic is a Mound Visit for a later day.
Finally, the Matt Carpenter at-bat. Behold one of the best three pitch sequences we're going to see this year, starting with a 98 mph heater Carpenter barely gets a piece of, though he probably wishes he didn't:
Right off the back foot. That smarts. So where does Burdi go next?
Slider on the back foot? That's as brutal as it is nasty. Especially since it was thrown right where the fastball was. Tunneling at work.
But there's no way he could get Carpenter again with the same pitch in the same location, right?
That's how you end an 11 pitch, three strikeout performance.
98 mph heat with that slider? Yeah, that's why the Pirates have been willing to wait through three opening days with his Rule 5 status still hanging over his head to keep him.
“I’m thinking he’s got really good stuff,” Derek Shelton said, grinning, Sunday when DK asked about the prospect of Burdi being a potential closer in waiting. “And I’m excited that he’s continuing to pitch for us and he’s healthy, yeah. I’m very happy with that.”
Health. That's the key. Burdi has always had this potential, but it's been a battle for him to just stay on the field. Tommy John surgery, Thoracic Outlet Syndrome surgery, a misdiagnosed bone bruise, the guy has been through just about everything.
Which is why, during the quarantine, he went back to Rhode Island.
Back in April, I wrote about how Burdi worked with physical therapy and strength coach Matt Hopkins and pitching coach John DeRouin at Hopkins' facility, Hop's Athletic Performance, during the offseason, and how he reinvented his mechanics there.
Perhaps the most important thing they worked on was his follow through and making sure he had a good deceleration path. Burdi was not able to use his obliques properly in the past because of a bilateral rib flare, and Hopkins believed that led to his poor deceleration and, by extension, his arm injuries. So they focused on new breathing mechanics for him to be able to use his obliques more during his delivery.
It was one of several changes Hopkins and DeRouin worked on, and time was an issue. Burdi didn't start throwing until mid-December. That gave them really just two months until the start of spring training, and even then, they started light.
Still, they made great strides in that time, and they made even more during the shutdown.
"[We] just continue[d] to hammer that home, even after spring training," Hopkins texted me, referring to working on Burdi's deceleration. "... It was a team approach to attack both sides of the coin, pitching mechanics and [body] movement patterns."
Back during spring training, Hopkins went to Instagram to explain the importance of the breathing exercises:
View this post on Instagram
And let's see how that change in Burdi's obliques impacts how he pitches. Here's a gif from April 2019 compared to Sunday afternoon. Pay attention to his back leg and how high it gets:
Burdi actually decelerates now rather than just stop. Hopkins had described Burdi's old motion as "trying to stop 10 feet away from a brick wall going 100 mph." Now, because of the bigger leg kick and the better follow through, he has more room to finish his motion with.
He takes a big step, but most of his kinetic energy is still going towards home. That's why his fastball went up another tick and is flirting with triple digits now, even after TOS surgery.
So there's just one question: Can he maintain these new mechanics?
"That's probably one of the hardest things," Burdi said during a Zoom call on July 8. "When the adrenaline gets going, your breath starts getting a little harder, being able to maintain that. So that was one of the big things we did. We would actually put speakers with music right next to where I was throwing. We'd try to get my heart rate to get up. Try to get me out of this rhythm. So that was one of the big things that we focused on, was when I start to get going and I start losing everything we've worked on, how can we get back before we fall into old habits and can create another injury or something that happened."
Well, he was able to do it with the adrenaline of his return going. That has to be a sign of good things to come.
