Oscar Marin was not much of a pitching prospect in high school. Right-handers who are 5-foot-10 with a mid-80s fastball and no breaking pitches don't tend to draw a lot of attention from Division I colleges, and he was no exception.
That was until he was in the infield one day, slinging balls sidearm to the first baseman during warmup. Marin threw over the top as a pitcher, like most do, but his coach approached him about maybe taking a different approach on the mound. Do what he was doing during infield drills, but off the rubber.
Marin decided to give it a try, and it worked. He would end up developing as a sidearmer, found a breaking ball and went to a junior college. Shortly after, he got that scholarship to a Division I school at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock.
Not bad for a guy who had to relearn how to throw off the mound for that to happen.
"So, yeah, I would say last resort," Marin said with a laugh reflecting on the change during a Zoom call Saturday night.
Marin's playing career came to a close after his college days, but in a way, it was really just his origin story. An example of being presented a new idea and how he used it to, as he would put it, "maximize," a pitcher.
Instead of playing, he channeled that mindset into coaching. He got his first chance in professional ball as minor league pitching coach before eventually moving on to being a coordinator for the Mariners and bullpen coach for the Rangers in 2019.
Now, at just 37 years old, he is revamping the Pirates' staff as their pitching coach.
And the Pirates' pitching staff could use a revamping. Despite entering 2019 with one of the perceived best collections of pitchers in baseball, they struggled mightily. The staff's 5.19 ERA was the fifth-worst in baseball, and each of their starting pitchers finished with an ERA over 4.00.
If that wasn't enough, the staff looks worse on paper than a year ago. Jameson Taillon and Chris Archer will both miss 2020 with injuries, closer Felipe Vazquez was arrested and reliable reliever Francisco Liriano left in free agency. While new general manager Ben Cherington opted not to start a massive rebuild in his first offseason with the team, he did not sign a pitcher to a major league contract, either.
They did pick up a few guys through minor league deals, such as Derek Holland and Robbie Erlin, who could be pieces to the staff, but Marin was not going to be given much outside help. The pitching had to improve internally.
"I think it's for everybody, just being able to understand how to maximize your stuff," Marin said. "If you do something well, keep doing it, and do it in the right locations."
Marin quickly took an analytical approach to try to start that maximization with the Pirates. At one time, the Pirates were considered to be on the cutting edge of the analytics movement, buying heavily into defensive shifts and utilizing sinkers to get batters to hit into them. It was a strategy that sparked three straight playoff appearances.
However, the game kept on evolving, and the Pirates didn't. They continued to rely on sinkers and two-seamers for years, even as the home run explosion happened across baseball. Most teams adapted to the livelier ball by throwing more breaking pitches. The Pirates didn't, and it was arguably the main reason why pitchers such as Gerrit Cole, Tyler Glasnow and Charlie Morton -- three serious contenders for the American League Cy Young this year -- slipped through their fingers.
As more time passed, the game started to shift towards using technology such as Rapsodo and TrackMan in order to monitor spin and movement. While the Pirates would invest in these tools, former pitching coach Ray Searage had a hard time utilizing them properly. A player might have good spin on a pitch, but there was little conversation beyond that. The information was there, but the message wasn't getting across.
"A lot of it comes to being in front of a screen, looking at numbers," Marin said about using pitching technology. "I think being able to translate that information and making it easier to read and see and to understand, I think that really helps out."
While almost everyone on the staff had used Rapsodo at some points under the previous regime, Marin wanted to properly introduce it to his new group of pitchers. And what better way to do that than to start with the basics?
"Our first pitchers’ meeting in spring training was just like an analytical seminar for dummies," Jameson Taillon said during a recent Zoom call. "He went over every single world, every number that you see. The reports that you see, he broke down how to read them and how to interpret them, which was really nice for me. It was kind of like a fresh start. Then from there, we’ve gotten to focus in on certain areas and nitpick certain areas that we want to focus on."
This wasn't the first time Marin has done a "For Dummies" introduction into analytics. He's found it's the best way to start introducing some of the more advanced ideas.
After all, it worked for him when he was starting to learn these concepts.
“The hardest thing to understand with this stuff is understanding the numbers that they’re getting from sheets or information, whether it’s TrackMan, whether it’s units that we have like a Rapsodo, things like that. So we simplified it for them,” Marin said. “And this came from when I was a coordinator, I had it simplified for myself when I first started learning it, and I dumbed it down for myself, which in turn made it a lot easier to teach people how to do it after I did it for myself. It started with the coaches and then from coaches transitioned onto the players.
“So it’s basically taking all that information and simplifying it so you’re able to understand and eliminating the noise on things that maybe they don’t have to see and going from there.”
As spring training went on, the vernacular among Pirates pitchers started to change. They became more focused on making sure their pitches tunneled, or that they followed similar flight paths up until the point they break in order to fool hitters. There was more focus on sliders and curveballs, rather than relying on fastballs like normal. And technology was no longer just shoehorned in just because the other 29 teams were doing it. It was part of the actual preparation process.
"It was something we never really had or never really saw," Chad Kuhl said about using Rapsodo and TrackMan. "Just being able to have that instant feedback, No. 1, in your bullpens and being able to work and not going off what you thought you saw or what someone else saw. The data is right there for you to look back every pitch. You could throw a pitch, look and kind of base what you felt and what the data says and kind of match it up or try and improve on that.
"It’s nice to have something that qualitatively says, 'This is what you did. This is how you felt.’ And try to blend those together."
The new messages seem to be resonating with top prospect Mitch Keller. Keller struggled in his first taste of the majors last year, going 1-5 with a 7.13 ERA. However, his peripherals were very good, signaling he was unlucky and there is a lot of room to grow and get better.
For example, Keller has a high-spin fastball, ranking in the 91st-percentile across major leaguers, per Baseball Savant. High spin correlates with more movement, but his four-seamer only had an average amount of break.
How is this possible? Well, there are two types of spin: "Traverse spin," which leads to movement, and "gyrospin," which does not. The more traverse spin, the better. This is measured in "spin efficiency," or the amount of spin that leads to movement.
Keller's fastball had a lot of spin, but a lot of it was gyrospin, which is barely useful. So Marin worked with him during spring training in Bradenton, Fla., on how to read Rapsodo reports.
Like Kuhl said, now he can work on finding something that feels right and gets better results, rather than just one of the two. That helped him make the most of the layoff.
"I have a Rapsodo back home so I was able to use that and really focus on what I'm trying to work on to get better and I was able to do that and just coming in here, leaving right where I left off [in spring training]," Keller said during a Zoom call this week.
In his time working with the Rapsodo, Keller has seen his spin efficiency go from the low-90s in terms of percentage to about 95 percent. That would indicate his four-seamer will get more movement this year, which could be a catalyst to the Pirates' top pitching prospect breaking out.
But the conversations Keller and Marin had weren't just about getting more movement. Marin also wants Keller to throw his heat up in the top of the strike zone more, partially because it would tunnel better with his breaking pitches.
That's a radically different approach for the 24-year-old. The Pirates' old mantra of low fastballs and getting outs on three pitchers or fewer rang through all levels of the system, not just in the majors. It was a one-size-fits-all approach, which sometimes led to disastrous results.
That has changed with Marin.
"It’s not so much cookie cutter as it is that everything has been individualized and everyone has their own plan," Nick Burdi said during a Zoom call this week.
So when it comes to Keller, it's about moving away from what the previous regime had done.
"I think one of the biggest things for him is understanding his repertoire," Marin said. "Where is he gonna work? Where's his attack plan? Where's his usage? Like, your pitches work here as opposed to here. I think that was the biggest thing for him."
Watching Keller work in an intrasquad game Saturday, he peppered the upper part of the zone with fastballs. Some missed their target or were out of the strike zone, but his intent was apparent.
Mitch Keller striking out Tucker looking with a high four-seamer. He’s been sitting 93-95 mph. #DKPS #Pirates pic.twitter.com/qH6TItoEFx
— Alex Stumpf (@AlexJStumpf) July 11, 2020
The conversations those two had registered.
Not all of Marin's conversations lead to grand revelations. There's some joking around get to know his staff beyond what shows up on video. Every Wednesday at 3 p.m. during the shutdown, the pitchers would have a Zoom meeting to check in with pitchers and map out the next week of work. The actual pitching talk didn't start until about 3:15.
"The first 15 minutes of our conversations, we first decided just to [say], ‘Hey, what’s going on? What’d you do yesterday? Who’s watching Netflix, and what’s your favorite show,’" Marin said. "Those types of things that really got us going as a group – not just myself, but as they were talking, I was getting to know different likes, dislikes, stuff like that with our guys and really getting to know their personalities as they were talking to their teammates as well.
"That was probably the funnest thing about our calls. It wasn’t just all business. It was us getting together then having conversations, having fun conversations about what they’re doing. For Jamo, it’s playing a lot of video games. So I found out that he plays a lot of video games. That’s one arena where I can start going with him. But finding little things like that within our guys and within conversations, that really helped build relationships as we go. And I’m still doing it now with our guys.”
Derek Shelton has talked at great lengths since his hiring about how he wants his coaches to have relationships like that with the players. That, plus Marin's communication skills, has made him feel pretty good about his choice in pitching coach.
“If you spend any time talking to any of our pitchers, the first thing they’re going to rave about is his ability to communicate,” Shelton said. “Because you can know all the other things, but if you can’t translate that into the players’ language — and each individual player’s language — then it doesn’t matter.
"The one thing about communication is if it’s not consistent and understandable, it’s chaos. And we don’t want chaos. We want consistent information that people understand and his ability to break it down for each guy.”
It's not just information from data. During the shutdown, he and Trevor Williams were able to meet up twice a week since they both lived near Phoenix. Williams wanted to incorporate his curveball more, and after two weeks, Marin figured out how he could get better feel for it. In the past, Williams thought he needed to make a full extension on the release. Instead, they shortened the extension, and Williams came into summer camp raving about how he can now spin both of his breaking pitches more consistently. A slight tweak could finally give him that fourth pitch he's been trying to find for years.
That's how Marin's hoping to maximize these pitchers.
"I think leaning on one side or the other [analytics or feel], you’re going to skip out on some things that are going to be really important for the development of a young pitcher or for the execution or maybe the development continuing with veteran guys," Marin said. "So it’s just a mesh of both and combining both so they understand the feel but also understand what their strengths are and maximizing them, because if they never know then they’re not going to really take that next step."
