How new drills, emphasis on individuals is driving hitting development

BRADENTON, Fla. -- The hitters waiting by the cage usually started by laughing or talking some smack when the hitter swung and missed during batting practice. That changed when they got into the box and saw how challenging it was.

There were two pitching machines set up on Roberto Clemente Field at Pirate City. The first one was about 5 feet behind the pitching rubber, the other about halfway between the mound and home plate. Both machines could mix up offerings, alternating between high and low spin and velocity. 

And those offerings did alternate. Outside of guessing, there was no way for a hitter to sit and wait for a certain pitch. With the closer machine, if you don't read the pitch immediately, it becomes much harder to make contact, let alone drive it.

As minor-league hitting coordinator Jonny Tucker walked by the players back to get to the batting cages past left field, one jokingly called out to him: “I thought we were fastball only!”

In plenty of camps, they'd be right. It was one of the first times they were on the field to swing this spring. But Tucker didn’t break stride, simply reminding them they need to practice like they’ll play. 

“We’re selling out to different training philosophies,” Tucker explained. “Different training measures and different constraints. We are doing things with vision. We are challenging our players that the cage is going to be looking somewhat similar to what the field environment is going to require.”

As a minor-league player with the Orioles and Nationals from 2004-2012, Tucker remembers a lot of “feel good” batting practice that didn’t accomplish much. Hitting meatballs that were lobbed in, underhand flips and off of a tee…

How is any of that supposed to help him hit a 100 mph fastball, again?

The Pirates have based their player development mindset around constantly looking for ways to get better, and on the hitting side, it starts at practice.

“This environment in the cage needs to match the environment out there,” Tucker said. “We can get as explorative and inventive as we can, within good reason and good logic. We’re just selling out to an individual approach.”

“We don’t discriminate against drills,” he added shortly after. “If there’s a small way to improve somebody, we’ll do it.”

Those drills come in many different shapes and sizes, with many of them being sampled at the “Get Better At Baseball” camp in November. To rattle off a few, players took one-handed swings with a Fungo bat, standing on a cushion or taking a step from one side of the batter’s box to the other while gearing up to swing.

Two-way player Bubba Chandler described a drill where there would be weights tied to the hip, holding them back after they open.

“I love those,” Chandler said of the lower-half drills. “I’m a terrible lower-half guy when I hit. That helped me create more power and create more stability in the box.”

Then there are occlusion goggles, which detect when the ball comes out of the pitcher’s hand, before blocking the batter’s vision. The batter has a fraction of a second to determine what the pitch is and if they should swing at it. 

When Mason Martin was told about the goggles, he immediately bought in and wanted to try them out. After using them in the camp, he asked the team if he could take a pair home, because one of the areas the two sides identified he needed to work on is his two strike approach. They obliged.

“It’s just, ‘hit,’ ” Martin said. “The drill’s going to do the work for you.”

“The training that we’re doing always keeps us on our toes,” he continued. “We’re always getting a new feel here, a new few there. It forces you to make those adjustments, especially pitch to pitch, round to round.”

Both Martin and Chandler are two of the Pirates’ higher ranking hitting prospects, but that’s where the similarities for the two end. Chandler is 19, learning pro-ball life, a switch-hitter, a pitcher, and raw in all of those aspects. Martin is an upper-level power hitting first baseman who could be destined for big things if he cuts down on his strikeouts.

With the new leadership regime’s emphasis on individualized development, it gives Tucker and the Pirates’ hitting coaches more opportunities to look for solutions for the roadblocks those two hitters, or anyone in the system, will face.

Matt Fraizer, for example, worked on getting his contact point out in front more and went from a borderline forgotten player to the team’s Minor-League Player of the Year in 2021. It wasn’t an “ah-ha” moment, and it took trial and error on both sides to find out exactly what makes him click.

“We try to identify what’s the leading problem, attack that and reverse engineer off of that,” Tucker said. “It’s a messy process. We don’t always get it right, but trying to be open and trying to have a hodgepodge of ideas of what the problems are and then attack them. If that’s a thing that helps, we know that was it. If it’s not, that’s all right, we cross it off and we know we’re closer to finding out what the next solution is.

“It’s a very messy process, one that does not have a straight line to production. That’s the business that we’re in. It’s fun nonetheless. It keeps you on your toes.”

It’s that type of thought process that has defined Ben Cherington and director of coaching and player development John Baker’s vision. Tucker, though, wasn’t one of their hires. He was a holdover from Neal Huntington’s Pirates, who didn’t have the same emphasis on individualized development. 

“We had the right pieces in the house,” Tucker said. “We just weren’t necessarily selling out to them [the right ideas] yet.”

The COVID-19 pandemic was an opportunity to assess several areas in coaching and player development, including how the individual players were treated. Tucker wants a player’s personality to come out, whether they’re from California, Idaho, Taiwan or the Dominican Republic, and the club is giving those players more leeway to be themselves.

“We’re not caring about uniforms,” Tucker said. “We’re not caring about facial hair. We’re not caring about anything. We’re caring about you being a good human being and getting in there and getting better. We’re wiping away the noise and doubling down on what we deem as important.”

Looking at the players around camp, there are plenty of players trying to grow mustaches or their hair out. It’s a departure from the military-style of the past.

There will be more changes coming once the minor-league season gets started, as each affiliate’s coaching staff is getting another member with a hitting background, essentially dividing the workload between two people. The purpose of the “integrated baseball performance coach” is to offer different areas of expertise, like catching or infield defense, while having more personal experience with the sport to offer a young player.

“Every coach in there has a very unique and expert skill set,” Tucker said. “Wherever they’re from and wherever they’ve played. It would be ridiculous for me to discredit all that and only to be speaking from my experience. I am not a genius. I am not the best coach in the world. I’ve got a lot of coaches that are older than me and do things better than me. It wouldn’t make sense for me not to get their ideas or include them.”

That emphasis on collaboration and working with the individual is what drives those unique drills and how they want to help hitters learn and grow. As Tucker said, "we are doing things with vision.”