ST. LOUIS – When he walked in the door, people stopped what they were doing around the facility and started to congregate.
They wanted to watch the “psycho.”
Five hours earlier, Mitch Keller caught a plane from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to finally set foot in Tread Athletics, a baseball facility in Charlotte, N.C. They had seen on social media and heard what Keller had been doing this winter. The velocities he had been hitting. Now, they had to experience it.
“When he came in that day, it was a different environment,” Devin Hayes, a performance coordinator at Tread Athletics, and the person who coined the “psycho” moniker on Keller because he threw in complete silence. “It’s like, ‘damn, this is what a big-leaguer looks like.’ They got after it a little bit more because Mitch was in there doing his thing.”
Keller threw at 11 a.m. that day. The next time, 9:30 a.m., before anyone else in the facility started throwing, and far earlier than he would ever need to for a major-league game. While he was only in North Carolina a week, those bullpens he threw there would end up going viral on Instagram and Twitter. After two years where his fastball velocity had dipped to 94 mph – which included times where he could barely keep it in the 90s – he was lighting up the radar gun with 99 and 100 mph heat, touching 102.
"It's probably the one time I've been a big fan of social media,” Derek Shelton, who wasn’t allowed to be in contact with players due to the lockout, quipped.
Shelton was not alone. Everyone in the Pirates clubhouse wanted to see Keller in action this spring.
“I get excited to watch his innings too,” catcher Taylor Davis joked.
“His arsenal is disgusting,” Hayes said.
“Filthy,” is how David Bednar described it.
“He looks like and sounds like he is who he was a couple years ago when everyone was super high on Mitch Keller,” Cole Tucker said.
Remember that Mitch Keller? The one Baseball America once ranked the No. 12 prospect in all of baseball, who was supposed to be at the front of the Pirates’ rotation for years to come? Now three years into his major-league career, he hasn’t lived up to that promise, outside of the occasional flash.
He knew it had to change. He couldn’t be the next Gerrit Cole or Tyler Glasnow as a Pirate pitcher who got away. He had to be the pitcher he knew he could be. He had to be confident and just have fun on the mound again.
Watching him light up LECOM Park’s radar gun like he did at Tread, it looks like that could happen this year.
“For the past two years, I haven’t really been the dude everybody wants me to be,” Keller told me. “It’s fine. It put me on this journey and this is where it’s taken me. I’m ready to roll with what I’ve got now.”
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To Keller, there isn’t one specific moment that sticks out as a turning point or day where he knew something had to change.
It’s hard to ignore what happened June 10, 2021, though.
To that point of the season, Keller’s starts had been painfully predictable. He would get hit hard in one start and then turn in a strong outing the next. He alternated between the two for two months, never getting into a groove or doing poorly enough to warrant drastic action on the team’s part. After each good start, the hope was that it was the outing that finally got him going.
That pattern broke in early June. The Dodgers tallied four runs and Keller allowed 10 baserunners before being pulled in the third. His ERA ballooned to over 7. Fans’ boos and complaints about him pitching timidly were getting louder.
“I’m probably the most-pissed-off guy in this locker room,” the normally mild-mannered Keller said after the start. After a pause, he then exited the Zoom room. It would be almost two months before Pittsburgh would hear from him again.
Two days after that start, Keller was optioned to Class AAA Indianapolis. According to Shelton after Keller’s last start, the team had not discussed demoting him or trying him out of the bullpen to that point. Within 48 hours, they decided to do both.
Keller was now the most pissed-off guy in a different locker room.
“I was frustrated,” Keller said in Bradenton, Fla. “I couldn’t figure it out. I couldn’t do it.”
Tucker, one of Keller’s closest friends on the team, could see it, both in Pittsburgh and when he and Keller returned to Indianapolis. The two were drafted and rose through the farm system together. It can be hard sometimes to read Keller since he is so even-keeled, but Tucker sensed he wasn’t in the best headspace.
“He expects a lot of himself,” Tucker said. “He knows he’s got a gift. He knows he’s got lightning in that arm. When it doesn’t work out, he gets pretty upset.”
That even-keelness was sometimes misconstrued by fans as apathy or pitching scared, neither of which were true, but were still heard by Keller.
“I wish I showed more emotion or whatever, but,” Keller said, taking a few seconds to think his over before cracking a slight grin, “It ain’t me. It’s just not who I’ve ever been.”
The pressure to succeed in the majors to stop the boos was only part of the equation. There was also the stress of needing to be that first guy through the wall. There was a wave of pitching prospects coming up through the minors, all of whom had the same goal: Be on the same staff as Keller.
“I put a bunch of pressure on myself,” Keller said. “That’s not good for anybody. I’m trying to live with that pressure.”
In spring training going into last year, he talked openly about needing to become more of a leader on the team for those reasons. With very few veterans on the major-league staff, it heightened that need in his mind.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” he thought to himself about all of those roles. “I was the top prospect. Everyone’s been looking to me for years.”
“Was it a little bit unfair to himself? Yeah, maybe,” pitching coach Oscar Marin said. “But that’s what he wanted to do.”
On top of all that, Keller’s stuff just wasn’t as good as it had been as a rookie, where he was consistently in the mid- to upper-90s with his fastball. That fastball got hit his rookie year, though he did suffer from historically bad luck. He threw 48 innings in the majors as a rookie in 2019 and had a .475 batting average on balls in play, the highest ever for someone with that many innings. The league average is usually around .300, and, while there is always fluctuation for individual pitchers, it’s never 175 points. Going based on the quality of contact allowed, his expected ERA (2.70) was one-third of what his actual ERA was that year (7.13).
To try to get better major-league results, Keller shortened up his arm path ahead of 2020. The old motion he had used did not always feel good, and this was a way to potentially be more deceptive with the fastball while increasing the spin efficiency and vertical break.
The trade off was velocity, falling into the lower 90s for most of the next two years. So while his results with the fastball got a little better, the peripherals got worse and his breaking pitches were getting tagged by hitters more.
The pressure, the poor results, the diminished stuff. It was taking its toll on the 25 year old.
“I was going through a lot,” Keller said. “It [baseball] wasn’t fun. Sucking is not fun.”
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CATHERINE COOK / INDIANAPOLIS INDIANS
Keller walked off the mound at Victory Field in Indianapolis still a bit down on himself. His first appearance as a reliever had gone about as smoothly as a pitcher could hope for: 1-2-3 inning, eight pitches, seven strikes, two strikeouts.
Pitching coach Joel Hanrahan went to greet him in the dugout to congratulate him on his inning. Keller didn’t feel great about the outing. In his mind, some of those pitches the minor-league hitters missed wouldn’t have worked in the majors.
“Who cares?” Hanrahan said back “They worked here right now.”
Hanrahan had two main goals working with Keller. The first was to take some pressure off of himself. He didn’t have to be anything other than Mitch Keller.
“One of the things I told him on his first day here was, ‘You're in Indianapolis now. You’re not going to be on the front page of the newspaper, you're not going to be on MLB Network,’ ” Hanrahan said at the time. “You have a chance to just go out and pitch here. You’ve got one inning. Let's see what you've got.”
The second? He was going to “beat it back into his head” that baseball was fun.
“I had to take a step back there,” Keller said. “It was the big leagues. There was no reason not to have fun.”
That slowly started to change in Indianapolis, in part because he got to taste some consistent success again.
“I think that’s what he wanted to bring back,” Indianapolis outfielder Bligh Madris said. “That fire, passion.”
Class AAA is filled with people right on the edge of their major-league dreams, but watching Keller in Indianapolis, Madris quietly thought to himself that “he’s more motivated than anyone here.”
Keller transitioned back into the rotation after a few relief outings and was called up again at the end of July, about seven weeks after his demotion. The results still weren’t great, with a handful of good games and duds mixed together, but he survived the season.
He knew that he couldn’t repeat that performance. He had to get better for 2022.
“If I don’t, I won’t have a job,” he thought to himself.
Back in spring training, Clay Holmes told him about a baseball facility in North Carolina that does remote training. With a lockout looming, Keller knew he needed to find somewhere to get some instruction and help him become the pitcher he wants to be.
“I pulled back and was like, ‘what do I need to do? When did I feel the best?’” Keller asked himself. The answer, he determined, was to go back to that 2017, 2018 form where he was a rising star in the minor leagues.
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It really started to click for Keller that he could throw hard when he did a pulldown – or a running throw – as a senior when he hit 104 mph, something few major-leaguers could do, let alone a high school kid.
Devin Hayes could never do that. In fact, he didn’t know if he even threw hard enough to pitch in college. He graduated high school without hitting 80 mph. With better diet and workout plans, he was able to get to the mid-80s early in his college career, but leveled off there. He was going to pitch Division III for Castleton State in western Vermont, but didn’t feel like he had the stuff to pitch at that level.
In 2015, the fall of his junior year, Hayes discovered a baseball facility in North Carolina, which was being promoted by a newer, indie baseball Twitter account that was starting to get some attention from the industry, @PitchingNinja. Hayes gave them a look and wound up being one of Tread Athletics’ first five athletes.
Hayes held his own at the NCAA level his junior year and then recorded a 1.58 ERA his senior year, leading a Castleton State staff which finished first in all of Division III baseball in team ERA.
He pursued a professional dream for a bit, pitching in independent ball and for the Irish Olympic team in qualifiers – only to lose to Israel and Pirates coach Jeremy Bleich in the latter – but eventually returned to Tread as an instructor.
There, he would work with several professional and a few big-league players, including Keller’s teammate Dillon Peters, but never anyone with the pedigree of Keller.
“I felt really comfortable after just talking to him on the phone,” Keller said. “Wasn’t tentative at all with him. They’re just a bunch of really good dudes that want to talk and know what the hell they’re talking about. It was pretty easy for me to decide that I was going there.”
Even if Keller believed in him early, Hayes felt like he should have to prove himself to Keller, too.
“It’s weird, a big-leaguer trusting their career to a 26-year-old Division III player,” Hayes said.
How did he do that? “S— talk,” Hayes joked.
One of the earlier steps of the program were flat ground sessions. Keller, like most pitchers, takes some time off from throwing after the season before beginning a ramp up process. When he did begin throwing again, he was at 90, 91 mph. So was Hayes, who had the advantage of a fully stretched out arm that he didn’t need to build back up.
When they texted each other videos of their flat grounds, Hayes decided to poke the bear.
“There’s no reason that your coach should be throwing as hard as you,” Hayes told him.
A few sessions later, Keller sent Hayes a video of him hitting 93 mph. Hayes was still at 91 mph.
“F— you,” Keller sent back. “You’re never gonna beat me again.”
Hayes knew he had him.
PHOTO COURTESY OF DEVIN HAYES
Devin Hayes and Mitch Keller.
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Once Keller advanced beyond just flat grounds, Hayes had a simple message for him.
“Teach your body to move faster.”
“If he tries to slow down and be deliberate, there are too many moving parts that he needs to think about trying to throw slow rather than just being athletic and trusting his body to get to the right positions he needs to,” Hayes said.
The two watched videos of when Keller felt the best, back when he was a minor-leaguer on the rise and identified some things they wanted to bring back. They also wanted to ditch the shorter arm action.
“It just didn’t work out for me,” Keller said. “I tried it for, jeez, two years. I didn’t feel comfortable throwing strikes. Obviously my command went down, my velo went down… I had to take a step back. That wasn’t working for me. I had to go back to what I used to do.”
Hayes introduced him to several new drills and ideas. With the shorter delivery, Keller felt he was pushing the ball instead of pulling it into his release. From the first day of the offseason, Hayes had him start doing “figure eight rocker” drills with weighted balls, getting whippier arm action again:
They also moved his glove up while on the mound to create more natural downhill action, better suiting his mechanics.
To help him move faster and improve his timing, they did shuffle throws to get his tempo, and athleticism, back up:
By this point, Keller was throwing consistently in the mid-90s, about where he was before shortening the arm path. Now it was time to add something new: The “Kikuchi Drill.”
Named after Blue Jays pitcher Yusei Kikuchi, the focus is on the lower half of his delivery to create more drift. The goal is to get the pitcher to feel taller during their drift and the land with their full foot on the plant, rather than just the heel first:
With all of those changes, Keller let it "eat" at Tread after spending most of the winter training back home and working remotely with Hayes. He immediately set the facility fastball record at 100.4 mph and went on to break it several times over.
All of it at 9:30 a.m., in complete silence.
“It takes a level of bad-ass or something to throw a bullpen at 9:30 and be consistently upper-90s,” Hayes said.
And hitting 100? “It’s definitely fun,” Keller said with a smile.
Diving into the pitch data, Keller’s stuff suddenly started to play like one of the pitchers the Pirates had let get away: Gerrit Cole. Of course Hayes wanted him to be Keller, not Cole, but comparisons like that don’t get thrown around lightly and can’t be ignored.
“I think that alone gives Mitch the confidence to be like, ‘damn. I don’t have to be perfect with things,’ ” Hayes said. “He doesn’t have to be perfect with things. He’s got the stuff to take him to the next level.”
Mix in a new sweeping breaking ball that the two discovered while messing around one day, and Keller was ready to return to the majors with a revamped arsenal of stuff.
Hayes also saw him leave with the right attitude.
“You face the ups and downs alone in the big leagues, and at 23, 24 years old, it can be really tough,” Hayes said. “I think for him, this offseason, it was about smaller victories. That flat ground competition with him. Build off of those small victories, and a couple months later, he was upper-90s in bullpens. I don’t think it was a confidence issue, but he had gone through a lot already.
“Reminding himself he’s a stud and there’s a reason why he’s a big-leaguer was big.”
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JOSH LAVALLEE / PIRATES
Mitch Keller.
Keller returned to Bradenton this spring with the same idea that he is going to be looked up to by all the younger pitchers in camp. Prized pitching prospect Quinn Priester’s locker was even put right next to his.
He was in a better spot to be a leader.
“I think he’s in a really good head space to be able to do that, and do it organically in his own way,” Marin said. “The Mitch that we’re seeing now is the Mitch that guys have a tendency to follow. When you look at him walk around now and that confidence and his mannerisms and the way he’s on the mound, the way he even stretches in the group, it’s different. I think the confidence of having this plan and clear path of where he wants to go is there. I think that’s what he’s exuding right now.”
Keller went into the offseason knowing he was a year away from arbitration. If he had a repeat of 2021, they could let him go.
He’s not feeling that pressure.
“I think I’ve shown I figured some stuff out,” Keller said. “I feel better, more confident. Now it’s about taking it into the season.
“I’ve got to do it now. Now or never.”
It can be now. His stuff can frustrate hitters and saw off bats. For a team looking for a front of the line starter, he could be it.
“I've caught great pitchers. A lot of them in Cleveland," Gold Glove catcher Roberto Pérez told Dejan Kovacevic. "Corey Kluber. Trevor Bauer. Carlos Carrasco when he was at his best. Other guys. None of them have the stuff this one does. Not one."
There will still be detractors who will be quick to point out his major-league track record, or people who doubt the revamped stuff and better head space is enough. And there are still plenty of prospects watching him, hoping they will be in the same Pirates rotation.
He’s ready for all eyes to be on him.
“Bring it on. It’s not going to bother me. They’ve been on me for a while. I’m good to go.”
All videos courtesy of Devin Hayes.
