The New York Mets keep bringing well-prepared people to take over critical positions in the organizations. Even when they aren’t signing or trading for players, they manage to find ways to improve the club.
In another attempt to fortify its research, development, and analytics department, the New York Mets hired former major league pitcher Carter Capps as a rookie league pitching coordinator, according to Jacob Resnick of MetsMerized.com.
Capps was, most recently, a private trainer and pitching analyst at Driveline, a data-driven training facility in Kent, Washington, that has been responsible for resurrecting lots of careers in major league baseball.
The pitcher himself tweeted the news.
Bringing Capps into the fold is another sign that the Mets want to prioritize player development. Facilitating rookie ball pitchers with all the tech tools and resources they may need to get the best out of their pitching talent is now an organizational priority.
The Mets are embracing analytics more than ever
Capps was actually a very good reliever in MLB. In 2015, he had a 1.16 ERA in 31 frames with the Marlins. But he had an unorthodox delivery, and the league enforced some rule changes that made really affected Capps. That, and thoracic outlet syndrome condemned his major league future. He retired with a career 4.21 ERA (3.20 FIP) in 147.2 innings.
On a recent Driveline podcast episode, the now Mets employee said:
“I have to know that [the athletes] can handle that amount of information. What I do [with long-term clients] is slowly start conditioning them so that by the time they leave [Driveline] I’m expecting them to know all the nuances. But with these shorter-stay guys I know they’re already going to be overwhelmed when I do the biomechanics report.
“If a guy has great vertical break, good approach angle — ‘Hey, maybe think about throwing your fastball up in the zone a little more often,’ help that curveball tunnel a bit better so you don’t just have to get strikes on your 0-2 curveball in the dirt. A simple suggestion like that. I’m not going to tell him about vertical approach angle and pitch tunneling and stuff like that, it’s just ‘Hey, this would play better in this scenario, based off these two factors.’
“Then depending on his correspondence — ‘OK, that clearly hit home, he clearly understood that’ —we can go into level two pitch design-type stuff. Same thing with understanding biomechanics. It’s strictly based on what the athlete is giving back to me feedback-wise.”
Basically, Capps will help the Mets by embracing data and tech resources as tools to help pitchers, and helping young hurlers digest and understand this information to use it to improve their performance.