Seattle Mariners lefty pitcher James Paxton has been dominant at times this season, striking out as many as 16 batters in a game and throwing the first no-hitter of his career.
The stats he began tracking this year, however, aren’t generated on days he starts. In his sixth big league season, Paxton started wearing Motus’ baseball sleeve to log data for every throw he makes when he’s not pitching. The affixed sensor tallies each throw, tracking both the pitcher’s biomechanics and the stress on his elbow.
“Part of my problem in the past, I think, was that I went too hard between games, not allowing myself that time to recover,” Paxton said, gesturing to the black compression Motus sleeve on his left elbow. “This just puts a number to that and shows me that I am taking it down a notch in between games to save myself for every fifth or sixth day when I’m actually pitching. It’s easier when I can see it on a computer screen that you actually are taking something off and saving yourself for those games.”
The Mariners have a six-game stronghold on a wild card position as the season reaches its midpoint. The franchise is attempting to end the sport’s longest playoff drought and is doing so with a strong embrace of data and technology under general manager Jerry Dipoto. Some of the data-collecting technologies now employed by the Mariners fall under the jurisdiction of the new sports science department led by high performance director Lorena Martin and some under the purview of the analytics team.
Most of the sports science work, Dipoto said, is “in the educational phase” until the club gathers larger samples of data, though the on-field analytics initiatives are already paying dividends. The Mariners use K-Motion’s baseball vest, which records the kinematic sequence a batter undertakes to launch his swing, as well as the Rapsodo hitting and pitching monitors, which track ball flight. Rapsodo’s pitching product records data points such as velocity, spin rate and spin efficiency; its hitting counterpart logs exit velocity (speed off the bat) and launch angle (initial trajectory). As player development director Andy McKay said while discussing Rapsodo’s value, “You can’t bring a 1990s skillset to a 2018 industry.”
The pitching data is gleaned using Rapsodo in bullpen sessions and Statcast’s TrackMan radar system in games. Dipoto said the use of this new information has been “wildly productive” and that the staff is seeing “immediate impact in that regard almost across the board with pitchers.”
Starting pitchers such as Paxton, Marco Gonzales and Wade LeBlanc have been particularly receptive and, at times, proactive in implementing the information available, the GM said. The recommendations vary. Some pitchers might be instructed to use a particular pitch more and another less, or else to raise or lower one’s arm slot.
Paxton said he used Rapsodo in spring training to learn more about a pitching concept called “tunneling”—essentially, a pitcher tries to start different pitch types down the same path, or tunnel, so a hitter has trouble discerning which has actually been thrown. He seems to have paired his two premium pitchers, his fastball and curveball, with devastating effect. So far this season, Paxton has thrown significantly more fastballs in the upper part of the strike zone; high fastballs and diving curveballs are known to be a great combination because they both begin their plate-ward journey on the same plane.
During his torrid May, Paxton’s pitch value—a measure of effectiveness concocted by FanGraphs—for his fastball was second-best in the majors, while his curve ranked third. Notably, Gonzales’ curve was sixth on that list. (LeBlanc’s cut-fastball, or cutter, sits in fourth place on the league-wide list for pitchers with at least 60 innings this season.)
“We actually have an analyst who has become a, let’s call it, ‘pitching developer’ where he’s looking at all the detail that’s coming in from these technologies and working with our pitching coaches—we have three at the major league level and then all of our people at the minor league levels—to try and enhance or develop specific pitches,” Dipoto said, referring to quantitative analyst Joel Firman.
This advanced data primarily helps pitchers over hitters, and the information gap is a popular hypothesis to explain why strikeout rates set new records each season. Technology to aid hitters has lagged but is growing. Dipoto called bat sensors, which track a swing path and are now approved for game use throughout the minor leagues, as “the tip of the iceberg.”
Dipoto is more bullish on the utility of the vest made by K-Motion that captures and renders swing mechanics in 3D. The product is primarily in use by minor leaguers, though several big league hitters tried out the wearable in spring training. The front office added a minor league quality assurance coach, Dustin Lind—a physical therapist by training who played college ball at Montana State-Billings—as a specialist. His daily job, Dipoto said, is to “take the information we’re gathering from the K-Vest, work with the individual hitters in the cage to translate what they’re seeing, and help them build better, more efficient and more powerful swings. I think, for the most, we’ve seen progress there.”
Much of the Mariners’ sport science work, on the other hand, is more exploratory at this juncture. Infielders Ryon Healy and Andrew Romine both said the new department has helped open new lines of communication and information. Healy said there’s been an effort to change the culture around the training room, helping players feel comfortable going for preventive care and early-stage treatment, rather than just rehabilitation.
Romine said there’s been education about training holistically, noting the impact of nutrition and hydration on injury risk. (Now, he said, “I drink a ton of water. My hydration levels were through the roof especially in spring when you’re doing so much, you’re there all day, and it’s hot.”) There are also more general-use gadgets available for trial, such as FireFly Recovery for Seattle’s long flights.
While Paxton has reaped some early benefit since he began using the Motus sleeve in spring training, maximizing the value of the device will require more data gathering. The coaches, trainers, and pitchers will need to digest the volume of information generated on metrics such as the acute-to-chronic workload ratio that figures prominently in injury prediction.
Paxton doesn’t wear Motus during regular season starts, but he did for a few spring outings to help approximate in-game intensity. That helps inform his off-day throwing now because he knows what three-quarters effort really means. He’s learned to trust that recovery can be more important than making extra throws to fine-tune his pitches in practice.
“Sometimes in the bullpen you’re not going to [feel] quite right, but it’s having that confidence to shut it down so you don’t raise your pitch count and know that it’ll be there on game day,” Paxton said, before later adding: “Now I can go throw a bullpen, not see all my best stuff, and still go out and know it’s going to be there when I need it.”
Paxton certainly had a reserve of his best when completing his no-hitter on May 8. His two highest-velocity fastballs of the outing were his final pitches. Those two registered 100.2 miles per hour followed by 99.7 mph, resulting in a called strike and a game-ending groundout from Toronto Blue Jays slugger Josh Donaldson.