PORT STREET LUCIE — Drew Smith battled mechanics throughout much of last season. The Mets right-hander has traditionally used what he calls a Ferris wheel move. After raising and then sinking his left knee, he lifts the glove over his head and swings it out, leaving space for his right arm to curl up and throw the ball. Changes made last offseason caused his glove to point at the target instead of going up.
His ball speed has decreased, and his favorite ball, the slider, lacks bite.
Two months later, he realized the adjustment wasn’t working, and the rest of the disappointing 2023 season was spent mastering the old mechanics to find the old results.
The Mets’ season ended on October 1st. On October 2, Smith and Brooks Lally arrived in Port St. Lucie for their final bullpen session.
They entered the most valuable and expensive research facility the Mets had to offer, the newly opened Pitching Lab, where tiny motion sensors were attached all over their bodies, and stripped down to their compression shorts.
“Who doesn’t like getting their underwear all over them and having their underwear thrown in?” Larry said with a smile.
And they threw.
Motion sensor technology and dozens of cameras (hundreds? David Stearns himself said he’s not sure and wouldn’t reveal the numbers if he did) provide a rendering of the pitcher’s biomechanics. and high-speed cameras can slow down each motion — including the actual throwing motion, which produces one of the fastest joint rotations the human body can perform.
Smith had already returned to his Ferris wheel style of pitching, but it was encouraging to see the data that showed his pitching was back to normal and gave him hope for his velocity and slider.
“That’s where I found out I was a better mechanic,” Smith said. “I could see that I got better right away. … So I got the feedback and spent the offseason working on it and I think I made some pretty good progress.”
In Smith’s case, the team and players are happy to receive immediate help from modern resources.
However, the Mets pitching lab currently in operation is designed to collect data that hopes to inform and assist future Mets pitchers.
The lab, which opened in June, is a clear sign of both Steve Cohen’s support and an attempt by the Mets to catch up in an area of technology where they have fallen behind.
With apologies to Tyler Megill and David Peterson, who are still developing, the Mets haven’t been able to graduate a starting pitcher from their minor league system since the Fab Five days.
Pitching is more like a science than ever before that can be analyzed and implemented.
You can add an inch or two of movement with just a few adjustments to your grip. This can be the difference between the pitch hitting the end of the bat or hitting the sweet spot. The technology in our pitching lab can trace and optimize pitch shapes. You can easily spot pitchers subtly struggling to repeat pitches.
“I think over the last 10 years there has been an influx of very important technological advances into the way athletes in general, including both pitchers and hitters, train,” Stearns said. “By the time the coaching gets more specific, we can provide real-time feedback to players in a variety of ways. And we have a centralized place in our player development hub and our spring training hub, and that’s where we put a lot of the technology. Being able to accommodate helps.”
The baseball operations manager laughed when asked to tour the laboratory.
The newspaper confirmed that the lab is indeed located at a facility in Port St. Lucie, not far from the Clover Park right field line. Naturally, media personnel are not allowed to enter.
This information is proprietary, and the Mets don’t want their rivals to know what they know. It is believed that about 10 baseball teams, including the Yankees and Sterns’ former team, have research institutes.
Stearns said there are “some high degree of similarities” between the Mets’ lab and the Brewers’ lab, but they are not the same.
“I would be surprised if we were doing something in our lab that doesn’t exist anywhere else in baseball,” Stearns said. “I think the technology that’s being used there now has some presence, whether it’s at other clubs or independent facilities.”
This technology (a camera, a force plate that measures the impact that occurs when a pitcher leaves the mound, and Trackman that measures pitch velocity, spin rate, spin efficiency, and many other data points) to start the data file. It was used. The Mets will send as many pitchers (major league and minor league) as they can to Port St. Lucie after last season.
A baseline has been established for each, and the plan is to test all of these pitchers again this spring to continue adding to the dataset.
“You can get just about any information you want,” said Eric Olze, a promising right-handed relief pitcher who spent last season at Triple-A Syracuse. “So they’re marking and tracking every inch of your body. And then all the camera setups and lighting and everything else is done to make sure every move is done. [is tracked].
“This is by far the most advanced baseball stadium report I’ve gotten from a pitch broadcast. It was a great experience.”
“It’s cool to see the dots move even though there’s no person on it, and you can try to figure out whose profile that is,” said starting pitcher Dominic Hamel. . “You can see how everyone’s body works differently. It’s just a kinetic chain of working from the ground up, and you can see how athletes can do different distributions.”
All of the pitchers surveyed by the Post appreciated the information, but expressed varying interest in digging deeper into its contents. They are currently stored in files.
Collecting data is “just the first step,” Stearns said.
The Mets hope they can develop a coaching staff that can translate that information in a way that players can understand, and that’s the next step.
Eric Jagers, vice president of pitching, leads the lab, and Stearns said that over the past two years, he has worked with “a number of really technically talented individuals” in hopes of properly communicating the results of this research to pitchers. The organization added “human resources,” he said.
(Although the lab is primarily used for pitchers, Stearns said it could also help hitters in the future.)
After data collection comes data analysis. Perhaps this data will help pitchers like Smith know when their mechanics are out of whack.
Perhaps in a few years, the Mets will realize what worked for Smith and be encouraged to try it out with another right-handed pitcher with a similar size and release point.
Perhaps the lab could be a place to not only fix pitchers, but also use historical data to learn which pitchers should throw which pitches.
All of this is speculation, but Cohen’s wallet allows the Mets to dream again.
“I think the honest answer is ‘I don’t know.’ We don’t know what’s going to happen as a result of this,” Stearns said. “When you get a huge data set, you don’t necessarily know what conclusions you’re going to come to. … I think that’s an exciting part of where we are right now as an organization.”
