In pursuit of ‘whippyness’: How J.A. Happ reworked his mechanics this offseason

TAMPA, Fla. — J.A. Happ describes it as “whippyness.” It’s the feeling a pitcher has when his mechanics are in alignment, and his torso and lower half are allowing his arm to be the final component to turn toward the plate. This is the sensation that allows for arm speed in a delivery and gives the pitcher better command, and often better velocity and rise on his fastball.

Whippyness is what Happ felt had disappeared during his ill-fated 2019 campaign. He threw 161 1/3 innings over the course of the season, second on the Yankees only to Masahiro Tanaka, but it took a late-season turnaround to bring his season ERA under five.

The simplest explanation as to why Happ went from a 2.69 ERA over 11 starts for the Yankees in 2018 to a guy who couldn’t get past the fifth inning more often than not in 2019 was the super-juiced baseball that plagued just about every fly-ball pitcher across the league. His fly-ball rate fell from 2018 to 2019. His rate of home runs to fly balls spiked. Happ refused to use the rabbit ball as an excuse, though he was vindicated in some of his struggles by the scientific report released by MLB in December 2019.

There was more to the story, though, and Happ wanted to understand why his season had gone awry. He was 36 years old and had stumbled to the finish line after putting up above-average seasons in the four years prior. He keeps his family home in the Tampa Bay area, so he took less than two weeks off following the ALCS, and showed up at the Yankees minor league complex looking for answers.

“I didn’t feel like I had all the tools in my bag,” Happ said. “I wanted to get to the point where I felt more comfortable throwing what I should be able to throw.”

Happ picked up his right leg a few feet from his spring training locker. He turned his backside toward the imaginary plate, rather than the side of his hip. He raised his right elbow up until it was parallel to the ground, and pointed to his left knee. Bent, as if in preparation for his delivery, he noted that it was aligned directly over his ankle. This is the modification to the mechanics he’s used for his entire career that he spent the entire offseason working to adopt.

The knee stays over his ankle, the hip rotates, and thus, he produces the power needed to drive toward the plate. In 2019, and possibly before, Happ felt like he fell down the mound toward the plate. Now, at age 37 and entering his 14th major-league season, he is looking to retrain his kinetic chain and muscle memory to unlock what he lost last year.

“What are my inefficiencies?” he asked after the 2019 season ended. And where, after a year in which he’d tried to adjust in-season, would he find out now?

In early November, he began working with Yankees director of pitching Sam Briend and the athletic training staff at the minor league facility in Tampa. Briend was hired away from Driveline Baseball last summer, and Larry Rothschild, then the Yankees’ pitching coach, gave him the authority to construct an offseason program for Happ. Later, when Matt Blake was hired as New York’s major-league pitching coach, he was briefed on the program Happ was doing with Briend and followed along by receiving video from his work in Tampa.

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Briend and the training staff analyzed Happ in two different ways. Briend trained high-speed cameras on Happ to give what he describes as “a rough biomechanic assessment” on his delivery. Pitchers and pitching coaches have long used video to identify variances and inefficiencies in mechanics, but the high frame rate cameras allow a staff to find smaller movements that get lost in typical slow-motion.

The training staff conducted several different movement screenings on Happ to determine mechanical patterns and places where he may have less physical mobility or stability in his delivery. In tandem, Briend and the training staff determined that Happ’s upright posture was affecting the mobility in his hips, affecting his ability to rotate properly as he moved down the mound.

“A lot of times I would drift into my delivery, and my knee would bend toward the plate,” Happ explained. In a wide stance, he shifted his left knee back and forth: Over his ankle, then pointing inward toward the direction of the mound. “I wanna be a little more up, with this knee staying over here and my foot back a little bit longer to just be in a little bit of a better power position. When my front leg lands, everything else should come, too.

“That allows the whippyness to happen. Instead of just falling into it, it’s like I am stabbing my movement toward the plate.”

Identifying a potential change in a pitcher’s mechanics is just the first step toward helping him become more effective on the mound. As Briend says, “setting an action plan is easy; then you have to individualize it based on feel.”

Once the plan was set, so began the repetitions. Happ had shown up early to the minor league facility so that he would have the full offseason to adjust to whatever he and the Yankees planned to do. Thus began a winter of new types of physical soreness for Happ, who began to engage his lower half in ways that were new for the muscles involved. Small changes in physical activity, especially done as many times as a pitcher practices his delivery, can make you feel muscles you hardly knew were there.

But Happ knew the best way to go into 2020 with physical consistency was to build the foundation of muscle memory in the offseason. Typically, he does a weighted ball program in December, plays catch in January, and throws four bullpens heading into spring. This year, he wanted to face hitters and see his new approach in action before getting into exhibition games.

Happ and Briend are in agreement that a total mechanical evolution would have been nearly impossible to manufacture in the course of the season. The lefty did make some adjustments in the second half of the season, but nothing that involved screens and cameras and the simplicity of focusing on it as he could in the offseason.

“You can’t hear about that on a Wednesday and then on Friday, you make a start,” Happ explained. “You’d work on it in sides to try to get the muscle memory and in playing catch, which is what I am doing now because it’s going to take probably thousands of reps before it just happens consistently, but in short, no. You couldn’t do this during the season.”

The winter was not without its frustrations for Happ, who was mentioned in trade discussions as soon as the Yankees signed Gerrit Cole. The Yankees knew that they had a potential injury issue in James Paxton on their hands, though, and were only open to trading Happ if a trade offer came in that blew them away. Behind the scenes, they also knew he was making actual adjustments and working under the guidance of their director of pitching.

Happ was compelled to dedicate his offseason to reworking his mechanics, but he and the team knew that such an undertaking also comes with new risk. What if, despite everyone’s best efforts, the new approach fell apart once Happ reached a competitive environment again? Then what? Back to the drawing board with the regular season just a few weeks away?

“As nice as it is to create a mechanical picture that is pretty,” Briend said, “pretty doesn’t win you ballgames.”

Happ’s extended winter program allowed him to get in 10 bullpen sessions before the full staff reported to Tampa. He requested to get into a game early to test out his new approach, knowing that “there’s no guarantee any of this would work.”

“When he came over here for spring training, we’d already hit the ground running,” pitching coach Matt Blake said. “He was already on his program, I knew what it was, he knew what it was. Sam’s feedback was basically giving us the jumping off point.”

Happ has now made two spring starts, throwing two innings in the first exhibition game and three innings five days later. He struck out five of 17 batters faced, allowed two hits, and walked none.

“He showed he’s confident and attacking the strike zone now,” Blake said after Happ’s first outing. “That’s where we saw some of the better fastball profiles out of him, compared to what he was getting last year. More of the old J.A. Happ. The velocity was up a bit, ride on his fastball was up.”

Manager Aaron Boone watched the game footage of Happ’s first outing later that night, looking to confirm what he thought he had seen from the dugout steps. Happ had renewed life on his fastball — “crispiness,” Boone said.

But what can be taken from five innings of work in exhibition games in February?

“Nothing,” Happ said. “Other than hopefully feeling good and rebounding, and feeling strong for the next one.”

(Top photo: John David Mercer / USA TODAY Sports)