Missing Bats: How culture and tech converged to spread baseball’s strikeout gospel

Missing Bats, a special series this week in The Athletic, explores how baseball’s profound metamorphosis over the last two decades traces back to one simple idea — maximizing strikeouts at all costs — that became an industry-wide obsession. Explore the entire series here.

Derek Falvey landed an internship with the Cleveland Indians in 2007, moreso for his economics degree and scouting acumen than for his pitching at Trinity College. When he ordered lunch for the office, he was so fearful that then-general manager Mark Shapiro might receive the wrong order that he’d request the same meal. That way, if the restaurant botched one of the meals, Falvey could simply claim the screw-up and his boss would be none the wiser.

For nine years, Falvey did stints in player development, scouting, administration and baseball operations, and by 2016 he had ascended to assistant general manager. Falvey no longer supplied lunch for the fourth floor, though his responsibilities now included constantly fixing a vital but temperamental tool at the heart of Cleveland’s burgeoning pitching machine: Terry Francona’s much-maligned desktop printer.

The printer provided the reports that would help Francona make smart in-game and roster decisions; but the former manager relied on cardstock that proved too thick for the HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile All-in-One that sat on his desk. The result was a daily paper jam. But thanks to Falvey’s IT skills, Francona could print every scouting report and matchup suggestion, turning data compiled by Falvey and other front-office types into on-field success.

In the years when the Guardians used new ideas and new thinking to establish what has become one of the game’s most prolific pitching factories, Falvey eventually became the manager’s most trusted fourth-floor ally. He was a frequent visitor to Francona’s office, his presence a noteworthy departure from traditional baseball norms, in which coaches and front-office personnel kept their distance. Falvey joined the club on roadtrips and acted as a conduit between Francona, the coaching staff and the number-crunching analysts back in Cleveland.

That connection between those providing the insights, and those implementing them, is at the core of why Cleveland was at the forefront of baseball’s strikeout revolution, when franchises did everything they could to build pitchers who could miss bats.

The potency of the idea itself isn’t new. In 1940, when a 21-year-old Bob Feller, in dress clothes, zipped a 104 mph fastball past a speeding Harley Davidson motorcycle on a quiet street in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, the experiment signaled that pitching experts understood the value of velocity — and specifically how it often translated into missing bats. But it would take another 75 years for the sport’s top minds to forge a path toward spreading that gospel.

“When you realize the value of the swing-and-miss and how to get it, it was probably more attainable than people realized,” said former Guardians pitching coordinator and current Yankees pitching coach Matt Blake. “It just had to be thought of in a little different light.”

Transforming the game required data and technology to provide long-awaited reference points, and then it required front offices investing in those resources, coaches embracing the information they spit out and, ultimately, players buying into the new ways of thinking about pitching.

It also required success.

As they figured it all out, teams unearthed competitive advantages, building pitching pipelines that flooded rosters with capable starters and hard-throwing relievers and buoyed their win totals. The Tampa Bay Rays embraced the primacy of missing bats early, as did the Houston Astros. But perhaps no club’s setup has been as envied as the one assembled by the Guardians. It left other teams scrambling to duplicate their model or risk falling years behind in an unrelenting arms race.

As much as pitchers have evolved in recent years, instruction has developed just as rapidly and profoundly. Pitchers have chased swing-and-miss stuff and front offices have chased after coaches and coordinators and data dissectors who can help pitchers produce it. The quest for swing-and-miss stuff— for baseball’s secret sauce — was not spearheaded by those blessed with triple-digit heaters. Those who taught it and spread it lack traditional or triumphant pitching backgrounds.

It’s coaches like Blake and San Diego Padres pitching coach Ruben Niebla — Blake referred to the two of them as “bum-arm lefties” — encouraging their pitchers to pump their 97 mph fastballs past hitters. It’s Rays manager Kevin Cash finding a place in his dugout for a spreadsheet savant with only T-ball experience on his playing resume. It’s baseball insiders like former pitcher Brian Bannister approaching his new vocation of coaching with the curiosity of an outsider. It’s the masterminds behind private training facilities and the authors of thoughtful online baseball analysis joining organizations as consultants or liaisons between the front office and the coaching staff.

It’s the guy assigned to unjam a future Hall of Fame manager’s overmatched printer.

By 2016, Cleveland’s brass knew the club was on the right track. That’s the year the organization finally started enjoying the fruits of its labor, with a World Series run made possible because of its pitching, because Andrew Miller slung sliders and Corey Kluber and Cody Allen tossed curveballs until their tanks emptied. Falvey was doing everything from relaying scouting reports to Francona to assisting pitching coach Mickey Callaway in breaking down Kluber’s mechanics. He anchored a support system that dug into the data to confirm or debunk a theory a coach or pitcher posited.

That integration was key to Cleveland’s success that year, when they rode their new ideas and ways of thinking to Game 7 of the World Series, falling one win short of capturing their first championship since 1948.

Nowadays, Falvey’s old conduit role isn’t uncommon. Cash added Jonathan Erlichman to Tampa’s staff in 2018 as a process and analytics coach, and the Rays now employ 28-year-old Bobby Kinne as a major-league pitching strategist. He sports a No. 31 uniform in their dugout, six years after he graduated from Vassar College and accepted an internship in their baseball operations department. The Mariners payroll includes a major-league director of pitching strategy, Trent Blank, and a major-league pitching strategist, Danny Farquhar, in addition to pitching coach Pete Woodworth.

Derek Falvey’s success helping to build Cleveland’s pitching pipeline led to a job as chief baseball officer for the Minnesota Twins. (Brace Hemmelgarn / Minnesota Twins / Getty Images)

In Cleveland, Eric Binder presents data-backed pitching plans to the coaching staff on a daily basis. A Northwestern graduate, Binder spent one year in the St. Louis Cardinals’ system and one year pitching in independent ball for the Trinidad Triggers and the Joliet Slammers. He also studied lower-half mechanics at the Texas Baseball Ranch, where founder Ron Wolforth preached the importance of missing bats.

On Binder’s third day in the office as an advance scouting intern in 2013, he was brewing a cup of coffee when Cleveland GM Chris Antonetti asked for a report on that night’s Toronto Blue Jays starter. Binder couldn’t believe the two were even conversing, but the organization had started to put into practice the collaborative efforts that would fuel their pitching development.

When Falvey left Cleveland ahead of the 2017 season to take over baseball operations for the Minnesota Twins, Binder inherited many of his responsibilities. That season Cleveland’s staff set an MLB record with a strikeout rate of 27.5 percent. They weren’t alone. The outliers on the all-time strikeout rate leaderboard were any teams not from the 2010s: the early-2000s Chicago Cubs with Kerry Wood and Mark Prior and Arizona Diamondbacks with Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling cracked the list, too. Those overpowering ace duos didn’t need high-tech pitching labs to hone their craft.

But those few outliers gave way to a parade of purpose-built strikeout arms.

Niebla first noticed analytics begin to drive coaching in the late aughts. It wasn’t just the arrival of Pitchf/X data or, a few years later, TrackMan, that influenced decision-making, but teams started to alter training methods. Coaches introduced core velocity belts and King of the Hill leg trainers to help pitchers create healthier movements and grow stronger in their deliveries, and those regimens trickled down to the college level, even high school. They spread to private facilities and performance centers.

“Strength and mass equals gas,” Niebla said.

And gas fuels swing-and-miss.

To maximize these advantages, organizations needed data from gadgets such as TrackMan or Rapsodo or Edgertronic to measure their progress, and a cast of coaches and coordinators who embraced the information and could translate it to pitchers.

Once technology seeped into the sport’s bloodstream, teams realized they could create their own otherworldly stuff, or convert so-so stuff into an above-average arsenal, or identify undervalued pitchers in other organizations and then help them improve.

Four-fifths of Cleveland’s record-setting 2017 rotation was acquired via trade: Kluber for Jake Westbrook’s expiring contract, Carlos Carrasco as part of a package for Cliff Lee, Mike Clevinger for the busted elbow of reliever Vinnie Pestano and Trevor Bauer for a year of outfielder Shin-Soo Choo. The next season, all four of them eclipsed the 200-strikeout mark, making Cleveland the first team in major-league history to accomplish the feat. The hunt for missing bats hit overdrive.

“As soon as we stand still,” Antonetti once told The Athletic, “that’s an opportunity for everybody to pass us by.”

It was the fifth starter on that 2018 team, though, who offered the clearest example of how Cleveland built its pitching pipeline.

Blake pitched at Holy Cross in the mid-2000s, a southpaw who leaned on deception to record outs. But he was realistic about his long-term chances, so he soon shifted to the training sector, working with pitchers at Eric Cressey’s performance center in Boston and launching a private business focused on movement quality and delivery assessments. He helped pitchers throw harder and move more efficiently. And he added pitch design to his repertoire once PITCHf/x arrived, making it possible to confirm which pitches were causing hitters the most strife.

Blake gained access to in-game TrackMan data for the first time in 2015, when he was a pitching coach in the Cape Cod League. He could see spin rates and pitch movement metrics as each baseball whirled toward the plate. That’s also where he first crossed paths with a pitcher with an upper-80s fastball, a loose slider and a changeup that lacked separation from his fastball: a righthander named Shane Bieber.

A year later, Cleveland made a pair of consequential moves, drafting Bieber in the fourth round in 2016 and hiring Blake as a lower-level pitching coordinator tasked with implementing individualized plans for each prospect. As Bieber breezed through the farm system, Blake encouraged him to workshop his changeup, to add another weapon that would stymie lefties once he inevitably reached the majors. Bieber credited Blake with opening his eyes to the world of analytics.

Shane Bieber didn’t have traditional strikeout stuff, yet Cleveland found a way to elevate him into the league’s best strikeout artist. (Rick Osentoski / USA Today)

Around that time, more and more players were recognizing the possibilities, buying into the idea that they could leverage data into swing-and-miss stuff. And to achieve that buy-in requires proper messaging from the coach. Not overwhelmingly technical. Not too vague. Just the right touch of explanatory and digestible. As one AL executive noted, the data is meaningless without precision in relaying it to the player.

“It’s not like, ‘Hey, I have a piece of paper. Here you go. Check this out.’ And walk away,” said Royals pitching coach Brian Sweeney. “There’s a conversation and a trust that the coach has to have with the player.”

The teams that earned that buy-in, the ones that had a seamless flow of information from the front office to the coaching staff to the pitchers, are the ones that incited a pitching revolution.

When Niebla became the Indians’ pitching coordinator in 2013, the organization was already teaching spin and pitch shapes and emphasizing velocity. They had company. By the middle of the decade, as the Indians flirted with a long-elusive championship, they were on the verge of breaking through on the pitching front, along with the Rays, Astros, New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers.

“The usual suspects,” Blake said.

In Tampa, they turned discarded pitchers into relievers with elite stuff and a ton of spin. They simplified and fine-tuned their arsenals and advised them to challenge hitters with that best pitch or two over and over and over.

In Houston, they made Gerrit Cole the face of modern pitching. He, too, could fire a fastball past a humming Harley, but he was stuck in Pittsburgh throwing sinkers and sliders low in the zone to induce weak contact. With the Astros, he fired chest-high fastballs past hitters, his strikeout rate soared and he bloomed into the prototypical ace teams envisioned when he became the No. 1 pick in the 2011 draft.

In Cleveland, they loaded up on strike-throwing college starters, helped them boost their velocity and optimized the usage of their secondary pitches. There’s no better example than Bieber, who authored an unlikely path to a unanimous American League Cy Young Award.

Bieber’s rotation mates didn’t spend much time ahead of him in Cleveland’s pitching hierarchy, so they would tease him about his rapid rise to prominence and insist they taught him everything. When they told his story, they exaggerated the lack of zip on his heater the way a grandparent would embellish how far they trekked uphill, barefoot and through the snow to get to school. But Bieber learned to tunnel his secondary pitches off his fastball, and because he wielded elite command, he used hitters’ aggressiveness against them, convincing them to flail at his curveball or slider. Velocity isn’t the only path to missing bats.

In his first full season in the majors, Bieber was named MVP of the All-Star Game, racked up 259 strikeouts and finished fourth in the AL Cy Young Award balloting. The next year, when he collected the hardware, he struck out hitters at a rate rivaled only by the game’s elite closers.

It was another coronation for Cleveland’s pitching factory.

The Indians jumped from 29th in the league in strikeout rate in 2012 to second in 2013, Francona’s first year at the helm. They tied the Rays for the league lead in 2014. Those usual suspects hogged the top of the leaderboard throughout the decade. The Cubs soared to the top of the list in 2015, a year before they ended their curse at the expense of the Indians.

One year after the Dodgers hired away front office wizard Andrew Friedman from the Rays, LA claimed the top spot. The Dodgers and Astros tied for second in 2017, behind that historic Cleveland rotation, and both teams reached the World Series. The Astros had progressed from 29th to 26th to 12th to seventh in the four years prior. They led the league in strikeout rate in 2018 and ’19. The Yankees climbed up the list in the later stages of the decade as well.

This all coincided with more technology infiltrating the space. The game had come a long way since the early days of Brooks Baseball and PITCHf/x, and equipping a bullpen with HawkEye or Edgertronic or KinaTrax cameras no longer placed a team ahead of the curve. It became necessary to keep pace. One AL executive recalled the spring of 2017, when he kept seeing photo after photo of each team’s new technological investments. Some teams put those resources to use. Others bought the gadgets but lacked the people or culture necessary to turn that technology into anything more than clutter, with unopened boxes of Rapsodo devices taking up space in hallways and closets.

The Twins finished last in strikeout rate in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015, and 28th in 2016. So, they swiped Falvey, anointing a 33-year-old the head of their entire baseball operation and imploring him to repair their broken pitching infrastructure. Twenty-four hours after the Indians dropped Game 7 of the World Series, Falvey flew to Minneapolis, where he quickly set about copying and pasting what he helped construct in Cleveland.

In the ensuing years, Cleveland lost Callaway to the New York Mets, Niebla to the Padres, Blake to the Yankees and Sweeney to the Kansas City Royals. They were all poached for their abilities to connect with pitchers, sure, but also for their insight into the inner workings of a prolific pipeline, as these ideas and methods spread throughout the league.

A year into his tenure, Falvey hired Josh Kalk, one of the masterminds behind Tampa Bay’s pioneering work in turning data and technology into pitchers adept at missing bats. Kalk fills a similar role to the one Falvey flourished in with Cleveland. In the first year after Kalk’s hiring, the Twins raised their strikeout rate by 3 percent. Last season, they led the league.

They also won their first playoff series in 21 years.

The dogged pursuit of swing-and-miss has caused ripple effects throughout baseball. Hitters adjusted their launch angles to hit for more power, to get more bang for their buck on each hack against a 98 mph heater or 91 mph slider. Pitchers resorted to since-banned sticky substances to improve their grips, throw with more conviction and attain more spin. MLB limited defensive shifting to promote more action to counteract all the empty swinging that made the game less captivating to viewers. An elbow injury epidemic has swept through the league, leaving every arm in peril.

In recent years, pitchers started throwing more sweepers, and then more two-seamers to pair with them — any ploy to keep hitters looking foolish and to ensure the power remains tilted toward the pitcher’s mound rather than the batter’s box. The league-wide OPS in 2024 is .704, the second-lowest mark in the last 30 years. A contributing factor? The work never stops for those in the lab.

Last offseason, the Padres partnered with Point Loma Nazarene University to create a biomechanics lab capable of producing instant feedback on every pitcher’s motion. In a matter of seconds, Niebla knows the metrics of the pitch, the details of the pitcher’s release point and body movements through Edgertronic’s high-speed cameras, and how much force the pitcher pushes into the ground to create those movements.

The Cubs had their lab up and running at their spring training complex in Mesa, Ariz., in 2018. They have a similar setup at Wrigley Field, too. The Milwaukee Brewers weren’t far behind. After the 2019 season, the Yankees opened what they dubbed the “Gas Station” at their Tampa, Fla., facility, the brainchild of Sam Briend, their director of pitching and a former employee at Driveline Baseball, one of the sport’s leading private development factories. The Baltimore Orioles partnered with MedStar Health in 2022 to construct a lab in Bel Air, Md.

The Royals have a NewtForce mound that allows them to track every twitch, breath and heartbeat during a throwing session. After years of failed early-round pitching draft selections, Kansas City owner John Sherman fired president Dayton Moore and insisted the organization would be more data-driven. They plucked Sweeney from Cleveland after the 2022 season and, after a year of settling in, the pitching staff has made significant strides.

“It used to be the front office here, and coaches there,” Sweeney said. “There was a relationship, but (one side) was baseball and (the other) made the roster decisions. Now, it’s happening all the time — we’re together, criss-crossing. That’s the way it should be. All the information is flowing seamlessly instead of having siloes on either side.”

The Mets opened their lab at their complex in St. Lucie, Fla., last June, when owner Steve Cohen lamented that “other teams had pitching labs six, seven, eight years ago. And, so, we’re behind.”

Now, it’s just a customary expenditure, an essential part of any serious operation. Guardians staffers refer to Carl Willis, Cleveland’s 63-year-old pitching coach, as a “Walking TrackMan,” a title Willis never would have imagined when he was guiding CC Sabathia and Cliff Lee to Cy Young Awards in the days before cameras that capture 17,000 frames per second.

Kyle Boddy built Driveline into such a destination spot for pitchers seeking feedback that the Cincinnati Reds hired him to advance their pitching initiatives in 2019. Boddy joined the Boston Red Sox in 2024 as a special advisor to Boston’s chief baseball officer, longtime reliever Craig Breslow.

“As an industry, we’re past the overwhelmed stage,” Niebla said. “There was a time when the changes were happening yearly. The advancement of technology and objective information was happening so quickly it became almost discouraging for some who had been in the game for a long time. It became scary for some who didn’t understand it. I think we’re past that stage.”

A key reason why? Players are on board.

When the Padres acquired reliever Scott Barlow in a trade last summer, Niebla completed his homework before the two ever met. Niebla studied Barlow’s arsenal and canvassed data to find pitchers with a similar arm angle and arm speed. He deduced what worked for those pitchers and surmised what could work better for Barlow.

At the Padres’ new pitching lab, pitching coach Ruben Niebla can receive instant feedback on pitchers’ mechanics and offer suggestions. (Matt Thomas / San Diego Padres / Getty Images)

Barlow occasionally hunched over too far while standing atop the mound, Niebla found. The movement profiles on his slider and curveball had blurred; with a tweak to his slider grip, the pitch would pair better with his two-seam fastball. And he should throw the two-seamer more often, too. Barlow considers himself an “open-minded person,” so he embraced the suggestions and watched his hit rate, walk rate and ERA all improve in the second half. Trial and error persists, but there’s a safer path to progress in today’s baseball climate. Every hunch or inclination can be supported or dashed by the data at every coach’s fingertips.

“It wasn’t going out there, like, ‘Oh, I hope this works,’” Barlow said. “I went in with confidence that, ‘OK, the stuff we’re working on, it’ll play.’”

Some teams have it figured out more than others. It takes the right people and the right messaging — and a working printer — to make it happen.

Francona helped to create something that would persist beyond his tenure in Cleveland. Many in the organization credit his influence for eliminating barriers between departments. There was some initial resistance, hesitancy that still exists in some corners of the league today, with coaches or scouts preferring to lean on their own experience or draw their own conclusions from their front-row seat rather than consider a suggestion from some data-driven dork in an air-conditioned conference room.

“There was that natural clash,” Blake said, “of what the front office thought and what the coaches thought. And the players were caught in the middle. I think the players have embraced it and the coaching mindset has shifted a little bit in the last five years.”

After Francona retired last season, he took the problematic printer that helped bring him closer to Falvey and signed it in silver Sharpie. It now resides in the apartment of a Guardians front office member, a symbol of the scouting reports and development plans and paper jams that helped put Cleveland at the forefront of what would prove to be the game’s transformation.

“That,” Blake said, “is where the sauce is.”

(Top illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic. Images: David J. Griffin / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images; Jason Miller / Getty Images; Duane Burleson / Getty Images)