As I have said here previously, the world is full of guys who thought they could make it in the bigs by throwing heat.
Some can and do make it by throwing heat. But when you have scouts, minor league skippers and coaches, and major league skippers, coaches, and brain trusts seeing that heat and going ooooh and aaaaaah over it nigh unto death, too many of those alleged brains decide they need nothing more than more of that and forget that guys can make it in the bigs without throwing heat.
Even though I notice today that a lot more pitchers are living with their non-heat stuff very nicely, I still tremble to think that if Whitey Ford (for one) was a prospect today nobody would know who he is and nobody would care. Or, one look at Juan Marichal and too many of today's alleged brains would think,
We gotta get this kid to trim down to one windup and one leg kick and one delivery, he's gonna kill himself or get killed with those fifteen windups and seven leg kicks! (And didn't the geniuses of the 1986 Mets think it was a great idea to tell Dwight Gooden he didn't have enough
despite owning the game for two years? How'd
that end up working out for them when it turned Gooden into a half shot confidence mess?)
Which is why I admire how the Astros work with pitchers. You come to the Astros and the first thing you're going to discover is that they've done their homework on you and they've figured out what your previous team(s) didn't have the foresight or the brains to figure out---that you weren't really maximising your repertoire, you weren't working your absolute best pitch more often (and if your best pitch wasn't a supersonic fastball so be it), and you were killing yourself because of it. You're going to be shown film, video, heat charts, strike zone spray charts, everything the Astros could possibly think of to show you that you've got what it takes but you didn't really get shown how to use it the right way. If you're a young'un like, say, Ryan Pressly was when he came to Houston, you're going to learn early and often. If you're a veteran like Justin Verlander, you're going to see keys to prolonging your career and remaining excellent. If you're Gerrit Cole, you're going to have your jaw dropped wondering just what the
hell the Pirates weren't doing smart with you while the Astros had their eyes on you for longer than you realised.
There's a terrific new book that breaks down how the Astros are able to fix or remake/remodel pitchers: Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchuk's
The MVP Machine: How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. Think of their analysis and the Astros' ways as the contemporary progression from how teams Branch Rickey ran dominated their leagues at their best, from the 1920s/1930s Cardinals to the 1947-56 Dodgers (never mind that Rickey was maneuvered out of Brooklyn after the 1950 season, the Boys of Summer were, essentially, Rickey teams)---long before anyone else thought of it, Rickey saw and implemented ways of developing professional ballplayers that were well ahead of his times and drove the purists of those times to the rye bottle. In certain ways, today's Astros can be called, fairly, Branch Rickey's great-grandchildren.
