‘Big Train’ still rolling strong with Guards

Greetings from Goodyear, Ariz.! I’m Anthony Castrovince, your temporary guide to all things Guards until our new beat reporter takes over in the very near future. I first covered the Cleveland club for MLB.com as an intern in 2004. The pitching coach way back then was a guy named Carl Willis. The pitching coach now is … Carl Willis? He’s still here?! Yes, and there’s good reason for that, as we’ll discuss today …

Pitching coaches don’t go to the Hall of Fame. But their work does.

We saw this recently when CC Sabathia was voted into the Hall on his first ballot. The person he credited most with his ascent to Cooperstown was his first pitching coach in professional baseball -- Carl Willis.

“Carl,” Sabathia said, “was responsible for everything with me being a professional pitcher.”

Then CC told the story about the day, after he had been selected by Cleveland with the 20th pick in the 1998 Draft, he reported to Single-A Burlington. In his first bullpen session with Willis, Sabathia revealed that he didn’t know anything about the distinction between four-seamer and two-seamer. He would just grab the ball and throw.

“Oh,” Willis told Sabathia that day, “we’ve got work to do.”

They would work together for the better part of the next decade, with Willis joining the by-then-established Sabathia on the big league club as pitching coach in 2003.

“So we get along to 2006,” Sabathia continued. “We went down to the bullpen in Oakland, and he showed me a grip for a cutter, and I end up with this 83-mph slider out of that bullpen. Really, from that second half of 2006 until the end of my career, that was one of my plus-plus pitches.

“Literally everything that I learned as a pitcher, mentality-wise, delivery-wise, even down to holding the baseball, Carl Willis was responsible for.”

Still here with the Cleveland club, all these years later (after in-between stints with the Mariners and Red Sox), Willis continues to make an impact. We are talking about the only pitching coach in history to help guide five individuals to the Cy Young Award (Sabathia in 2007, Cliff Lee in ’08, Félix Hernández in ’10, Rick Porcello in ’16 and Shane Bieber in ’20).

And at 64, the “Big Train,” as Willis is known, is still running.

Forget about his own pitching days back in the 1980s and ’90s. The evolution of pitching just in the time since Willis became a coach has been transformative. But he’s rolled with the changes while also remaining true to his core beliefs.

“I have two assistants [Brad Goldberg and Joe Torres] who are very well-versed in those newer aspects of the data and technology,” Willis said. “It truly is a team approach to coaching. It not only helps me to learn it, but it assures the player is getting the right information.”

For a team on a limited budget, an asset like Willis is a competitive edge. He’s a big reason why pitchers want to come here and try to realize (or return to) their full potential. And in Cleveland, he’s proven himself a valuable asset both to an established, Hall of Fame-bound skipper in Terry Francona and to a novice one in Stephen Vogt.

“I miss him,” said Francona, now with the Reds. “To me, he’s what’s good in baseball. He has taken the time to learn [new things] out of respect to young kids and how they want to develop. But he also knows how he feels about the game, and that blend is really good.

“He’ll never act like it, but he’s a star.”

Added Vogt, who has said he never would have won the 2024 AL Manager of the Year Award and gotten the Guards as deep as he did without Willis’ influence: “Carl is the best teammate I’ve ever had.”

Willis is too humble to know what to do with all these kind words. Back when Bieber won the Cy Young, we had to beg Willis to let us write a feature praising his work. But he teared up when he heard Sabathia’s words in January, and those words also meant a lot to Willis’ family.

Now in his 42nd Spring Training, Willis isn’t sure how much longer he’ll do this. He honored the last year of his contract when Vogt took over, and he enjoyed his experience last season enough to sign on again.

“My kids are getting older, my grandkids are already getting older, and, at some point in time, I will become a normal dad, a normal grandfather and a normal son, because I still have a mother to look after,” he said. “And honestly, I do wrestle at times with how the computers take over. But there are still some things that I think absolutely set the foundation for success. I just don't want that part of it to get lost and we all just become robotic.”

And with that, he went back to work.