How have Bucs' potential starters improved?

PITTSBURGH -- At 3 p.m. ET every Wednesday while baseball was shut down, the Pirates’ starting pitchers joined Oscar Marin in a Zoom room.

For the first 15 minutes of every call, they talked about anything but baseball. They caught up on how they were staying busy in quarantine, what they were binging on Netflix, which video games they were playing. That might have been their pitching coach’s favorite part of the starters’ weekly chats.

“It wasn’t just all business,” Marin said. “It was us getting together, then having conversations.”

But because it’s 2020, they also conducted plenty of business on Zoom. Marin shared presentations full of pitching philosophies, attack plans, scouting reports and reviews of the work they did during their abbreviated Spring Training. Marin’s biggest challenge was clicking through windows to make sure every pitcher was paying attention.

“It just kind of felt like we weren’t totally off on our own planets and doing whatever,” rookie right-hander Mitch Keller said. “It kind of brought us together a little bit to spit some ideas, share ideas, different drills we were all working on, going over some new things we were going to implement this year and new ideas. And it was great, so when we came back, it didn’t feel like we had missed any time, really.”

If anything, the Pirates believe their starters made the most of their time away. Here’s how each of Pittsburgh’s top six rotation options worked to improve over the past four months.

Joe Musgrove
Musgrove didn’t have to alter his delivery after shortening his arm action and finding success late last season. Instead, he focused on his pitch usage.

The right-hander already had plenty of offerings. Six, to be exact: a four-seam fastball, slider, sinker, changeup, curveball and cutter. He’s spent most of the past year trying to harness his arsenal, finding pitches that pair together well and others he can rely on when he doesn’t have a feel for his entire repertoire. Marin encouraged him to study where his pitches have been most effective, not just which ones produce the best results overall.

To that end, Musgrove worked on what he called a “comeback sinker” against left-handed hitters. His primary sinker is a one-seamer, a rare pitch grip that Marin also saw Rangers reliever Ariel Jurado use last year. Musgrove said he’s accidentally thrown the extension-side two-seamer before with surprisingly good results: a low launch angle, not much hard contact.

“Everything about that pitch is quality for me. It’s just execution. I really locked in on that during this downtime,” Musgrove said. “It’s got action to a certain side of the plate that none of my other pitches have, so it feels like I’ve created this seventh pitch almost.”

Trevor Williams
Williams worked with Marin nearly every day, as they both went home to the Phoenix area. When Williams and lefty reliever Nik Turley threw bullpen sessions on Tuesdays and Fridays, they did so in front of Marin. If they needed extra reps or another set of eyes, they could always call him.

“Personally I feel like I made a leap getting to work with Oscar every day,” Williams said. “We really hammered in certain things that we were working on at the end of Spring Training.”

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Specifically, Williams wanted to find consistency with two breaking balls. His slider accounted for 20.1 percent of his pitches last year, according to Statcast, but he only threw his curveball 21 times. Williams said he expects to use the curve more this year, and his 12 weeks of training with Marin left him “not just hoping with it, as I probably would have if the season started normal.”

“I jokingly said, like, ‘You know what? I’m upset at myself. It took about two weeks for me to figure out what to do with your curveball when it was right in front of my face from the beginning,” Marin said, laughing. “It started with a question. It was basically getting him to shorten up with his breaking ball, because his thought process was to get full extension on that pitch that he probably shouldn’t have. But we were able to adjust that. We were able to use some tech to make sure we were on it, and we went from there. And he felt really good about it.”

Mitch Keller
As Keller discussed last week, he spent his time back home in Iowa using Rapsodo data to improve his fastball’s spin efficiency and help him find a changeup grip.

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“Delivery, his mechanics, stuff like that, I like them. They're pretty efficient. Pretty short, pretty quick. It sneaks up on you with high velocity,” Marin said. “Making sure he knows exactly where to go with his pitches, I think, was the No. 1 thing that we wanted to make sure he understood, and he's doing a really good job with getting there. To understand [that] information, and knowing where he needs to go and why he needs to go to certain places, has really helped out."

Derek Holland
The 33-year-old left-hander had a solid Spring Training, quickly building up to his five-inning outing as he posted a 3.95 ERA with 15 strikeouts in 13 2/3 innings, so his quarantine goal was simple: Don’t lose any of that momentum.

“Oscar had a game plan for every person to make sure that we showed up and it wasn’t Spring Training 2.0, where we had to really start all the way over and build innings back up,” Holland said.

Sure enough, Holland was able to put in six innings’ worth of work in Sunday’s scrimmage at PNC Park. That should bode well for his stamina and durability with Opening Day less than two weeks away. Beyond that, he and Marin believe he’ll benefit from their shared history in the Rangers' organization.

“Knowing what his delivery should look like, knowing when it’s the most optimized, knowing what type of pitches he should be throwing the most was already in my mind before he came in,” Marin said. “It was a really good head start. Seeing him for the first time on the mound, I could directly go straight into what I thought he could adjust. And he agreed, and we went from there.”

Steven Brault
Brault could be the fifth starter or a piggyback pitcher to start the season after recuperating from a left shoulder strain that would have made him unavailable for Opening Day in March.

While recovering, Brault worked with bullpen coach Justin Meccage and senior rehab coordinator A.J. Patrick to make his mechanics more biomechanically sound. Now, his throwing motion puts less stress on his shoulder, he’s staying more upright in his delivery and he’s not falling forward off the mound. Combine that with the fastball command he displayed last summer, and Brault should be effective in any role.

“I feel much better than I ever have, more confident, more strong and not just kind of flying everywhere like I used to do, which is nice,” Brault said. “It's a process of eliminating small issues, a lot of it was focused in my lower half, to prevent my shoulder from ever barking like it was again.”

Chad Kuhl
Now nearly two years removed from Tommy John surgery, Kuhl believes he’s in a superior state physically than he was in March. That’s the nature of returning from such a major operation: He’ll feel better as time goes on.

“Every guy is different coming back from surgery, and he was tentative. He was not afraid to let it go. He just was easing his way into it,” catcher Jacob Stallings said. “I think now he’s just much more comfortable with where his arm is and with where his stuff is and how his body’s feeling.”

Kuhl, who also could be a traditional starter or a tandem starter this season, spent his quarantine period throwing bullpen sessions at his old high school field and working out in his basement’s home gym. He focused on improving his curveball -- a pitch he introduced around the same time his fastball velocity spiked in 2017, and despite it being his most effective offering, he used it only 13.1 percent of the time in ’18.

The righty came up through the Minors as a sinker/slider pitcher, but now he wants his curveball to be just as reliable as the slider he’s been throwing his entire life.

“It's nice to have that weapon to throw that is different from my slider. Gained a lot of confidence in '18 from it, and it surprisingly came back a lot quicker than I thought it would during this whole Tommy John rehab,” Kuhl said. “Very happy with where it's at right now and happy with both my breaking balls. But just to see the analytics on the curveball, how well it is spinning, just gaining that consistency, I feel really good with where it's at and what I'm doing with it."