Former MLB pitcher and current Team USA U18 pitching coach Brad Penny spoke with The Baseball Insiders ahead of a program called “Sabermetrics and the Science of Baseball”. Interested fans can pre-register for the virtual event at the following link, or can attend in person Thursday, May 29, at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City. Penny will be participating in a panel discussion alongside MLB Network's Brian Kenny and other luminaries.
Once the No. 5 overall prospect on Baseball America's Top 100 list, Brad Penny knows the value of teaching a young pitcher to use a high fastball at the top of the zone to his advantage. He rode in-zone whiffs and the art of temptation to 121 wins at the big-league level and a World Series ring. He found his way, despite very limited data available to him that expanded his learning beyond the game's long-established norms (get swings and misses, get ahead in counts, get outs).
Now, it's Penny's job to counsel the next generation of great pitchers on how to reach their potential as the pitching coach for Team USA's 18-and-under team, and he's got a wide array of new tools at his disposal in order to predict their success and show them the way.
Still, Penny acknowledges that it's a gradual process to teach eager learners to understand their body. He reads the predictive metrics. He receives the data. They simply start by tuning out the noise.
"We get probably no more than three weeks with these kids, and from the time they step on the mound, there's spin rates being recorded, from the first pitch, everything," Penny noted. "So the first thing I try to tell them is, 'Don't worry about the machine in front of you. Let's try to get loose before we spin the ball too much'."
This is a generation with unprecedented access to the same learning tools that MLB stars use, and Penny believes that, more often than not, his learned big-league 'gut' lines up with the information that he and his team are gathering.
"I'm really big on outcome-oriented metrics. You know there are all sorts of algorithms that show you what should be done, and the numbers don't always match up to the outcome. But a lot of the times, they really do," Penny mused. "I get lost with people who say analytics should be the gut test. And I think there's room for both of them in the game. But the majority of the time, when I see high spin rate, when I see vertical approach angle and horizontal approach angle, I see the results matching up with what the analytics say and you can't deny that. A lot of people who are against analytics just need to take a deeper look into that, and they'll see there really is a place for it in today's game."
In terms of receiving pushback on the notion of the value of advanced analytics, Penny hasn't had to do too much convincing of his U18 parents that the program is handling their sons properly. Instead, it's mostly his ex-teammates and former big-leaguers who he's got to preach to.
"A lot of the old-school-type mentality players are completely against analytics. I wouldn't say all of them, but a lot of them are," Penny said. And, remember, this isn't a dominant, hand-me-the-ball-and-don't-ask-questions hurler from the 1970s talking. This is a man who rose and teamed up with AJ Burnett and Josh Beckett, made All-Star teams with the 2006 and 2007 Dodgers, and officially made his final big-league appearance in 2014. His contemporaries are either freshly out of the game or still participating.
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Former Dodgers, Marlins pitcher Brad Penny has to convince his ex-teammates that analytics are the way of the future
Thankfully, MLB teams have adjusted en masse to this revolution, whether ex-big leaguers believe they should or not. Any team without a deep bench of analytics people, who can deliver people like Penny the information they need to make informed decisions, is woefully behind.
The way Penny sees it, though, there's one more avenue where the coaching infrastructure can still be improved, and where he might want to take a dip in the water someday.
"I've got little kids right now, so I'm coaching them, and until they're all old enough, I'm going to keep doing that, because I love working with the kids. Just to give back ... But we have this conversation all the time: I think the Minor League coaches need to be where the better coaches are," Penny shared. "When you get to the big leagues, you should already have an idea. Right now, we've got guys coming up to the big leagues kind of learning this stuff."