BRADENTON, Fla. – I’ve covered a lot of minor league Spring Trainings at Pirate City.
Ten, to be exact, prior to this season.
This one had a much different feel, and it’s not because I’m the only media member who is covering this massive group of players this year.
The atmosphere around this camp is different. Gone are the long workdays, the drill-sergeant approach to the schedule, players running in groups from station to station, and every single member of player development hovering around every batting practice swing and every practice pitch off the mound.
There’s still a schedule, but it’s more relaxed. The players and coaches walk around smiling, wearing whatever feels comfortable to them, with no strict dress code. The players have the option to scale back any work if they’re tired, which wasn’t an issue on day one.
This has been a massive shift in atmosphere with the new front office.
“I got here in 2019,” said Pirates hitting coordinator Jonny Tucker. “We had the right pieces in the house. We just weren’t necessarily selling out to them yet. In 2020, COVID happened, and we were trying to figure out, then some positions became open and we really doubled down on the direction that we’re going in. It’s all full-steam ahead. Everyone is on the same page and the same direction.”
While the atmosphere is more relaxed, the practices are more geared toward live-game action, especially for hitters. The Pirates had hitters taking batting practice off of alternating pitching machines. One was placed behind the mound, throwing off-speed stuff. The other was in front of the mound, set to fastballs. The goal was to alternate and adjust the timing of the hitters, rather than giving them easy fastballs to crush.
“Historically, and in my terrible career, we used to do a lot of underhand flips and feel-good batting practice, and tee work,” said Tucker. “When you really sit down and think about that, that doesn’t make much sense if a guy is throwing 100 MPH to put a ball on a tee that is stationary.”
The focus is to match the practice to the game environment, so that the players get more applicable practice that can help them improve.
“We’re strong believers that this environment in the cage needs to match that environment out there,” said Tucker. “We can get creative and as explorative as we can, within reason and with good logic. And we’re just selling out to an individual approach. There were other things that we deemed as important and prioritized that we just aren’t prioritizing anymore. We’re very much in the tone of this guy is from Taiwan, this guy is from Australia, this guy is from California, this guy is from Idaho, I want to see all of your personalities come out. It’s a very real and genuine thing. We’re not caring about uniforms, we’re not caring about facial hair, we’re not caring about anything. We’re caring about you being a good human being, and getting in there and getting better. Really, we’re wiping away a lot of the noise and really doubling down on what we deem as important.”
Pirates Prospects Spotlight
Henry Davis is Already Acting Like a Leader on Day One of Spring Training
The coverage of Spring Training lines up with this week’s article drop, and there’s no better place to start than with Henry Davis.
This week I’ll have at least two Spring Training updates per day, to go with the weekly drop, including the P2Daily article.
