Spenser Watkins worked with O's pitching coaches to step up his game

During a year where the Orioles have made dramatic improvement as a team, so have several individuals, especially on the pitching staff. And as those players got better, so did the team. One led to two.

As it relates to Orioles pitchers, pitching coaches Chris Holt and Darren Holmes have worked with guys to tweak pitches, add pitches, work on their deliveries and learn what their real strengths are and go to them often. Anything they can do to help one pitcher helps the team.

And an underrated part of this, said manager Brandon Hyde, is finding willing pupils. Coaches can suggest all they want but if the pitchers are not willing to make needed changes and then able to perfect them enough to get outs at seven o’clock, this process won’t work.

“To be able to get player buy in, one of those things not talked about enough, is what makes good coaches,” said Hyde in Houston. “Trust. And after trust becomes buy in. And you get buy in from players from sometimes having tough conversations. By being able to prove things. That the player knows you have their best interest.

“That’s one thing I feel like we’ve done a good job here the last few years of being able to get players to make adjustments or talk about adjustments. And you’ve seen that with the pitchers this year. Our guys have gotten better.”

And better by a huge margin.

A team ERA that was last in the American League in 2021 at 5.84 now ranks seventh at 3.84. The rotation ERA jumped from last at 5.99 to 10^th at 4.35. The bullpen ERA is now fourth at 3.19 from last year, last at 5.70. And the O’s pitcher walk rate jumped big from 12^th at 3.61 per nine to now fourth at 2.72.

One of many pitchers to make dramatic improvement is right-hander Spenser Watkins. He starts tonight at Cleveland after celebrating his 30^th birthday Saturday in Houston.

“I have minimized a lot of walks,” he said this weekend. “When you look at more advanced statistic measures, lot of less three-ball counts, lot of less hitters’ counts, getting into my counts. That’s been a big difference. Credit a lot of that with the work the staff has done with me. Just mentally, physically, all of that to get me leaps and bounds better than I was last year.”

Watkins reduced his ERA from 8.07 last year to 3.96 now and his WHIP from 1.70 to 1.32. His homer rate took a big drop from 2.3 to 1.0. And while the Orioles went just 2-8 in his 2021 starts, that mark this season is 9-8.

The coaches worked with him to both get his pitches better and sharper, but they also suggested he add a slider to his cutter to make for two similar, yet distinctly different pitches. Where he threw his fastball 47 percent last year, that dropped to 40 percent now. And the two breaking pitches – slider and cutter – he now uses a combined 45 percent of the time.

The staff helped him improve one pitch and encouraged him to add the other.

“Yeah definitely," he said. "I think the cutter has become more of a weapon, working on getting the axis right. And the addition of the slider too has been a huge step for me with what we thought in the beginning was going to be just against righties, but we’ve been able to use it to lefties as well. So, adding that pitch has been huge for my career and I would credit that to Holt and Holmes and our pitch development team, just bringing it to me and saying, ‘Let’s give it a try and see what it does for you,’ It’s been great.

“The staff offers us the ability to take a new pitch like that and go throw it a few times. See where we need to make adjustments, see where it is doing well and go from there. The staff gave me the confidence to say, ‘Let’s try it, let’s fail with it (perhaps initially) and then work on it and get it better and go from there.’ The team we have here has been incredible with developing and allowing us to get better each day.”

So, are Holt and Holmes miracle workers? No, not really, just two hard-working coaches who look at each pitcher as an individual. There is no one size fits all. What works for one may not for another. But they look to make improvements anywhere they can find them. Then they had pitchers willing to take chances to get better.

“They have a great balance between with what Holt’s specialty is and what Holmes’ specialty is. You know they bounce ideas off each other, they bounce ideas off us. It’s more of a collective thing rather than two guys telling us what to do. They have their thoughts and ideas and run it by us and see how we feel, and we try things. It’s an experiment and a long season. See what works, what doesn’t. They’ve offered a ton to me and everyone else on the staff and it’s been leaps and bounds a difference with that this year," added Watkins.

The coaches and pitchers were not afraid to fail, as Watkins said, in getting better. It has meant so much to the improvement of the 2022 Orioles.

Here is a link to the video story on this I did with Brett Hollander Sunday on MASN's O's Xtra pregame.