FORT MYERS, Fla. — Pitching coach Wes Johnson is using his biomechanics background to alter the mechanics of Twins pitchers and increase velocity. Minor-league catching coordinator Tanner Swanson is modifying the setups of the organization’s catchers to secure more strikes. And earlier this year, minor-league pitching coordinator Pete Maki helped revamp instructional camp so pitchers would arrive for instruction before the season when they’re fresh.
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Everywhere you look around Twins camp this spring, there’s an influx of college coaches with new ideas. Whereas coaches rarely used to make the leap from college into the professional ranks because of a perceived stigma, the industry has shown more willingness in recent years to open its door to find new concepts. And the Twins are at the forefront.
This is the kind of atmosphere Twins chief baseball officer Derek Falvey envisioned when he used to attend college coaching seminars during his days with the Cleveland Indians. One of the only major-league executives to attend events like Pitch-A-Palooza — a winter workshop for baseball coaching and instruction — and the Texas Baseball Ranch pitching camps, Falvey was seeking top talent and establishing connections. Now, he’s hoping his past explorations lead the Twins into a new frontier of continued success.
“It was an untapped resource for a period of time,” Falvey said. “But I think we need to open our minds to different kinds of people who have different backgrounds that aren’t just in professional baseball. I’m not of the belief that the only people who know baseball are the people who are on the professional side of the game. There’s a lot of good people out there on the amateur side too.
“I think new ideas or things you haven’t thought about before are always going to be what you should be seeking. Wherever they come from, that’s great.”
Johnson, Swanson and minor-league infield coordinator Billy Boyer probably thought the only way they’d ever be in Fort Myers during spring training is if it was for a college tournament.
Of the three, only Boyer played professionally, and all but seven games of his career were at Single-A or below. While Johnson’s career path eventually took him to the University of Arkansas, he began as a high school coach. And Swanson started his coaching career in the community college ranks before ending up as an assistant coach at the University of Washington.
“Come on, man. Ain’t no shot,” Wes Johnson says of getting this opportunity out of the college ranks. “I didn’t even have any aspirations of getting into professional baseball.” (Brace Hemmelgarn / Minnesota Twins / Getty Images)
Even five years ago, their resumes would have given them little chance of ever coaching in the pros. A glance at the majority of organizations shows coaching staffs mostly loaded with former professional players.
“That was a view for a period of time,” Falvey said.
A few years ago, the Houston Astros started hiring college coaches. Other organizations have since begun to open their doors, too.
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When he worked as Cleveland’s director of baseball operations, Falvey also began to seek alternative solutions. The Indians were known for having an out-of-the-box organizational mindset. Team president Mark Shapiro and general manager Chris Antonetti gave Falvey permission to start attending the multi-day conferences.
But Falvey didn’t see many familiar faces at the events.
“It was very unique,” said Driveline Baseball founder and president Kyle Boddy. “He was one of the only directors of operation. Usually, that guy’s a nerd that sits behind a desk. Derek was out there trying to find out where the next coaches were going to come from.”
Seeing what kind of success the Indians have had with similar hires — current baseball ops director Eric Binder was hired out of the Texas Baseball Ranch in January 2015 — Falvey began to build a network of college coaches.
Several years ago, Falvey heard Johnson deliver a keynote address at the Texas Baseball Ranch in Houston and made an introduction. Also speaking at the event were current Astros pitching coach Brent Strom and Cincinnati Reds pitching coach Derek Johnson.
The two met and Johnson’s future changed.
“I specifically spoke on biomechanics,” Wes Johnson, 47, said. “I talked about elbow angle, ball release and just a lot of different things. I also spoke on individualizing pitching plans because that’s about the time I really stopped with one generic pitching philosophy and started individualizing for each pitcher.
“But no. Come on, man. Ain’t no shot. I didn’t even have any aspirations of getting into professional baseball.”
Swanson, 36, never was a catcher. Not for a single inning.
He was an infielder throughout a playing career that ended at Central Washington University, a Division-II school in Ellensburg, Wash., that sits a little more than 100 miles from Seattle in the shadows of Mount Rainier.
But it hasn’t prevented him from developing into a catching authority. Boddy described Swanson as the best catching instructor in the country. This spring, Swanson has earned rave reviews for his innovative methods, including several resistance drills to improve his catchers’ receiving skills.
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“I think (not catching) has given me a unique perspective because I don’t have the bias of, ‘This is how I used to do it or how I was taught,’” Swanson said. “I got to look at it really objectively and I still look at it that way. I think that has really helped me. If anything, I think I’m asking the right questions. I don’t think I have the right answers. But I think asking the right question is where the creative process starts.”
Catcher receiving drill with Mitch Garver and Tanner Swanson. #MNTwins pic.twitter.com/DhMlY1eamD
— Dan Hayes (@DanHayesMLB) February 19, 2019
The process took off at Green River Community College in 2010, where Swanson dabbled in every aspect of coaching. Because staff sizes are generally small, community college coaches have a hand in a number of areas instead of one particular specialty.
Shortly thereafter, Swanson was hired at Washington, where he’d spend the next five seasons as a volunteer assistant baseball coach.
Since he wasn’t responsible for recruiting, Swanson focused on improving his skillset working with catchers. In doing so, he became a highly sought-after catching instructor.
Swanson met Twins farm director Jeremy Zoll in 2015 at the CatcherCON conference. He accepted a job at the University of Santa Clara in early 2017 but the Twins lured him to the pros in late 2017.
While Swanson only worked with Twins minor-league catchers last season, that changed once word of his impact spread and the group showed a vast improvement in its receiving performance.
Armed with statistical evidence of Swanson’s efforts, Mitch Garver called him this winter. The two worked out later that week in January and Garver came away confident in the changes they have made and impressed with Swanson.
“He understands what’s he’s talking about,” Garver said. “He believes what he teaches is true. He believes there’s not just one way to do something. He’s very open to change. He’s effective in that way because you have to adapt to every player and I think he does that well.
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“It makes it easier, especially when you’re looking a new task or new style. It makes it easier when he is understanding and can put it in words that are helpful to you.”
Swanson realizes this is a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
Whereas a few years ago he would have been restricted from a shot at the pros, this winter he had a major-league catcher request his help and immediately flew into action.
“I feel like in the past if you didn’t play professional baseball you weren’t allowed to coach it,” Swanson said. “If anything, those walls have been crushed down. It’s about hiring the best coaches. It has expanded the pool of people that you can go out and try to bring into your organization.”
Swanson credits his five years with the Huskies for increasing his knowledge.
He used the period to watch what the top MLB catchers were doing with framing and then investigated in a fertile UW testing ground. He thinks the Twins have created a similar environment.
“I look back at how great of a testing ground it was to play around with different things and experiment,” Swanson said. “It even took off beyond that once I got here. Our philosophy in our system is to coach, develop and experiment. All of our coordinators, all of our coaches have free reign.”
Boddy, the Driveline Baseball founder, has known Johnson, Swanson, Maki and Boyer for years. He also worked with Falvey in Cleveland.
Boddy is a big fan of the way the Twins have operated under Falvey. He noted that the Astros were the first team to dip into the college market. But Houston’s hires differ from what the Twins are doing.
“The Astros hired mostly mid-major and smaller school coaches who had often been fired,” Boddy said. “The Astros would swoop in with kind of like a management consultant thing.”
Boddy likes how Falvey has approached hiring college coaches and those in the private sector. Maki was seen as a rising star when the Twins hired him out of Duke before last season.
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After they lost minor-league hitting coach Rick Eckstein to the Pittsburgh Pirates this offseason, the Twins sought a coach with a strong understanding of the basics of kinesiology and human movement.
They wound up hiring Peter Fatse out of the private sector in January. A former minor-leaguer, Fatse is the founder of Advanced Performance Academy.
“Derek took a much different approach and said, ‘Let’s get the best college guys,’” Boddy said. “Tanner Swanson was the best coaching guy nationally. Billy Boyer is an outstanding fielding guy. Wes is considered one of the three best pitching coaches in college and is, I think, one of the top five pitching coaches at any level.”
While his role as the Twins CBO limits him from attending college seminars, Falvey still has a strong network. When Eckstein left, Falvey and Zoll knew exactly where to look for his replacement.
“You start to meet some people who you start to think are doing some really good things in the college space and you recognize that person could do that on the pro side,” Falvey said. “Even back to my time in Cleveland, there’s been some unorthodox hires. It started there and was something I wanted to carry.”
“It was an untapped resource for a period of time,” Derek Falvey says of the college game. “But I think we need to open our minds to different kinds of people who have different backgrounds.” (Hannah Foslien / Getty Images)
Falvey has continued that tradition with the Twins. The team has put a heavy emphasis on player development since he was hired in late 2016, pouring resources into the farm system, whether it’s equipment or coaches.
That push to development has opened up opportunities that might never have previously existed for someone like Boyer, who worked at Green River, Pierce College, Washington and Seattle University. Though his primary position is infield instructor, Boyer, who turned 35 last week, has dabbled in just about every facet of baseball over the past eight years.
“The game is changing and the development side is changing,” Boyer said. “The nice thing about college is a lot of guys are a jack of all trades. They’re everything. That’s what I loved about being a junior college coach is every day you get to do something different and really push yourself. Because of that, you kind of evolve as a coach every day and you get better because you’re forced to get better every day.”
While it might seem that way, Johnson was not actually born in a biomechanics lab. But it is where he spent all of his time if he wasn’t at the field or at home.
The only comparisons Johnson is willing to make between college and pro coaches relates to the working facilities they used. A coach who made his reputation as a guru of the TrackMan player evaluation tool, Johnson saw how the college game was turning to analytics earlier than pro baseball was and jumped on board. But professional baseball has made up some ground in other areas.
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“What’s happened is the college game has moved a lot faster to analytics and maybe biomechanics of pitching and hitting as well,” Johnson said. “I think what’s going on from the shifting standpoint, college is behind in that aspect.
“In college you’ve got biomechanics labs on the campus of your universities and different things of that nature that are just readily available. You’re always in there.”
Having attended the University of New Mexico, Garver has experience with both professional and college coaches. He does think there’s a difference between the two.
But he also has seen the way pro baseball has shifted its philosophy on development the past few years. As opposed to the cream-rises-to-the-top-mentality of the past, teams have begun to invest more in their prospects.
“(College coaches) get a chance to develop guys for three years, sometimes four,” Garver said. “Once you get into pro ball it’s like finding your strengths and then maximizing it. I think it’s starting to change though, where pro ball is also becoming about development. Guys are drafting talent and then going to develop them as opposed to the old way. It was like ‘Draft an MLB-ready player or someone who has a tool and then work on that tool.’”
The Twins seem well-positioned to handle pro baseball’s paradigm shift toward development. They brought in Zoll last year, a highly-regarded development hound.
Beyond that, the lower levels of the Twins’ farm system are inundated with college coaches.
The list includes: Double-A pitching coach Justin Willard, Single-A Cedar Rapids hitting coach Ryan Smith, Dominican Summer League manager Seth Feldman, Gulf Coast League manager Robbie Robinson, hitting coaches Michael Thomas, Nathan Rasmussen and Caleb Abney and pitching coach Zach Bove.
It’s all a product of Falvey’s trips to Houston and Nashville to see what the rest of the baseball world was talking about.
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“I wanted to learn,” Falvey said. “There aren’t a lot of times where the Cleveland Indians, Pittsburgh Pirates, Arizona Diamondbacks, Seattle Mariners and Minnesota Twins are sharing information with each other. It’s just too competitive. In most other walks of life, you have professional seminars and opportunities to meet people whether you work for Target or 3M or whoever. You get a chance to learn from one another. Professional baseball, it’s competitive. What I found was these seminars … they were opportunities to learn and talk to people that had really studied the craft.
“I just think you’re looking for guys who are good coaches, good teachers. I’ve seen some guys come over time in my career from different amateur spaces into professional baseball, whether it’s high school, college or otherwise, facilities outside of coaching, that can really help impact you. I’ve always felt let’s evaluate the candidate on his merits and less on that criteria alone.”
(Top photo of Tanner Swanson: Courtesy Brace Hemmelgarn / Minnesota Twins)
