PORT ST. LUCIE — Drew Smith fought his mechanics through much of last season. The Mets righty traditionally has used what he calls a Ferris wheel motion — after his left knee raises and then sinks, his glove is lifted above his head and whips through, leaving space for his right arm to wind up and throw the ball — but a delivery change made the previous offseason resulted in his glove pointing to the target rather than rising.
His velocity was dipping and his best pitch, the slider, lacked its bite.
After two months, he realized the tweak was not working, and the rest of a disappointing 2023 season was spent trying to master his old mechanics to find his old results.
The Mets’ season ended Oct. 1. On Oct. 2, Smith and Brooks Raley arrived in Port St. Lucie to throw one final bullpen session.
They entered the most prized and expensive research facility the Mets can offer — the newly unveiled pitching lab — and stripped off their clothes, down to compression shorts, as small motion sensors were attached all over their bodies.
“Who doesn’t like getting a bunch of dots put all over them and throwing in their underwear?” Raley said with a smile.
And they pitched.
The motion-sensor technology and dozens of cameras (hundreds? David Stearns himself said he wasn’t sure and likely would not reveal the number if he did) provided a rendering of the pitchers’ biomechanics, the high-speed cameras able to slow down each movement — including the actual throwing motion that creates one of the fastest joint rotations the human body can perform.
Smith already had reverted to his Ferris wheel style of pitching, but seeing the data that informed him his proper delivery was back, which gave hope for his velocity and slider, was encouraging.
“That’s where I saw that my mechanics were better,” Smith said. “We confirmed that it was better right away. … So got the feedback from that, spent the offseason working on that, and I think we made some good strides.”
In Smith’s case, the team and the player will gladly accept immediate help from their newest resource.
But the Mets’ pitching lab that is now operational is engineered to collect data that they hope will inform and assist Mets pitchers of the future.
The lab opened in June, a tangible sign both of Steve Cohen’s support and the Mets’ attempt to catch up in technological areas where they had fallen behind.
With apologies to the still-developing Tylor Megill and David Peterson, the Mets have not successfully graduated a starting pitcher from their minor league system since the Fab Five days.
More than ever, pitching is resembling a science that can be analyzed and implemented.
A slight grip tweak can add an inch or two of movement, the difference between a pitch hitting the end of the bat or the sweet spot. Technology found in the pitching lab can trace and optimize pitch shapes; can immediately spot when a pitcher is subtly struggling to repeat his delivery.
“I think over the last decade really we’ve seen this influx of really important technological advances to how we train athletes in general, both pitchers and hitters,” Stearns said, “to the point where our instruction can become much more specific. We can provide real-time feedback to players in a variety of different ways. And having a centralized location in your player-development hub and your spring-training hub, where a lot of that technology can be housed, is helpful.”
The president of baseball operations laughed when asked for a tour of the lab.
The Post has confirmed the lab is indeed in the facility at Port St. Lucie not far from the right-field line at Clover Park. Media, obviously, is not allowed in.
The information is proprietary, and the Mets do not want rivals knowing what they know. Around 10 teams are believed to have labs, including the Yankees and Stearns’ former team.
Stearns said there are “some high-level similarities” between the Mets’ and Brewers’ labs, but said they are not the same.
“I would be surprised if we’re doing anything in our lab that doesn’t exist anywhere in baseball,” Stearns said. “I think the technologies that are used in there now have some presence, whether it’s with other clubs or independent facilities.”
The technology — the cameras, the force plates that measure the impact created when a pitcher pushes away from the mound, the Trackman that measures pitches’ velocities, spin rates, spin efficiencies, among many other data points — was used to begin data files on as many pitchers (major and minor league) as the Mets could send to Port St. Lucie after last season.
A baseline was set for each, and the plan is to test all those pitchers again this spring to continue adding to the data set.
“You get pretty much every bit of information you could ever ask for,” said Eric Orze, a promising righty reliever who spent last season with Triple-A Syracuse. “I mean, they have every inch of your body kind of marked and tracked. And then all the cameras set up, the lighting, all of that, make sure that every movement that you make [is tracked].
“That’s the most advanced report back I’ve gotten from a pitching delivery, just from information about anything on the baseball field ever, by far. It was a cool experience.”
“It’s cool to see the dots moving without the person on it, and you can try to figure out whose profile is that,” said starting pitching prospect Dominic Hamel. “You see everyone’s body works different. It’s the kinetic chain of just working ground up, and you see how guys are able to distribute differently.”
All of the pitchers polled by The Post appreciated the information, although they showed varying degrees of interest in digging into it. They are now on file.
Gathering the data is “just the first step,” Stearns said.
The Mets hope they have developed a coaching staff that is able to translate that information in a way that players can understand, which would be the next step.
Eric Jagers, the vice president of pitching, is the leader of the lab, and Stearns said the organization has added “a number of technologically, really gifted people” over the past two years in hopes of properly communicating the findings to the pitchers.
(The lab is predominantly being used for pitchers, though Stearns said it could be helpful to hitters in the future.)
After data collection comes data analysis. Maybe this data can help pitchers like Smith see when their mechanics are out of whack.
Maybe a few years down the road, the Mets will have seen what worked for Smith and will be encouraged to try it out with another righty with a similar build and release point.
Maybe the lab becomes a place where pitchers are not just fixed but found, using past data to inform which pitchers should throw which pitches.
All of this is speculative, but Cohen’s wallet has again allowed the Mets to dream.
“I think the honest answer is: I don’t know. I don’t know what comes of all of this,” Stearns said. “When you get huge data sets, you don’t always know what the conclusions are going to be. … I think that’s the exciting part of where we are now as an organization.”
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