Mike's Mets - Advanced Biomechanics, Meet the Mets

 

By Mike Steffanos

The Mets pitching lab is open for business in Port St. Lucie. Now the challenge for the club is to properly implement the expensive gizmos they invested in.

One of my biggest frustrations when the Wilpons owned the Mets was how far the team had fallen behind other, more progressive organizations in taking advantage of analytics and technology. Teams in much smaller markets operating under relatively small budgets were miles ahead of a team playing in the greatest city in the world. It's been reported that the Mets' front office was frequently frustrated by their inability to convince ownership that investing in technology would ultimately make the organization more efficient in developing ballplayers. This reluctance pre-dated the nosedive the club's finance took with the collapse of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. The Wilpons were notoriously unwilling to spend on anything they couldn't understand.

In recent years I have become interested in comprehending why the Mets lagged so far beyond MLB's progressive teams in their efforts to sustain more than the briefest spurts of winning baseball. I started reading whatever I could find on the revolution analytics and cutting-edge technology brought to Major League Baseball. Some of the most interesting work was happening with pitching, where advanced biomechanical analysis was instrumental in developing pitching prospects into major leaguers. The most innovative organizations began building pitching labs utilizing this technology to get a leg up on their competition.

In his newsletter for Post Sports+ this week, Mike Puma reported that the Mets have finally joined these clubs this season:

Open for business since early June, the Mets' 360-degree pitching lab in Port St. Lucie, Fla., is among owner Steve Cohen's latest forays into improving the organizational infrastructure. 

The lab is staffed by pitching development personnel, biomechanics experts and analysts with backgrounds in various disciplines. 

One estimate put the number of teams using such labs around 10, so the Mets are hardly pioneers in this regard. But Cohen’s wealth — he's MLB's richest owner — could give the Mets an advantage in the amount of resources devoted to the lab.

In Puma's piece, he noted that Billy Eppler said that he pitched the idea to Steve Cohen of building the lab. I'm sure he did, but the idea of a Mets pitching lab under Cohen began before Eppler's arrival as GM in November 2021. In March of that year, I wrote about the Mets' plans to build their own lab, linking to an excellent piece by Tim Britton in The Athletic. It took a couple of years to realize that goal, but the pitching lab is open for business. It's ready to help create the next generation of Mets pitchers and aid current Mets pitchers in refining their talents.

Needless to say, you shouldn't expect any instant results from the new lab. There's no magic in the technology, just the ability to better focus on what the ballplayers need to work on and track them over a period of time. This should help with the consistency of coaching these players receive as they move up through the organization.

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