How the Phillies’ big bet on changing their pitching program culture and coaching went wrong (2024)

Gabe Kapler and Chris Young conferred in the dugout and they agreed it was the right time to push Aaron Nola. It was Tuesday and hours earlier they had been mathematically eliminated from the postseason.

The Phillies have an algorithm that calculates a number on a 1-to-100 scale to rate every potential batter-pitcher matchup in that day’s game. It is a guide for Kapler, the manager, and Young, the pitching coach, to navigate the most treacherous moments. But, at that moment, the idea that Nola needed to feel good about the hypothetical end to his season outweighed all.

Few things in 2019 had unfolded as planned. This could represent a small victory.

Nola’s pitch count rose to season-high levels as he pitched into the sixth inning. Kapler and Young rose to the top step of the Phillies dugout. They were enraged about the strike zone. Nolawalked Howie Kendrick after two close pitches were called balls.

The Phillies believed they had good ideas for their pitchers throughout the 2019 season. They hastened changes in how the pitchers were coached and how information was delivered. When they replaced Rick Kranitz with Young last offseason, they risked relationships for the constant pursuit of a competitive edge. The Phillies did all of this during a time of heightened expectations and, in the process, they alienated some of their pitchers. Results were elusive. They made a big bet and lost.

After Nola walked Kendrick, Kapler handed the ball to Jared Hughes, an August waiver claim. Hughes surrendered a grand slam on his second pitch. As four Nationals circled the bases, Young seethed. He pointed at the home-plate umpire. “f*ck you!” Young yelled. The 249th homer surrendered by the Phillies was the breaking point, and it was so emblematic.

The disconnect is rooted in a chain of decisions that began almost two years ago, according to more than a dozen team sources interviewed by The Athletic for this story. Those people were granted anonymity to freely speak.

Soon after Kapler was hired as Phillies manager in late October 2017, the team announced that Kranitz, formerly the assistant pitching coach, would remain as a coach but in an unspecified role. He was anointed pitching coach three weeks later. During that time, the Phillies continued to interview candidates for the pitching coach job. Kranitz was the only coaching holdover whom the front office pressed Kapler to retain.

But Kapler and Kranitz often clashed, multiple sources said, while most of the pitchers saw Kranitz as a confidant.

Kapler and Young, who was hired as the assistant pitching coach in 2018, leveraged Kranitz’s relationships with the pitchers and often filtered ideas through him. It helped because Kranitz had established a level of trust with many of the pitchers. Young conducted extensive work on scripting potential sequences and in-game maneuvers, gaining Kapler’s support in the process.

What Kapler and Young prioritized was not uncommon in modern baseball. The data-driven decisions that have influenced most front offices for the better part of a decade have filtered to the ground level. Teams have installed quantitative analysts in clubhouses and hired uniformed personnel tasked with interpreting and implementing data.

So general manager Matt Klentak and the Phillies attempted to accelerate their reliance on data to instruct their pitchers.

It came at the expense of Kranitz, who was neither a pitching troglodyte nor a savant. Kranitz, 61, has been hired and fired during his two decades as a big-league coach. Key members of the front office had familiarity with him from their shared days with the Orioles and they liked him. Some Phillies pitchers, after the 2017 season, offered feedback that pushed for Kranitz to be elevated to the head pitching coach job.

But the front office’s loyalty toward Kranitz waned as Kapler’s influence grew. They identified Young as a rising star. Kapler, according to multiple sources, perceived Kranitz as defiant; the first-time manager and his veteran pitching coach sometimes engaged in postgame disputes — one of which escalated over a specific bullpen-management issue. The Phillies, in assembling a new front office and on-field staff, said they promised to value “diversity of thought.”

Kapler disputed the notion that friction existed with Kranitz.

“I respect the work Kranny did with our pitchers,” Kapler said this week. “I valued the relationships he had developed with all the pitchers that came through. Kranny had a way about him both in the dugout and in the clubhouse that made people smile. I personally enjoyed working with him.”

Kranitz, now the Braves pitching coach, declined to comment to The Athletic earlier this month when asked about his relationship with Kapler and the Phillies. “I was mad,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer on Sept. 10. “Obviously, in this game, there are very few jobs available, especially at the time when I was let go. When you’re talking about being let go in November, yeah, it upset me.”

While the personalities were tenuous, the arrangement of a traditional pitching coach tasked with instilling confidence and offering mechanical tweaks backed by a forward-thinking assistant plotting the optimal pitch usage proved fruitful during the 2018 season. Phillies pitchers posted a 3.83 FIP, which ranked seventh in baseball. It’s why they did not push harder to upgrade the rotation this past offseason.

The Phillies could have permitted Young to interview when at least two teams — the Braves and Rangers — requested permission to speak to him in the offseason. But team officials, according to sources, feared they would lose a competitive advantage if they let Young even interview. Kapler advocated for Young. A front office that had urged Kapler to keep Kranitz on his initial staff capitulated when faced with the possibility of losing Young. They fired Kranitz on Nov. 14, 2018.

The change was made without consulting any of the team’s pitchers.

There was a perception among a majority of the pitchers that Kranitz had been mistreated. It bothered some. Regardless of how much the team valued Kranitz’s pitching acumen, his bonds with many of the pitchers were irrefutable. Kranitz could, in many cases, more easily convince a pitcher to try something because he had gained that person’s trust.

But when Young became the top pitching voice, the Phillies committed to a culture change for their pitching program.

It was based on a successful model. Young, 38, came to the Phillies from the Astros, a team at the forefront of innovative pitching strategies. Young was an advance scout for the Astros; he was not asked to directly work with players. But he was exposed to some of the club’s ideas. Two central tenets to the Houston model became Young’s guiding principles: He wanted pitchers to throw their best pitch as much as possible, and he expanded the rate of four-seam fastballs thrown at the top of the zone.

The Phillies found the implementation of those ideas difficult in 2019. The team’s FIP rose by more than a full run — from 3.83 in 2018 to this season’s 4.91, which is tied for 24th in MLB. Regression by a pitching staff is attributable to a combination of factors — not just coaching but also evaluation by the front office and performance by the pitchers. The Phillies, based on their offseason actions, expected a linear progression aided by the coaching changes.

The problems were compounded by a lack of trust between pitchers and a coach who often told themwhat to do but nothow to do it. Some of the dissonance was attributable to a broken process that prompted a shift in what data were incorporated into game-planning tactics, sources said.

The Phillies suffered a rash of bullpen injuries. In June, when the season went sideways, the Phillies relied on pitchers they didn’t initially expect to rely upon. But many of the younger pitchers, raised by the organization and now instructed to alter their approaches, failed to improve and were not capable of maintaining the desired adjustments.

At least six Phillies sources described a pitching process that was not collaborative. “We were asked to do things based on the way they want to see it done — not what has worked before,” one Phillies pitcher said. That in itself is not an unusual coaching practice, but some believed it had been taken to an extreme.

“It’s selective,” another Phillies pitcher said of the coaching approach. “They just decide most can’t be helped.”

The learning curve proved steeper than expected. Young’s first coaching experience came in 2018 and, while teams have embraced nontraditional paths to leadership positions, one truth remains: A coach needs credibility to reach his pupils.

“I think trust is earned,” Young said this week. “Sometimes, it takes time to earn trust. Sometimes, it takes a lot of time to earn trust. Sometimes, trust can be earned quickly with success. There were times when we had ideas and we had success with them right away. The trust came fast. And I think there were some times when we might have not had as much success early on with some of our ideas and it took longer to gain the trust.”

Everything was magnified because expectations around the Phillies were raised by their active offseason. They spent hundreds of millions in free agency and traded two of their top prospects but did not address the rotation.

Zach Eflin was the most public example of a pitcher who resisted the coaching suggestions, but there were others. Eflin, who was groomed as a sinkerball pitcher, deployed more four-seam fastballs at the top of the zone in 2018. It worked. The Phillies told Eflin to be more aggressive with that strategy at the beginning of 2019. He found early success. But spotting those high fastballs became troublesome and tiring for Eflin. When his command dwindled, he missed low, and that meant more belt-high fastballs. Eflin, after a demotion to the bullpen, ditched their suggestions.

Other Phillies pitchers ignored coaching recommendations or agreed to implement certain ideas only to adopt a different plan during games because they didn’t trust the plan or considered it too predictable. Several declined to provide specifics because they feared retribution from Phillies management.

Phillies starting pitchers the third time through the order

The distrust was not universal among the pitchers who began the season with the Phillies. Multiple pitchers praised Young for always demonstrating that he cares. They acknowledged the long hours the coaches put into preparation and studying. Numerous pitchers said the onus was on them as players to apply the adjustments and execute the pitches — no matter who gave the orders as pitching coach.

Some pitchers need more coaching than others. But the Phillies, under Kapler, have said player development does not stop at the major-league level.

“I think it is unquestionably true that our pitching staff as a whole has not met the expectations we had going into the season,” Kapler said. “We had planned for some incremental steps forward by the starting rotation being backed by a shutdown bullpen. That didn’t happen. I think there are several reasons that we didn’t meet expectations in this area. Injuries are an obvious one.

“Pitching development is very rarely linear, but we need to take a careful look at our projections, our predictions and our evaluations. We will be dissecting our game planning, our between-starts work, our mechanical adjustments and our understanding of every pitcher’s physical and mental conditioning. When we miss on an evaluation, as we obviously did here, we will do extensive debriefing to understand why we missed and do it better next time.”

On July 1, Phillies pitchers had the second-worst home run rate in the majors. They allowed 1.7 homers per nine innings. Only the woeful Orioles were worse. The Phillies’ rate has dipped to 1.5 homers per nine innings since July 1, which ranks 18th in that span. But the damage had already been done.

The Phillies boast vast resources, but top executives have asked for time to assemble a perennial contender. They have learned that the best ideas — even ones studied and copied from successful, progressive franchises — require time. They need shrewd infrastructure and buy-in from everyone involved. If anything, the shortcomings from the pitching program illustrate how far the Phillies remain behind model clubs.

It also raises questions about what the organization values and how it evaluates not just talent but people, too.

The Phillies identified Young as an integral piece in what they were trying to accomplish. The human element — potentially strained relationships — was considered but deemed less important in the bigger picture. The game is littered with examples of coaches and players at odds; teams have succeeded before in spite of that. It’s reasonable to wonder about the timing of it all. A sudden change in how the Phillies guided their pitchers might have been more easily installed during one of the rebuilding years.

“One of the many things I have learned in this job over the last year is that being prepared at 7:05 p.m. isn’t the only thing that matters,” Young said. “I have always known the players matter. I have always known those relationships matter. But I spent so much time and effort early in the year making sure that, at 7:05, nothing was going to catch any of us off-guard.”

A few months into the season, the Phillies tweaked their game-planning models and matchup algorithms. The Phillies had abundant information, but they were not always certain how to best use it or what to prioritize. “We can adjust our delivery to our pitchers,” Kapler said. “We can get more information, share it a little bit differently.” It was harder than anticipated.

It’s possible the Phillies give it more time. Or perhaps they could reconsider Young’s role and create a job for him similar to that of Brian Bannister’s for the Red Sox. Bannister, a former big-league pitcher, was an early adopter of analytics at the field level. He started as a pro scout/analyst with the Red Sox, and then joined the on-field staff as assistant pitching coach in 2016. He has since transitioned to more of a front-office role.

Young had aspirations beyond scouting and that is what led him to the Phillies. He relishes the search for a nugget or trend that can produce a competitive advantage. “We can make sure we have the right pitch versus the right guy,” Young said. “To me, that’s incredibly important.”

But, even in 2019, a pitching coach’s job involves more than that.

“There are times when that preparation needs to take a back seat,” Young said. “You need to go out and spend a little bit more time doing some other things and spending some time around the lunch table. That’s the biggest adjustment I’ve had to make.”

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(Top photo of Chris Young with J.T. Realmuto and Nick Pivetta: Dale Zanine / USA Today)