BA: 3 YEARS IN, RANGERS NEW PITCHING APPROACH GETTING RESULTS

JJ Cooper wrote this really good piece on the Rangers changing their approach after meeting with pitching coach Alan Jaeger. Jaeger was one of the first guys to institute the extreme long tossing program.

"The fact that a team was willing to even meet with Jaeger was somewhat surprising. At the time, he viewed three or four organizations at most as "progressive." Those were the ones that didn't immediately laugh at the mention of Jaeger's ideas. Pretty much everyone else in Jaeger's eyes was a slave to the rules of limiting pitchers to throwing to 120 feet on a straight line.

The Rangers sat down and listened to him explain his full throwing program. A couple of months later, they asked Jaeger to check in at their Dominican Republic complex. When Jaeger arrived, he quickly found that farm director Scott Servais had taken very detailed notes. The players were already doing the full long-toss program, pretty much just the way they would have done it if Jaeger had drawn it up.

"I was shocked when I got down there," Jaeger said. "I felt like we would have a moral victory if they took off the restraint of 120 (feet), stopped counting throws and let them throw for 20 minutes instead of 10."

Instead he found a team that was doing things entirely differently, with many pitchers airing it out to 300 feet and beyond. At the extreme, future big leaguer Alexi Ogando had to go from center field of one field to center field of another because his throwing program couldn't fit on one field."

4 months ago ramjam36 2 comments 0 recs |