Pitchers want to know how to get hitters out. Teams want to help them to do so. That’s why it astounded Dan Straily, the former A’s starter, whenever the guidance he received wasn’t based on his own past results.
Liam Hendriks had different concerns. Most data on matchups is negative: Here’s what not to throw to this hitter, don’t miss here, don’t use this pitch. That’s not how Hendriks operates.
Enter Codify, a Vacaville-based data-analytics firm that boasts an increasingly glitzy client list, including Giants starters Tyler Beede and Logan Webb; Hendriks, a two-time All-Star with Oakland; and A’s left-handers Sean Manaea, Jesús Luzardo and Jake Diekman. Using Codify’s personalized “heat maps,” Diekman, who is in line to succeed Hendriks as the A’s closer, allowed only one run this past season.
“It’s helped me by just condensing the info I like and feel I need,” Diekman said. “It’s easy to see visuals with each opposing hitter. I love to take a glance right when I get to the mound just for a quick study session.”
Diekman and Hendriks print out Codify’s information and place it on the bullpen mound as they warm up, a refresher on what to do — as opposed to what not to do.
“I wanted something more positive; I wanted to know where the hitters struggled so I could accentuate that,” Hendriks said. “If you can tell me, ‘This is the area you can throw in,’ rather than, ‘This is the area to stay away from,’ that works so much better for me.”
Straily, who now plays in Korea, is known for driving teammates and coaches batty with questions in his efforts to improve, and he often found himself looking for something more layered, less generalized. All pitchers are not created the same.
“The one thing I never understood is I’d walk into the video room and say, ‘Are these scouting reports based on all righties?’ And they’d say yes, and I’d go, ‘Cool, so ... my fastball, Bartolo Colon’s fastball and Gerrit Cole’s fastball are all in this?’ and they’d say, ‘Yes,’ ” Straily said. “So I was left thinking, ‘Why should I trust this?’ ”
Serendipity struck. One day, Straily’s mother, Sarah, was at a family reunion and started chatting with her second husband’s nephew, a financial data analyst named Michael Fisher. He was wearing an A’s shirt.
“This woman was like, ‘Yeah, my boy plays for the A’s,’ and I’m meeting her for the first time and I’m like, ‘OK, that’s nice,’ I’m sure he plays for the Little League A’s or whatever,” Fisher said. “She said, ‘No, no, he plays for the organization, you probably don’t know their minor-leaguers.’ And I started rattling off the Kane County rotation, and she said, ‘That’s my boy! Dan Straily!’’
“I thought I was being pranked. I’m a serious green-and-gold guy. I thought, ‘This has to be a joke.’ ”
Fisher started a Dan Straily fan page online and as the two became friends, Straily began to see not only what a good mind Fisher had for numbers but also his intuitive feel for baseball. That impression was cemented in 2014, when Straily had some shoulder issues and Fisher texted him and said, “Hey, did you mean to move your arm slot so much?”
“I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ He showed me the data and the release was six inches lower,” Straily said. “That really established a trust factor. I knew he knew what he was talking about.”
Straily explained his need for more specific data, especially after moving to the National League, where he had little history with hitters. So Fisher, 51, began to tinker with a system, constantly adjusting it over the course of months and years. In essence, he creates a facsimile “Dan Straily,” or any other client, based on similar pitchers — those with similar stuff, tendencies, arm angles — to determine how a specific hitter might react. As the pitcher begins to face batters more often in real life, that data is given more weight, and the pitcher can see what is working and what isn’t.
“It’s a prediction, not history,” Fisher said. “Most of what they had been getting was history — ‘Hey, throw it down the middle, because the last three times you faced him, you threw it down the middle and he took it.’ That’s not what we’re trying to do.
“If Dan’s never faced a hitter, the system will build a pitcher by taking a bunch of other pitchers who are like him — well, this one is a lot like Dan, this one is a little like Dan — and there is something we can learn from all of that.”
Fisher is happy to tweak things based on requests and provides as much extra in-season analysis as is required. Hendriks, for example, wants more weight given to his more recent results, and a hitters’ latest tendencies. Luzardo proved to be a little tricky — he has so many variations to some of his pitches, Fisher had to input each variation separately: slider 1, slider 2 and so on.
There are occasional surprises. Diekman learned his four-seam fastball plays well in more areas of the zone than he’d expected. “Some guys might be surprised they can work farther out of the zone that they do. They’ll say, ‘Are you can telling me I can throw high and away fastballs to Brandon Belt all day and he’ll never hit it?’ and I’ll say, ‘Maybe not never, but pretty close,’ ” Fisher said. “Or a slider by a right-hander to a left-handed hitter high and away — it’s a weird pitch, but it’s really effective.
“There is stuff that pops up like that, ‘You’ve never thrown him this pitch, but with the similarity data we see, that could work for you.’ ”
Fisher doesn’t advertise or solicit clients, so his business has grown through word of mouth. He has 50-some big-leaguers, including a number of All-Stars, and a few catchers such as Yasmani Grandal who have purchased the data for some starters. Fisher doesn’t discuss his fee structure other than to say it’s a sliding scale based on income, much like an agency’s percentage, think six figures.
One of the earlier adopters was former A’s closer Blake Treinen, who started using Codify before the 2018 season and then put together one of the best seasons in Oakland history. Another former A’s closer, Sean Doolittle, is a current client, as are Lance McCullers Jr. of the Astros, Trevor May of the Twins, Detroit’s Spencer Turnbull, Lucas Giolito of the White Sox and Mets starter Marcus Stroman.
Fisher even has created “fake” big-league models for minor league pitchers, including A’s starters Luzardo and A.J. Puk, to apply before promoted, potentially quickening their learning curve; current Oakland minor-leaguer Grant Holmes also is a client. “It shows them how to get ML hitters out now, even if they’re not here yet,” Fisher said. “In Double or Triple-A, you can just pump fastballs by guys and get them out but that’s not going to work in the big leagues; they’ve learned how to get guys out in an advanced way early.”
With no access to video rooms because of COVID protocols, pitchers are finding Codify’s information especially helpful now. But Fisher, who coached high school baseball for seven years, provides more than heat maps and statistical analysis. He notices things that are out of whack, from mentioning to Straily that he’d moved an inch over on the rubber to pointing out that one pitcher’s arm slot was a full foot off where it had been the previous year, something that client’s team had not picked up. He can suggest new pitch possibilities or grip changes to clients, and he helped Hendriks with a split-finger fastball that wound up with near-knuckleball-like action.
All of this traditionally is the purview of teams’ pitching coaches, of course. A decade ago, many clubs would have forbidden any outside influence, and a handful are still restrictive. That’s understandable: Organizations have philosophies they instill at draft day, training methods they implement after years of study, proprietary data systems they’ve spent huge sums developing. And it’s nearly impossible to keep up with the explosion of performance-improvement companies, ranging from the influential training/velocity development company Driveline to sketchy outfits with untested gadgets and self-styled gurus with YouTube channels, all of them unregulated.
A’s pitching coach Scott Emerson makes himself familiar with all the popular programs and tools, and he asks his players what they find works best for them. He’s receptive, to a point.
“Any information to me is information,” Emerson said. “You ask guys to do their homework, you can’t complain how they’re doing it. A fresh set of eyes, the way someone else puts the maps together, it might be a little different, but generally if there are parts of the plate you want to go to with one or two pitches, it probably is going to reinforce what you’re thinking, and so much of this is mental.
“There are so many products out there, though. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. The biggest thing is: Does it help? If it does, obviously, you’re all right with it.”
Hendriks is such a strong believer in Codify, he said it will be a prerequisite for him as he considers teams in free agency.
“I’ll use Fisher as long as I can, because the ability to personalize everything is phenomenal,” Hendriks said. “But you can have all the information you want — it’s up to you what to do with it after that. You still have to do the work.”
Susan Slusser is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sslusser@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @susanslusser
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