The Rockies’ bounce-back parade marched through the big stadium at Salt River Fields last week with Kyle Freeland out front, handcuffed. The 26-year-old left-hander was moving methodically through a spring training progression of particular pitches. And this day was Curveball Day. Every other pitch in his extended arsenal was a second thought. Curves or get out.
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“I’m staging myself,” he said. “I’ve executed two of the five parts of the plan so far. And I want to lock in every one.”
Two years ago, Freeland helped launch his hometown club into new territory, leading a young and exciting pitching rotation that, for perhaps the first time in Colorado’s history, carried them. For two years between 2017-18, the Rockies reached the playoffs on the shoulders of their pitchers, a completely foreign concept in the 27-year history of baseball in Denver.
Then Freeland faltered and, not coincidentally, so did his team. His career-worst season, with a 3-11 record and a 6.73 ERA and an extended sojourn in the minor leagues, neatly echoed the Rockies’ slide in the National League to a 71-91 record, their most disappointing year in a decade.
Their hopes for 2020 and beyond depend, in no small measure, on Freeland’s ability to bounce back into form. His staging plan began nearly eight months ago before it became a full process of reclamation in the winter. He progressed through injury recovery, a windup remodel and confidence rebuild before finally piecing everything together through the first month of spring training.
And before baseball was ripped away in a coronavirus pandemic that put the season on an indefinite pause, Freeland was bounding toward a breakout.
“Beautiful,” Colorado catcher Elias Díaz said of Freeland’s progress. “Just nasty. Every pitch.”
Freeland’s orderly and patient climb back on track put him in a position to find himself again. He rebuilt his base step-by-step. He embraced the Rockies’ high-tech new pitching lab to eke out every hidden improvement, however small. And baseball’s delay, he hopes, will not send him back to the spiraling trouble that knocked him back in the first place.
“The results I’ve been getting have been very pleasing to me,” he said.
For a shining moment — really, a season-long series of shining moments — Freeland looked every bit like the liberator of pitching in Colorado, a thinking man’s lefty who grew up in Denver and never blinked at working in the thin air of Coors Field.
In 2018, just his second season in the majors, Freeland won 17 games and pitched the fifth-most innings in the National League. His 2.85 ERA was the lowest in Rockies history. He finished fourth in NL Cy Young voting. And in an elimination wild-card game at Wrigley Field, he threw 20 scoreless outs in a 2-1 victory over the Cubs. Only one other left-hander, Madison Bumgarner, had ever matched that output in a deciding playoff game.
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It turned out to be Freeland’s peak. His 2019 fell apart in the first month. He had a 5.90 ERA to begin May and a 7.13 ERA before the calendar flipped to June. His home run rate spiked, nearly triple his mark from 2018, to 2.2 per nine innings. The Rockies dug deep to find the root of Freeland’s issues.
The pitch that had always set Freeland apart was a glove-side fastball, jammed inside to right-handers and tailed away to lefties. Freeland in his first two seasons threw the pitch fearlessly, painting the edge of the plate in that inch-wide strip just out of reach.
When he began to struggle, those pitches drifted to the middle of the plate and hitters teed off. The Rockies decided to take him out of the fire and sent him to Triple-A Albuquerque for a reset.
“There was a lot of pressure he put on himself,” Colorado manager Bud Black said. “The expectations of being from Denver, being the guy.”
The Rockies found some nibbling errors in Freeland’s pitching, starting with his hitchy windup that paused at its apex with one knee held in the air like a flamingo. Every mistimed movement after that pause, however minor, was pushing his pitches out of focus.
The first step in Freeland’s correction was to reclaim the basics of who he is as a pitcher.
“His best stuff is fastball-slider,” Black said. “His mindset is power, hard, hard slider, hard fastball.”
They forced him to reduce down to those pitches, honing them back to a baseline before letting him loose again.
When Freeland was called back to the majors in July, in his third start after returning, he cruised through six innings against the Nationals at Washington, with no earned runs and just four hits. Of the 109 pitches he threw, 80 were fastballs and sliders. He was beginning to find himself.
Kyle Freeland set Rockies pitching records in 2018, then was among the league-leaders in home runs allowed in 2019. His repairs ran deep. (Ron Jenkins / Getty Images)
His results didn’t show it, but Freeland was piecing together the loose strands of his identity, even through a groin injury that took him off the mound again in August. He returned to Dodger Stadium in September, eager for competition, hoping the heat would propel him into the offseason like a wave. That was the second step of his rebuilding.
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By November, knowing he survived two big-league games to end the season, Freeland convened with his former minor-league pitching coach, Darryl Scott, who was newly hired as the Rockies’ bullpen coach. Late in the season, Black and Rockies pitching coach Steve Foster laid out to Freeland a plan to streamline his windup, to get rid of his flamingo pause. They wanted a windup that was simple and repeatable, to remove any minor margin for error.
The third step in Freeland’s comeback was to drill that windup into second nature.
“There was a little fight at the start, breaking that mental barrier of getting comfortable not pausing when trying to throw pitches,” Freeland said. “Once I got past that, everything started to smooth out and I was able to see how much more fluid my delivery was, how easier it was to throw pitches.”
His throwing program went from long toss to bullpen sessions, from bullpen sessions to spring training, and from spring into Cactus League games. At one point last season, Freeland was taking too much advice, hobbled by excessive analysis. His new path cut out the noise and centered around a minimum of basics.
Freeland was repeating his steps without thinking, inputting them into muscle memory: one fluid motion, separate the ball from his glove early, time his forward motion in line with his legs, keep in direct path to the plate.
At his center, Freeland is not the kind of pitcher who overpowers hitters with high velocity and raw stuff. His four-seam fastball averages about 92 mph, according to FanGraphs, with a slider slightly slower. When he excels, Freeland throws like an old-school lefty who commands the strike zone, inside on hitters and out, rarely in the hot zone.
“I don’t have a blistering fastball or an exploding slider,” he said. “I’m more finesse, location, kind of mess with you and outthink you.”
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Deep into spring, then, Freeland needed to start seeing the strings holding up his changes. He needed to understand the mechanism behind what he was doing.
The Rockies in November promoted their Double-A pitching coach, Steve Merriman, to minor-league co-coordinator, so he could work with all levels. Merriman’s responsibility extended up to teaching Freeland. Two years ago, Merriman helped the Cubs build a high-definition pitching lab at their spring headquarters in Mesa, Ariz. The Cubs were among the early adopters of new-found technologies that opened up avenues for advanced pitching instruction.
Merriman brought those ideas with him to the Rockies’ spring setup at Salt River Fields. Among the line of outdoor batting cages next to the stadium, the Rockies turned one tunnel into their pitching lab, installed to the brim with four high-speed cameras pointed at a pitcher from different angles, collecting data on everything from spin rate, spin axis, spin efficiency, velocity and release points.
Freeland dove into the lab, the fourth and final step in his comeback.
“It’s an opportunity for him to see where he might find benefit in small spaces,” Merriman said. “We talk about finding value in the margins. And when you can do that, it just enhances who he is. Kyle is very athletic. He’s very talented. And what he wants to try to do is just make sure that he’s being the best version of himself.”
Freeland could see how fluidly, or not, he was moving on any given pitch. He could see the minor moments of inefficiency that might slip by unnoticed in real time, the kinds of slight movements that bumped him off track in the first place.
“I’ve been learning a lot about it,” he said. “It’s new to me, learning this part of the game. … You can never stop learning in this game and you shouldn’t stop learning in this game. That’s one thing that my dad taught me at a young age is never stop trying to learn about this game in every aspect.”
Freeland’s two Cactus League starts played like pop quizzes. He threw two innings late in February against the Athletics, with just one hit allowed, a home run. His three innings against Cleveland earlier this month netted two hits, including a homer, and four strikeouts.
“His command was good. His changeup was playing. He’s throwing four pitches,” Díaz said. “With him, it’s a little different because he can throw on both sides of the plate, he can do a lot of things on the mound. That’s good for a catcher. It makes me work.”
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Against Oakland, Freeland focused on changeups. Against Cleveland, curveballs. His plan in a third start was to nail down a slider, then his fastball in a fourth game, then put it all together in one final, fifth start in the Cactus League.
That plan is on hold while baseball waits for the pandemic to subside to safely play games again. That time will come, sooner or later. Springtime pop quizzes are one thing, regular-season games something else entirely. It is impossible to fabricate the competitive environment of a major-league game, he said, whether in spring training games or the bullpen sessions he was forced into while social distancing from the coronavirus.
The base he built, though, is in place, Freeland said. And now he will wait.
“It’s gonna be tough, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he said.
(Photo: Jayne Kamin-Oncea / USA Today)
