For years, ASU baseball's Achilles' heel has been its pitching. Just in the last three seasons, the Sun Devils have only had one season with a team-earned run average below six, and it was 5.95. But a step in the right direction was made this offseason with the addition of the Whiteman Family Performance Center Pitching Lab.
The game of baseball is in the midst of an analytical movement where Major League Baseball teams are prioritizing high-tech tracking data to tell them anything and everything about what pitch was just thrown. The trickle-down effect of this is creeping its way into college baseball, and ASU is joining the party.
"It can be a scary thing to look at when you're not aware of the importance of it," ASU's new pitching coach, Jeremy Accardo, said. "But I can promise you, if you look at the teams that are in the playoffs every year, they invest in it. That's just the truth. That's where we can go. We can be behind it, or we can be ahead of it."
Through just one semester of working in the pitching lab, the Sun Devil pitching staff is already seeing the results, and Accardo has been a big help. Accardo has experience working with analytics as a coach with the Milwaukee Brewers and New York Mets organizations. His tenure with the Mets included a three-year stint with the major league club as a pitching strategist and assistant pitching coach.
"Him (Accardo) just being able to incorporate all his knowledge with all the tools that we have, we've really seen a growth with a lot of these arms that we had from last year to this year," head coach Willie Bloomquist said.
The process of day-to-day work with the pitching staff includes pitchers coming in to throw their bullpens. Afterward, the pitchers and catchers will meet with Accardo and have an open discussion about how the bullpens went and what the data says about it. After sifting through the data and talking it through, the staff builds their plans for the next bullpen.
"We try not to let it get too complex because then we end up achieving nothing," Accardo said. "So we make sure we grab the lowest hanging fruit, rip that down, take it and go to the next one."
"Getting too complex" can be easy to do when staring at gobs of data. With numerous technical terms such as velocity, spin rate, spin axis, "vert" (vertical break) and much, much more, going too deep into the weeds of it all can be detrimental to a player's mental state on the mound.
That is why Accardo and the staff have open discussions after every bullpen, so they can pick out exactly what is worth looking into and how to attack the next bullpen. Position players can go to the cages and take hundreds of swings a day to perfect their craft, but pitchers do not have that luxury. So, having a crystal clear plan is vital.
"I don't go in there with anything scripted," Accardo said. "I just say, 'Talk to me. What do you feel?' And then I can start putting fact to what they feel and then start to guide them in the direction that they actually need to go to maximize their potential and their arsenal."
Accardo said these discussions have led to the pitching lab being a "teach a man to fish" situation where pitchers are learning what the data means. As a result, they are having more in-depth conversations that lead to them picking up things from their teammates before the coaching staff even has to tell them.
The in-depth conversations can create questions that Accardo admits he may not know the answer to, which results in making phone calls to those who do for a better explanation.
"I'm not going to try to lead a guy somewhere and be wrong, so I understand where my limits are, and then I'll go find the answer and get it explained to me better," Accardo said.
The specific data that is presented in the lab is from Trackman, which uses Doppler radar technology to track the flight of the baseball to give out all of the information about the pitch. With a plethora of data to sort through, the staff keeps their focus narrowed for now.
"We've only scratched the surface," Accardo said. "We're pretty much presenting them with pitch metrics and release heights and release sides and kind of all the basic stuff. We haven't even hit them with the biomechanical side of it, and once we get force plates, we're drinking from a fire hose right now."
Even though the whole team is looking at the same data, Accardo is still making sure each plan is individualized per player. Every player is different and reacts differently to the data, which is why no two bullpens are the same.
"The biggest thing I look at is one, velocity difference between my different pitches and then how everything is moving off each other, so that I know what to tunnel off different pitches and how to sequence and ultimately get guys out," redshirt junior right-handed pitcher Tyler Meyer said.
Accardo said that, depending on the player, the bullpen could be a pitch design session where the mentality is to have some fun and tweak things to see different pitch movements and not worry about game-like situations. A bullpen could also be one where Accardo doesn't even have to say anything because the pitcher is throwing well and coaching himself.
The same can be said about how each pitcher is different outside of the lab and actually on the mound. Real game situations can be far different than chucking baseballs in front of a tracking machine, but some guys still want to know what their pitches are doing.
"Once you get in the lines, for me, I don't like thinking about it because that's not the goal," senior right-handed pitcher Jack Martinez said. "The goal is outs, but some people feel more comfortable when they know how their stuff is playing, which can lead to getting more outs."
At the end of the day, it's about learning what works best for each pitcher to maximize their potential and so far, the coaching staff believes the pitchers are doing just that.
"They're learning quickly," Accardo said. "They're understanding why things are going a certain way when they're out there by themselves, and that's one of the best things to see."
Old school baseball fans and coaches may argue that analytics are ruining the sport they love. They may say all these fangled terms on a screen are a bunch of nonsense. However, these developments can help players reach new heights just by understanding what the data means and how to apply it.
"What it does is eliminate the overreactions," Accardo said. "Just because our eyes tell us something, it doesn't mean what's actually happening. It's really hard to focus on exactly what a ball is doing while we're max effort throwing at each other."
"This is a level of the game that can take you to another. It's just as important as some of the other things like recovery or strength or any of that. It's just another piece to make you as good as you can possibly be," he added.
The Sun Devils have not made the NCAA tournament since 2019. This is the first time they've missed three consecutive tournaments since the Kennedy administration. This is partly due to a pitching staff that has not had a team-earned run average below 4.50 since 2016.
If used properly, this pitching lab can potentially be the turning point for the Sun Devils.
"F-that," Accardo said. "We're not a hitting school anymore. Not in this room we're not. We're a pitching school."
Edited by Katrina Michalak, Abigail Beck and Natalia Jarrett.
Reach the reporter at jmjanes1@asu.edu and follow @JackJanes_ on X.
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Jack is a graduate student studying sports journalism. This is his second semester with The State Press. He has also worked at Walter Cronkite Sports Network and The Sporting Tribune.
