Gamecocks taking advice from MLB teams on pitching management

SOUTH CAROLINA GAMECOCKS BASEBALL

Mark Kingston has been up front in his time at South Carolina about looking at the major leagues to see how clubs are doing things and adapting that to the college game.

So, when trying to figure out the Gamecocks’ pitching staff after the fall, Kingston and the coaching staff talked to a handful of MLB teams, looking for any unique ways to approach managing the staff.

“There are a million different ways to tilt the advantages to your side. That’s what we want to do. We just want to make sure we’re up to speed for every possible way to give us a better chance to win,” Kingston said. “We just want to make sure we’re a step ahead, not a step behind.”

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They talked with teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers and Atlanta Braves, but spent a lot of time talking with the Tampa Bay Rays, a team that’s been on the cutting edge of managing the organization’s pitching staff and pioneering baseball’s opener.

With the opener, a team starts a traditional back-of-the-bullpen pitcher that could be considered a closer and have him pitch two innings before handing the ball off to a pitcher that could conceivably go seven innings to finish the game.

That way, the traditional starter would come out and immediately face the bottom of the opponent’s batting order as a way to make sure the best pitchers are going up against the team’s best hitters.

South Carolina may not have guys that could dominate for seven innings at the moment, but the Gamecocks could be implementing some of that thinking this season to create the best match-ups possible.

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“There’s a lot of mathematics to it. At the end of the day, what we took from talking to the Rays, you’re just trying to maximize advantages,” Kingston said. “If your best guy is pitching against the bottom of the order, you’ve given up too much. You want your best guys pitching against their best hitters as often as possible.”

The Gamecocks have been on the front end of implementing more statistical and analytical approaches to the game with the coaches trying to marry Sabermetrics and gut feel.

They’re already using different technologies in the program, measuring different metrics for both pitchers and hitters.

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That’s why they’ve tried to maximize every advantage they can get over the course of a season, which starts with the potentially unique approach to managing the pitching staff.

Kingston said the coaching staff is extremely high on the team’s back-end of the bullpen but are still waiting to see if some of the young pitchers can develop into guys that can go deep into games.

If those arms emerge, then the Gamecocks could go back to a more traditional style of managing a pitching staff.

“Until we know we have three work horses on the weekend we can just hand the ball off to and say, ‘we’ll see you in the seventh inning,’ we don’t have that yet. That doesn’t mean we won’t, but what we’re trying to do is study what the latest strategies are for winning games. At the end of the day, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to win games. Major league teams now through the use of analytics and studying statistics and trends are finding ways to be creative if you don’t have Kershaw and Chris Sale to throw out there every day.”