Inside the Phillies’ plan to cut down on chasing pitches in 2024: ‘We have to get better at this’

CLEARWATER, Fla. — Last October, a few months before he was hired as one of the Phillies’ assistant hitting coaches, Dustin Lind was watching them play the Diamondbacks in the National League Championship Series. He saw something familiar. Lind had spent the past four seasons with the Giants organization, and knew the Arizona pitching staff well. Coaching against them was a constant “cat and mouse game,” in his words. They were adept at flipping a game plan on its head.

And that’s exactly what they did against the Phillies. Arizona was facing an aggressive team and decided to exploit that. They changed their strategy to induce more chase. It worked. From Games 3-7, the Phillies chased pitches at a rate of 36%. All of a sudden, a team with a $240 million payroll and World Series aspirations was going home.

It was an unceremonious way for their season to end, and president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski made it clear that lowering chase rate would be a focus moving forward. As a team, the Phillies chased 31.5% of pitches out of the zone last year — the fourth highest rate in baseball. Lind was hired, in part, to rectify that. Over his time in San Francisco, as director of hitting/assistant major league hitting coach, the Giants’ chase percentage plummeted from 31.2% in 2019 to 24.2% in 2021. (For context, the Rangers had the lowest chase rate in baseball last season with 25.5%).

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Lind wasn’t the sole reason for that trend, but he was a big reason. And Phillies hitting coach Kevin Long is hopeful that he and assistant hitting coach Rafael Peña will help the Phillies get on that trajectory in 2024.

With that in mind, the Phillies’ hitting trust will place a higher focus on chase rate this season than they have in years past. It will be something they monitor daily. They will be more intentional in how they approach their batting cage work, and more diligent in evaluating players’ at-bats. The goal is to create a heightened awareness of when they are chasing, when pitchers are adjusting to them, and how to combat that.

“With the talent that we have in that room, we’ve got to work at it a little bit harder,” Long said. “And that’s what we’re gonna do.”

Long said that in previous years, about 95% of the pitches the Phillies saw in batting practice were strikes. That will no longer be the case. They’ll now be fed different velocities and shapes, in an attempt to challenge the hitter’s decision-making. There will be fewer strikes and more balls.

“Now, there is going to be more ball work, more strike to ball,” Long said. “More shapes than there were before. It’s going to be harder. They won’t groove their swings as much. And we can still do that. But we got to get to work the other way as well.”

The Phillies have three different pitching machines: A basic three-wheel, a Trajekt, and an iPitch. Long refers to Lind as a “wizard” with all three. He has spent the last six seasons — four with the Giants and two with the Mariners — learning how to emulate everything from Devin Williams’ airbender to Clayton Kershaw’s curveball.

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He’ll use that skill to prepare the Phillies’ hitters for pitching matchups this season.

“Variety is kind of what we’re after,” Lind said. “We want guys to be exposed to a lot of different things. And usually it’s going to dovetail nicely with what they’re going to see that night. That’s the idea of training. We come in, and we go over the game plan, we talk about it. And then we build a training day that allows them to study for the test before they actually take the test at 7 p.m.

“We want to create really clear visuals for our players to understand where a pitch needs to start, in order for it to end where we need to hit it. Because guys are throwing with such incredible movement and velocity nowadays, we really need to take a lot of the decision-making process and make it as automatic as we can. So that’s why we’re really trying to mix it up and maybe change speeds on them, and make training a little more difficult, in some cases.”

There will be times when cage work will involve some creativity. A few weeks ago, Lind, Peña and Long were working with center fielder Johan Rojas — who is coming off a rookie season with a chase rate of 40.4% — and placed a stool behind the plate. They put a medicine ball on the stool and told him to protect the medicine ball.

“It was an exercise in swing decisions,” Lind said. “Especially with sinkers. So, we set it up, and I said, ‘Alright, don’t let me touch that medicine ball.’ And I would move it around, and he would swing at the ones that were going to hit the medicine ball, and he would take the ones that weren’t going to hit it.”

Rojas has been doing the drill almost every day.

“It helps me a lot,” he said. “Because I’m only focusing on swinging at pitches that are going there, in that spot. It helps me with pitch recognition.”

When Lind was in Seattle, the Mariners used a concept called “16 for 16.” The idea was to “win 16 pitches” every night. That didn’t necessarily mean going 4-for-4. It was more about decision-making.

“We’re typically going to see about 16 pitches in a game,” Lind said. “For every single pitch, what was your plan? And did you get a good swing off on that plan? Or did you take it if it wasn’t a pitch that you wanted to swing at?”

Lind brought the concept with him to San Francisco. What made it successful, for the Giants, was repetition. The day after a game, Lind checked in with every hitter who took an at-bat the night before. He gave them one or two observations and they talked through the at-bat, and discussed whether they stuck to their plan.

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Now, he’ll do the same with the Phillies.

“Our goal is to create feedback loops on a daily basis for players, to help them understand what happened in last night’s game, and maybe where they could have executed their plan a little bit better,” Lind said. “Having daily conversations is really helpful because a lot of times, we get going through the season and we get on the hamster wheel, and it starts spinning. And before we know it, we look back, and it’s two weeks, and we’re not really aware of how the league has been adjusting to us.

“These are going to be ongoing conversations because the league is inevitably going to adjust to whatever we do. So it’s this daily interaction between the hitting coaches and the hitters — talking about these plans — that really brings out the best in players in regards to their swing decisions.”

Lind will provide automated reports for players to look at, as well. Players will see where pitches were located, whether they followed the game plan, how hard they hit the ball, and how many balls out of the zone they swung at, among other things.

Shortstop Trea Turner has had a few of these postgame meetings already. He posted a career high chase rate in 2023 — 35.3% — and believes he will benefit from the daily check-ins.

“I think that’ll be good, from a mentality standpoint,” Turner said. “Because sometimes, as players, you have a bad day and you want to come back and change everything the next day. And in that case, the hitting coach’s job is to almost say, ‘No, look at this — if you did this one little thing, or swing at this strike, and not this ball, then your day is way different.’ Kind of talk you off the ledge a little bit.

“Sometimes we go and chase a bunch of pitches and we want to change our swing and it’s not always about necessarily changing your swing. It’s about getting the right pitch to hit. And if you get the right pitch, a lot of things go well.”

The trick with all of this will be making sure that the Phillies don’t lose their aggression. And, as we’ve seen in the NLCS, there is a fine line between aggression and over-aggression. Nick Castellanos can go from being one of the best hitters in baseball to looking lost at the plate. Turner basically spent the first half of last season looking lost, until August, when he found his swing again.

Long and Lind are not trying to change that. They just want to channel that aggression toward the right pitches.

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“Our team likes to swing, because we have really good hitters,” Lind said. “When they swing, they do damage, usually, and that’s a trade that we want to keep with this club. We just want to make that aggression more focused, whether it’s a really good fastball above the zone, or off-speed below the zone.

“It’s about understanding what each pitcher’s trap is and then focusing our hitters’ energy and effort and eyes on the part of the zone where they’re going to be able to do the most consistent damage. We want them to swing every single time the ball comes across the plate. But harnessing that aggression is going to be the key adjustment that a lot of guys are looking to make, I think.”

A lot of this work will focus on pitch tunneling. This is not a new concept, but one that still confounds many hitters: A pitcher will throw his pitches on the same trajectory, only to have them break at the last moment (when the pitch reaches the tunnel point).

This is where awareness — both in the cages and in games — becomes crucial.

“We’ve got to make sure that they know what’s happening to them,” Long said. “And some of it is a bit painful. Because these guys like to swing. They want to swing. They don’t want to go up there taking pitches. And that’s not what we’re talking about. This is not a discussion about, ‘We need to take.’

“It’s a discussion about looking for zones. If you’re tunneling in a certain spot, and if it’s not in that tunnel, then you’ve got to take it. So what comes with that is you may take a couple of third strikes, more than what you’re used to, but the trade-off really weighs in our favor.”

None of these proposed changes will work overnight, but they might in the long run. The players know they have work to do.

“Listen,” Long said. “These guys want to win. And if they want to win, then we have to get better at this.”