Former Braves Pitching Director Paul Davis Joins To Talk Pitching Development

Image credit: Paul Davis (Brian Westerholt/Four Seam Images)

In this week’s Future Projection, Ben Badler and Carlos Collazo have a conversation about pitching development with Paul Davis. Davis has spent years in the game and was most recently the Braves’ director of pitching. He’s also spent time with both the Cardinals and Mariners and coached and played baseball in college.

In his sit-down chat with Future Projection, Davis talks about what it’s like to be a pitching director and how pitching development has changed over the years. He talks about movement patterns, delivery checkpoints, injuries, the importance of having a competitive mindset, the development path of Spencer Strider, breaking ball development, why fastballs are more than just velocity, the importance of making hitters swing, stuff vs. command, how to train strike-throwing, developing deep arsenals and more.

Time Stamps

(2:30) An overview of a pitching director’s job
(6:10) How much collaboration does a pitching director have with draft picks?
(9:15) Delivery checkpoints, movement patterns and injuries
(14:50) The difficulty of changing movement patterns
(23:00) The importance of a competitive mindset
(31:30) Spencer Strider’s development path
(46:30) Developing a breaking ball
(53:00) Why fastballs are more than velocity
(55:00) The importance of making hitters swing
(1:03:00) A pitcher with stuff vs. a pitcher with command
(1:11:30) Training command and strike-throwing
(1:16:20) Thoughts on stuff+ and granular pitch data
(1:20:00) Combining force plate metrics with pitch data to reverse-engineer stuff
(1:24:30) The next wave of Braves pitchers