The following is an excerpt from the script to Episode 8. Click on the embed above to listen to the full episode, or you can subscribe to Razed Sports on your favorite podcast app.
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A baseball season is a grind. There are games nearly every day and things, at times, kind of take on a Groundhog Day kind of feel. Every day you get up, go to the park, work out, go through your process to prep for the game. Then after the game, whether you play or not, it’s shower, eat and try to get some sleep before you do it all over again. There isn’t a lot of time to self-reflect on how things are going.
So in our last episode, Cole had what he called one of the worst games of his professional career. He walked four guys in just one inning. He was embarrassed by that outing. But if there was one silver lining, it’s that the following day was one of those rare off days. It gave Cole a chance to take a deep breath and examine what had gone wrong the night before, to see if there was something he could identify as a reason for the command issues he had had.
So he went to the video…
COLE: I had to step back and go ‘OK this isn’t me. What is going on?’ It was just really good timing that there was an off day falling.
Cole looked at video from 2018… video of his first pro stop in Spokane, video of his time in college at Georgia-Gwinnett, and video from Spring Training. And he spotted the most minor detail …. something so small that maybe nobody else, even the coaches who knew him best, would have noticed.
COLE: It was pretty subtle, but in my delivery I was getting, like not as tight as my delivery. It was getting a little bit, it had slowed down and it was getting, like, moving parts in different directions. … when I lifted my leg I kicked my leg more out, towards third base, which caused my back to kind of shift, back toward first base, and then I was having to catch up and compensate. And I think that’s why I was missing a lot down and in and up and away, to lefties, like pulling the ball.
This small thing, was causing sort of a disruption in the kinetic chain. One little thing led to another, and another, and another, and the next thing you know, you can’t throw strikes.
COLE: It’s kind of like a chain of events. If one thing you know might be a little bit off, it kind of snowballs into a number of other problems that I hadn’t even realized I had gotten into until I saw some old tape. It was just cleaner, quicker and more efficient to the plate, and like I said just working on my direction to the catcher and not getting so erratic in my delivery, which was causing me to be erratic with my command. I’m glad I caught it when I did.
Again, as we’ve mentioned before, the ability to self-evaluate in an honest, critical way, is a big strength of Cole’s. It allows him to make changes when necessary, but to do so in an analytical manner, not out of emotion or frustration. One huge influence for Cole in this respect are the lessons he learned from his late mother, Denise.
COLE: She always used to talk about how everything happens for a reason. That was kind of her, her mantra. I think as I’ve grown I’ve seen not just in baseball but in life I really believe that to be true. But especially in my baseball career there’s time where I’ve kind of had things planned in my head and like expected them to go a certain way and they .. (laughs) normally don’t. It’s frustrating or upsetting at the time and then as I’m able to look back, years down the road you do realize that like, that was probably a good thing that happened that way and that was probably the biggest lesson that I took from her, just that to kind of ride the wave, not too high, not too low and just understand that there’s a reason that this is happening.
Those lessons stuck with Cole. He draws on them when he runs into struggles. He knows he just has to figure out what’s wrong and keep pushing forward.
That’s what he did after his four-walk outing on July 15. The very next day, he spotted the problem with his delivery on video. And he immediately worked to fix it.
COLE: And so I just saw that and yeah just made a simple adjustment, started messing with it in my throwing program, and then messing with it in my bullpens. And then I just took it into the game and I’ve, yeah, I’ve been seeing a lot of good results, like throwing a lot of strikes. So it’s been exciting just trying to build off that.
Cole’s next outing came on July 20, fittingly against Winston-Salem, the same team he gave up four walks to five days earlier. Cole threw 14 pitches in one inning of work. 10 of those pitches were strikes. He struck out two and walked none.
And the run continued. Over his next four outings, covering the rest of July and into early August, Cole pitched 5.1 innings and not only didn’t walk anybody, he didn’t even allow a hit, while striking out 11. He threw 62 pitches during that stretch, 44 of them — or 71 percent — being strikes.
It was a remarkable turnaround, and even better, the only baserunner Cole allowed during that run was when he hit a batter with a pitch. That batter then tried to steal second base, but was thrown out. So Cole, who in addition to everything else had been working to be quicker to the plate, had seemingly found a groove in all aspects of his game.
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EPISODE CREDITS:
Written and produced by Bob Harkins.
MUSIC CREDITS:
Theme song: “Rip My Jeans” — dl-sounds.com
Broke For Free — “If”, “Only Instrumental”
Andy G. Cohen — “Scramby Eggs”
(All music edited for time purposes)
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