DePodesta: I wouldn’t say we were seeking out low velocity. We certainly were seeking out strike throwing.
If you look at the teams really from 2023, 2024, 2025, especially, we just didn’t throw enough strikes. And in this ballpark, especially, we don’t want to be giving up free bases. We thought that was something that the market last winter sort of offered us is that there there were pitchers out there that were much more efficient strike throwers. We wanted to be in a position where we forced our opponent to beat us by swinging the bat, and figured that that would at least do something to improve our overall pitching performance, and in some respects we did.
We were much better strike throwers. We did walk fewer hitters. Our strikeout-to-walk ratio was better than it’s been in four years. That did not make nearly as much of an impact as we would have hoped in terms of our overall outcomes. Was some of that unlucky? Was some of it tied to other things going on with the club, even, like, usage? Was it sequencing? There are a lot of different things that we’ve sort of talked about, but I think we we certainly learned a lot through the exercise.
I think the biggest thing was that last winter we decided we need to do things from a pitching staff standpoint to make hitters more uncomfortable in the box. What was available was guys who had deep mixes, and we still think that that can be an element of what it is we’re looking for. But that’s not the only thing, and I think each year, the market will actually offer up probably different types of pitchers, and we just need to decide whether or not we think those will fit here in Coors.
But I think we’re going to continue to seek out different types of pitchers that we think have a chance to have some success here.
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I think we have to be open to anything really.
This environment certainly is different, and I think in some respects almost necessitates an open-minded approach as to how you build it.
One of the things we’ve been talking about for the last few months was “Let’s think about 27 outs times 162, and you’ve got 13 slots, right? How do we do that? Let’s let’s start with a blank piece of paper and try to build it from scratch.”
It’s also, though, going to be heavily predicated on the players that we have in any given time. So I don’t think we would have a plan right now for 2027 without knowing what free agents we might be able to sign because that could dramatically affect our plan.
We were able to add a couple of pitchers at the trade deadline, a starter and a couple of relievers. That certainly changes things. Who’s available for us in Double- and Triple-A that we think have a chance to come up and help us in 2027? So all those things are going to matter.
I think it’s interesting even right now as you watch the playoffs, different teams are doing different things based on the personnel that they have and the off days that they have available to them, which are more plentiful in the playoffs. But I think we have to take a similar approach. Given the talent we have available to us at any given time — and that may be different in April than it is in July — how are we going to adjust and do our best to get 27 outs six or seven days a week?
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We had our best month of pitching in April — it was really March, and then into April — and we probably had the most length on our pitching staff during that time. So, not only did we have our sort of traditional five starters, you also had Chase Dollander, Antonio Senzatela, Zach Agnos were all in the bullpen, and available to pitch not as traditional long men, but as guys who could go win a game. “Hey, this game is 4-4 in the fifth. Go take us to the finish line. Win us this thing.” And those guys were able to do that.
Now, I think in May, in a span of — what a week or 10 days? — we lost both José Quintana and Dollander, and I think that exposed some of our lack of depth. Certainly, Senzatela was also pitching so well that he ended up pitching in somewhat shorter and higher-leverage roles as the season rolled on, and so it really took away from some of that strategic depth we tried to build up at the beginning of the season that did work pretty effectively.
I think the short answer is we have to look at everything, and we also have to be creative in terms of how we do it, and it may look very different throughout the course of the season depending on what pitchers we have available to us. But I think going with five starters and eight relievers, and expecting the five starters to all go six innings every time out, that’s probably unrealistic here, or at least less realistic here than it is in most other places.