Tarik Skubal, a former Seattle U teammate, leads qualified pitchers with a 3.8% mark.
While Junk’s Stuff+ scores have remained constant this year, his walk rate and underlying Location+ scores vaulted into elite status.
He wasn’t expecting those results, that improvement, or how it changed what he thought he knew about locating a pitch.
Great progress in increasing velocity, in pitch design, came after we began measuring progress.
For velocity it was the radar gun. In pitch design it was the combination of high-speed cameras and spin-tracking tech that became a Rosetta Stone.
What was lacking in command training was an ability to quantify location quality and improvement in practice settings.
Enter the Intended Zones Tracker.
With the tool, a pitcher or coach uses a touch screen to move the visible crosshairs of their intended target, a digital catcher’s glove, on the interactive screen that is placed at home plate in a bullpen setting.
The location of the pitch, how close it was to its intended target, are automatically recorded in addition to the pitch’s spin, velocity, and expected run values.
“With anything, it starts with measuring it in a practice setting, the same way velocity started to explode as soon as we got reliable radar gun data,” Driveline’s Joel Condreay said. “Now we can measure these things. Same way as if I need to gain or lose weight, a great way to start is to step on a scale.”
This past winter, it was fitting that Junk, an early Driveline trainee, was one of the first to buy into the training tool.
“He was on the Intended Zones tool twice a week basically the whole winter,” Condreay said of Junk.
Junk had plenty of experience in the past with trying to hone his command by throwing to nine pockets, those contraptions where pitchers throw to a facsimile of a strike zone that is divided into nine sections of numbered targets.
But there was no tech recording his actual performance with a nine pocket, and there was no target like the Intended Zone’s glove to throw toward.
Initially he just started playing light toss with the IZ tracker but then Junk advanced to throwing all his higher-intent bullpens with the tool.
He noticed with Intended Zones he was more focused. He was practicing with more intent. Yes, it helped that there was a digital catcher’s glove making it more game-like. But he also knew his performance was being recorded. That feedback loop was just as critical as it was in, say, pitch design. He wasn’t guessing about progress, or a step back, it was there in black and white.
He also noticed he was getting better.