Can you feel that? Explaining pitcher “feel” and how important it is to MLB success

“I just didn’t have feel for that pitch today.”
“He seems to have lost the feel for that pitch as the game has gone on.”

We hear the phrases mentioned countless times during a day of baseball. Instinctively, we believe that we understand what’s being discussed. We know what it’s like to feel something with our fingers, so the concept of there being an incorrect feel to the baseball on certain pitches makes sense. But the truth of what “feel” is and just how important it is in the art of pitching is likely more complicated than anybody who has never pitched in the upper levels of baseball can understand.

“I don’t think there’s any one singular definition of what ‘feel’ actually is,” explains Sean Buchanan, the Triple-A pitching coach for the Houston Astros. “When guys reference ‘feel,’ they could be talking about the literal feel of the baseball coming off their fingertips. They could be talking about a level of confidence they had with a specific pitch. They could be talking about a movement pattern in general, part of their sequencing, or part of their delivery.”

Therein lies perhaps the biggest issue with talking about a pitcher’s ‘feel.’ You have to first establish if you’re even talking about the same thing.

“Feel is getting to the same spot every time in the delivery, or getting close to it,” said Nationals starting pitcher MacKenzie Gore.

“It’s a little bit of both location-focused and movement-focused,” explained Mets starter Griffin Canning

“Someone that has ‘feel’ on the mound is somebody with the ability to adapt and adjust and do things on the fly, rather than be very black and white,” said Rangers’ Bullpen Coach and former Pitching Coordinator Jordan Tiegs.

So ‘feel’ is about the mechanics of your delivery, but it’s also about the location and movement of your pitches, and it’s also about the ability to adapt within a game. Seems simple enough.

But even if it’s hard to pinpoint an exact definition for what ‘feel’ is, what all pitchers can tell you without any hesitation is what Gore told me: “Feel is huge.”

WHY IS ‘FEEL’ SUCH A CRUCIAL PART OF PITCHING?

When you have good “feel” for a pitch, “you understand that you can throw it where you want to, whenever you need to,” explained Gore.

It’s a concept that was echoed by Buchanan, who said, “Somebody has ‘feel’ of a particular pitch if there’s minimal deviation from their movement patterns. They’re consistent. It’s repeatable. It’s something that they can command pretty well to specific locations, and is something that they can throw pretty much to anybody in any count.”

Repeatability is a term that came up often when discussing “feel.” Not only the repeatability of a grip, but also the mechanics of the delivery to allow the pitcher to repeat the movement profile and repeat the location of the pitch. To have true “feel” for an offering, a pitcher needs to have their mind and body so in tune with the movement that they don’t even have to think about how to grip the ball or how much finger pressure they need to get the right spin on the ball or how hard to drive off the mound.

“When pitchers are at their best, they’ll all tell you, ‘What are you feeling? What are you thinking?’ And they’ll all tell you, ‘Nothing,'” explained Tiegs. “It’s like that flow state where they can’t even recall anything. That’s when they’re at their best.”

In many endeavors, both athletic and otherwise, chasing a “flow state” is among the rarest of experiences. Runners often talk about a “runner’s high” when nothing else enters their minds and their legs simply keep driving their bodies forward. Psychologists, like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, discuss it as a mindfulness path to happiness through full immersion in your present. However, in baseball, this rare mental state is becoming something essential for pitchers to find on a nightly basis.

“In today’s game, when so many people throw hard, 100 [mph] doesn’t necessarily guarantee you’re going to blow a hitter away anymore,” said Tiegs. “Hitters can be on time for that. Anybody that pitches in the big leagues has to have some element of feel in order to stay here.”

HOW DO YOU KNOW IF A PITCHER HAS FEEL?

So, who are some examples of pitchers who have mastered this nebulous concept of “feel”?

“The easiest one, he’s been doing it for a while, it’s really how he’s survived, is Kyle Hendricks,” revealed Tiegs. “I mean, that’s how he’s pitched. He can cut his change up; he can sink his change up. He can cut his four-seam and run his four-seam. He’s one who immediately comes to mind.”

If hearing Kyle Hendricks’ name mentioned makes you pause, let’s consider that this is a pitcher who has a career 3.75 ERA in 1,676 MLB innings despite having a fastball that has averaged 87.6 mph over his career and never once averaged over 90 mph in any one season. Yet, here Hendricks is, at age 35, 11 years into his big league career, almost entirely because of his elite feel for pitching.

“There’s a word some guys use: ‘hand talent,'” divulged Canning. “Some guys are just really good manipulators of the ball. They just see a shape in their head and can manipulate the ball to do what they want. Those guys are usually more ‘feel’ guys.”

“Typically, some trends you’ll see with ‘feel’ guys are that they might throw four or five different pitches, maybe even six,” explained Tiegs. “They’re probably not going to walk very many people.”

Some starting pitchers who have shown near-elite walk rates with a deep pitch mix are Logan Webb, Sonny Gray, Chris Bassitt, Dean Kremer, and Max Fried. All of them could likely be considered pitchers who have survived due to strong ‘feel’ for their pitches.

Finding other pitchers who have great feel for their pitches doesn’t just mean watching a pitcher and seeing who has a dominant pitch or can get consistent swings and misses. Sometimes pitchers with the most movement on their pitches can have the least amount of feel for those pitches, no matter how often they throw them.

“It’s about the situation,” explained Buchanan. “If there’s an offering that you see that’s super high usage in two-strike counts, it’s like, okay, well, that one might be really nasty, but he doesn’t throw it in zone, so he might not have the best feel for it, but it’s so gross, it’s just trying to get guys to swing and miss at it.”

That could include guys like Reese Olson, who has elite swinging strike rates on his slider but poor zone rates, or Tyler Glasnow with his curveball, which has a swinging strike rate over 20% but a zone rate under 30%. These pitches may get tons of swings and misses, and may be all over your Twitter timeline in GIF form, but they’re not necessarily pitches that either pitcher has good “feel” for.

Glasnow might not be a surprise to be mentioned as a pitcher with “nasty” stuff but not as refined “feel,” but, generally speaking, having good “feel” doesn’t mean a pitcher doesn’t also have velocity. “Typically, hard throwers don’t need as much of it,” described Tiegs, “but there are some hard throwers that definitely still possess these qualities.”

One of them is Josh Hader, who Buchanan believes is one of the best pitchers he’s seen when it comes to feel because “he’s great at feeling out little adjustments with his body and hand awareness.” He also happens to throw 96 mph, which doesn’t hurt either, but feel doesn’t have to be limited to just breaking balls, as we might immediately think.

“Possibly even more feel is needed on fastballs,” admitted Tiegs. “The ability to move your fastball to different parts of the strike zone, add and subtract velocity on it. Essentially, you can take that one pitch and turn it into two, maybe even three different pitches. Either up and in or down and away, or a ‘get me over 92’ and then a two strike 96; those are all different pitches to a hitter.”

DO YOU NEED “FEEL” FOR A FASTBALL?

With so many pitchers moving to multiple fastball variations, as Tanner Bibee explained to me during spring training, having feel for the fastball is becoming even more important in the modern game. With hitters now able to hit high velocity more consistently than they ever have, pitchers need to have different wrinkles to keep batters off the barrel of the bat. Oftentimes, as Tiegs mentions, the solution is to have pitches that look similar out of the hand but vary slightly in velocity or movement profile. These pitches often “tunnel,” which means they approach the hitters from a similar release point and at a similar trajectory for long enough that it’s hard for the hitter to determine what pitch he’s seeing before he has to decide whether to swing or not. By that time, he might get jammed or swing and miss entirely.

However, even though that concept is logical and seems easy enough to implement, there are plenty of pitchers who don’t possess the feel to take their one fastball and turn it into two or three different variations (cutter, two-seamer, splinker, etc.). In fact, adding new pitches is one of the quickest ways to throw off a pitcher’s “feel.”

“When you start to add new things in and start to chase external results, whether it’s pitch characteristics or pitch shapes, I think naturally, in order to do that, your body can start to change to achieve a certain results,” revealed Mets starting pitcher Clay Holmes, who spent the offseason revamping his pitch mix to help him transition into the starting rotation. “If you add something in and you’re chasing a certain thing, in order to get the most optimal pitch shape for that pitch type, it may change things a little bit with your release or your mechanics that may throw off the feel for the other pitches.”

It’s why we see pitchers like Brayan Bello struggle with pitches that had once been their bread-and-butter. In his first full season in 2023, Bello threw his changeup more than any other secondary pitch, 24% of the time, and had a 71st percentile strike rate on it while producing a 21% swinging strike rate. It was his calling card. Then he began to work on his slider grip, turning it into a sweeper to try and induce more whiffs, and the feel for his changeup waned. This season, he’s using the changeup just 15% of the time, and the strike rate has fallen to the 36th percentile while the swinging strike rate has dropped to 14.5%.

As Tiegs, who used to implement countless pitch mix changes as the Pitching Coordinator for the Rangers organization, explains, “The shapes of pitches, a lot of it is created off hand and wrist positions at ball release. So, breaking balls, you’re trying to hold a more supinated position (thumb facing up), whereas like a fastball, you’re going to try to stay behind it, or maybe even pronate through it (thumb facing down). Let’s say you naturally pronate or supinate better, and you’re going to try to throw a pitch that’s the opposite, that can definitely start to pull your other pitches in that direction accidentally because you’re not used to having to overcompensate for them.”

In fact, Tiegs went on to explain Bello’s situation perfectly: “Let’s say you’re a change-up guy, and you really pronate on your change-up. Now, all of a sudden, you’re going to work on a slider or cutter, and so now you spend a lot of this practice time trying to hold supination when before you never really did that, right? Now the path to go from a slider wrist position at release and get all the way back to a change up is a lot bigger swing than you’re typically used to just going from your fastball to your change up.”

That’s a big reason why pitchers have started to build an entire pitch mix around one pitch.

“There’s an important balance of knowing those parameters,” explained Holmes. “It’s knowing ‘This is my best pitch,’ or my best pitches, and I need to make sure I’m in these positions to throw this. Within that, I can try to add the best compliment to that. Versus, if you start chasing another pitch shape, you may start taking away from the best pitch…At this point, you can know yourself in a sense that you know the kind of positions you get into and what’s within the realm of possibility.”

So, in the quest to continue to better themselves and improve their craft, pitchers can sometimes inadvertently take a strength and make it a weakness or create an issue with “feel” when that issue never existed in the first place. Yet, losing feel is something that pitchers anticipate. Despite it being such a crucial element of pitching, every pitcher knows that there is no world where they will maintain “feel” for their pitch mix for the entire season. The obstacles to overcome to establish “feel” are just too great.

HOW CAN A PITCHER LOSE FEEL?

“It could be anything; the smallest things,” revealed Gore. “It could just be, it’s humid that day, and you have a certain pitch where there’s more grip, and you have more sweat than on other days. That can cause you to be off a little bit.”

“Sometimes being out of whack in your delivery can take away from your feel,” explained Canning. “A lot of times, if my delivery doesn’t feel quite right, then I feel like my arm gets stuck. You kind of lose where your arm is in space.”

“You see these small injuries on a hand,” continued Gore, “and it kind of messes up a pitcher just because of the feel factor.”

“Everything is connected,” is how Buchanan best explains why “feel” is so easy for a pitcher to lose. “Anything that happens with the lead leg causes a ripple effect through the rest of the delivery. Anything that’s happening with the hand through release is sometimes a byproduct of something that happened further upstream or downstream in the delivery. The delivery itself is this interconnected web, and everything has cause and effect. So if the player feels like, “Hey, it’s not coming out of my hand right,” the issue could be at the hand or the issue could be somewhere else, and we’re just feeling the final effects of it at the hand.”

Pitching is, therefore, one of the few athletic feats where a player begins the performance knowing full well that the skill they bank on will leave them at some point during the process. It’s not a matter of if but a matter of when, and they will need to adjust and adapt.

“We’re all such good compensators, so we’re going to figure out how to make a pitch,” states Canning, “but sometimes it doesn’t feel as crisp or as sharp as you know it should.”

“Pitching is a constant process of trying to maintain what we have and improve what the low-hanging fruit might be,” said Buchanan. “It’s just constantly looking at the different offerings, the different location strategies to make sure that it’s all one tight package.” And when it’s not, “There’s a constant fine-tuning to the maintenance pieces to support those pitches so you have the feel back,” detailed Holmes.

The other complicating issue of feel, apart from knowing that it will leave you at some point in time, is that a pitcher is never quite certain when it will leave him or for how long.

“Sometimes in the bullpen, you may not have feel for anything, then you get in the game and it’s there,” revealed Holmes. “Within the start, things can change from bullpen to the beginning, that, you know, in a perfect world, maybe that’s not the case, but I feel like more times than not, it’s that constant assessing and reassessing…. It’s an in-the-moment type of thing.”

“Things come and go,” Gore shrugged. “It could be one inning. Could be a start. It could just be for a hitter, and you just didn’t have it that at-bat, or whatever it is. But this game is all about adjustments, so you’re gonna throw bad ones at some point.”

“The brain is powerful, right?” laughed Tiegs. “We have moments of higher stress, higher anxiety, that maybe we’re not fully in control of what we want to do out there as much as we want. That definitely plays a factor.”

A pitcher may be warming up for a game and be keenly aware that nothing feels right. The pitches don’t move the way they want or feel as crisp coming out of their hand, but that doesn’t mean they’re in for a long day at the office.

“For me, the pre-game bullpen doesn’t mean much,” said Canning. “Something about getting on the game mound and having the game speed can sync everything up…Sometimes it just takes throwing the pitch one time in a good way for it to click in and to get that feel back.”

So how long does a pitcher have to lose “feel” for one or more pitches before they start to worry?

“When you start to see diminished performance over a few outings, we start to worry,” disclosed Buchanan. “Everybody can have a bad day, and there are plenty of times when guys just need a little nudge back in the right direction, and boom, we’re back. But when a little nudge doesn’t really do anything for us, and now, for a starter, we’re a few outings in, and we’re not regaining what we had before, now we need to be a little bit more aggressive about how we’re going to recapture what was going so well.”

But how can “feel” be recaptured? Surely, a skill that is as finicky and temperamental as “feel” is not something that can be easily found once it’s lost.

From talking to a few pitchers, it seems like pitchers will most often put the onus on themselves first to fix what might not feel right.

“You’ve got in between innings to throw it,” explained Gore, “so if you figure it out, then maybe you use it in a spot where it’s not going to hurt you if you don’t execute it perfectly, or you just go on that night without it…You don’t want to try to manipulate too many things. You have to make adjustments, but if you start trying to fix things on the mound, runs can score in a hurry.”

Once the game is over, pitchers will often use their mid-week bullpen sessions to address the issue that cropped up during the game. But even then, there isn’t a clear method to follow. “Sometimes throwing the pitch more helps,” said Canning. “Sometimes throwing the pitch not at all during the week helps.”

That’s often where their coaches come into play, trying to get the pitcher out of their head and just focusing on how the pitch feels and looks.

“Your job is to find a way to get it simplified,” explained Tiegs. “It’s figuring out, okay, if you’ve lost feel for this pitch, when you were at your best with it, is the shape different now? We’ll try to figure out what they’re doing differently from a movement standpoint on their throw, and is their intent with their mind any different on their pitches right now than what they once possessed when they were at the top of their game in terms of feel? And trying to find what’s the simplest, easiest fix to get them closer to that. Not necessarily getting them all the way there, because that comes with confidence as a component of feel as well.”

“One of the first things we always look at is past success,” reiterated Buchanan. “Success leaves clues. What were you doing when you had feel? When you were going good and this thing was dialed in, what did it look like? What did it feel like? What was your routine like? What were the locations and metrics of the pitch? And try and recreate that. Leaving guys puzzles to solve or tasks to accomplish or constraints to help put them back in positions that we know have led to success in the past, or are usually the different avenues we could take to get there.”

But if past success in regards to “feel” is the best roadmap for future success, then what do coaches or organizations do if a player has never established a baseline of “feel”? Have we reached a point in the modern landscape of baseball where we can teach something that was once thought of as being a natural ability?

CAN A PITCHER BE TAUGHT TO HAVE FEEL?

“You can’t truly teach “feel” to someone,” said Buchanan. “But that’s something that we can help with by guiding them to that self-discovery.”

A big part of that guidance is no longer being locked into a belief that pitches need to be thrown a certain way. Fastballs don’t need to be thrown with a certain grip. Changeups don’t need to involve turning your wrist over if that’s not a comfortable position for you. Pitchers no longer need to throw from specific arm slots to ensure a pitch will move the way they want it to. Pitching development has grown to a place where an entire pitch mix can be built around the mechanics and comforts of a specific pitcher.

“I think everybody’s a little different in that sense, where everybody doesn’t have the same grip with a cutter or change-up, etc,” said Holmes. “It’s just finding what’s optimal for you.”

That individualized approach requires lots of situational work in bullpens and side throwing sessions.

“There are just so many examples of guys who have either gained or lost [feel] as they’ve gone through their career,” explained Tiegs. “It’s just from the thousands and thousands of reps that they’ve had, slowly taking a buffet menu of options on the way they think and throw and move and slowly trimming it down and down and down. By the end of the career, they’re just honed in on a couple of things that make them work.”

“If we’re we’re throwing a side [session], something that we’ll do is we’ll run through sequences,” discussed Buchanan. “As we’re doing that, you’ll find out what they have feel for and what they don’t pretty quickly. If they can execute a fastball to the glove side, boom, boom, boom, no problems. Alright, we’ve got pretty good feel for the glove side fastball, let’s move on to a different offering. If even in a low-leverage bullpen-type situation, they have a pretty big miss on a specific task that they’re trying to accomplish, like, okay, this might be the area where we’ve got the least “feel,” and we’ve got to spend the most time developing.”

A lot of that development is being made easier these days by advances in modern technology.

“I think all the tools we have now, like the edgertronic, help kind of give you a better picture of what your hand and fingers are doing on the ball,” explained Canning. “That’s why guys are able to make these pitches so much better now. Instead of someone just saying something and trying to feel it, you can see it and put a picture to that feel.”

The edgertronic camera that Canning is referring to is a high-speed camera that captures live footage and slows it down considerably so that coaches and pitchers can break down the mechanics of a delivery or evaluate the release point or movement on a given pitch. The camera produces the images in real-time, so pitchers and coaches can evaluate the film during a bullpen session and work to make adjustments on the fly.

“It’s definitely one of the harder things to teach,” admitted Tiegs. “I don’t know to what extent we truly feel confident saying we can take this guy who has no feel and give him a lot of feel, but I do think we’ve, as an industry, been creative enough now where we find ways to move the needle on it and improve it. Like, we know more about change-ups and how you can create them with a supinated position, so they don’t all need to pronate on them. So now it’s like, what’s the path of least resistance with this pitcher, and how do we keep him in that lane and throwing as easily as possible for what he naturally wants to do, and not try to chase him all over the ends of the pendulum. That’s asking for a disaster, both from a feel and from a health standpoint.”

However, as Buchanan revealed, “There are just some people who, at the end of the day, it’s tough for them to learn the kinesthetic awareness to repeat things, and they’ll always have great stuff but not a lot of feel.”

IS IT HARDER TO TEACH STUFF OR FEEL?

That “stuff versus feel” debate is an age-old question in the baseball world. Would a team rather take a chance on a pitcher with high-end velocity or tremendous late break on their slider but little feel for how to repeat their delivery or how to manipulate the baseball to locate the slider wherever they want to? Previously, most teams had tended to gravitate towards pitchers with the better raw stuff, believing that it was a natural ability that couldn’t be taught, while the “art” of pitching could be imparted.

That doesn’t appear to be the case anymore.

“The reality is, in the big leagues, you need some component of both,” answered Tiegs, “but I would say, as an industry, we would feel easier on the advances we’ve made in technology and knowledge that we could help somebody’s stuff come along quicker than somebody’s command or feel.”

It’s why we see so many teams working to add velocity to a pitcher’s fastball in the off-season or get them in front of the edgertronic cameras to find a new grip on their breaking ball that will lead to a movement profile that pairs better with the rest of the arsenal. Improving the baseline movement or velocity on just one pitch can drastically change the outlook of a starting pitcher in today’s MLB, as long as they have a baseline of “feel.”

“It would have to be a pretty elite pitch to succeed with ‘feel’ for just one,” said Tiegs. “Something like, if you have a Mariano Rivera cutter, you know, something like that. We call those trick pitches. Then you can get away with it, but typically, now, you need to have ‘feel’ for at least two, and, in a perfect world, they would play well to both-handed hitters. If you have feel for one, that’s great, it gives you a chance, but if you only have feel for a second pitch and it’s a sweeper, for example, that’s only going to play decent to one-handed hitter, you might be in trouble when you I have to face the opposite hand more consistently.”

Buchanan had a similar line of thinking: “It really comes down to, ‘Do we have feel for something that can get us strike one?’ As Little League as that might sound, it’s true. We have to be able to have feel for at least one offering in-zone at a high clip. The more pitches we have feel for, the better. If we could have feel for two offerings, but have three nasty pitches, we can work with that, for sure. The guys who have feel for four or five pitches are rare. They’re aces, is what they are.”

Even if they don’t start out that way, we might now be in a place where feeling your way to ace status is a bit more plausible.