‘Everything they touch turns to gold.’ How the Dodgers help pitchers change their fortunes
LOS ANGELES — Alex Wood was preparing for his first full season with the Dodgers in 2016 when then-general manager Andrew Friedman approached him in the team’s spring-training clubhouse and handed him a three-page analysis of his pitching patterns.
“The gist of it was that I was one of the best in baseball at getting to two strikes — I was elite, like in the 99th percentile, of getting to 0-and-2 and 1-2 counts,” said Wood, a left-hander who had been traded from Atlanta to Los Angeles the previous July. “But I was at the bottom third of putting guys away.”
Wood was 25 at the time, with three years of big league experience, but was still pitching with what he called a “high school, college mentality” of wasting a pitch or two — usually fastballs up and out of the zone — when he got ahead of batters.
“Andrew was like, ‘You have two really good secondary pitches, when you get to two strikes, all I want you to think about is using your offspeed as much as possible to punch guys out,’ ” said Wood, who mixes an 83-mph curve and 85-mph changeup with his 91-mph sinker. “That kind of shifted how I was attacking guys throughout the at-bat.”
Wood was limited to 14 games in 2016 after injuring his throwing elbow while batting in late May, but he went 1-4 with a 3.73 ERA and improved his strikeout rate
