[calculoso]

Fairly informative story up on Sportsnet’s website today, talking about how a couple of prospects were happy to be traded from the Astros to the Jays

https://www.sportsnet.ca/baseball/ml...logjam/sn-amp/

The swing between roles ahead of the draft weighed on him — “as soon as they started throwing my roles around it affected me mentally a little bit,” he admits — and his delivery got messed up along the way. Once he joined the Astros, they presented him with some data and video on his arm slot, extension and release point that explained some of his command issues and helped him make an adjustment he couldn’t figure out at North Carolina.

“My arm slot started getting higher and higher (in college), which is not normal for me, and as soon as I went back down, to about three-quarters, I started throwing strikes extremely consistently,” says Thornton. “My stuff went back to normal, which was awesome for me because I felt normal.”

Thornton subsequently learned to embrace all the data offered by the Astros, once he learned how to effectively identify and implement the information he deemed most relevant. Initially, he explains, “if you don’t know what you’re looking for, your head explodes, really.” As he learned to identify the way things like spin rates impacted his repertoire, he learned how to eliminate the guesswork from his self-evaluations.

“Everything the Astros do is based off statistics,” says Thornton. “They use Trackman data a lot and Rapsodo (measuring spin rate and angles) so I was looking at my spin rates on my curveball, my cutter and my fastball — all the pitches I throw. And then I was looking at all my pitches on the break chart so if I’m trying to work on a pitch and make it better, I can see if I’m going in the right direction or not, and make little tiny changes along the way.”