SARASOTA, Fla. — Cole Irvin didn’t want to boast.
It was far too early for victory laps. The Orioles left-hander wanted to see proof that the “quiet work” he put in this offseason would yield the results he hoped.
He got that reassurance during a live batting practice session last week, and it was on full display for Orioles fans Sunday when he showed off his improvements.
Irvin spent 2023 — his first year as an Oriole — bouncing between Triple-A, Baltimore’s bullpen and its starting rotation after he struggled to begin the season. This winter, Irvin didn’t sulk or explain away his underwhelming campaign. Instead, he started his offseason early, lost 12 pounds, increased his velocity and fine-tuned his pitch arsenal after embracing a new way to think about pitching.
“I wanted to take my career by the horns,” he said. “I wanted to prove to a lot of people that I can make the adjustments. But it was mainly just proving to myself that I know I can throw hard. I wanted to prove to myself that I can be nasty.”
Back to school
In Irvin’s first time speaking with local media after the Orioles acquired him last January, the southpaw was self-aware about what he was — and what he wasn’t.
Coming from the Oakland Athletics, where he was seen as a soft-tossing innings eater, Irvin gave into that persona — even calling himself an “old school” pitcher.
“I may not be fancy, I may not be lighting up the radar gun a lot of the time,” Irvin said in January 2023. “I know how to get hitters out. At the end of the day, that’s all my job is.”
A significant part of his work this offseason — perhaps more important than throwing around weight in the gym, tweaking his mechanics or working on pitch design — was rewiring how he thought about pitching and himself as a pitcher.
“I was trying to learn and adapt to the new mold of ballplayers,” he said. “I’ve always just avoided that stuff. I was pretty old school. Just do a couple arm circles and I’m ready to go.”
Irvin didn’t even wait for the season to end to get to work. In late September, he reached out to Paul Hall, a performance coach at Tread Athletics, about working at the performance lab located near Irvin’s home in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“I’ve never had someone in my ear or a program to look at to help me understand what these new things are,” Irvin said. “I’ve always just avoided it.”
Hall, a 26-year-old former independent league pitcher, served as that for Irvin, whom the pitching coach said had an “open mind about all the new stuff we threw at him.” They spoke for over an hour during that initial conversation, and Hall could tell that Irvin was motivated to get his career back on track.
“He felt there was more he could get out of himself, and that was something I illustrated to him was definitely possible,” Hall said. “Our goal of an offseason is to be almost reinvented for the better to where you’re showing a different look. He’s creeping into his thirties, so to show we can get better and we can have a prosperous career for longer — that was something that was motivating to him.”
Tread is considered one of baseball’s most forward-thinking performance labs, helping pitchers improve through the use of modern technology and research-based methodologies.
Irvin was hooked up to motion-capture technology during his first bullpen at Tread — one he threw shortly after the season ended, taking only one week off in October — so Hall and others could identify areas to improve biomechanically. He underwent movement screenings to see any deficiencies with his body. When Irvin started ramping up for the season, he threw his bullpens with high-speed cameras and TrackMan systems set up to monitor his pitch grips and ball movement. He started a weighted ball program — a common practice in the game today — for the first time in his career.
The results: He’s throwing about 2-3 mph harder, almost hitting 96 mph Sunday. The rest of his offerings are harder, too, his sinker is moving more and he added a sweeper.
“It’s really cool to see that come into fruition,” Hall said. “It’s a testimony to Cole. He’s absolutely worked his tail off. He was a man on a mission.”
Irvin entered the offseason with eight years of professional baseball under his belt and nearing his age-30 campaign. But 2024 poses a potential crossroads for Irvin, who is out of minor-league options with three seasons before he hits free agency, about whether his best years are ahead of him or behind. He trained with the hopes of making the former his reality.
“You can be out of this game very quickly,” Irvin said. “I’m trying to learn, trying to adapt.”
Bouncing back
He didn’t know it at the time, but when he was traded just a few weeks before 2023 spring training, Irvin went from the American League’s worst team to its best.
He doesn’t like thinking about what ifs, but had he known all offseason he’d be pitching for a club competing for a division title rather than for a 50-win ballclub, Irvin would’ve handled that winter differently. In 2021 and 2022, the southpaw averaged nearly 180 innings with the Athletics, pitching to a respectable 4.11 ERA. Entering 2023, he was expecting to pitch close to 200 innings for the lowly Athletics, and he planned his winter around peaking later in the season.
“I probably played a little bit more golf,” Irvin said. “It’s not like I wasn’t working out. I was still training hard. But I just wanted to give my body a little bit of a breather. When I got traded, I was like, ‘Man, maybe I should’ve done more.’
“My stuff kind of stayed the same, it didn’t get better. I came in a little heavier. I was moving slower than I am now.”
Still, Irvin technically achieved his goal. From June through the end of the regular season, he posted a 3.22 ERA in 64 1/3 innings as both a starter and long reliever.
But the season started so poorly — 15 runs allowed in his first three starts — that he was optioned to Triple-A for the first time since 2020 and spent most of the next two months with the Norfolk Tides. He was shuttled back and forth three times and was left off Baltimore’s postseason roster.
“I was not happy with how I started the year,” Irvin said. “As much as I like to hang my hat on that second half that I had last year, I was not fulfilled with my role, my job, what I accomplished.”
Irvin’s perceived struggles in 2023 could reasonably be chalked up to a smaller sample size than the previous two years in Oakland. Most of his underlying metrics were the same, and if he had been on a worse team, it’s possible he would’ve worked out of his April struggles for another year as a league-average starter.
But Irvin is no longer on a bad team, and he can’t afford another slow start. During the offseason, it appeared he was destined for a long-relief role in the bullpen, but Kyle Bradish’s elbow injury and John Means’ delayed timeline have Irvin on an inside track for a rotation spot to begin the year.
“I think the reason why I got into a pissed-off attitude to start the offseason is because I’m a starter,” Irvin said. “I still have goals I want to accomplish. I’m not going to do it by sitting on the couch and eating potato chips.”
Bringing the heat
At first, Irvin’s 2024 spring debut raised a pressing question: Are the radar guns broken?
That’s the question many on social media were posing when Irvin was throwing 95 mph at LECOM Park in Bradenton, Florida, home of the Pirates’ spring training facility. It quickly became clear that the velocity bump was a credit to Irvin’s training this offseason, not to a hot radar gun. The only heat coming out was from Irvin’s left hand.
Sure, 95 mph isn’t what it used to be. But Irvin’s 95.9 mph four-seam fastball to Pirates infielder Oneil Cruz was faster than any pitch he’s thrown in a major league game. His previous best was 95.3 mph. From 2021 to 2023, his average fastball was between 90.7 mph and 92.2 mph.
cole irvin throwing 95 my goodness pic.twitter.com/iTKPXGcBHf
— Codify (@CodifyBaseball) February 25, 2024
The velocity — and the evident changes to his sinker and cutter — raised eyebrows. But not his teammates’. Some of them witnessed it firsthand during live batting practice at Ed Smith Stadium last week.
“When Irvin was facing us in [live batting practice], it was [Anthony] Santander and myself and I think [Ryan] Mountcastle was there,” said catcher James McCann, who caught Irvin on Sunday. “We all kind of came back asking if we were seeing the same thing they were seeing. It kind of caught us off guard — the velo, the way the ball was coming out of his hand.”
There wasn’t one change Irvin made to gain velocity. In fact, each of his tweaks was small — the combination has made the difference. He improved his diet and lost about 10 pounds from last season to 220. He set personal bests on his deadlift and squat while also doing upper body workouts more than at any point in his career. He tinkered with his mechanics based on the feedback from Hall to move more athletically down the mound and build up tension on his back leg to improve his hip-to-shoulder separation — a key component to maximizing velocity. And, perhaps most importantly, he simply worked on his intent to throw harder, doing max-effort throwing drills before stepping on the mound.
“I think he learned a lot from last year,” Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said. “He did a great job making some adjustments this offseason. The velocity is up early, it’s good to see.”
Irvin doesn’t believe he was “lazy” in the offseason before the 2023 campaign. “But if you look at the two players in comparison,” he said, “last offseason was lazy.”
Since Irvin threw just 126 2/3 innings between the majors and minors last year, he barely took any time off throwing this offseason so he could spend as much time sharpening his arsenal — a six-pitch mix that Hall said was “serviceable, but with untapped potential.” The top goal was to improve his effectiveness against right-handed hitters, who posted a .744 OPS off him last season. He tweaked the grip of his cutter, a pitch he added last year, to mimic that of Corbin Burnes’ signature offering. Irvin is now throwing the pitch that moves into a right-handed hitter at about 89 mph — nearly four ticks harder than last season.
Irvin’s sinker, which he calls a two-seam fastball and is a pitch he threw at a higher rate after his demotion to Triple-A, already graded out as an effective pitch, Hall said, but a change to that grip increased the horizontal movement from about 14 inches to 18 inches. Irvin also said he sharpened his curveball and altered his slider, which he stopped throwing in 2022, to look more like a sweeper — two changes aimed at also helping him against left-handed batters.
The sinker and the cutter pair well with his other pitches, including his “bread and butter” changeup, to keep righties honest, forcing them to cover the entire plate.
“Now that you match up the velocity with the better movement profile, it makes it that much harder to hit him,” Hall said.
Despite the improvements, Irvin doesn’t want to go too far in the other direction. He still views himself as a strike-thrower. He still prides himself on knowing how to pitch. He still wants to be an innings-eater.
But he also believes — now more than ever — that he can be much more.
“I didn’t want to leave any doubt about if I did enough to get better,” Irvin said.
Baltimore Sun reporter Matt Weyrich contributed to this article.