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GOODYEAR, Arizona, March 2, 2025 — As Shane Bieber popped the catcher’s mitt with fastball after fastball during a spring training bullpen session, he kept looking back at one man standing behind the mound. Every few pitches, Bieber would walk behind the mound and huddle up with him, looking down at a tablet filled with more information than many baseball fans could begin to comprehend. Bieber would then walk back, toe the rubber, and deliver another pitch under the watchful eyes of his pitching coach, Carl Willis.
Willis has been in this racket for a while. This year will mark his 42nd spring training. He pitched nine years as a reliever for the Detroit Tigers, Cincinnati Reds, Chicago White Sox, and Minnesota Twins before transitioning to coaching at the minor league level. In 2003, six years after he retired, he got his first MLB gig as a pitching coach for the Cleveland Indians. Since then, he has served as a pitching coach for the Indians, Mariners, Red Sox, and Guardians, coaching up five Cy Young Award winners along the way.
When CC Sabathia was recently elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, he said, “Literally everything that I learned as a pitcher, mentality-wise, delivery-wise, even down to holding the baseball, Carl Willis was responsible for.”
Now, as the Guardians head into the 2025 season, Willis has a new challenge in front of him. With Shane Bieber out until at least the All-Star break following Tommy John surgery, the Guardians rotation will feature only one player over the age of 27 (Ben Lively) and only one pitcher with over two years of MLB service time (Triston McKenzie). But that relative inexperience doesn’t deter Willis, who has always adapted his coaching to the pitchers at his disposal.
“I think our philosophy is dictated by the pitchers we’re working with and what their strengths are,” he explained after overseeing a series of bullpens at the Guardians’ spring training facility in Arizona. “But you’re also looking for an arsenal. It’s tough for a guy to be able to go out and have long-term success relying on one pitch.”
Building out that more complete arsenal has become a much different process since Willis began coaching. MLB organizations are now filled with players wearing wearable workload monitors, and all bullpens are accompanied by technology like Trackman, which is a radar-based system that tracks baseballs during bullpens to provide data on spin, velocity, and much more to benefit performance analysis. Pitchers are not only working with their pitching coaches but utilizing training labs like Driveline or Tread to develop new pitches or refine pitches currently in their arsenal to make them more impactful.
It’s a change that Willis has not only learned to roll with but come to embrace.
“I’m more on the old school side of things,” he admitted. “Still, I have tried to stay abreast and up to speed with the new technology and the things that we have at our fingertips now. How I view it is that it helps me put a plan together. I have tremendous support here. Guys who are stronger in those areas, I let them take the lead in those areas, and I then look at what we’ve developed and help the pitcher understand how to use that arsenal.”
That second step of “how to use” the new tools at their disposal is an integral part of what Willis brings to the table and can often get lost in the shuffle with all the available data now. As with any new piece of technology, sometimes we can get sucked into the information, closing our mind off to anything else.
“We have video right there where we can see if two fastballs in a row moved differently or potentially if a pitcher caught a little more of a seam on one pitch,” said Willis. “But a lot of pitchers live and die on that. They want to look at every pitch. In my mind, it’s still, how did it feel? Right? Is it repeatable? Is it sustainable? And at the end of the day, this is telling us the profile of pitch, what it’s doing, and how we think we can use it.”
For Willis, knowing the profile of the pitch and what it’s doing and then learning how to be as effective as possible with the rest of the arsenal is another science completely.
“It’s kind of looking at the holistic picture,” he explained. “How I like to put it is, pitching is not just ripping your best stuff all the time. There’s an art to it. There’s throwing your fastball to different quadrants of the strike zone, changing speeds, changing eye levels. And I sometimes feel like that’s getting lost.”
The idea of attacking the four quadrants of the strike zone is a foundational principle of calling a game that will never be phased out by technology. A strike zone is broken down into four quadrants: up and in, down and in, up and away, and down and away. It’s long been believed that the most effective pitchers have an arsenal that can attack hitters in all four quadrants of the plate. Even if sometimes one pitch is used in multiple quadrants. This prevents hitters from being able to anticipate pitches in certain quadrants, which allows them to “sit on a pitch” more successfully and make authoritative contact.
Right now, in baseball, there seems to be a shift towards pitchers having multiple fastballs that they can throw in multiple quadrants of the plate. Tanner Bibee talked about adding a two-seam fastball to keep right-handed hitters from leaning out over the plate, and that’s something Willis is working with many of the Guardians pitchers on. Because with all the data pitchers have at their disposal, hitters have just as much at their fingertips as well.
“I think with the advance of technology and how we can measure seemingly everything, hitters are a lot more in tune with not just getting on top of that four seamer, but knowing where they have to start,” explained Willis. “They know how much ride a guy has, and so I think just creating a little bit of unpredictability into the profile of a fastball, the four seamer or two seamer, makes it more difficult [for the hitter].”
At the end of the day, making things more difficult for the hitter is the pitcher’s primary job. Sometimes, it doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that.
“You know, it’s about keeping the ball off the barrel of the bat,” said Willis. “The most important feedback is a hitter. The swing they take, the swing-and-miss, the poor contact, how they react, etc. Those things, at the end of the day, are most important.”
So Willis, and Guardians manager Stephen Vogt, and the rest of the coaching staff continue to work towards building a pitching staff that can regularly make things harder on hitters and induce poor contact. To do that, they need to ensure their pitchers have complete arsenals that they can utilize in different ways to always stay one step ahead of the hitter in the “cat-and-mouse game” that hitters and pitchers have played for decades.
As a team, the Guardians want pitchers that “can do multiple things with the baseball and command those things as well.” To Willis, that not only means that the team is more likely to win games, but it means that “the pitchers are gonna be more efficient and not tax their arms as much just trying to rip the heck out of every pitch they throw.”
“Everyone looks at velocity, although you can’t throw too hard anymore,” Willis chuckled. “Hitters hit or see these [fastballs] up or in 98 and 99 on a daily basis now, but I do think we work to try to find pitchers who can develop a pitch off of that fastball that’s going to tunnel, that’s going to look the same, that’s going to create separation, whether it be speed, north, south, east, west, etc. We look at deliveries, we look at profiles, but we never take their strength away from them or neglect that strength.”
That philosophy of looking for pitchers with profiles that could lend themselves to adding new pitches or creating more separation to keep hitters off the barrel of the bat led the Guardians to identify two targets in the off-season: Luis L. Ortiz, formerly of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Slade Cecconi, who had been with the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Ortiz enjoyed a breakout season in 2024, finishing with a 3.32 ERA and 1.11 WHIP in 135.2 innings for the Pirates. The former top-100 prospect had failed to live up to expectations for a few years, primarily because he struggled to control his four-seam fastball, which often ran up to 100 mph. Part of Ortiz’s turnaround was connected to adding a cutter and taking some of the pressure off of that sub-optimal four-seamer.
“I know the night that [Ortiz] shoved against us, [the cutter] was his bread and butter,” recalled Willis. “But what we’re trying to work towards is more consistency with that pitch, particularly more consistency with the location of that pitch. It is a newer pitch for him. That’s part of the reason it played last year because the guys hadn’t seen it. Now we’re just trying to refine it a little bit to show him what zones it is actually successful in, and where he should hone in on commanding that particular pitch, and now that it’s not a surprise, not making mistakes with it in other areas of the strike zone.”
That’s where that lend of technology and old-school attack of quadrants blends. Ortiz has the pitch. He has a shape that he and the team like. It’s a new weapon in his arsenal, but how can that weapon be used more efficiently? How can the weaknesses be minimized as much as possible? That’s also the question that the Guardians are asking with Ortiz’s slider, which scouts believed was one of his best pitches when he was coming up through the minor league system but has never materialized as a real weapon in his big league innings.
“We’re kind of toying with a minor grip change with the slider,” said Willis. “It’s more so about the movement profile, but we also feel that with the with the change he’s made [by adding the cutter], he’s got a little more feel for staying with the baseball a little longer, so that, in itself, is what’s creating the profile, but it’s also creating consistency at release to hopefully translate into better command.”
Understanding that mutability of skills is another consequence of Willis’ decades of experience at the big league level. Identifying a new pitch for a pitcher is great, as is coming up with a strategy to target improving one of their weaknesses, but seeing how one change can impact a pitcher’s ability to make another change requires a deep understanding of what it takes to pitch. By adding a cutter last year, Ortiz had gained experience in throwing a pitch with “cut” but a pitch that he needed to release way out front like a typical fastball and not “break off” like you might a traditional curve or slider. By gaining comfort with that type of release, Willis knew that it would be easier now to teach Ortiz a slider grip that features a similar release point than it would have two years earlier in his career, before he ever picked up the cutter. One piece builds onto the other piece, as you create a more well-rounded pitcher.
With Slade Cecconi, the Guardians went beyond just pitch shape and looked back at his foundation as a pitcher.
“We looked at, you know, spin rates and vertical profile of his pitches,” explained Willis, but we actually went back to looking at video when he was at the University of Miami and some of the changes we saw. So the higher release [in his first spring start] is coming from a change in his lower half. Not him trying to raise the arm slot, but putting him in a better position to stay behind and through the baseball.”
Cecconi only pitched 101 innings over two seasons at the University of Miami (FL) because COVID shortened the 2020 season, but Willis and his fellow pitching coaches knew that they liked the way the ball came out of Cecconi’s hand then. By identifying how his lower-half mechanics had changed since then, they were able to work with him to recapture that height on his back leg and torso, which is creating more consistency but also a new shape on some of his pitches. “There’s still improvement to be made,” admitted Willis, “but we’re seeing the right progress.”
Although, that hasn’t stopped the Guardians from also tinkering with how Cecconi utilizes the pitches at his disposal.
“When you look at his entire arsenal, [the curve] does create separation in terms of velocity and the back and forth with the hitter,” said Willis. “We feel like he could throw his curve more than he threw it last year. He relied heavily on the slider. We think the curveball is good enough that he could up the usage and create a little bit of that separation while also creating a whole different profile.”
That goes back to the guiding principle the Guardians and Willis have to help pitchers play to their strengths and “not to get beat with their third or fourth pitch.” It’s part of the reason that they have always produced good results with their MLB pitching staff. Even if they may not have the flashy success stories of drastically re-inventing a pitcher like the Twins, Astros, and Tigers have a reputation of doing, the Guardians always set their pitchers up for success by maximizing the tools at their disposal.
It’s a big reason why I’m a fan of many of the Guardians’ pitchers for fantasy baseball in 2025. I have already written countless articles on Gavin Williams as a post-pick-200 favorite of mine, and I covered Tanner Bibee as a burgeoning fantasy ace. Luis L. Ortiz was listed as one of my favorite late-roud draft picks, and Ben Lively is coming off a season where he registered a 3.81 ERA in 151 innings. He won’t miss enough bats to be relevant in 12-team leagues, but he could be a good streamer in 15-team leagues, and both Slade Cecconi and Joey Cantillo could provide value if they get a chance to earn a spot in the starting rotation.
As of now, I have Bibee ranked SP24, and he’s being drafted as SP34. I have Gavin Williams ranked SP50, and he’s going SP67, and I have Ortiz ranked SP86, and he’s going SP119, so there is a lot of value to be had in this rotation, and a lot of that has to do with the tutelage of Carl Willis.
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