Sidearm pitcher Brad Brach hoping for a career renaissance with Kansas City Royals
Sidearm-throwing right-handed reliever Brad Brach knew his pitching motion had gotten out of sync. He felt it in his arm.
Even if he couldn’t feel it, the signs were clear. His velocity dipped. His command wavered. Opposing hitters reached base at a higher rate than any other point in his career. Then he saw it.
“There was a video I saw last year at Yankee Stadium,” Brach said. “That was just — it was really bad. I didn’t realize how bad my mechanics were, but I was basically throwing to home plate with my numbers facing to home plate and stepping towards the third base dugout. I do that a little bit, but the drastic measure that it was at at that point was just way too much. It’s probably why my arm wasn’t feeling the greatest and I wasn’t getting very good results.”
Just when Brach, 34, thought he’d found the key to getting back on track, he also found himself without a team. The New York Mets released him the week before spring camps opened.
That paved the way for him to sign a minor-league contract with the Kansas City Royals that included an invitation to their major-league camp. Brach hopes to prove he can play a role out of the bullpen for a club that hasn’t been shy about stating its goal to make a playoff push this season.
“They pretty much gave me the only thing I could look for, which is an opportunity to make the team,” Brach said.
Through his first three Cactus League appearances this spring, Brach has thrown three scoreless innings and allowed one hit along with two walks and two strikeouts. He has faced 11 batters.
“His stuff continues to just develop,” Royals manager Mike Matheny said after Brach worked around a walk and threw a scoreless inning on Saturday. “He’s still trying to show us what he has got and how he is going to potentially fit in with us. He’s got some funky stuff, so I was happy to see him get back out there and work through a couple of things.”
Brach ranked among the most valuable relievers in the game from 2015-17. In that three-year stretch with the Baltimore Orioles, he posted the 17th-best wins above replacement (WAR) of any reliever in the majors (3.8) as calculated by FanGraphs.com.
That put him in a category, as far as WAR rankings, with closers and highly-regarded relievers such as Jeurys Familia (3.9), Trevor Rosenthal (3.8) and Liam Hendriks (3.8).
Brach posted a 2.62 ERA with 251 strikeouts, a 1.12 WHIP and a 10.0 strikeout per 9-inning average in 226 1/3 innings over 200 appearances during that three-year span. He earned an All-Star selection in 2016.
But last year, he certainly wasn’t that guy.
After having missed the Mets summer camp following a COVID-19 diagnosis, he appeared in 14 games and registered a 5.84 ERA with as many walks as strikeouts (14 each).
His 24.1% walk rate in 2020 nearly doubled the highest single-season walk rate of his career (12.8%). He allowed eight runs and posted a 1.78 WHIP in 12 1/3 innings.
Brach’s average four-seam fastball velocity dropped to 90.3 mph from 94.1 the previous season.
Blasts from the past
In hindsight, Brach thinks part of his problem came from him getting too wrapped up in the analytics of his pitches. He started overthinking and lost trust in his stuff. That led to him being “way too fine early in the count” and then having to come at hitters in hitters counts.
“I knew last year was not a good year,” Brach said. “The velocity was down. Whether it was having COVID, whether it was who knows what, but it was just not a good year stats-wise, not a good year physically for me and velocity-wise too.”
During his time in Baltimore, Brach worked with pitching coach Dave Wallace and bullpen coach Dom Chiti. Neither remains with the Orioles, but that doesn’t mean they’d forgotten about Brach.
“I had been searching for (answers),” Brach said. “Was it me pitching from the armslot? Was it me falling off too much? Was it me being too straight to the plate? I looked at everything. It was actually my old pitching coaches that I had from the Baltimore Orioles. They just kind of reached out to me and asked if I wanted to throw some bullpens with them.”
They made suggestions, and he sent them video of him throwing.
After he got cut by the Mets, he got the chance to throw a couple bullpen sessions for them in Florida and came away feeling like he’d gotten into a better leg kick and arm path. Everything had just “tightened back up.”
That extra time he got to work with them after getting released may turn out to be a “silver lining.” He now feels like things have been simplified.
“I don’t even know where things kind of went awry, and I didn’t even know where to go back to,” Brach said. “So to have somebody who was a great reference point back when I was really pitching my best from ‘14 to ‘16, ‘17 and to go back to those guys and have a chance to work with them and them just kind of get me back to the basics was really helpful.”
