Yankees Magazine: Speed Game

There is a natural order to the way a Spring Training clubhouse lays itself out, drawn from the tried and proven methods that remain in place when the team heads north. For the most part, pitchers' locker next to pitchers, catchers alongside one another and other position players tend to cluster, as well. Veterans get prime spots and superstars even better, sometimes even enjoying an extra locker.

But Spring Training is about mixing, about natural mentorships bonded by association. There are a lot of early hours and some downtime in the clubhouse between workouts and training sessions. That’s when the iPads come out, or the crossword puzzles or -- for the past two years in the Yankees’ spring clubhouse -- the Rubik’s Cubes, which once again became a sensation four decades later. The hope, for an organization trying to embark on a winning season while also developing the next generation of winners, is that the time together -- on the field, at a mini-golf outing and, yes, in the clubhouse -- can foster matter-of-course counsel. If you’re Brian Cashman walking through the clubhouse in March, you have to be pretty happy to see Anthony Volpe chatting with DJ LeMahieu, to spy Austin Wells deep in conversation with Jose Trevino, to hear Greg Weissert comparing notes with Gerrit Cole.

And there was plenty of that this year, only with one slight wrinkle: As the Yankees and the rest of the league embarked on a new season, they did so while trying to master some rule changes that are going to make the game markedly different. Tested in the Minor Leagues before reaching the big time this year, the rules -- a pitch timer; limited pickoffs and timeouts during at-bats; larger bases; and dramatic limitations on defensive shifts -- promise to make games shorter and more action-packed, rewarding quickness, athleticism and other traits that make a sport a more pleasant viewing experience.

The irony, though, is that it turned the tables at least somewhat this spring. That chat between Cole and Weissert? Who was teaching whom?

“There’s going to be Minor League guys that are more familiar with it,” Cole, the Yankees’ ace, acknowledges. Weissert, with 11 1/3 big league innings on his register, adds, laughing: “I have a little bit more insight into it than they do. I just try to help out wherever I can. Try to give them some tips.”

Cheeky jokes about status aside, the players that find themselves in the Bronx on Opening Day will have to be ready, having spent the spring adjusting quickly to a quicker game that will demand quickness. And as they embark on this new world, the Yankees are ready, willing and decidedly able to prioritize speed.

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They say that “those who can’t, teach.” Matt Talarico, the Yankees’ director of speed and baserunning (and also a roving hitting coach), just reverses the poles a bit.

Immediately after playing at Manchester University in Indiana, Talarico set off on a coaching career that included stops at Heidelberg, Toledo, Dayton and Wright State before he stepped aboard the Yankees train in 2019. Primarily a hitting coach at his first college stop, he noticed that there wasn’t enough attention being paid to coaching baserunning. “And I did it when I played,” Talarico said, “so I thought I’d probably be a good coach at it. Which is never how it works. You never coach really well the things that you were good at.”

Unsurprisingly, what seemed so obvious to the speedy Talarico wasn’t necessarily getting through to the college kids. “I think I ran into a roadblock,” he continues, “and it caused me to go down this path of, ‘How do I explain this better? Because this guy is not getting what I’m saying.’”

So Talarico leaned on a mentor of his, Mike Roberts, whom he met at an American Baseball Coaches Association convention. The longtime college and Cape Cod Baseball League coach was renowned for his philosophy that prioritized aggressive and intelligent baserunning. The young coach studied his new mentor, and watched endless videos of his son, Brian, a longtime Orioles star who also played for the Yankees in 2014. Brian Roberts stole 285 bases in his career, leading the AL with 50 steals in 2007. “I watched how he stands and how he acts and what he does and why things work and why they don’t,” says Talarico, who proceeded to build out his own baserunning business.

It started with a web site that he created -- stealbases.com -- and as he went out on the speaking circuit and began holding private camps, he decided to convert his presentation into book form, which became The Complete Base Stealing Manual.

Eventually, more and more big league teams started noticing Talarico and the stats that his college kids were posting. He had built a relationship over the years with Dillon Lawson, whom the Yankees hired as a Minor League hitting coordinator in 2018. “And when Kevin Reese called,” Talarico says of the Yankees’ vice president of player development, who offered him the job in 2019, “I just believed in Kevin, and I believed in Dillon Lawson.

“There’s not a day I show up over here and I’m not learning.”

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Of course, Talarico’s education isn’t of foremost concern to Cashman or Reese. The results up and down the roster, though, speak for themselves.

Last year, Aaron Boone’s team stole 102 bases, by far the Yankees’ best total since 2014. Further, it was almost double the 55 bags they swiped in 2019, the last season before Talarico arrived. For years, MLB teams have been hesitant to run wild for a variety of reasons. Analysts have done loads of work figuring out the crushing costs of outs on the bases. Plus, with dominant pitching and slugging-focused offense matching up all night, and more runs than ever scoring via the home run, most teams believe that the risk-reward calculus favors restraint.

And, you might recall, the Yankees were hitting quite a few homers of their own last year, including Aaron Judge, who set an AL record with 62 blasts. But Judge also finished second on the team with 16 steals.

“Boonie loves aggressiveness, and he preaches that to the team,” third-base coach Luis Rojas says. “So, I do see ourselves pushing it, finding the spots where we can go ahead and take it.”

It’s not something you notice on first glance. Yes, the 2022 team added Isiah Kiner-Falefa, a speedy infielder who, sure enough, set a new career high with 22 stolen bases. But around him, you were looking at a bunch of guys more known for their trots than their sprints. Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, Anthony Rizzo, Gleyber Torres … it doesn’t look like a roster destined to finish eighth in the Majors in steals. “We’re not burners,” Rojas continues. “We don’t have the team that’s known to have the speed. But we are aggressive, and I believe that we’re smart. We study; we get prepared.”

Judge, a 6-foot-7, 282-pound behemoth, doesn’t profile as a baserunning threat. But right when Talarico started working with the outfielder, he saw what every other coach and teammate always has: Judge is smart, calculated and aware.

“He’s a good runner. Not just for his size -- he’s a good runner, period,” Talarico says. Rojas, who waves runners home from third, concurs. “He moves really well. He’s a good athlete.” Still, it takes a lot to convince a titanic slugger that he should be pressing the issue on the basepaths, risking wear on his body and, of course, outs. Talarico, like he does with so many players, certainly worked with Judge on his first steps and reads and the like. But he also tried to clear a mental block that a guy Judge’s size might possess, overlaying video of him running the bases on some film of known speedsters, including Brett Gardner. It was plain to see: Judge was right in the race. (Talarico promises that no video was doctored in the making of a basestealing threat.)

“Judge is moving,” Talarico says. “You don’t know when and where he’s going to decide to go, because he knows what he’s looking for and when it’s there. But he also knows when it’s not. Any great basestealer is like that. They’re not just running. There’s a lot more thinking involved than you would guess.”

Such as? Well, it’s hard to say.

Talarico and his players don’t want to offer too much about where they look to find edges. “I don’t want to give too much away,” Jose Trevino says. “Maybe you should ask [Talarico],” Volpe says, nervously. “I only have so much I’m willing to share,” Talarico, himself, adds.

So, you’re not getting any nuclear codes here. What’s clear, though, is that the Yankees are trying to avoid any constraints of an eye test. It’s not about setting the burners free to steal a few more bases. It’s much more holistic than that. “Everybody has a role in baserunning,” Talarico says. “I don’t care who you are, you have some sort of role. If you’re the slowest player on the planet, we need you to be the best slow baserunner on the planet.” As a result, Judge (who, again, is anything but slow) puts together just the ninth 50-plus homer/15-plus steal season in history. Meanwhile, the ’22 club finishes in the top third on the franchise’s all-time list of stolen-base seasons. Kiner-Falefa and Harrison Bader laud the organization’s attention to detail, and Volpe gushes about the revolutionary ways Talarico has been teaching the running game.

“He’s the guru behind it all,” Volpe says, pointing out that he has been following some of Talarico’s teachings since high school. “The way we practice it, you can really decrease the risk of getting picked off or thrown out at second. Turning being on first to being on second or third is a really big advantage for the team.”

***

There’s no one kind of runner, no single paradigm for success. Even if you’re watching film of both playing center field, Judge looks different when he runs than Bader does. Talarico points out the way that Volpe always looks like he’s gunning it with everything he has, real burning showing on his face; Oswald Peraza, meanwhile, seems smoother. But both rate out as excellent runners. The idea, he says, is to use objective metrics to try to figure out how to improve strides and timing. There’s a lot of high-speed video involved, plenty of runs with resistance sleds, a lot of sprinting and, in one of Talarico’s favorite workouts, trap-bar deadlifts, which are quick and safe and well targeted to avoid adding too much bulky weight that can counter everything else.

“Everybody’s a little different,” Talarico says, and along with Ryan Chipka, who specializes on the Yankees’ Minor League side, he makes sure that all players up and down the system are putting in the work that best suits them. “We’re trying to put force down underneath our body. If we make our actions efficient, we’ll have better posture, which is going to be more powerful, which is going to allow our center mass to move.”

The idea, though, is to build game speed, and in doing so, to fight against aging. Talarico knows that he’s going to lose every long-term war against Father Time, but he’s confident he can win the battles. Everything, as he sees it -- really, the whole game, and the ability to thrive in it -- boils down to speed. “Building speed could be maybe the most important thing you can do,” Talarico says. “As a representation of your athleticism, of your ability to swing a bat, all this stuff.” Sometimes, the results show up in unexpected places.

Before Talarico could even get through a full first Spring Training with the Yankees, the pandemic shut down the planet. Plenty of big league stars could go back to the gyms that many of them built at their houses, but young Minor Leaguers had no such luck. So when everyone reconvened, the Yankees coaches noticed some interesting byproducts of the situation.

“A lot of people didn’t have access to weight rooms, but they did have access to open areas,” Talarico says. “A lot of these people committed to a speed program -- and I’m not saying mindless running. I’m saying really, really fast, take long breaks, run really fast, take long breaks -- and when they got back to the weight room, we were seeing PRs [personal records] in lifts that they hadn’t been doing. And I think it’s a representation of just building an explosive athlete.”

And that’s just one example Talarico uses to explain his role as part of a chain, not its own department. It helps, in that sense, that he’s also a hitting coach. The old adage goes that you can’t steal first; hitting, and the ability to get on base, is going to take priority every time over sprinting on a side field with Talarico and his cameras and clocks. Even beyond that, Talarico is pretty sure that he could design the perfect swing to maximize a runner’s time from home to first. But it would likely be a disaster, a downward smash with poor posture, your body moving toward first before the swing is done. No one would ever suggest that, even if it might get you there faster.

Rather, it’s about fitting into the system, requiring assistance and buy-in from all corners, literally. Talarico points to the coaches at the bases -- Rojas at third, Travis Chapman at first -- and notes how much value they add, how much data they can synthesize on the spot. He notes, as well, that while third-base coaches have the sexier job, waving runners around, first-base coaches are the glue on the field. They can offer the most proactive help, instructing a runner what to do in a quiet moment, rather than trying to analyze it later. Because, no surprise, some of the best speed training a baseball player can do is the sort that allows him to slow things down.

“Little things are such huge separators, especially when it’s a bang-bang play, or when anxiety is at an all-time high in the ninth inning, when we need a bag,” Bader says. “When stuff is kind of going a little haywire and it’s really intense and the crowd is very loud, you’re able to pull yourself back into this notion of simplicity and calm because you have the repetition, you have the foundation.”

It’s the same thing that Rojas notices when he’s at third, trying to prepare for any possible outcome, and knowing that he can trust that the runner is on the same wavelength. “I get excited when I see guys taking their secondaries,” Rojas says. “At first, at second and at third right there with me. Because they’re always on time for that first step. And that’s so huge, for me to send a guy on a double from first, for me to send a guy on a single from second, for me to send a guy on a fly ball that’s probably within throwing range tagging from third.”

***

In the Minor Leagues, as the new rules were being tested, stolen-base attempts increased 26% from 2019 to 2022. It’s entirely too early to know what will happen at the big league level this year, but the Yankees are excited to find out.

“Look, I like running, so hopefully we can,” Boone says, considering whether the rules and some added strategic adjustments can help push the team’s baserunning metrics to an even higher level in 2023. “But the game will dictate that, and your personnel dictates that. It was a point of emphasis for us last year. Hopefully we can continue to do that. But we’ll see.”

With bigger bases, there will be slightly less distance that runners need to cover, and the pickoff restrictions will, at times, even offer something of a running start. During Spring Training this year, the players were sure to note all the viral videos of pitch timer infractions that were called on pitchers or hitters, knowing that the time to experiment was down in Florida, before the games counted. But it was clear that Major Leaguers were going to approach the new normal a bit like an electric fence, testing it out ever so delicately rather than running toward it at full speed.

It’s not going to turn back the clock to Rickey Henderson’s time, and no Yankee seems likely to top 40 stolen bases this year, let alone 90. But if Talarico’s main goal is to see every player -- the fast guys and the slow ones -- build speed, and then use that increase to become a stronger and more durable all-around player, then he can’t ask for much more than the buy-in he already has. Even if, ironically, it’s the players with the least service time who can offer the most assurances about what’s to come.

“I know a lot of guys are working really hard to kind of push up that end range in training, and then I think a lot of guys have seen that it translates into the game speed,” Volpe says. “I think just the culture of the clubhouse, that everyone knows that it’s important and wants to get better at it, regardless of how many home runs you hit. Everyone’s doing the same speed work and really in tempo with it.”

Jon Schwartz is the deputy editor of Yankees Magazine. This story appears in the April 2023 edition. Get more articles like this delivered to your doorstep by purchasing a subscription to Yankees Magazine at www.yankees.com/publications.