Confidence returns for Pirates reliever Kyle Crick after finding 'huge tell'
BRADENTON, Fla. — Kyle Crick wants to put a forgettable season, one in which he faltered in a setup role and fractured his index finger in a fistfight, behind him.
What might sound odd is the 27-year-old right-handed reliever is more confident than ever this spring training with the Pittsburgh Pirates, given he was 3-7 with a 4.96 ERA and 1.55 WHIP and allowed 10 home runs last season.
Crick doesn’t just want to be a successful high-leverage pitcher.
“I want to be an All-Star,” Crick said. “I don’t want to mess around and just throw some scoreless (innings). I’ve got goals bigger than all that: scoreless months. I need chunks of scoreless, not just a couple in a row, a couple holds or a couple saves. I want the whole deal. I want to be elite.”
Crick’s confidence stems not from arrogance but rather embarrassment. He learned late last season he had a “huge tell” on the mound that was tipping his pitches and is convinced it contributed to batting averages jumping from .190 against him in June to .308 in August.
“Now that I know what I’ve been doing,” Crick said, “I’m going to be a different pitcher this year.”
Crick couldn’t figure out why pitches that were baffling batters in 2018, when he was 3-2 with a 2.39 ERA and 1.13 WHIP, suddenly were being stroked for home runs. He gave up three homers in June, two in July and four in August.
“It was incredible because I knew something was going on,” Crick said. “I would throw a 2-1 breaking ball, and people would never pick their foot up. They were sitting back on it the whole time. While I was watching it, I knew that was abnormal. I didn’t know what it was.”
Pirates catcher Jacob Stallings said: “It just didn’t seem right with his kind of stuff.”
Crick credited Pirates video coordinator Kevin Roach with discovering the problem. Roach searched for signs Crick was tipping pitches — his hand movement and glove placement sometimes provide a cover — and finally found the tell. It wasn’t necessarily pitch-to-pitch but on specific pitches.
“Whenever I was throwing a heater, I’d look down. Whenever I was throwing a slider, I never looked down. I just went straight to third. My head never was down,” Crick said. “You plaster the fastball and the slider side by side, and it’s bad. I was embarrassed when I saw it. I was actually embarrassed because I’m a high-leverage guy. I’m the eighth-inning guy. If I give up a run, that’s Joe’s game, that’s Trevor’s game.”
The worst part for Crick wasn’t just that he let down starters such as Joe Musgrove or Trevor Williams. It’s that the tipping was something he could have controlled. It wasn’t that his stuff wasn’t good enough. It was that batters knew what was coming.
Crick knows opponents study successful pitchers harder, and baseball analytics and technology are too advanced to miss such a huge tell.
“It’s part of being a complete pitcher,” Crick said. “If you’re doing it, they’ll find it because that’s an edge.”
Crick believes it has given him an advantage. His confidence is back after figuring out what was wrong, working to be more cognizant of it and trying to correct it.
“I survived in the big leagues when people knew what was coming,” Crick said. “They knew what pitch I was throwing. I would still strike people out. I would still throw random scoreless innings. And I knew that they knew. I just didn’t know what I was doing.”
Now, Crick is counting on looking like a different pitcher, one who has everything to hide but nothing to lose.
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Kevin Gorman is a TribLive reporter covering the Pirates. A Baldwin native and Penn State graduate, he joined the Trib in 1999 and has covered high school sports, Pitt football and basketball and was a sports columnist for 10 years. He can be reached at kgorman@triblive.com.
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