Red Sox taking novel steps to spur remarkable pitching turnaround

The 2023 Boston Red Sox pitching staff finished 22nd in ERA (4.52) and 20th in WHIP (1.32). Their primary offseason pitching acquisition, Lucas Giolito, underwent surgery on his pitching elbow in March and is out for the season. Three members of their starting rotation – Nick Pivetta, Brayan Bello and Garrett Whitlock – have spent time on the IL.

Yet despite no significant additions and plenty of adversity, the 2024 Red Sox pitching staff is second in ERA (2.99) and third in WHIP (1.13) through Thursday's games.

How did the Red Sox, who are third in the AL East, engineer such a remarkable pitching turnaround?

Turning over coaching staff instead of pitching staff

The Red Sox hired Andrew Bailey as their new pitching coach in November 2023. One of Bailey's first moves was the hiring of Justin Willard as director of pitching. 

While many teams opt for a roster overhaul to address a poor pitching season, the Red Sox took a different path. They chose to invest in coaching talent and then entrusted the new coaches with finding a plan to improve the team's pitching performance with the existing roster.

Challenging every assumption

Bailey, Willard, bullpen coach Kevin Walker, game-planning coordinator Jason Varitek and analysts  Dave Miller and Devin Rose started a group chat in the offseason that came to be called the "Run Prevention Unit."

In 90 days, the unit designed and implemented a new organizational philosophy and approach to pitching.

Doing things the way everyone else does and always has is out. In its place is a detailed plan tailored to each of the 22 pitchers on the 40-man roster. 

Mindless bullpen sessions are out. Every bullpen or live BP session now has a specific focus and objective. Among these is a tracked bullpen competition where pitchers seek to win a three-pitch sequence by getting ahead 0-3 or 1-2 (2-1 or 3-0 is a loss). 

Everything the pitchers do has an associated set of metrics. 

Per The Athletic's Jen McCaffrey, even fielding practice became a competition in which pitchers earn more points the more accurate their throws into a fielding net are. Missing the net altogether sees points subtracted, while fielding the ball and hitting the net in under four seconds earns bonus points. 

At stake are prizes for the points leader and, perhaps much more importantly, bragging rights in the clubhouse.

Winning the strike battle

The pitching overhaul is all-encompassing. It includes everything from bullpen sessions to fielding drills to blaring music playing throughout drills that condition pitchers to the noise they face on game days.

Amid the change, the Red Sox are still guided by a simple lodestar that is as ancient as it is simple: the first-pitch strike.

In the offseason, the Run Prevention Unit identified a fundamental change the entire pitching staff could make to get more first-pitch strikes: Ditch the dogma that says the four-seam fastball is the best "go-to" strike pitch. 

Through the first six weeks of the season, the Red Sox threw fastballs or sinkers only 31.8% of the time (against a league average of 47.8%).

Speaking to ESPN.com in early May, Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow offered a simple reason behind the move away from fastballs.

"I think what we have done is refuse to be beholden to traditional baseball thought, which says you have to be able to throw a fastball down and away," Breslow explained. "I would argue you have to be able to throw a pitch over the plate. I have no idea why that has to be a fastball."

Is this sustainable?

Pitcher is among the most volatile and difficult-to-project positions in any major American sport. 

If the Red Sox's turnaround was driven by a couple of high-priced free agents working under the same pitching staff and organizational approach as 2023, it would be easy to say the success has more to do with luck.

However, their turnaround has been built by an overhaul in organizational philosophy and approach, which bodes well for this success sustaining through the summer and, perhaps, becoming a model that every other team in baseball seeks to emulate.