MMO Exclusive: Right-Handed Reliever, Jared Hughes

Since 2015, no pitcher has appeared in more games than right-handed reliever Jared Hughes with 372. His 358.1 innings pitched in that span is the third-highest total, while his 61.4 percent ground-ball rate is the 11th-highest mark among qualified relievers.

Hughes, 35, was a fourth-round pick by the Pittsburgh Pirates back in the 2006 MLB Draft out of California State University. He has been a durable pitcher who has appeared in at least 63 games in seven of his ten major league seasons.

The six-foot-seven righty recorded the finest season of his career in 2018 with the Cincinnati Reds, posting career-bests in ERA (1.94), games finished (23), innings pitched (78.2), FIP (3.27), WHIP (1.017) and bWAR (3.2).

Hughes posted the fourth-lowest ERA among qualified relievers that season, along with the fourth-highest ground-ball rate (65.4 percent).

Following his outstanding debut year with Cincinnati, Hughes’ 2019 season with the Reds was a tale of two seasons. In the first half, Hughes posted a 0.955 WHIP while opponents posted a .610 OPS against him in 35 games. Over his next 12 appearances, Hughes allowed nine earned runs in 11.2 innings pitched (6.94 ERA), with hitters posting a .941 OPS in that span.

In mid-August, the Philadelphia Phillies claimed Hughes off waivers. The veteran right-hander saw some positive improvements in his 25 games with Philadelphia down the stretch, including an over five percent increase in K% (17.1 to 22.2), a one and a half percent increase in SwStr% (9.1 to 10.6), along with a decrease in xFIP (4.35 to 3.82).

Whether he wanted to or not, Hughes played a big role in what would become a viral meme. In the August 30th game against the New York Mets, shortstop Amed Rosario hit a two-run single off righty Mike Morin to put the club ahead in the eighth. Manager Gabe Kapler decided to make a pitching change, calling on Hughes with two on and one out in the inning.

Catcher J.T. Realmuto, upset over the previous at-bat, was caught shaking his head standing on the mound while Hughes was doing his customary sprint in from the bullpen. The camera panned in such a way to make it appear that Realmuto was none too pleased with Hughes’ running entrance, however, the All-Star catcher later clarified his position.

Hughes signed a one-year deal with the Mets this past June after he opted out of his minor league contract with the Houston Astros back in March. His debut with the club would be delayed, as he tested positive for COVID-19. He made his Mets debut on August 3rd against the Atlanta Braves on the road, tossing two scoreless innings in the Mets’ 7-2 win.

While the season was delayed due to the global pandemic, Hughes built a pitcher’s mound in his backyard at his home in Texas and enlisted the help of Utah State University professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, Barton Smith, on the effects of seam-shifted wake.

Smith had traveled to Florida to give presentations to major league clubs about his findings on baseball aerodynamics, but the tour was cut short when the sport was postponed. He then began presenting his findings on Zoom calls, one in which, Hughes was on.

The professor had been studying the effects of seam-shifted wake on a pitched ball for several years and found that with certain pitches, primarily sinkers and changeups, not only would a pitch rely on gravity and the Magnus effect for movement, but with a stable seam position can add a third force: seam-shifted wake.

Hughes, as primarily a sinkerball pitcher, was intrigued at the prospects of adding more drag to his pitch, which would create more downward movement. The pair quickly formed a bond and Smith became like another pitching coach to Hughes; aiding him in setting up the Rapsodo camera in his backyard, examining the videos Hughes uploaded along with the pitch-tracking data and providing him with analysis on how to get the most out of his stuff.

Comparing his sinker from 2019 to 2020, Hughes saw improvements in his average exit velocity (89.9 mph to 86.0 mph), whiff rate (18.9 percent to 27.6 percent), and average spin rate (1869 RPMs to 2009 RPMs).

Overall, Hughes appeared in 18 games with the Mets during the 2020 truncated season, posting a 4.84 ERA with 21 strikeouts over 22.1 innings pitched.

Hughes pitched well in the month of August, sporting a 70.3 percent ground-ball rate, a 2.70 ERA, and 1.20 WHIP. Those numbers took a 180 turn in September however, as his ground-ball rate dropped to 40.6 percent, his ERA rose to 8.00 and his WHIP nearly doubled to 2.33.

The sinkerball pitcher remains optimistic that with continued use of technology, work with Smith, and commanding the zone better (as his BB percentage was in the 14th percentile in 2020), he still has more productive seasons left in him.

I had the privilege of speaking with Hughes in November, where we discussed the story behind him sprinting in from the bullpen, recovering from COVID-19, and his use of analytics.

MMO: Who were some of your favorite players growing up?

Jared Hughes: Frank Thomas because the White Sox were on WGN, and I would get home from school and turn it on and watch them play. Nolan Ryan because he struck everyone out and I thought that was awesome. John Smoltz, same thing. Those are probably my three favorites.

MMO: Who introduced you to the game at a young age?

Hughes: My dad did. He started teaching me how to play as soon as I could walk, and he had played in college at Carson-Newman in Tennessee. He also played basketball but he definitely pulled me to focus on baseball, and it ended up being a good choice.

MMO: At what point during your development did you start to hone in on pitching?

Hughes: In high school. I went into high school as a first baseman and a pitcher, and then our coach saw me pitch and said, “Hey listen, we’re just going to stick to that.”

MMO: Given your height and how you mentioned that your dad also played basketball, were you a good player?

Hughes: I was not a good basketball player. I loved basketball, and maybe it’s because I spent all my time practicing baseball, but it never quite clicked.

I can’t really run fast – it looks like I can – can’t really shoot, can’t really dribble; it was not a pretty sight. But I played for a couple of years in high school.

MMO: What memories do you have from the 2006 Draft? Did you have an idea that the Pittsburgh Pirates were looking to select you where they did (4th round, 110th overall pick)?

Hughes: I knew all thirty teams were interested. I didn’t know where exactly in the Draft, I figured it would be in the first ten rounds. Around rounds two or three I started getting some phone calls, and it pretty much worked out as I expected it to in the ’06 Draft.

It went without hiccups which is better than the 2003 Draft out of high school where I thought I was going to go much higher and ended up falling to the sixteenth round [to Tampa Bay].

MMO: At what point did the Pirates ask you to transition to the bullpen, and what was your initial reaction?

Hughes: In 2010 I switched over a little bit towards the end of the year because I had a terrible month of July. I remember our manager said, “Listen, we’ve got to ask you to go the bullpen.”

I was upset, but I told him, ‘Hey, whatever the team needs, I will do.’

We ended up winning the championship that year, and I pitched in the championship game out of the bullpen. The following year I went back to doing both, and eventually, at the end of 2011, I became a full-time reliever.

MMO: Were there any changes – be it physical or mental – that you needed to make to help aid your transition from starter to a reliever?

Hughes: The biggest change is when I started sprinting in, and that was at the end of 2011. That was huge! When I started doing that, I went from being, not a prospect – more of an organizational player that had been around for a while and could log some innings and throw strikes – to being a guy that was major league capable.

What the sprint did was basically get my heart rate up, get my intensity up, and I started throwing a little harder and my stuff played better.

MMO: The sprinting anecdote came up with your former minor league teammate Brett Lorin on his podcast, Too Tall Sports. As you mentioned, that piece of advice you received from your catcher in the minors on sprinting in the from the pen seemed to be a major boon for your career.

Hughes: Oh yeah, that was huge. I was at the end of the road and I had just gotten called up to Triple-A because I was the oldest guy in Double-A, and we had two guys get hurt in Triple-A. They called me up as kind of like a fill-in, and I did terribly. I sat for eight or nine days.

One of my catchers, Kris Watts said, “You need to go in there next time and grunt, throw as hard as you can. Just go nuts, man. Go nuts.”

I did it and it clicked. It worked.

MMO: I read the terrific article by Stephen J. Nesbitt in The Athletic which detailed some of your work with Barton Smith in 2020. Can you talk about how Smith helped you and the information he provided on your sinker?

Hughes: Oh yeah, there’s a big-time article that came out today on Baseball Prospectus about it, too. It started to take off in the industry. You get on this pitch-tracking software and you see the movement or the hardware like Trackman or Rapsodo, you see the movement your ball has and sometimes they measure it differently. My best sinkers that move down the most are the ones that I can prove hitters have less success off of; the launch angle goes drastically downward, so I get more ground balls, less damage and the quality of contact is worse.

So, I thought to myself a few years back, How on Earth can I continue to chase more downward movement? I kind of got to a point where I was just extremely inconsistent, and not that it’s not anymore, it’s still pretty inconsistent. But I understand more now that what makes my ball move downward is how the seams catch the air on the way to home plate. And that’s what I need to work on: Making sure those catch air the right way every single time so that the ball moves downward as much as possible.

Barton Smith has been a huge help in that regard. With the seam-shifted wake, I don’t understand all of it because I’m a baseball player, not a physicist, but what’s happening is the seams are creating a wake and that’s creating drag which is pushing the ball downward for me. And when that happens I get way worse contact.

That’s something that I worked on with Barton over the break after the season was postponed this year, and I showed up with the ability to do it. And some days I did it great, other days I didn’t do it well. But working with the coaching staff and analysts in New York, they gave me some pointers on how to do it more consistently and we learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t.

MMO: Do you still keep in contact with Barton?

Hughes: I talk to Barton all the time. We trade information and I’ll send him my slow-motion video in my backyard, and then he’ll send me his take on what the seams are doing. We’ll talk about other pitchers around the league. Pitching Ninja [Rob Friedman] will put up a slow-motion video [on Twitter], and Barton and I will talk about the pitch and how it moves. He understands how the ball is moving much better than I do, but I understand grip and how the release of the pitches works for that pitcher, so we’re a good team.

MMO: You’re someone that has clearly embraced and utilized technology and analytics to try and improve your game. Was there a point that you can remember when you started to incorporate tech and analytics more into your routine?

Hughes: It’s been a learning process my whole career. When I got up to the major leagues, I couldn’t have told you what FIP was. I didn’t know much about any of the advanced metrics, but I believe that my career continued on and lengthened because of these metrics.

First off, when I was with the Pirates, I feel like the shift was extremely important for me as a ground ball pitcher. They said, “Just throw sinkers and they’ll hit it into the shift.” And it worked! That’s what happened, they hit it hard, but they hit it into the shift.

Then I looked at charts of where guys hit the most ground balls, and I would hunt those locations with my sinker for those ground balls. Then if I can find out where they hit ground balls, maybe I should look to see where they swing and miss, and then I started looking where guys swung and missed at breaking balls.

It just kept advancing to the point where I was chasing vertical break because I realized that if I had the best vertical break, location wasn’t as important because guys would likely hit a ground ball.

MMO: Not long after signing a one-year deal with the Mets, you tested positive for COVID-19. What was that experience like and how long did it take you to start feeling better?

Hughes: It was completely miserable for me, I got hit really hard. It took me about ten days to beat my symptoms, my worse symptoms. It took me back a few steps and I was definitely worn out by the end of it.

I did continue to throw into a sock at my apartment (laughs) and do arm work, so I was able to bounce back quick on the tail end of it. But it hit me hard and it was a scary process. I wasn’t expecting it to be that bad because I’m an athlete in my thirties, but it was an intense battle.

I lived in the city, and every night at seven everybody would clank the pans to honor the medical workers getting off their shift at the hospitals, and I did that too. Whenever I was home after I beat COVID, at 7:00 p.m. I would go outside and clank my pans.

MMO: How did you enjoy your time with the Mets?

Hughes: I loved it. I loved the guys in the clubhouse, it’s a good group. A lot of homegrown players came up the whole way with each other, which is really saying something about the organization in terms of producing some serious talent without having to acquire it elsewhere. So that was really neat, joining in their culture that they already formed up through the organization, and they welcomed me right in.

There’s a lot of really nice guys in the clubhouse, my locker neighbor was Pete Alonso, and he has such interesting things [about him], he’s so smart – he’s very young – but he’s so smart for his age. He’s a very mature cat. And I think that’s going to help him have success for a very long time in the major leagues.

MMO: You had both a rookie manager and rookie pitching coach with the Mets in 2020 in Luis Rojas and Jeremy Hefner. What were your impressions of both?

Hughes: I loved them. In terms of Hefner, he might be a rookie pitching coach, but he’s been in the game in terms of pitching for a long time. With the advanced metrics that are coming out, they’re allowing people to really understand how to approach hitters; how your ball is moving, and how to find your best movement. Jeremy’s in on that stuff.

He’s extremely well-versed, he’s fluent in the data and it really made a difference for our staff. I know it made a difference for me as I was able to make adjustments based on what he said. And that’s kind of what you will see from the leading teams in the league now, is what Hefner is doing.

In terms of Rojas, similar things: His mind is set on winning. He’s going to make the decisions needed to win. Whether or not we go out there and do what we’re asked to do is a different story. I wish I would’ve performed better this year to help the team win, and I know a lot of other guys felt the same way. But we believe in Luis and we really respected how he ran the team.

MMO: It was a small sample size given the playing time, but in 2020 you cut down your sinker usage by over 20 percent compared to 2019 (74.86 to 51.94 percent per Brooks Baseball) while increasing your slider usage by over 15 percent (11.35 to 26.7 percent). Can you talk about the reasons you altered your pitch selection this season?

Hughes: With the slider, I added some horizontal movement to it, and I slowed it down just a tad. And to be honest, I was told by coaches early in spring training with the Astros and again when I got to the Mets that I really needed to compliment that sinker for guys that are getting under it because last year I gave up a ton of home runs and I didn’t have all that much success.

The idea was to mix in that slider more to get a few more swings and misses, and to limit hard contact on my sinker. And my average exit velocity did go down this year (89.7 mph in 2019, 84.6 mph in 2020), my strikeouts went up, so there was definitely some truth to that.

At the end of the day, my struggles came from being wild; I didn’t consistently command the zone, I fell behind in the count too much and the three best counts to hit in in the major leagues are 3-0, 3-1, and 2-0. Those are the three counts where exit velocities get up over 90 mph, and I found myself in those counts way too much.

MMO: Obviously, this was an unprecedented season for Major League Baseball. As a player, can you talk a bit about playing under the conditions that were put in place? What was it like playing without fans in the stands?

Hughes: When we were on the field it was normal because you still lock-in when you’re on the field, that’s just how you train and play. But it was strange walking out to the bullpen every day and seeing the fan cutouts; I’m so used to chatting with people, signing autographs. And it was just cardboard cutouts. It was an eerie feeling, it was strange.

I was asked recently what we did for fan appreciation this year, and we kind of didn’t do enough. My thought is eventually when the stadiums open back up and there’s a treatment for COVID and hopefully a vaccine, we can triple the fan appreciation in the major leagues.

MMO: You’re facing free agency again this offseason. Do you envision yourself playing for a bit while longer in the majors?

Hughes: Yeah, I definitely felt strong this year and I was really encouraged by how the quality of contact went down against me. I thought there were a lot of positives and I’m working out and feeling strong here in Dallas this offseason.

In terms of free agency, with being a middle relief right-handed pitcher a lot of the time it’s just a waiting game to see how everything looks. Right now, I’m just trying to learn more about baseball, and trying to continue to work out and stay in shape.

MMO: Thanks so much for some time today, Jared.

Hughes: I appreciate you giving me a call, man.

Follow Jared Hughes on Twitter, @locatejared