espite his new job title, Dan Rohn doesn’t wear a three-piece suit, unless you count the warmup jacket over his baseball uniform.
Along with the fungos he hits to infielders before games, that part hasn’t changed in Rohn’s daily regimen. What has, however, is his title – administrative coach for the Seattle Mariners – and his job description.
Rohn, a longtime minor-league manager who spent the past five seasons as the Class AAA Tacoma Rainiers’ skipper, is working in the newly created high-tech job of helping the Mariners improve their scouting reports on opposing hitters and pitchers.
He literally works behind the scenes at gametime, watching the Mariners in the video room behind the dugout and logging into a laptop computer each pitch and every ball hit into or out of play.
The goal is for the Mariners to use the information to learn opponents’ pitching and hitting tendencies. At the end of each game, he’ll print out charts that bench coach Ron Hassey and manager Mike Hargrove will use as they set strategy.
“It’s a big insight we can use,” Rohn said. “We’re in the baby stages of it right now, but down the line it’s going to be really good. I’m trying to guard against our guys falling into patterns against pitchers, and watching to see if their guys are tipping pitches or if our guys are tipping pitches. We’re just trying to get an edge.”
Computer-generated reports are hardly new in baseball. Hargrove started relying on them in 1993 when he managed the Cleveland Indians. The current software used by the Mariners, produced by the Inside Edge scouting service, will allow them to develop specific pitcher-vs.-hitter strategy.
“So many times the information you get on how to defend hitters and how to pitch hitters is a real general thing,” Hargrove said. “It lumps Randy Johnson and Jamie Moyer and Joel Pineiro together. What we’re trying to do is to personalize it a little more, so the information that goes into it is specific to that pitcher.”
That process began in the offseason when Rohn went through about 40 hours of training to learn the computer program, then watched video of games the past two seasons and prepared his first reports.
“I chart every pitch, the location, speed, pitch, where it’s hit and if it’s hit hard,” Rohn said. “When they have meetings, I print it all out and there it is. It shows how we pitched guys last time, where we made mistakes with a hitter and the spray charts (pinpointing where the balls are hit).”
During the Mariners’ first homestand, Rohn noticed that one opposing pitcher used two-seam fastballs to get ahead early in the count, then threw four-seam fastballs to finish off hitters.
“Then we noticed his two-seamer started to flatten out and we started hitting him,” Rohn said.
Rohn may notice patterns that will allow the Mariners to make adjustments in their hitting, pitching or defensive strategies in mid-game, although the true benefit of his work will come in the reports generated after he has logged numerous games.
“As we get used to it and learn to read it better, it will be a better process for us,” Hargrove said. “Ten at-bats don’t give you a lot to go on.”
Hargrove said basic baseball instinct will never be fully replaced by computerized scouting. The numbers generated by such reports can become mind-numbing.
“If you see that some guy is 5-for-10 off you with four strikeouts, but four of those five hits are home runs, the numbers will start getting jumbled and they’ll scare the hell out of you,” Hargrove said. “With this, you end up learning what it is that worked and what it is that you need. It reinforces what you believe at some baseball instinct level.”
For example, when Hargrove managed the Indians, he faced a dicey situation in one game when the White Sox loaded the bases with two outs and slugger Frank Thomas coming to bat.
“We had a stat that showed Frank was 0-for-11 with six strikeouts off Eric Plunk,” Hargrove said. “I got Plunk specifically to face Thomas, and people were screaming and hollering, ‘What in the world are you doing?’
“At the end of that at-bat, Thomas was 0-for-12 with seven strikeouts.”
It didn’t take Hargrove long to learn, though, that a manager’s genius can disappear with such reports.
“I don’t think Plunk got him out again,” he said.
Kirby Arnold covers the M’s for The Herald
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