Matt Carasiti bridges analytics, experience with AquaSox pitchers

EVERETT — In an American job market where entry-level positions often look for people with multiple years of experience, Matt Carasiti is a dream candidate.

The Everett AquaSox pitching coach is in his first year on the job. He only stopped playing baseball a year ago. As of last June, he was pitching with the Colorado Rockies.

Yet the 34-year-old Carasiti will have five years of coaching experience by season’s end, at least to an extent.

The Resume

A sixth-round pick by Colorado in the 2012 MLB Draft out of St. John’s University, Carasiti moved up through the Rockies organization, making his MLB debut in 2016. He spent the next year in Triple-A, played in Japan in 2018, and reached the majors again in 2019 for 11 games with the Seattle Mariners.

An elbow injury in March 2020 and a couple of subsequent surgeries kept him off the field for two seasons. Inspired by his own rehab as well as his growing interest in the analytical side of baseball, Carasiti opened his own pitching development business, The Spin Lab, back in his home state of Connecticut in 2021.

“I had a lot of time on my hands,” Carasiti told The Herald. “I had helped out doing lessons every now and then. … I saw that I was pretty good at it, so I figured stuff out for myself, how to get back from injury and then pitch-design stuff, so I just morphed it into a business, and every season it grew.”

While keeping a hand on his business, Carasiti returned to pitch in the San Francisco Giants organization in 2022, and had a stint playing Independent baseball, after which he “soft retired.” Approaching the 2023 season, he reached out to Chris Forbes, the Rockies’ senior director of player development, to inquire about a potential pitching coach opening in Hartford, Colorado’s Double-A affiliate, which would keep him close to The Spin Lab.

There was no opening in Hartford, but Forbes was not convinced Carasiti was done playing anyway. He had heard from one of his pro scout friends that Carasiti was throwing 98 miles per hour that summer, and Forbes didn’t want him to regret jumping into the player development side too early.

Forbes asked him when he last threw a bullpen session. Carasiti replied it was four days prior.

“I go, ‘Siti, guys throwing bullpens are not wanting to start coaching yet,’” Forbes told The Herald over the phone. “I said, ‘Why don’t I sign you back and you can finish it where you started it.’ That was like how quick the conversation went.”

Forbes invited Carasiti to minor league camp, and if he didn’t make the Triple-A team in Albuquerque, they would move forward discussing a coaching role. After discussing it with his wife, Katrina, Carasiti decided to go for it.

After throwing at camp, Carasiti believed his arm felt the best it had in three years. He made the team, and by May 21, he was back in the majors for the first time in nearly four years, making 16 appearances with the Rockies over the course of the 2023 season. He decided to run it back in 2024, when he once again spent most of the year in Triple-A but reached the majors for seven games.

Filling the Gaps

Despite returning as a player, Carasiti did not abandon his itch to get into coaching. He took it upon himself to serve as a de facto pitching coach in Albuquerque’s bullpen, serving as a “middleman” on the staff to help players understand biomechanics and pitch flight data.

Carasiti would even host teammates in his hotel room to go over games and analyze pitch metrics, helping to fill the gaps in development left by the organization.

“I don’t want to bash the Rockies, but they don’t have really any sort of direction with pitching,” Carasiti said. “I would say that they’re probably pretty far behind. And so most of the guys there hadn’t been to other (organizations), where I had bounced around and in a lot of good places, and (I) met a lot of smart people that, like, lit the fire under me to figure things out.”

In addition to Carasiti’s thoughts, a Yahoo Sports article published on May 12 detailed the perceived shortcomings of the Rockies organization, which included testimony from an anonymous MLB evaluator who claimed they “question everyone else doing things differently.”

Forbes did not address the claim that the organization “keeps players in the dark,” but said Carasiti’s understanding of both analytics and pure production makes him valuable as a player developer.

“Sometimes you get pitchers nowadays that are so focused on metrics stuff, but then they’re not getting guys out,” Forbes said. “And then you get guys that, you know, need to learn that. … Having a guy like ‘Siti’ that knows both worlds, I think, is critical in player development.”

After serving as an unofficial player-coach in 2023 and 2024, Carasiti said he started to feel more enjoyment helping his teammates progress instead of focusing on advancing his own career.

“That was kind of the moment where I was like, ‘Oh, this might be the sign to move on to another thing,’” Carasiti said.

He was designated for assignment by the Rockies on June 10, 2024, and later signed with the Braves organization, where he pitched 13 innings across 11 games in Triple-A before his release on Aug. 1, which marked the end of his playing career.

After gaining several years of coaching experience at The Spin Lab and in Albuquerque, Carasiti was ready for his first official job.

Interviews and Onboarding

It was late November/early December of 2024 when Mariners pitching strategist Ken Roberts reached out to Carasiti. The two never played on the same team together, but overlapped in the Rockies organization from 2012-15 and had known each other from training camps.

Roberts initially wanted to gauge Carasiti’s general interest in coaching and give some advice, believing he still had a couple of years of playing left in him. When Carasiti revealed he was ready to transition into coaching, the two spoke on the phone. The Mariners had no openings at the time, but Roberts told Carasiti he would keep him in the loop.

As luck would have it, a job with the Mariners opened just a couple of weeks later, and Roberts called back. Seattle’s assistant general manager, Andy McKay, and director of pitching, Trent Blank, had also kept tabs on Carasiti, according to Roberts, and it wasn’t long before they brought him in for a series of interviews.

In addition to evaluating his knowledge of the technical side of pitching, the Mariners also threw out scenarios to get a feel for how Carasiti would manage different personalities. Roberts had already seen that on display during past interactions with him, but was also impressed by his commitment to building up The Spin Lab and his desire to learn and grow on the job.

“I knew he would be a good coach; one, because I’ve seen him connect with people, and all types of people,” Roberts told The Herald over the phone. “And I think that’s obviously a huge priority with coaches. You’ve got 13-15 different pitchers, and you need to connect with all of them and figure out what makes them tick. …

“He’s very receptive to feedback. He’s not insecure. Like if you tell him, ‘Hey, I think you really need to focus on this and get better at this,’ he’s like, ‘Yes, thank you.’ Like he craves that. And it’s just that growth mindset that he has that I think allowed him to come in and take on all of our information and the way we do things and just run with it, and kind of make it his own, too.”

At the end of the interview process — the first one Carasiti went through in his life — Seattle extended him a job offer. He was reluctant to leave home in Connecticut, but felt that if he was going to go anywhere, it would be to an organization that he knew was at the forefront of pitching development.

Based on his experience there in 2019, he felt Seattle fit the bill due to their tools, resources and overall philosophy that falls in line with his own.

“I think the results side of things overshadows the process of development in most places,” Carasiti said. “Whereas here, the process of development is overshadowing the results.”

Carasiti accepted Seattle’s offer, and went across the country to Everett, joining Zach Vincej’s staff that was largely intact after arriving from Low-A Modesto, where they had won back-to-back California League Championships.

Upon his assignment to Everett, Carasiti hopped on a Zoom call with Vincej and his staff, and the group hit it off immediately. Vincej and Carasiti are the same age, and even played for different teams in the Cape Cod League (2011) and Pioneer League (2012) at the same time, but had never directly crossed paths before. Still, it didn’t take long for Carasiti to find his fit.

“It was like Day One,” Vincej said. “His personality shines. We all connect well because we’re all baseball guys at the end of the day, so we’re able to connect on some good things. Like I said, he’s got a great personality. We joke around, we can talk about some serious things, and then we can ask each other questions. I’ve picked his brain more on some things than I ever have.”

Despite Carasiti being in his first official coaching position, Vincej has given him agency to do his thing, trusting his opinion on how to handle the pitching staff without breathing down his neck – and not just because Vincej is a former infielder.

With the two men in lockstep with each other about how to operate a High-A ball club, as well as their own desires to develop into better coaches, the 2025 season has largely been a success so far. The AquaSox clinched a berth in September’s Northwest League Championship Series after winning the first-half title on June 19.

But, as Carasiti emphasized, development is prioritized over results.

Working Philosophy

When he looks back at his own career, Carasiti believes he wasn’t ready for the big leagues when he was called up to the Rockies in 2016. Despite leading all of minor league baseball with 31 saves that season, Carasiti felt like he was just “throwing” as opposed to pitching. He averaged 9.8 strikeouts per nine innings, but posted a 9.19 ERA in 15.2 innings with the Rockies in 2016.

“As my career went on, it was like I started to look through a different lens of ‘Alright, what do I have to do to be more consistent?’” Carasiti said. “Because I was always like this roller coaster of a pitcher. I’d be really good, and then I’d be really bad. And so I started to shrink those times of being bad between the good, and I think that’s kind of the lens that I look through with these guys.”

Those experiences inform his coaching today, with his goal to equip his pitchers with the tools necessary to ensure they are ready by the time they are promoted.

In some cases, it’s just adding a couple of new pitches, like Carasiti has with Nico Tellache, who is incorporating a sinker and sweeper in an attempt to give the lefty better results against left-handed batters, against whom he has struggled for most of his career.

For others, like Evan Truitt, it’s changing up their entire arsenal. In addition to focusing on using his sinker more, Truitt has worked with Carasiti to add a new sweeper, a gyro slider and a changeup among other tweaks. Despite putting up a mixed bag of results, Truitt is starting to get a handle on things, tossing six shutout innings against Spokane on July 24 and following it up with a one-run, seven-strikeout performance against Eugene on July 31.

“Everything’s pretty new, but he just gives me confidence to go and attack with those pitches and get ahead,” Truitt said.

Whether it’s a small tweak or a sweeping change, Carasiti has an explanation behind everything, which he makes sure to present to his players clearly. He leans on advanced statistics as well as his own insight and experience as a former player.

Carasiti also tries to bake in changes slowly, focusing on one aspect at a time rather than bombarding players with every change at once.

“I could look at a guy in High-A and say, ‘Hey, we need to change 10 things right now,’” Carasiti said. “A lot of these guys you could do that with, but it would ruin their season because it’s just mental overload. … We try to keep them athletic and keep it as simple as possible, but I think (Truitt) especially has done an incredible job of working on the things that we throw at him and understanding that it’s a process.”

For each player, Carasiti’s coaching style has resonated in different ways. For Ryan Hawks, it was a conversation about pitch usage after a rough start to the season. Carasiti provided insight on what worked best for him when he played, which Hawks internalized. As of July 31, Hawks leads the Northwest League with nine wins and ranks third in ERA (3.14).

“He’s done a real good job keeping things simple,” Hawks said. “He really gives us just one goal at a time during the week. He might bring us all up as a staff and kind of give us one thing he wants us to work on and improve on in that week.”

AquaSox reliever Stefan Raeth pointed to Carasiti’s ability to instill confidence in players, while Ben Hernandez — who signed with the Mariners organization following his release from Kansas City in 2024 — likes his presentation of ideas to succeed not only now, but in the majors as well.

“The biggest thing here, again, very loose atmosphere. They want you to be comfortable,” Hernandez said. “They want you to compete, and yeah, that’s kind of what’s new for me.”

The Road Ahead

Carasiti is at peace. Unlike during his “soft retirement” a few years ago, he has not once wished that he was still playing this season.

“I know I could still do it, but the desire is not there,” Carasiti said. “I just dove in, especially once the season started, and I have 15 guys that I’m trying to get better. And once you start to see the plans that you put in place start to come to fruition, it’s like the same feeling that I got when I played.”

Not even a full season has played out in Everett, but Carasiti has enjoyed things so much that he can see himself be a pitching coach in the majors at some point. For him, it would depend on the opportunity, as he still has his family and business back home in Connecticut.

After spending the back stretch of his playing career getting ahead of the curve in coaching, Carasiti has positioned himself to make the most of whatever path he chooses.

“I do love it here, but you never know what the future holds,” Carasiti said. “So I try to keep my options open as much as I can.”