At the onset of the offseason, Rick Hahn poked fun at himself a little bit for putting right field and DH on his winter shopping list for a second consecutive year.
Dylan Cease has something similar going for him on a personal level. Making an appearance on the White Sox Talk podcast, he highlighted his offseason to-do list, and it's pretty much recycled from the year before:
- Fastball command.
- Fastball cut.
Command in general has plagued Cease so far in his career, but it's most evident with his fastball, which ends up regularly visiting places most right-handed pitchers find physically impossible to tread. He described his solution to Chuck Garfien thusly:
"If anything, probably a little mechanical, just not using my lower half well. It's something I have to figure out how to fix a little bit quicker and make better in-game adjustments. For me this offseason, it's been a big emphasis on being a little bit smoother and having better lower-half mechanics."
And as for the other:
"I haven't even really started any intense mound work yet, so we're just getting to that phase now. With my throwing, something I'm pretty optimistic about right now is the fact that none of (my fastballs) are cutting, and I definitely have a better, different feel for my body than I did before."
At the last SoxFest -- which will still be the last SoxFest even next month -- Cease told Josh that he felt like he was conquering the cutting issue, which saps his fastball of the spin efficiency it could use to play up to its velocity.
Part of the problem Cease says was his fastball cutting and front shoulder flying open.
“My main focus this offseason has been fastball command and not cutting the fastball. This offseason working on my pitching, I haven’t been cutting the fastball as I’m always trying to make adjustments,” Cease said.
So how does one learn not to cut a fastball?
“For me, it’s the front side,” said Cease. “I was getting too rotational, but everything I’ve been throwing this offseason has been really good.”
This makes it hard to believe in words alone. It'll also be a little difficult to buy into any spring improvement, because he showed a fleeting ability to paint with his heat during 2020's first preseason. Proving progress is going to require more staying power this time around.
The good news? If Cease's biggest issues remain constants, the White Sox were proactive in switching another variable, firing Don Cooper and bringing in Ethan Katz. The new Sox pitching coach was instrumental in Lucas Giolito's turnaround, and so it's welcome to hear the words "core velocity belt" involved in Cease's program.
Katz's reputation carries a little bit of reductive risk. If Giolito's success were that replicable, more talented pitchers would be that good, but Cease and Reynaldo López tried Giolito's neural feedback program last winter with zero apparent results. It's similar to the fall of "Coop'll fix 'em," which lost its standing when cutters started to cause more problems than solutions (see: Jeff Samardzija and Carson Fulmer), and pitcher health fell off to league average as well.
Until spikes meet the rubber, there's no risk in being optimistic about Katz unless you can't afford to have your heart broken. Whether or not he works out as spectacularly as Giolito suggests possible, he's a physical embodiment of a real White Sox search for improvement, and that's good enough for now.
(Photo by Keith Gillett/Icon Sportswire)
