How the Twins are turning late-round draft picks into major league pitchers

SEATTLE – It was a drill Kody Funderburk learned about in his first minor league spring training with the Twins, and he’s continued to do it every offseason afterward.

He stands on the mound with three different-sized baseballs: A normal ball, a ball 5% larger than normal and a ball 5% smaller than normal. Someone hands Funderburk a randomly selected ball, tells him a pitch, and he needs to throw it for a strike.

The drill is designed to help Funderburk’s command, a two-way player in college at Dallas Baptist who was a 15th-round pick in 2018.

“I know what adjustments I need to make to throw each one in the zone,” said Funderburk, a lefthanded reliever. “I feel like it’s helped me. When I throw a regular baseball for a ball, I know what it felt like and what I need to do to get back to throwing it in the zone.”

One strength of the Twins is turning pitchers who were low-round draft picks into major leaguers. Three of the seven starting pitchers the Twins have used this season — Bailey Ober, Louie Varland and David Festa — were picked in the 12th round or later in their respective amateur drafts.

There are two general ends of the spectrum when drafting pitchers. Teams can pick a pitcher on pure stuff, hoping they can help pitchers harness it with better command through the minor leagues. The other side is prioritizing strike throwing while working to extract more velocity and movement.

All teams maintain a mix between the two, but the Twins have had success in the latter approach.

“That comes down to really good scouting,” said Twins pitching coach Pete Maki, a former minor league pitching coordinator. “That can’t get overlooked. And we’ve been able to get these guys a little bit of help here and there with a few things.”

The Twins conduct three velocity-based training camps for select groups of minor league pitchers beginning in January. Some pitchers will focus strictly on adding velocity. There is a command camp, which Funderburk participated in, and a pitch design camp.

Ober went to a pitch design camp after a couple of years in the Twins’ system to work on improving his slider. He threw hundreds of sliders, varying his grip and using different-sized baseballs.

“They’ll be like, ‘All right, we want a slider that is more of a sweeper, and it has more horizontal [movement],’” Ober said. “Then it would be up to me to find it. They weren’t like throw this grip, it’s going to work. It was more like here are a few options, find whichever one works for you.”

Many teams employ velocity camps, but it’s clear the Twins have drawn attention from other clubs. The Boston Red Sox poached Twins minor league pitching coordinator Justin Willard last offseason. Zach Bove and J.P. Martinez were assistant pitching coordinators who were plucked for jobs on major league staffs with the Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants within the past four seasons.

What makes the Twins’ velocity camps successful?

“They do a really nice job of meeting with players, going over a simple plan, getting the pitchers bought in on that, and then figuring out what are some of the simplest adjustments that might work,” Twins farm director Drew MacPhail said. “You see that on the back fields in spring. Where a guy started maybe when he was drafted last year to what his pitches look like when he breaks camp and starts in April, it’s usually drastically different.”

Zebby Matthews is the best-performing pitcher in the Twins’ farm system this year, and he’s transformed into a top-100 level prospect. In 12 outings, primarily at Class AA, the 6-5 righthander has posted a 1.70 ERA with 81 strikeouts and four walks in 69 innings.

Matthews, an eighth-round pick in 2022 out of Western Carolina, was always an elite strike thrower, but he’s bumped up his velocity by 2-3 mph.

“A guy that really popped after velo camp,” MacPhail said. “He was 96 [mph], and unbelievable commanding the baseball. Last year, he did a really good job during January camps working on developing a breaking ball. He developed two, a sweeping slider and a cutter that is like 87 [mph] with sort of sliderish movement.”

One criticism is the Twins haven’t developed a homegrown frontline starter under Derek Falvey, the team’s president of baseball operations. They traded for Pablo López, Sonny Gray, Joe Ryan and Kenta Maeda.

Where the Twins have excelled is developing overlooked pitchers in the draft, and a pitching pipeline is partially a numbers game with the amount of arm injuries.

Another drill that helped Funderburk was a metal plate attached to a bungee cord. It was set up over the middle of the plate and gave him auditory feedback when he was working on landing pitches for strikes.

“There’s actually some science with throwing it, hitting it, hearing the bell sound,” Funderburk said. “They’re very on their stuff. They are always looking for new ways, new data and new analytics of what’s helping guys. They are always forward-thinking that way.”