Coach Pete Maki is writing sweet music with Twins pitching staff

Pete Maki likes listening to hits, and helping pitchers avoid them.

The Twins rank first in Major League Baseball in ERA in Maki's first full season as their pitching coach. Maki's vocation and avocation require a similar skill: Placing your fingers in just the right places, with just the right pressure, to create something beautiful.

Big-league coaches work long hours, but the baseball lifestyle creates downtime in hotel rooms. Often, before instructing at the ballpark, he decompresses with his Martin acoustic guitar.

"I travel with my guitar and I play it on the road, just about every day," Maki said. "On a busier day, it might be just two minutes, but I try to play it every day. It sends me back to zero."

To survive in the big leagues, as a player or coach, you have to be able to execute a daily reset: get "back to zero."

"I enjoy creating chord progressions," he said. "I'm a fan of pop and rock music done well. It can be simple — the good old 1-4-5-minor 7 progression — but when done well it's always so impressive to me. Like Tom Petty. Everyone can play Tom Petty's music but his music is pop-rock music done to perfection.

"You listen to one of his songs and you think it's a major chord but it's actually a 'sus4,' or you think it's a minor but it's actually a diminished 7th, like a lot of George Harrison's music. It's simple, well-done, well-executed."

Maki was a relief pitcher at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. He coached at New Haven, Columbia and Duke before joining the Twins as their minor league pitching coordinator in 2017.

His time in academia and the Twins' emphasis on analytics suggests that he would speak of pitching in highly technical terms. He doesn't.

"We've been doing a really good job with first-pitch strikes and throwing two out of three pitches for strikes, so we're getting into really good counts," he said. "We're also making guys swing and miss with two strikes. Guys are leaning on their best pitch or pitches with two strikes. That's kind of our philosophy: get to two strikes as soon as possible, and once you do, you have to know what produces a miss.

"Swings and misses are great all the time but they're exponentially important with two strikes. Controlling our walks, maximizing our strikeouts is at the heart of our approach."

Maki's mother, a big-band singer of some renown, introduced him to music. He remembers listening to Stevie Wonder when he was young. Now he plays guitar and keyboards, and searches hotel lobbies for pianos. Monday night, he pulled out his phone and displayed a trove of his own recordings.

He can talk about the Beatles all day, and he has attended two concerts with Twins manager Rocco Baldelli: Wilco and Watchhouse. Phish, Baldelli's favorite, will have to wait.

Maki is an example of the Twins' front office being willing to make unconventional hires. Even Maki didn't see himself ever becoming a big-league pitching coach until he joined the franchise.

"I guess, at that point, it felt like a distant possibility," Maki said. "But a year prior to that, it seemed like a zero-percent possibility, just because for the longest time that wasn't an actual track to take to this job."

Last summer, Wes Johnson left as Twins pitching coach to take the same role with LSU. Last month, LSU won the national title, and Johnson left to become head coach at Georgia.

Replacing Johnson last July could not have been easy, but Maki has written a catchy bridge. The Twins' ERA is 3.55. The last time the Twins finished a season with an ERA better than 3.55 was in 1972.

"There is an analogy to be drawn between music and pitching," he said. "It's 'Simple well-done.' The fundamentals are the fundamentals — time-tested. First-pitch strikes and getting into good counts is analogous to C-Aminor-F-G7. It just works.

"In both, the creativity and off-script touches we can add while staying within the proven, winning formula is where it's a challenge, and where the fun lives."