Former Blue Jay Danny Barnes helping Mets translate data into results

NEW YORK – The baseball industry’s data and tech revolution arrived a little too late for Danny Barnes. Throughout his decade as a pitcher in pro ball, the 35^th-round Toronto Blue Jays pick in 2010 tried and tried to develop an effective slider to complement his fastball and changeup, to no avail. Seeing all the tools available to players now, the Princeton product who majored in economics would have embraced using even a simple movement tracker like Rapsodo, which had just begun filtering in during his final years.

“Absolutely,” Barnes said. “I always struggled trying to throw a slider, getting anything to move left. I was a natural pronator and it was just hard for me. I never really knew like, OK, this is a good one. You're looking at it and can't really tell a lot of the time. If I'd seen, this had eight inches of horizontal on it, and if you change the grip, it goes 10 inches, let's see how far we can get it over there, that would have helped me a lot. 

“I wouldn’t have had to throw George Springer 10 fastballs in a row and hope he misses one,” he continued. “I would have actually developed a slider or sweeper or whatever it is that's moving left and known how to execute it well.”

As the strategy coach on manager Carlos Mendoza’s New York Mets staff, Barnes’ focus is on helping players utilize the type of information he wishes was available to him during his days on the mound, among other tasks. It’s a position the 34-year-old never envisioned for himself after the 2020 pandemic season shelved his progress with the Baltimore Orioles, whom he joined on a minor-league deal after an injury-marred 2019 with the Blue Jays.

By then, Barnes had started pursuing an MBA at Columbia and envisioned a future outside of baseball, but the itch to keep pitching remained and he threw in 16 games for Long Island of the independent Atlantic League. While there, some connections urged him to pursue an analyst opening with the Mets and that eventually turned into a job on then-manager Buck Showalter’s staff for the 2022 season, an opportunity he couldn’t turn down.

“Because I had an analytics background from school and I had played so I could understand a lot of things players are actually going through,” Barnes explained, “the idea was I could be a voice on the staff to help support some of the ideas that were coming from R&D and merge that with the player development people and some of the strategy stuff.”

Over the past three years, that’s precisely what he’s become, a sort of interpreter who ensures the organizational information flow doesn’t get lost in translation.

Such roles are becoming increasingly important as the gaps in quality of information between clubs decreases while wide gaps in application remain. The current Blue Jays, for instance, are believed to be searching for someone with that type of fluency as they remake their coaching staff, and the right people can make a massive difference helping players both off- and in-season.

“It's not like it gives you the magic formula, it just helps you make adjustments better and faster,” said Barnes. “And the teams that are good at developing pitchers and getting free agents and making them better, that's what they do really well. They know what pitches work and they know how to adjust pitchers' slot or grips to throw more of those pitches.”

Sean Manaea, slated to start for the Mets in Game 6 versus the Los Angeles Dodgers on Sunday, is a prime example of that, having adjusted his arm-slot mid-season to great success. The 32-year-old set career bests in innings (181.2) and ERA (3.47) while winning his last two post-season starts after taking a no-decision in the wild-card round versus Milwaukee, positioning himself well for a return to free agency.

“Sean's really smart and he's willing to try stuff,” said Barnes. “His whole routine now that's gone viral (in which he throws from one bullpen mound into the adjacent plate) is unorthodox, but I bet you'll probably see people trying that out now. Without getting too in-detail, it's having an openness to try things and being OK with getting feedback from all these different sources, whether it’s data or Trackman or a coach.”

The trick, of course, is in drawing the right conclusions from each stream, presenting it in a relatable way and having enough credibility for a player to fully trust what they’re being told. 

After all, statistical analysis isn’t unfamiliar to today’s player – “They're around the data all the time,” Barnes said – so what they really need help is in “boiling it down because there's so much that you can grab on to, like this might be it, this might be it. The challenge for coaches is to show them, this is actually what you need to do, this is the best thing. Trying to simplify things is the hardest part.”

Barnes did that in more traditional ways during his 2 ½ seasons in the majors with the Blue Jays, when he posted a 4.33 ERA in 120.2 innings over 119 games, striking out 114. He broke through to the majors in his seventh season, in 2016, appearing in 12 games, and was around the club but didn’t pitch in the post-season that year.

In a memorable debut Aug. 2 at Houston, he was called on to nurse a 2-1 lead in the eighth inning and popped Springer up, struck out Alex Bregman, gave up a single to Jose Altuve and then struck out Carlos Correa to end the inning. 

“Toronto means so much to me. When we went up there in September and I saw all the renovations, it's hard not to get emotional. A lot of the people that helped make me who I am are still there,” Barnes said. “My debut was in a one-run game following up R.A. Dickey. Coming in the locker room, they put me between Jose Bautista and Josh Donaldson, and I was in double-A at the start of that year watching them, the bat flip the year before, thinking, man, it would be cool to be a part of that. That whole year was nuts looking back. We made the playoffs on the last day of the season, won the wild-card game, swept Texas, it all happened in a week. And the whole time I was there, I was like, where am I?”

There’s a similar-but-different feel to the Mets’ current run, too, but no doubt about where he and his team are, after a Game 5 win sent them back to Los Angeles for a Game 6, sights set on a Game 7 and beyond.