This Week in UNC Baseball: Bryant Gaines, UNC Prep for Supers

As North Carolina prepares for its Super Regional this weekend, associate head coach and pitching coach Bryant Gaines joins Grace Nugent and Tommy Ashley for a discussion of the Diamond Heels pitching staff.

The trio discusses important moments from the regular season and go in depth into the process of preparing pitchers during the week and pregrame and the challenge of calling pitches. Gaines highlights the trust he must have with his arm on the mound and how he gets to know and understand his players’ mental state heading into a game.

Scroll down for excerpts and to watch the full interview.

Managing Time This Time of Year

Bryant Gaines: “To me it is just about perspective. We’re fortunate that we’re one of 16 teams still playing. We’re extremely fortunate that we are hosting. The way I look at it is the first thing I do in the morning is I’m going to focus on is getting our guys ready for the for the super regional this weekend, whether it’s a practice or whatever, a bullpen, and that’s going to be the first thing we tackle. Then you really just try to structure your time. I’m going to spend two hours on Southern Cal, then I’m going to spend an hour on the portal. 

“Obviously, our team being the first and the most important thing that we’re focused on. So, I think, as long as you manage your time the right way and you work hard at it, it’s manageable.”

Favorite Part of Coaching

“My favorite thing is seeing guys have success when they’ve worked really hard to achieve that success. An example of that would be if a guy has struggled and then they’ve pushed through it, and then finally at some point they get rewarded for their resilience having gone through it. So I love the moments of when a guy has a good outing or a guy has a great at bat, and as a coach, you’ve seen what they’ve done to achieve that, that type of success.

“Hopefully this weekend, good Lord willing, we play really well, and then we get a chance to see our whole team celebrate that success. That’s the thing that I look forward to the most, just seeing them be excited about what they’ve achieved.”

Formulating a Pitching Plan Week to Week

Gaines: “This week with Jason DeCaro, we were very specific on his two-strike pitches, because that’s where he’s given up some hits here recently. He’s done a good job getting in good counts, but his execution hasn’t been good when he’s been in those advantage counts. So, after I take a look at the opposing team we’re getting ready to face, I have an idea of how we’re going to pitch them, and then it becomes – for each one of them individually – what do they need to do in order to be successful? 

“East Carolina’s two-strike approach is very different than Southern Cal’s approach. East Carolina is going to do a good job of fighting pitches off, being on the plate, taking you deeper in the count, whereas Southern Cal, they’re going to try to do damage throughout the count, so they’re going to take some bigger swings. So, our two-strike pitches are going to be extremely important this weekend, and that’s why, like with DeCaro, for instance, he needs to make some better pitches with two strikes. So we would work on his curveball, and I would randomly just say 0-2 count and then he would have to execute that pitch down. Or it’s 1-2 and he needs to move the hitter off the plate.

“That way, they get into a game and they are more prepared for that specific pitch because they’d practiced it.” 

Preparation and Plan Different in Postseason?

Gaines: “I don’t think so. I really think it’s just a matter of we’re going to try to win this one game, and if you’re throwing really, really well, obviously we’re going to keep you out there. Then when we get to tomorrow we will play the hand we were dealt tomorrow. When you start looking too far down the road – this scenario, that scenario – you lose focus on just winning today.

“And that’s where, from our guys’ standpoint, I try to make sure they understand in our preparation, our most important game is our next game. Then once we get to the next day, we’ll adjust and go from there and see exactly what we need to do to be ready for that next one.”

How Much Information Do You Give Your Pitchers Before An Outing?

Gaines: “We talk about the opposing team typically before every game, so we’ll meet every single day, usually before batting practice, and we’ll talk about the opponent, or we’ll talk about what we learned from playing the opponent the previous day. I try to keep it fairly brief, because their job is not to develop a scouting report, their job is just to understand what type of offense they’re facing, what they can expect coming out of the bullpen. 

“I’ll always tell them how many righties, how many lefties, are they aggressive, are they pretty patient, do they like to run, do they like to bunt. So you know what to expect if we bring you in in a certain situation. So say there are runners in scoring position, you need to be prepared to pitch the middle of their order this way, also that they have an understanding of exactly what it is they’re getting ready to face. 

“I feel like if I get too detailed in it, then it becomes more about the opponent rather than us, but I do think it’s helpful for them to have some sort of a baseline of information. Like I’ve said earlier, we’re going to pitch Southern Cal probably a little bit different than we pitch East Carolina. That’s not to say we’re going to not pitch off of our strengths, but it’s a very different offensive approach that I think helps them, and helps them understand why I may call certain pitches, or why we may do certain things in that game.”

Pitching Version of a Quality At-Bat Chart?

Gaines: “We have a post-game report that they get after every time they pitch, whether they throw one pitch or they throw 100 pitches. It scores their outing based on four different categories. It scores it based on their count percentage – advantage counts. It scores their outing based on how good their stuff was. They get a quote nasty score. They get a pound score, meaning how many advantage counts did you actually get in, and then you get an overall score that’s taken from all three of those.

“So that’s important, because similar to the QAB chart, it tells guys whether or not they actually had a pretty good outing, even if the result wasn’t what they wanted, or vice versa. For instance, you can have a quote good outing on paper where you get three quick outs, but if the average exit velocity was 105 and it was line out, line out, fly out to the warning track, your score is going to be lower because of how many barrels you ended up giving up.

“So basically what it does is it tries to keep them kind of in that healthy medium of ‘you know what, I did pitch well, but okay, my count score wasn’t very good, like I need to improve in these counts’ so it allows them to really read between the lines of what was good in that outing and what wasn’t as good in that outing.”