A decorated prep & collegiate athlete, Gunnar Hoglund, struggled to find his footing in professional baseball due to a Tommy John Surgery shortly before the 2021 MLB Draft. Out of high school Gunnar was a first round draft pick but chose to attend the University of Mississippi. After breezing through 3 straight years in college at Ole Miss it was expected he would continue this upward success through the professional baseball ranks. As mentioned though the road to success coming off of Tommy John Surgery was a long one for him. Once healthy, Gunnar found himself having to reset his focus on the aspects he felt hadn’t quite returned to shape. Fastball velocity, overall health, and sustaining consistent ball flight were all top of mind going into the 2023 winter off-season.
At KP, ahead of the off-season, our staff dove into opening up what made Gunnar successful in the past and began to devise how we could establish a winter roadmap that would help Gunnar return to form, ready to compete in 2024. As the title obviously states, he had a great year. Here is how we set up his off-season to lay the foundation for this success…
Workload
Since the draft Gunnar had been through different rehab protocols, a trade and a flurry of attempts to keep his return to play pace slowed in hopes of protecting him. The truth though? All this effort to limit throwing intensity and limit outing length once he was deemed healthy really only hindered his ability to create the necessary adaptations to the load he would be facing in a regular season schedule. Our first priority this off-season was to assure Gunnar would be built up to handle the 2024 season.
We knew that if Gunnar pitched well this year he would have a chance to start the year in AA. Looking back over our historical data that meant that with a throwing program built for him on a 5 day rotation he would need to reach at least a 15 throwing fitness by spring training.
We started in November and built him up to just that before he left for spring training. Here is an example throwing program plan we used for him…
Stuff
To begin the 2023 off-season we needed to look back and evaluate what potentially needed to improve in Gunnar’s arsenal. In College he predominately threw a 4 seam-fastball (61%), slider (31%) and a changeup (9%).
It’s important to note when evaluating any arm that the level of competition can sometimes dictate a usage change in a pitcher’s arsenal. With Gunnar returning from Tommy John but now competing at a much higher talent level, we did have to ask if the level of play was contributing to a lower level of success for him.
The other question to ask was surrounding Gunnar’s actual health. After a long time in the rehab process athletes can often struggle to return due to things aside from just the arm. Atrophy is real and when athletes are focused on arm health, sometimes they forget about their overall development in the weight room.
Looking at available data. We wanted to see areas where we might find major changes in Gunnars historical data. We asked the question, did he actually return to the player he was in 2021 or had he not?
If we could first identify this then we could establish a plan to get those metrics to return. Beyond this we would then have to plan for ways to optimize Gunnars development further to give him the best chance at finding success once again in 2024.
Upon a deep dive into Gunnars data the first obvious area of change for Gunnar was in Fastball velocity. In 2021, pre-injury, Gunnar had an average FB velocity of 92.5. Post surgery, this declined to roughly 90mph for both the 2022 and 2023 seasons.
FB Velocity
FB Velo (by year)
2021 (College): 92.5
2022 (Pro): 89.8
2023 (Pro): 90.8
2024 (Pro): 92.2
Fastball velocity was an obvious problem but for us indicated that he might not have been built up enough or lacked just the general strength he once had. Many would jump to conclusions here and want to make this a mechanical problem or feel the need to push a velocity program. There was no need for a velocity program here and his biomechanics reports from season didn’t indicate a need for anything but some minor changes to his plyocare routine. We had confidence that with a quality workload based throwing progression and a good off-season pushing him in the weight room that this velocity would return.
After 4 months going back to the basics of managing his throwing workload and developing his strength, it’s obvious to see the velocity did return in 2024. A major win to begin his return to success in season.
So velocity was back and this meant the fastball was in a much better place for the upcoming season. Our staff had to decide what else we would want to improve to give Gunnar the best chance at a breakout year in 2024.
Enter the less efficient change up…
At the onset of the winter we approached Gunnar with some ideas on his change up. We started messing around with the idea of adding depth and he was all for it!
Now depth could mean a lot of things, possibly creating a splitter instead of a change up, it could also mean possibly creating a SSW changeup, or we could focus on a pitch that just completely messed with efficiency and lowered the magnus force of the pitch.
With Gunnar finding comfort and repeatability of the less efficient change up, we pushed forward to implementing into his arsenal. We utilized a 2-seam changeup grip that added a spike to the middle finger. We spike the middle finger to get dominance out of the ring finger which essentially pulls the lateral seam down (sideways) and creates a more horizontal axis to the pitch. Since the pitch interacts with the air less efficiently, it utilizes less spin and therefore, has more vertical drop than a typical changeup. The results form this change were spectacular this year:
CH metrics (by year):
2023
82.4 mph
12.6 vb
1:40 tilt
0.7 HAA
-7.4 VAA
2075 rpm
2024
83.5 mph
4.2 vb
2:24 tilt
-1.7 HAA
-7.9 VAA
1660 rpm
Major improvements across the board on the CH marked an important change in both FB velo and CH shape to close the winter off-season. The question, after the off-season’s improvements, would be surrounding the actual impact these changes would make on his success. Let’s look at some of his data from 2023 to 2024 in order to better understand the impacts of these changes.
2023:
6.05 ERA
1.3 WHIP
9.9 H/9
6.8 SO/9
2024:
3.20 ERA
1.034 WHIP
6.9 H/9
8.3 SO/9
ERA: Down from 2023
WHIP: Down from 2023
Hits Per 9: Down from 2023
Strike Outs: Up from 2023
Massive changes! What about his Fastball and Changeup though? Did they actually improve compared to the previous year? For this we will use xWOBA to measure improvements 2023 to 2024…
Fastball
2023 LHH: .359 RHH: .329
2024 LHH: .336 RHH: .268
Change Up
2023 LHH: .329 RHH: .392
2024 LHH: .240 RHH: .209
We’ve now explained the impacts of our off-season work surrounding workload and stuff. Let’s talk about the last major piece of our plan… Gunnars strength.
Strength
What does it mean to get stronger? Is it adding weight to your deadlift? Is it just being able to jump higher? The industry is full of arbitrary measures of strength but strength is something developed over time. It is something that requires the consistency of an athlete and the proper progression of a well built program. At KP we use our “KP Lifting Score” to govern and assure strength development.
Uniquely our score accounts for the exercise load, individual player body type, the movement of the exercise selected and tempo.
Our focus for Gunnar was to increase his “KP Strength Score” and push him physically to get as high as he could on our scoring before the end of the off-season. Starting around a 40 Gunnar moved all the way to a 71 “KP Strength Score” over 11 weeks. This was a substantial progression and marked his overall strength improvement during this period.
Conclusion:
As shown above Gunnar’s off-season development paid off substantially in 2024. Even with the successes this year, competitors like Gunnar seem to never be content. As the ‘24 season concludes, we understand that we are going to have a conversation about what is next. This is where finding the 1% needed change and uniquely deploying a program to improve that 1% in the duration of the winter becomes an art.
It’s back to the drawing board. How do we continue trending towards the best version of Gunnar Hoglund? What is it going to take to reap these similar results at the big league level? Answering these questions and working with Gunnar to bring to light the answers is what makes this process so exciting and rewarding in the long run. How good can Gunnar Hoglund get? We are appreciative to be a part of the journey to find out.
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