White Sox right-handed relief pitcher Matt Foster is a phone call away from making his major league debut. His eye-opening experience with analytics is a prime reason he is in this spot.
“I’m excited,” Foster said in an interview with FutureSox. “Hopefully I stay on the path I’m on right now and I’m able to make it to the bigs. That’s always been the dream. I really want to go up there and be a part of the best.”
The 25-year-old is a homegrown Sox arm who was drafted in the 20th round of the 2016 draft. He’s taken the scenic route within the organization, which includes time spent in all six U.S.-based affiliates. Most recently, he was with Triple-A Charlotte.
Foster took a major step in 2018 when he compiled a 3.30 ERA across 60 innings in Advanced-A Winston-Salem and Double-A Birmingham. He began 2019 with Birmingham and didn’t allow a run in six appearances until he was promoted to Charlotte before the end of April.
Foster’s Knights career got off to a great start. His initial four appearances resulted in five strikeouts, one walk and two hits over six shutout innings. The subsequent five innings did not play to a similar tune.
“When I first got up to Charlotte, I did really well for about two weeks and then it really caught up with me,” Foster said. “I just started getting beat down with it. Once you get up to Double-A, Triple-A level, it’s not all about if you got the stuff. It’s about how you manage the stuff.
“The strike zone starts to shrink at each level and then you don’t really get the in between calls as much anymore,” he continued. “Balls that I think are strikes — the batter doesn’t swing and I don’t get the call, so I gotta change up things like eye level or go inside and out.”
Foster was hit with a stretch of adversity during his initial experience in the highest level of the minors. He gave up seven earned runs on 10 hits – four of which were home runs – across those three Triple-A relief outings.
He proceeded to allow just one run over his next seven appearances. Foster finished the year in Charlotte and produced a 3.76 ERA and 1.182 WHIP while striking out 62 over 55 innings.
Following the rough stretch, Charlotte’s pitching coach at the time and current Arizona League pitching coach, Steve McCatty, approached Foster to add a certain perspective.
“I had been pitching the same way pretty much since I first signed with the Sox,” Foster said. “I got in there after the first few weeks of success and started to get beat down and my pitching coach pulled me aside and started showing me all these analytics.
“I never really paid attention to them and he broke those down for me,” he said. “It was very eye-opening. It made me learn how to pitch. You can’t just go out there and throw the same stuff over and over like I’ve been doing.”
Foster elaborated on how the White Sox are incorporating analytics.
“I’ve been going pretty much all away fastballs for the most part until I saw the stats on it. It was all about what you were throwing in certain counts. My fastball percentages were anywhere from 90-to-100 percent in hitter’s counts and I was just kind of like, ‘wow, no wonder I’ve been getting beat down here.’ So, I had to change that up. Even down in the count, flipping in offspeed stuff. In counts when they’re thinking fastball here I’ll work in a changeup or a slider and as long as you’ll work those in for strikes, you’ll be set.”
Matt Zaleski, an organizational mainstay, who was newly assigned as the Knights’ pitching coach for 2020, has also seen the benefit of analytics within the White Sox.
“It is incredible,” Zaleski told our Charlotte correspondent Jeff Cohen in February. “You can see how a pitcher’s stuff will produce at the major league level. You can get an idea on what kind of a development path a guy needs. It could be on a fast track, it could be that this guy needs to add a breaking ball, or something along those lines.
“If someone is a hard-throwing guy, I’ll look at the movement of his pitches. If they are more pitchability guys, I’ll look at the opposing team’s contact. Is it hard contact? Is it weak contact?”
Foster and Zaleski spent plenty of time together across their experience with the White Sox.
“The guy I soaked up the most from would be Matt Zaleski,” Foster said. “I had him when I was in Great Falls, Kannapolis and I had him again when I was in Winston in the beginning of ’18. That man knows everything about pitching.”
Now they will add Charlotte as a shared stop on their journeys.
“Zaleski works with each guy to their strengths,” Foster said. “He can see what each guy does really well and he’ll try to show you ways to have success. When I first started, I had a good slider, but didn’t have a changeup at all. I got hounded by him about throwing and showing my changeup.
“There’s nothing I could’ve asked him that he wouldn’t have had an answer to.”
Foster understands he needs to be finer with his stuff at each level of professional baseball. The most encouraging sign of all relates to his consistency in appearances. In back-to-back seasons, the right-hander threw at least 60 innings across 45 and 43 relief outings, respectively.
“I got a little tired toward the all-star break last year, but it was just one of those things where you’re finally getting the workload that you want as a relief pitcher,” Foster said. “It’s about how you’re able to deal with it and not wearing yourself down.”
At this point in his career, Foster has done just about everything the White Sox have asked of him. This is an easy player to root for throughout 2020.
Pitch types/speed
Fastball: sat 92-94, topped out at 96 last year
Changeup: 82-83
Slider: 80-87
Foster shared that he developed his slider that began as more of a “loopy curveball” that sat 78-80 mph. He noted that he recently managed to throw it at 87 mph.
Photo credit: Clinton Cole/FutureSox
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