What comes up in your Instagram explore tab? White Sox free-agent rumors? The personal pages of seemingly every actor from Netflix’s “Cobra Kai?” Something creepily specific to a personal conversation you had in your home?
White Sox starter Lucas Giolito kept seeing something about a service called Codify. As the son of a video game designer, the graphic overlays showing pitchers directing their arsenal around heavily personalized red and blue splotches in the strike zone reminded Giolito of the hot and cold zones of the games he played as a kid. It appealed to him before success stories like Blake Treinen and new White Sox closer Liam Hendriks validated his interest, and before Orioles minor leaguer Conner Greene recommended the service and put him in touch. The resemblance is probably not a coincidence.
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“I hate to say how many hours I played MVP Baseball 2005,” Codify founder Mike Fisher said in a phone call with The Athletic.
As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, Fisher is a Bay Area-based former financial analyst who went from a personal friendship and exchange of information with pitcher Dan Straily in 2014 to treating Codify as a full-time job as of last August. Fisher claims dozens of MLB players as clients, spread out over 20 teams, with each one receiving intensely individualized heat maps about where their pitches — or now that he has a trio of catchers as clients, their pitchers’ pitches — will be most effective against certain hitters. Just before the abridged 2020 season started, he added two White Sox clients: Giolito and Yasmani Grandal. Hendriks, their newest addition, has been an enthusiastic Codify client since 2019.
“I cannot say that there’s been a team that’s been more accepting to the flow of this information,” Fisher said.
Codify founder Mike Fisher started working with Dan Straily in 2014. (Courtesy Mike Fisher)
While a typical player on a typical team might receive information and data from their club about where each of their pitches are most effective against right-handed and left-handed hitters, or how opposing hitters fare against different types of pitches in every part of the zone, Codify touts personalization and simplification.
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Fisher says every square in the overlay is about the width and height of a single baseball, containing “millions of calculations” based the specific pitchers’ arsenal, the velocity, movement and spin rate of each of his pitches, how those pitches work together, and how the opposing hitter — or similar opposing hitters — have fared against pitches with those same ingredients. We could go on with more variables, but then it would take longer than the 20 minutes a single chart would require from Fisher in the early days of his modeling.
“That was fine for when I had four guys,” Fisher said. “Every square in that map is a separate thing. It’s not just hand-painted or drawn or smoothed thing, it’s really looking at every single at every little ounce of it. I’ve spent years not just refining the model but also tuning how fast it runs.”
Most importantly, the end product is handing over a different, but straightforward heat map for how to attack every hitter in the lineup on a given night. Codify’s Instagram handle is an all-encompassing instruction of how pitchers should respond to the information with their pitches: “get into the blue.”
“I’ve never been a math guy,” said Giolito, who like most athletes is best as a kinesthetic learner, but also processes well visually. “You can’t feel a scouting report, so the next best thing you’re going to get is visual. You’ve got the blue for this is where your pitch will work, and you get the red for this where your pitch will probably not work as well.”
Giolito’s dominant 2019 came largely in partnership with catcher James McCann, whom he credited for “doing what I don’t want to do,” and distilling a large supply of numbers into a coherent game plan. The arrangement worked, but Giolito wasn’t satisfied with putting the burden wholly on his catcher, which became prescient now that McCann is with the New York Mets. Ironically, shortly after Giolito hooked up with Codify, Fisher got a voicemail from Grandal. He was interested in getting maps for his new pitching staff.
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For Fisher, it was a new frontier to work through a catcher, but an immediately refreshing one. As a catcher, Grandal was not burdened with personal pride, or any preconceived conceptions on how any pitcher’s arsenal should work. But he was also interested in working with Fisher to walk the line between not overreacting and abandoning Codify’s recommendations due to a single at-bat’s results, but still incorporating in-game and mid-at bat observations that any good catcher makes, and weaving them into his pitch calling.
“There wasn’t one word that he said that wasn’t just extremely oozing professionalism,” Fisher said. “I’ve worked with other catchers and no disrespect, it was just the sort of thing that’s hard to define other than just being on another level of batter understanding and pitcher understanding.”
Giolito’s consistent pairing and superior results with McCann toward the end of last season were notable. But the right-hander believes it was a function of a weird 2020 season where spring training was interrupted, summer camp was hastily assembled and socially distanced clubhouses stymied Grandal’s very earnest attempts to build rapport with a new pitching staff. That Grandal has latched onto an additional service to assist his understanding of his pitching staff and improve his game calling only heightens the confidence in him.
“I’m excited to throw to Yaz next year,” Giolito said. “If I had to pick one guy on the team other than myself using (Codify), it’d be Yaz, because he’s the guy calling the shots back there and he’s got that information. In a way, Yaz using it is almost like our entire team using it.”
A lot of Codify’s impact can be unseen. When pitchers are constantly talking about throwing “with conviction,” simply having data affirm where their pitches play best can be valuable for confidence. Random insights like certain lefty hitters being brought to their knees by letter-high sliders on the outside corners only show up in isolated moments. Often pitchers, especially those with major league-caliber stuff who have struggled with control, find Codify suggesting they have a larger margin of error than they realized, and that a slider they’ve been trying to pinpoint to the outside corner merely needs to get to the outer third of the plate to be effective.
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But if there’s a way to boil down the impact of Codify into a memorable, bite-size insight, it’s this seemingly inexplicable moment from Giolito’s no-hitter against the Pirates. He ended the eighth inning by striking out Cole Tucker with a changeup that was higher than would be recommended for any pitch.
The extreme height of Giolito’s changeup was a mistake, but there was a time when he thought all of his high changeups were mistakes that he happened to be getting away with. That he could have success up there with off speed was counterintuitive enough that Fisher needed to double-check.
“The first time I ran the maps I thought: ‘Shit, I think something’s wrong with my algorithm,’” Fisher said. “Because this guy not only has a ton of blue with the changeup, but look how high it runs.”
But similar to the Tampa Bay Rays using pitch data to tell Danny Farquhar that he wasn’t “getting away with” his high fastball, but had the carry necessary to rely on the pitch to get swings and misses, Codify affirmed to Giolito that based on his fastball’s angle, ride, spin and other factors, he could often have success with an elevated changeup. And really, it’s a testament to mapping Giolito’s arsenal together, since in a vacuum, his changeup does not have the devastating movement of Devin Williams’ “Airbender.”
“I’ll see blue zones for my changeup from the bottom of the zone all the way to the top of the zone,” Giolito said. “Some hitters, not so much and you want to execute your changeup to the bottom of the zone. But there’s others where I look at the map and am like ‘Oh wow, I can literally just rely on my changeup speed differential, movement and I don’t have to be concerned too much with the location. I can throw a high fastball and then throw a changeup in the same location and not worry about it getting hammered.”
A relatively traditional approach to game prep could ready Giolito to face the Kansas City Royals. Because of divisional scheduling, the Royals could easily field a lineup next season with six batters Giolito has faced 15 times or more in his short career. Both a Codify plan that Fisher develops and just any pitcher and catcher would base an attack around what had worked and not worked in the past. That night against the Pirates, Giolito was facing a large collection of hitters he had never faced before, or perhaps one prior game. Typically when both sides are equally unfamiliar with each other, the advantage goes to the pitchers. But both sides weren’t equal.
“He leaned pretty heavily on those maps during that no-hitter,” Fisher said, “because other than a generic knowledge of where his pitches tend to work against most guys, which is decent, he would not have that individual (knowledge) of how high I can go with my fastball, how far outside can I go with my slider, all that stuff. That worked really well because they didn’t have anything against him and he had a pretty good battle plan for that game against them.”
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The inevitable question many, including some MLB teams, ask is why doesn’t this sort of information come in-house? Part of the answer is that it’s unique, which is why Fisher’s client base has grown enough to go full-time during the 2020 season. He also says he enjoys working directly with pitchers, with the straightforward relationship of being paid month-to-month based on his results that comes with it, and doesn’t covet the idea of selling his model and being siloed away from direct contact with players. Fisher considers himself a baseball fan above all, and talking pitching with Grandal is the sort of personal thrill that makes the job worth it.
“I’m allowing (Fisher) to do his job and then I’ll take what gets spit out and apply it to my job,” Giolito said. “Pretty standard business practice.”
Some teams — wary of having players they have invested millions into veer off on their own to calibrate their approach and game plan — don’t see it as simple. Fisher says he has some secret Codify clients, and most teams have wanted to at least know more about how it works before they stand by as more of their pitchers take the plunge. Fisher understands that instinct, and happily fielded a phone call a few weeks back from new White Sox pitching coach Ethan Katz, who was eager to learn more.
But Giolito was never really worried. He credits that to the trust he has built up with the organization that he’s going to do whatever he can to improve himself. And since the Sox obviously didn’t stand in the way when he remade his delivery with Katz, and reaped the results when he did, Codify has just continued that trend.
“We obviously want our players to have access to the best information when it comes to their development, training, or game preparation,” general manager Rick Hahn said to The Athletic. “While our internal group produces outstanding work from which we greatly benefit, we also realize that their are some unique and valuable alternatives available in the larger market outside the organization — some of which players come to us already comfortable utilizing. In the end, we aren’t going to let our own egos or any ‘pride in authorship’ get in the way of us potentially winning more ballgames.”
The latest step in winning more ballgames for the Sox was Monday night’s addition of Hendriks to the back of their bullpen. Between embracing the power of his riding four-seamer, changing his throwing routine, and the gut check that being designated for assignment a fifth time brought, Hendriks turned around his game in the middle of the 2018 season. As a result, Fisher is hesitant to take too much credit for Hendriks’ emergence as an elite closer who can command a $54 million deal, since they did not hook up until the next year.
But Hendriks, who sought teams in free agency that would embrace his way of preparing, thought enough of it to sign a jersey from the 2019 postseason and dedicate it to Fisher with a message that began “Thanks for the blue, mate.”
Thrilled with our two years together in Oakland and looking forward to making some new stories on the South Side!@Athletics @whitesox @MLB @LGio27 @YazmanianDVL08 pic.twitter.com/VvM0SFjQSM
— Codify, Inc. (@CodifyBaseball) January 12, 2021
Up until the middle of last season, Fisher was still weighing whether he should leave financial analysis behind entirely and pursue his dream job. He ultimately reasoned with himself.
“The future me is going to be really pissed off,” Fisher said, “if I don’t pursue this and let it be what it could be.”
(Photo: Quinn Harris / USA Today)