PEORIA, Ariz. — I have a confession: I’ve been wanting to write about new Mariners pitcher Chris Flexen for a while. His story is a good story. After getting roughed up in his initial run in the big leagues, he went to Korea to revive his pitching career, shedding 50 pounds along the way as he remade himself as a pitcher.
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I’m a sucker for the nonlinear path-to-the-big-leagues stories. They are one of the great things about baseball and the people who play it.
But for as fun and interesting as Flexen’s story is — a lesson in resilience and perseverance — I found myself fascinated by another aspect of it: How did the Mariners find him in the first place?
This winter, Seattle general manager Jerry Dipoto made a comment about the team “looking under rocks for guys” who can help them in 2021 and beyond. This is the story of what led the Mariners to Flexen.
It’s a nontraditional story about player acquisition, to be sure. And in many ways, it was shaped by the pandemic and the open-mindedness that led the team to consider and value information from a number of sources, some a little unconventional.
This is that story: Finding Flexen.
When baseball came to a halt last spring, the Mariners were still in Arizona. Many of their professional scouts were on the road, watching high school and college players. Soon enough, though, everyone was back home. There were zero games to watch, to scout and to write reports on. At least not stateside.
“We found ourselves with a scouting staff that didn’t have a lot to do. Our guys were dying to work. They were desperate to do something … to feel like they were making an impact,” said Mariners assistant general manager Justin Hollander. “So rather than sit around, we had video of KBO (Korea Baseball Organization) and the NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) games that had already started.”
What were the Mariners looking for, exactly? Well, that was sort of the beauty of going through this exercise: They didn’t know, which was completely fine. The performances (and data) would shape their interest. When you’re looking under rocks, you have to sift through a lot of basalt in hopes of finding a ruby.
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“We asked our pro scouting staff to go through all the video and look for U.S.-born players who had gone over there and foreign-born players who may have come over for the first time, just to get a sense of who were the guys we wanted to track and also monitor all season,” Hollander said.
Flexen certainly fit that mold. He had an 8.07 ERA in parts of three seasons with the Mets (2017-2019) and had gone to Korea with the hopes, really, of rebuilding his resume in case the big leagues came calling again.
Pitching for Doosan, Flexen didn’t just find his big breaking ball — a pitch that got a lot of positive reviews and awkward swings — in Korea, but he also found himself as a pitcher. Across the board, his stuff jumped. Flexen posted a 132-to-32 strikeout-to-walk ratio, saw a bump in his velocity and had a 28 percent strikeout rate, which caught the eyes of the Mariners.
And because of the pandemic, the Mariners could allocate more of their scouting resources than in a typical year to evaluate players like Flexen. That led to more eyeballs and opinions and, the Mariners believe, better decision-making.
“This was born out of opportunity. Before (the pandemic), we may have had two or three looks, mostly analytical. But we would not have had the breadth of different evaluators take a look at him like we did,” Hollander said.
“Between those early-season reports, midseason reports and end-of-season reports, I want to say we had six reports on Chris from last year from different evaluators. Then, at the end of the season, we were able to run our analytical work on the NPB and the KBO, and Chris popped in both of those lenses.”
The Mariners then had their director of analytics, Joel Firman, look over the data on Flexen — a “deep dive,” Hollander said. Firman had access to TrackMan data on Flexen, which proved vital. At the end of the day, the conclusions, based on data and through a scouting lens, confirmed Flexen was the real deal.
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“We saw some notable stuff, both in the velocity, the pure shapes and the location. From the time that he left the United States and gone there, it was very easy to see a lot of the changes both from an eyeball perspective and from a data perspective,” Hollander said.
“That’s one of the things that the data really reinforced. Chris had trouble throwing strikes at the big-league level but never in the minor-league level before he went to Korea. And it really reinforced to us that he was a good striker-thrower and he had command of four pitches that he really couldn’t locate. On top of that, he showcased new shapes on his curveball and to some degree his slider as well.”
There was another element that came into play in Flexen landing in Seattle, though it didn’t have to do with anyone associated with the Mariners. No, it came from a 19-year-old college student with a keen interest in baseball who had some time to kill — Ben Howell, a sophomore at the University of Texas in Austin.
Howell, a sport management and economics double major, started watching games after the spring semester ended last year “pretty much since it was the only sports on TV,” he said, “and I was interested in watching and evaluating players … even if I did not know much about the players.”
Howell can’t specifically talk about Flexen because he recently accepted a summer internship in the Padres’ research and development department, but he did shed a light on his process. Howell started charting games and tracking pitch types and posted GIFs of what he considered interesting pitches or sequences on Twitter. People noticed, including the Mariners, as well as Flexen’s agent, Tom O’Connell.
Another #KboPlayoffs start for Chris Flexen and another gem. This time, 7.1 IP, 11Ks with 21 whiffs, and 17 called strikes on 108 pitches, coming out to a 35.2% CSW%. Has been absolutely dominant the postseason #KBO #KBOLeague (4-seam/slider/curveball) pic.twitter.com/W2qNbh05Fc
— Ben Howell (he/him) (@benhowell71) November 9, 2020
“Chris did some amazing things in Korea, and the good thing for us was that due to the pandemic, everyone was starving for baseball. Chris was able to be seen,” O’Connell said. “Ben was putting up these amazing videos (on Flexen).
“When Chris became a free agent, I began sending the videos to all of the general managers in baseball. Some guys loved them, including Jerry (Dipoto). He called me and said this was some great stuff.”
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Dipoto wasn’t the only one impressed with the videos.
“(Howell) was posting GIFs or short videos online of Flexen and other pitchers in the KBO, and he was making notes about the success or the lack of success different guys were having,” Hollander said. “I actually ended up connecting with him after we signed Chris … just complimenting him on the work and that it was useful to us. It helped us sort of visualize some of the things that data was showing us. That’s awesome.”
O’Connell made it clear to Dipoto that Flexen would be interested in pitching for the Mariners. This happens during the offseason, and some players are better fits than others. But first O’Connell wanted to convey to the Mariners that they should take a deeper dive into Flexen’s performance in Korea.
“(O’Connell) urged us to take a deeper look into the changes Chris had made, which allowed us to take a second look. So credit to Tom O’Connell for being our best scout in the organization,” Hollander said, joking.
Mutual admiration is one thing, but trying to broker a deal is something completely different. O’Connell made it clear he was looking for a multiyear deal for Flexen so that he “wasn’t looking over his shoulder.” A selling point was that Flexen was stretched out to shoulder a heavier workload. Including the playoffs, he threw 145 innings in Korea, and with teams looking to fill innings in 2021 after a truncated 60-game season, well, it made Flexen even more enticing.
O’Connell said there were “four or five teams very interested in Chris.” Yes, there would be competition. O’Connell felt it was important to get Flexen in front of Dipoto so the two could get to know each other. It ended up being a very wise decision. Dipoto talked about the culture and camaraderie of the organization — and what they were building. Said O’Connell, “I think there was admiration for that on Chris’ end.”
Flexen said the Zoom call convinced him that Seattle was where he wanted to be.
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“I think the thing that really got me excited about Seattle was jumping on the Zoom call with Jerry and him giving me a breakdown of what the organization was about; it truly got me excited and really made me want to come here,” Flexen said. “I felt this organization could do a lot for me and that it was the perfect fit.”
Soon enough, the two parties had a deal, as Flexen agreed to a two-year contract for $4.75 million with a $600,000 signing bonus. He will make $1.4 million in 2021 and $2.75 million in 2022. He has a $4 million club option for 2023, or an $8 million vesting option if he pitches 150 innings this season or a combined 300 innings between this season and next.
Flexen made his organizational debut Friday in a game against the White Sox, allowing one earned run in two innings with one walk and three strikeouts.
In the end, the Mariners got their guy. There were a lot of hands that touched this project, a lot of eyeballs and a lot of conversations that turned an idea into what could be an important cog in the rotation this season and next. At the end of the day, though, the ultimate credit goes to Flexen for getting himself in this position.
“Credit to (Flexen) … ‘I can reshape my body, I can go to work on my craft, I can travel across the ocean and try something different. And then when I get there, I can be receptive to feedback that they are offering me,’” Hollander said. “He said, ‘I’ll do whatever that it takes,’ and then he clearly did that. It’s very exciting.”
(Photo: Corey Brock / The Athletic)