A Longshot Lefty, Jared Koenig Hopes He's in the Right Place at the Right Time

[Matthew Trueblood]

To be a non-roster invite to Milwaukee Brewers spring training is to play with your back to the wall. It means having your locker in an out-of-the-way corner of the clubhouse in Maryvale. For one low-profile bullpen candidate, that's ok. Being out of the way suits him.

Image courtesy of © Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

"I like being tucked away over here," Jared Koenig swears, and once you get to know his story, it's not hard to believe. Koenig, 30, was born in San Jose, but when he talks about his training facility "back home," he means Scotts Valley, Cal., a city of 12,000 or so nestled just inland from Santa Cruz and about half an hour south of Palo Alto, Cupertino, and yes, San Jose.

Koenig works out at Rossy's Training, run by local product and ex-pro Matt Rossignol, who pitched sparingly for a couple of independent league teams after graduating from Scotts Valley's Bethany University (since closed) and then got certification to work as a trainer. Rossy's is on Technology Cir. in Scotts Valley, but like the city itself, that mostly means the less glamorous kind of technology--the stuff without which Silicon Valley would sputter and stop, but not much like Silicon Valley itself.

Next to Rossy's is a machine shop, and there are two electronics fabricators on the same block, just off Route 17. It's a good place to get things done, but not a great place to get noticed. The same can probably be said for Koenig's locker in Maryvale, and he's pleased about both.

For the moment, Koenig is the most famous client of his little training spot, and he's trying to put both it and himself on the map. To date, his big-league career consists of a 39-inning stint with the moribund 2022 Oakland Athletics, and even that came only after a seemingly impossibe baseball journey. Hold on for this ride; it's bumpy.

After finishing high school, Koenig went to Central Arizona College, which is really a junior college, and was drafted in the 35th round by the White Sox. Chicago never even made him an offer, though, so Koenig opted instead for a transfer opportunity to Old Dominion University, in Virginia. That stop was short and brutal, as Koenig pitched sparingly and had an ERA of 7.63. He next transferred to Cal. State-Monterey Bay, less than an hour down the coast from home, but things went only fractionally better. After that flier from the White Sox, Koenig was never drafted again.

From 2017 through 2019, Koenig pitched in a staggering five different independent leagues: the Pecos League, the American Association, the Pacific Association, the United Shore Baseball League, and the Frontier League. In the winter after 2019, he went to Australia and pitched there, too. and somewhere in there, seemingly right around 2018, a funny thing happened: Koenig got better. He had impressive numbers in Australia and had the same in his last couple of stops in indy ball.

The A's spotted him in Australia and signed him in Jan. 2020, but because of the pandemic, his affiliated pro career had to wait a year to begin. When it did, he put up good enough numbers in Double- and Triple-A to earn a reasonably long look with the parent club in 2022--even if it was for a team who lost 102 games. After finishing the season in the minors, however, he became a minor-league free agent.

Throughout all this time--even for half of his stint with Oakland--Koenig was a starter. After signing with the Padres in late February, he tried his hand as a reliever in 2023. He had a 3.81 ERA in 48 appearances at the two highest levels of the minors for San Diego, but he was never especially close to cracking the big-league roster. After the season, he again became a free agent.

This time, his free agency only lasted two weeks. The Brewers offered him the spot he now occupies, as a non-roster player but in big-league camp, on Nov. 20. In his work for the Padres in the minors, Koenig's stuff ticked up. Moving to the pen certainly helped, but so did a lot of work at Rossy's Training.

"Everything with my trainer has been to help me see an increase in velo and consistency," Koenig said Friday. "But the last couple of years, we really focused on speed down the mound and pace—everything directed toward trying to create more velo from the body."

It worked, in a big way, but even beyond what he worked on between seasons, some of the work he got in while with the Padres helped him find another gear near the end of the season, too. However you distribute credit, he's now frequently throwing about four miles per hour faster than he was in 2022, and two miles per hour faster than in early 2023. Late in the season, he touched 98.

Another change he made after joining San Diego and moving to the bullpen was in his pitch mix. He has a very different fastball profile than he showed in 2022.

"I throw a four-seamer, but very seldom," Koenig said. That was his bread-and-butter fastball prior to 2023. Now, it's a sinker, and the weapon now nearly in parity with it is his cutter. "The induced vert is pretty high for a cutter. I do throw a four-seamer, but usually the four-seamer is a little more distinct. It’ll have a little bit of perceived cut, but nothing compared to the true cutter I’m throwing. And then I have a sweeper and a changeup."

The southpaw will see many more lefties, as a share of all opponents, now that he's made the move to relief work, so he's more comfortable using the sinker as his main fastball. That was the pitch everything else worked off of last year.

Against righties, though, it was the cutter (once he found conviction in it) that became his primary offering. 

He gained much better feel (and applied better shape) to the changeup in 2023, as he alluded to above, and the pairing of the cutter and that change might just be the key for him to find greater success against right-handed batters. Check out the movement changes in his profile from 2022 to 2023, but keep in mind that almost all of the pitches coded by Statcast as four-seamers in the righthand image are actually the cutter, as Koenig moved away from the four-seamer.

A starter needs three pitches they can throw to each type of batter, but a reliever only needs two. For Koenig, the cutter and changeup should work to righties, especially if he can keep the cutter above 90 miles per hour, as it was last year. The sinker and sweeper, meanwhile, will be very tough on lefties. The four-seamer can be reserved as a mere changer of eye levels at the top of the zone, on occasion.

"This offseason with my trainer, the goal was to create more of a sweeper-like curveball—a little sharper, a little more left to right instead of north to south," Koenig said. That fits, if he'll primarily be throwing that pitch against fellow lefties. "And so with that, the goal is to have it be 15-20 [inches of sweep] and anywhere from 8 to, if I can get down to like 3 for [induced vertical break] then that’d be great. Then it’s just making sure the sinker is staying under 10 inches of vert. That’s the goal for that aspect."

The sinker already meets that standard, and the magnitude of his movement on the sweeper (labeled a curveball, in the images above) is already right. With the tilt adjustments he's describing, he should be able to run the sinker in on lefties, then get them chasing fairly helplessly away on the sweeper.

It's momentarily startling to hear a pitcher with Koenig's rural NorCal accent rattle off numbers like these so fluently, but then you remember: he's from the place where Silicon Valley's innovations become tangible things. Just like the machine shop next door, Rossy's is receiving specs and going about the process of manufacturing. In Koenig's case, that could mean manufacturing a big-league career as a lefty reliever, long after most people would have given up the game. He's not doing something radical and new, though a decade ago, all of this would have been. He's just one of the latest highly unexpected beneficiaries of this kind of pitch design.

Don't expect Koenig to make the roster out of camp. Do keep an eye on him, though, because he's not a junkballer with little to offer. In his first two outings of the spring, he racked up five strikeouts in two innings. The stuff is legitimate, and the journeyman wielding it is clearly no quitter.

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[eddiemathews]

Added to the guys you hope to succeed list. Well, I guess that's all of them.

[Team Canada]

2 hours ago, Matthew Trueblood said:

and anywhere from 8 to, if I can get down to like 3 for [induced vertical break] then that’d be great.

Missing at least a number after "8 to"

[Matthew Trueblood]

56 minutes ago, Team Canada said:

Missing at least a number after "8 to"

Mm. That's probably poor rendering of the quote on my part, but it is verbatim. He was sort of thinking aloud about the numbers he's targeting, saying, "anywhere from eight to... if I can get to", if that makes more sense.

[Joseph Zarr]

Once again, just an incredibly insightful; nuanced; and really cool look at a 'fringe' arm (for lack of a better phrase - fringe for now) who is continuing to fine tune and re-invent himself with the Brewers. These write ups are phenomenal. Thank you!

[Team Canada]

12 hours ago, Matthew Trueblood said:

Mm. That's probably poor rendering of the quote on my part, but it is verbatim. He was sort of thinking aloud about the numbers he's targeting, saying, "anywhere from eight to... if I can get to", if that makes more sense.

Ah sorry, that does make sense now if I read it as a player talking off the cuff vs a writeup.