It's Safe To Say Sonny Gray Despised Yankees Pitching Coach Larry Rothschild

Great article today in The Athletic by Eno Sarris, detailing how Sonny Gray is working to fix himself in Cincinnati after his disaster stint in New York. My long saga with Sonny was one that ripped my insides out. I was ecstatic to get him from Oakland and thought he could regain his Cy Young stuff and become a true number 2 for this rotation. That plan fell flat on its face. I wanted him to be so good so badly, it just never came together.

So why didn’t it work out? I think everyone will point to the fact that he simply couldn’t handle pitching under the bright lights of New York. There’s without a doubt a lot of truth to that, and he was certainly rattled when he began to struggle and the media piled on. There’s also some blame to be shared with the Yankees for sure. Sonny opened up about that in this article and without directly naming him, expressed his hatred for Larry Rothschild.

Maybe the four-seam and park situation led to the homers, but why so many walks at home? He nearly doubled his walk rate at home.

“That’s the question,” Gray said. “It was insane. It wasn’t like two or three starts, either, pretty large sample, with that drastic of a split.”

It caused the pitcher to go to his coaching staff with questions.

“What do you think?” he remembers asking. “Am I nuts? Do you see a difference? What’s the difference? They said, no, you’ve just been unlucky. I was like, ‘that’s bullshit.’”

Yeah that sums up Larry Rothschild in a nut shell I’d say. Useless. I remember when Sonny was going through his struggles big time last year and was taken out of the rotation. While he was working out of the bullpen a reporter asked him if Larry was working with him on the side to help get back to form. Sonny simply said he was not which confused the shit out of me. You’d think maybe a pitching coach would help…you know…the struggling pitchers fix their issues.

Then Sonny went into how they forced him to throw his slider way more than his curveball, which he was never comfortable doing. Almost as if they were setting him up for failure.

“I can’t command my slider that well,” the new Reds starter admitted. “I want to throw my slider in the dirt with two strikes, and that’s about it. I don’t have that type of slider, like Tanaka’s slider. His slider, the catcher will catch it, and the batter will swing and miss. If I get a swing and miss, the catcher is blocking it in the dirt. When I try to throw sliders for a strike, I get around it and it’s just a shitty spinning pitch. I don’t know how people throw sliders for strikes that are still tight, good pitches. I’m at 2-0 and I’m throwing a slider, and either I’m throwing a shitty slider in the zone, or I’m yanking it into the dirt and it’s 3-0 and I’m screwed either way.

Back in college Sonny was told to stop throwing his slider because it would mess with the shape of his curveball. That’s what happened in 2018, according to Sonny.

I thought this last part was super interesting. By the end of the year Sonny was beyond frustrated and decided he was just going to throw his cutter, his favorite pitch, the entire outing against the Sox.

“In my very last outing against the Red Sox, second to last game of the season in New York, I threw two innings out of the pen, all I did was throw cutters,” Gray said. “I said, ‘Fuck ’em, all I’m going to do is throw cutters today.’ I just threw 94-mph cutters — six up, six down, four punchies, and I thought maybe I’ll make the postseason roster here … but I didn’t.”

You read can all this and say “well look at Sonny lashing out on the Yankees now that he’s not there and making up excuses.” That’s fair, but I also think Larry Rothschild has to shoulder a lot of the blame as well. He’s a bumbling idiot. He couldn’t fix Severino’s tipping pitches problem that threw his entire second half in the garbage. He couldn’t fix Sonny, or didn’t bother to try. The Yankees philosophy of less fastballs and more sliders definitely messed with him. It was all a disaster and Sonny needed to get out of there. He’s going to probably thrive in Cincy, especially after being reunited with his college pitching coach, and it’s going to break our brains. Just be ready for it.