Cole Hamels taking Texas Rangers’ analytical data to mound

The pursuit of greatness is different for Cole Hamels than it is for many of his baseball-playing peers.

The left-hander has dedicated himself to a routine, which isn’t unusual for a ballplayer. What’s unusual, or what sets Hamels and other greats apart, is how rarely his focus is swayed from it.

Once he strikes on something he likes, he sticks to it. Take for instance his workouts, which include a contraption for core work and balance that he favored so much in Philadelphia that he brought one to Globe Life Park after his trade to the Texas Rangers and to the club’s spring home in Arizona.

But Hamels isn’t afraid of change. This spring he started throwing all of his pitches at the beginning of camp as opposed to rolling a pitch out a week at a time as he had done previously. The goal of using his full arsenal from Day One was to be better prepared at the start of the season.

He has also gone back to school — an entirely new school. Actually, he’s a student at the New School.

Hamels has started to incorporate analytics into his preparations for each start, a new wrinkle far more available to him with the numbers-rich and scouting-heavy Rangers than during his days in Philadelphia.

And the data is making him better.

“I’m starting to see the positives with it and how to understand it,” Hamels said Tuesday during his between-starts media session. “When it’s first thrown at you, it’s rather foreign and you’d rather just stick to your experiences and that comfort. With the analytics being so strong here, I’m able to now understand.

“You actually have to go do it. It’s great to have all the answers to the test, but if you’re not able to apply it, it doesn’t go anywhere.”

Hamels made his second start of the season Saturday and his first career start at Angel Stadium in a late game against the Los Angeles Angels, whom he beat with a complete game in the 2015 regular-season finale to clinch the American League West title.

Hamels’ first exposure to analytics was in the notes former teammates Roy Halladay and Jamie Moyer kept and relied upon as they got older and were looking for new ways to beat hitters.

Hamels isn’t old, at 32, but he is pitching in his 11th season and is in his first full season in the American League after the July 31 trade last year. He doesn’t know AL hitters as he did National League hitters, so every bit of data is welcome.

“As you start to get through a game, there’s a lot of information that you want to be able to grasp and there’s a lot of information that other teams are trying to take off of you,” Hamels said. “So you have to find the patterns and the holes.”

Hamels was gun-shy when asked if there was a specific instance during his Opening Day start when he reached into the analytics to gain an advantage. There were, he confirmed, without being too specific.

He did say that he is studying hitters’ approaches, from which they seldom stray. It’s up to him to make the pitches the analytics tell him to make, and Rangers coaches say that Hamels is better equipped than most to execute.

While he has good stuff, Hamels also leans heavily on his command, and each is so good that he exploits the data better than most.

“When you have that and you can read a scouting report and stick with your strengths the way he can, it plays really well,” pitching coach Doug Brocail said.

But learning what all the analytics mean wasn’t an overnight task. For most players, it requires a video component to back what the evidence is saying.

“There were things I always looked for on video that I had to write down, and they take care of it and now it’s just there,” Hamels said. “There are some things that I might not have necessarily ever been aware of that they’re now slowly introducing to me, and now I’m trying to look for it in a game. There were a few things [Monday], and I saw them.”

Now that he’s armed with analytics, Hamels has a chance to get better.

“Any time you can educate a player on anything that’s going to benefit them and they can go out and utilize that information based on their talent and skill, it increases their talent level,” manager Jeff Banister said.

“Cole is another one of those high baseball IQ players. They study their craft. He looks at the video. He can prove what he’s seeing. I think that gives him a stronger confidence of what he can do and what he should do.”

This story was originally published April 9, 2016 at 8:53 PM with the headline "Cole Hamels taking Texas Rangers’ analytical data to mound."