Exclusive: Reliever Trevor Hildenberger
Hildenberger talked to Shea Bridge Report about his offseason, his goals for 2021, and how he's working to fine-tune his delivery.
Trevor Hildenberger is an ambitious guy.
“I just hope to pitch well, have a long and prosperous career with the New York Mets, and we win a lot of games,” he told me over Zoom this week. “That’s my goal.”
On Steve Cohen’s Mets, that attitude will fit right in. Last month, after Andy Martino reported that some GM candidates had been deterred by Cohen’s hopes to win a World Series within five years, Cohen responded.
“Who wants them if we aren’t setting high goals?” he asked.
Hildenberger has his long-term goal, of course. But for now, he has other priorities.
“I’m trying not to get too far ahead of myself,” he said. “I just want to come into Spring Training in Port St Lucie ready to compete for a job and get hitters out.”
Hildenberger, a righthanded, side-arming reliever, signed with the Mets last week. After pitching for the Twins from 2017 to 2019, he didn’t pitch during 2020. He spent that time with his wife Kristin, who in August gave birth to the couple’s daughter Miya.
But eventually, he knew, normalcy would return. So he stayed sharp. He built a home gym to work out while staying isolated. To find a throwing partner, he contacted Brian Yocke, the baseball coach at his alma mater, Archbishop Mitty High School. Yocke found him a high school catcher.
“I can lift and do my arm care stuff in my garage,” Hildenberger said. “Then I have one catcher and a mound and a bucket of balls, and a net that I throw to about five days a week, and about a bullpen a week. Just trying to stay sharp and stay ready.”
“I haven’t pitched in the big leagues since 2019,” he added. “I’m just looking for an opportunity.”
Hildenberger’s career so far has two very distinct halves. When he’s on his game, he throws a sinker and a changeup that — to put it mildly — fall off the face of the earth. Like Fernando Rodney’s helicopter changeup, Hildenberger’s off-speed stuff simply drops far further than seems possible. Over 2017 and the first half of 2018, Hildenberger rode those pitches to a 3.27 E.R.A.
He wasn’t sure exactly what he was doing: as he said, “When you’re going good, sometimes you don’t understand why.” But it was working — until it wasn’t.
At the halfway point of 2018, it stopped working. Over the first season and a half of his career, his E.R.A. was 3.27. From mid-2018 through the end of 2019, it was 9.55.
“I fell out of rhythm a little bit mechanically,” he said. “The game kind of sped up on me and got away from me, and I wasn’t able to find my form.”
Hildenberger’s future in baseball probably depends on whether or not he can rediscover the rhythm of the first half of his career. To do that, he’s studying “proprioception,” or body awareness. He watches videos of good outings and bad outings, and observes minute mechanical differences. He does drills like juggling while standing on a balance board, to train his arms and legs to operate independently. He’s working towards the moment when it all comes together in his brain, and his windup feels exactly the way it should.
He’ll be working with a familiar face: Mets’ pitching coach Jeremy Hefner, who was Hildenberger’s assistant pitching coach in 2019. Hildenberger says Hefner understands the mental side of baseball: he knows how to put a bad outing behind you, and how to survive as a reliever. But he’s also kept up with recent developments.
“The new-age analytics and Edgertronic slo-mo cameras and Rapsodo, spin rate and all that,” Hildenberger said. “He has a good grip on all that information, so he’s kind of the best of both worlds, and I’m really excited to work with him.”
He’s already started talking to Mets fans. From one interaction he highlighted, it’s clear that Hildenberger understands the essence of Mets fandom, perhaps even more than he knows. Encountering an optimistic fan on Twitter, he responded: “I can only imagine that this has always been and always will be as optimistic and positive as Mets fans will be.”
Hildenberger has a clear list of goals for the season: “Contribute at the major league level, help this Mets team win the division, get to the playoffs, and obviously make a deep run in the postseason.”
It’s an ambitious set of goals, to be sure. First he’ll need to perfect his mechanics and make the team, and then he’ll need to maintain his form over a full season. Winning the division, going to the playoffs, making a run in the postseason…It’s an ambitious set of team goals too.
But Trevor Hildenberger is an ambitious guy. He sets ambitious goals. Who would want him if he didn’t?