(670 The Score) With the start of the regular season three weeks away, the Cubs' staff is under the direction of its third pitching coach in as many years. That individual is Tommy Hottovy, whose background is different from that of his predecessors.
Hottovy, 37, made 17 appearances in the big leagues across 2011 and 2012 before enrolling at Boston University and taking a sabermetrics class. He landed in the Cubs' front office as part of the staff that prepared pitchers for each game. After Jim Hickey resigned from his position last fall, Hottovy was promoted to become the Cubs' new pitching coach.
"The unlikelihood of it is maybe the fact of how soon this all really came together," Hottovy said on the Mully & Haugh Show on Thursday morning. "I never had the stuff that Jon Lester has and Cole Hamels had.
"My original point to get into this role was not to be a pitching coach. It was to help guys get better and help this team win. The role evolved into one where people finally kind of felt that I could be a pitching coach, and then the players have the confidence in me and our staff in what we're trying to do.
"It was more an evolution of how this game has evolved, how I personally evolved with it and how our players are evolving with it."
Hottovy is a link between Cubs manager Joe Maddon and president of baseball operations Theo Epstein, combining the typical role of a pitching coach with his understanding of presenting information gathered from the team's analytics department.
How does the new-school approach of Hottovy work with an old-school pitcher like Lester?
"You have to know the players and have to know what pushes their buttons and what nuggets they need to take," Hottovy said. "I don't need to sit with Jon Lester and show him all these numbers and all these graphs and all these different things. All he needs is the info.
"We've had a great relationship. I've known Jon coming up through the Red Sox organization. We played together in 2011. For everything he says, he's one of the hardest-working, most diligent but always looking for a new edge. He's constantly pushing himself to get better. He knows all of this information helps him, it's just presenting it the right way."
