Matt Barnes’ wife just wanted to show the pitcher a video of their dog.
Turns out, it might have helped fix an issue with his delivery.
Barnes was one of the top relievers in the game in the first half of last season, which gave him a stranglehold on the Boston Red Sox closer job, a trip to the All-Star Game and a midseason contract extension.
But in the back half of the year his effectiveness and numbers cratered, now making him one of Boston’s biggest and most important question marks heading into the 2022 campaign.
During a spring training outing, Barnes’ wife shot a video of their dog playing with a squeaky toy while Barnes was on the mound. As he watched the video in the parking lot, he realized that his mechanics were wonky.
So, as he explained on the “Bradfo Sho” podcast, he went down the rabbit hole.
“My wife had sent me a video of me pitching because my dog was squeaking a toy running laps in front of the TV," Barnes said. "But I’m sitting there and I saw that, and that was funny, but then I start looking at the actual video and I’m like ‘Man, it looks like my legs and my arms are really far from my body and I’m really upright and kind of stiff.’
So I go to my phone and I’ve got a video that the Red Sox posted on social media from like May of last year from behind, and I was like let me look at this. So I literally go through, I’m stopping, zoom in, screenshotting both and I’m swiping back and forth between them. I’m sitting in the parking lot after the game here. And I’m looking at it like ‘Well in this one I’m a lot more compact in my delivery, and this one I’m more upright and away from myself.’ I was like huh, alright.
“So I took that to start working on that, and I’m sitting on the training table the next morning and Alex Cora comes in and says I’ve been looking at some video, and it looks like last year you were a lot more compact, like a ball coiling all this energy, and yesterday it looked like you were tilting back and upright. And I said it was really funny you say that because this is what I did, and I explained to him what I just told you and said this is what I did yesterday in the parking lot. So we went in and started looking at it in the video room and I was like 100 percent, you’re totally right.
“I took it out to the game and felt like I finally had the carry and the whatever through the baseball in the game yesterday. Curveball felt like it was sharper, I could command it better, I wasn’t pulling off.”
Barnes re-gaining his form from early last season will go a long way in shoring up the back of the Red Sox bullpen. And if he really does rectify the issue long-term and return to being a dominant arm out of the bullpen, then he’ll have his wife and dog to thank.
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