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O’s, Braves pitching staffs have strong ties
- Updated: November 26, 2016
Now this was interesting heading into Thanksgiving weekend for those who enjoy stories of irony: The Orioles continued their rise in the American League East by hiring Roger McDowell as pitching coach for an improving rotation and an already efficient bullpen.
Well, that, and this is about the Braves edging closer to reviving at least the promises of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz.
For starters, I’m a McDowell fan, and he’s the former Major League reliever turned veteran pitching coach who just finished 11 seasons of mostly splendor with the Braves. He’s a combination of many folks. He got his confidence from legendary pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre. He got his obsession with the mental approach to the game from Maddux. He got his need to make the environment comfortable for his pitchers from Hall of Fame manager Bobby Cox. He got everything else from the books that are always in his vicinity whenever he isn’t in the dugout or the bullpen.
“My favorite is Harvey Dorfman’s ‘The Mental ABC’s of Pitching,'” McDowell once told me, always speaking in a composed tone. “The book goes through all of the different aspects of being effective [on the mound], whether it’s breathing, whether it’s anxiety, whether it’s competitiveness, Harvey Dorfman. That’s the best and most informative book I’ve read.”
• McDowell in as O’s pitching coach
Here’s the thing: McDowell takes the words from those pages and applies them to himself and to others. He does the same with the philosophy he acquired from Dave Wallace, another one of his mentors. They worked together in the Dodgers’ organization in the early 2000s, and McDowell told The Baltimore Sun this month that Wallace used to say back in the day, “They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
McDowell still uses that approach from Wallace, and here’s where all of this gets deeper. With the Orioles in the midst of a pitching renaissance over the last three years, …
