Playing catch with the perfect partner. Behind the Cardinals pitchers’ practice routines

St. Louis Cardinals hurlers Dakota Hudson and Drew VerHagen had a brief fling, and each man thinks the other is mostly to blame for their separation.

“We had two days in a row where we were together,” VerHagen said. “I thought this was going to be a regular thing, and then he just left me for Woody (Jake Woodford).”

“There’s a guy that’s throwing a 20 pound baseball, it feels so heavy on your hands,” Hudson said in his defense. “I threw with him the first two days, and then I was like, ‘hey, uh, Woody, do you want to ...’”

Playing catch is maybe baseball’s most fundamental act, but finding a catch partner can be a delicate social dance inside the walls of a clubhouse. Simple days of heading out with a sibling or parent to toss the ball around seem to go by the wayside when you’re both trying to get feedback on the shape of your pitches and also find someone whose preparation schedule matches up with your own.

“Starting pitchers, it’s a little bit different in that you kind of know what you want to do day in, day out,” Jack Flaherty said by way of explaining why starters play catch with other starters.

“Spring is different when everybody’s on kind of a different schedule, but you’ve got to find somebody that you’re comfortable with and what you want to do day in, day out.”

The worst possible outcome from a game of catch, of course, is injury. That might not seem likely when you’re tossing a ball around in the backyard, but when you’re trying to snag throws from professional pitchers who approach triple digits, the downward motion and hard biting sink can be uncomfortable in a standard glove.

“A lefty catching my sinker, it would go this way,” TJ McFarland said, sweeping his hand toward the back foot of an imaginary left-handed hitter. “And that’s when you break your thumb.”

That risk is why McFarland prefers to play catch with a righty, though he did pair up with fellow lefty Andrew Miller for a chunk of last season. “A lot of sliders,” he said ruefully. “A lot of sling.”

Miles Mikolas is somewhat less committed to monogamy than his teammates, owing in part to the starter’s schedule Flaherty described. He also enjoys seeing how teammates from across the spectrum of handedness and repertoire hone their skills, and recently had a stretch of catch with lefty fireballer Génesis Cabrera.

“It was a great game of catch until he started throwing breaking balls,” Mikolas cracked.

‘He got used to the way I throw’

Some relationships can last over multiple years. Flaherty’s long time throwing partner was Austin Gomber, who was traded to Colorado last January. The two were friends who were drafted in the same year (Flaherty the first round, Gomber the fourth) and rose through the system together, developing their pitches together in their daily throw sessions.

“He got used to the way I throw,” Flaherty said with a laugh. “I’m good when I’m going out. I can hit you in the chest for the most part.”

“You see their tendencies and you pick up on, you know, when you do this right, this is how it goes.”

Still, Flaherty admitted some important work might result in balls being chased.

“When it comes to coming in, throwing a flat ground, I gotta have somebody who’s willing,” he said. “If I’m gonna throw my pitches, I’m gonna miss down, I’m gonna miss up, right?

“Are you gonna complain about it or like, are you gonna pick it, or are you gonna go get the ball? I’m okay with that. Because I’m okay with you doing that to me.”

Working together

A collaborative environment makes for a stronger pitching staff and a better team. Working together means being able to push each other, and learning about the way another pitcher operates can open a players eyes to grips and arm actions they may not have previously considered for themselves.

That desire for growth is part of what leads Mikolas to look around the room for a new partner time and again, and it’s part of the benefit a player like VerHagen receives from moving to a new team.

Describing his process for finding his first partner, VerHagen said, “day one this year was, walk around the locker room, Dakota Hudson’s over there with his cleats on. I said, ‘you’re going to throw?’ He said yeah. ‘You want a catch partner?’ Cool, let’s do it.”

‘You’ve got to find somebody you know’

In an environment where so much work is so precisely structured — discerning and dissecting daily schedules is its own category of work and learned language at any spring training — the simplicity of going out to toss a ball around is a respite even as it carries its own layers.

Important work gets done, but so does bonding and team building. The conversations among the pitchers playing catch, while sometimes not fit for print, are where each player can learn plenty about the others outside of how their ball moves.

“You’ve got to find somebody that you know ...” Flaherty said before trailing off. “Everyone takes their throwing seriously. There’s just differences.”

Thankfully, they’re rarely irreconcilable.