When Sal Fasano got a call this offseason from Los Angeles Angels general manager Perry Minasian, it wasn’t the first time.
Fasano had just been fired from the job that Minasian first established for him with the Atlanta Braves seven years ago.
“He said (in 2017), ‘Hey, I want to make a job for you,’” the longtime big-league catcher and coach recalled recently. “‘I want you to work with the catchers … but you’re going to help with the pitching and do all the game plan stuff.’”
“It’s funny how things work,” he added. “Being let go by Atlanta, the first guy who calls me is Perry.”
Fasano’s title with the Angels will be assistant pitching coach; the team will have a pitching coach, bullpen coach, and Fasano somewhere in between.
Minasian hopes that a connection dating back to their days in the Toronto Blue Jays organization can boost a pitching staff in desperate need of improvement.
“He’s outstanding with arms and with pitching in general,” Minasian said. “I can go on and on about really quality pitching coaches that were at the catcher position. They look at things in a different way.”
Fasano — who won a World Series with the Angels for playing two games in 2002 — will be something of a jack-of-all-trades on the team’s coaching staff more than two decades later.
He’ll work closely with head of game planning Alex Cultice. He’ll work with catchers, in the context of how they work with pitchers. And he’ll also be front-facing with the pitchers themselves. Fasano said he expects to communicate with catchers and pitchers in-game, and work directly with the team’s analytics department.
While it’s not common, it’s also not unprecedented for catchers to become pitching coaches. The most notable example is the legendary Dave Duncan, who was a pitching coach for three World Series champions and four Cy Young award winners. Charlie Greene, the Milwaukee Brewers’ bullpen coach, also spent his playing days behind the plate.
“The one thing with never pitching is it’s a double-edged sword,” Fasano said. “It’s good and bad. I’ve never felt what you’ve felt, but I’ve caught a million dudes like you. I’ve seen a lot of guys pitch the way you do.”
The Angels were not an effective pitching team in 2024, by almost every measure. They ranked 26th in ERA (4.56). They were 29th in walks (601), ahead of only the historically awful Chicago White Sox. And they were 28th in home runs allowed (202).
First-year pitching coach Barry Enright’s work was highly regarded throughout the season, but the pitchers struggled and were unable to execute a plan to improve in 0-0 and 1-1 counts. As a whole, the Angels are refining their strategies. And part of that is adding people like Fasano, and backup catcher Travis d’Arnaud, who both worked with a Braves pitching staff that was among the best in baseball last year.
“It just didn’t get accomplished,” Enright said of his own team’s strike-throwing last year. “So I’m welcoming guys coming in to help me re-message. Help me be able to apply our strengths a little bit better into our game plan.”
Both Enright and Fasano acknowledged that it can be difficult for pitchers to focus on generating swing-and-miss, while also preaching strike-throwing early in the counts. That can lead to pitchers attempting to become “too fine.”
Fasano said he hopes to help simplify things for pitchers and take some of the pressure off their batterymates. Enright said that this season, he wants to create more individualized messages and strategies for each pitcher, particularly in the bullpen.
He hopes to bridge the gap between the mound work, training room and weight room, something he said will take more manpower. Enright also felt that pitchers were chasing swing-and-miss more, and never established the command that necessitates generating swing-and-miss.
“It’s just getting those guys to get into an attack mode, getting the catchers not to be paranoid of, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the guy’s hot spot. I’ve got to be careful of it,’” Fasano said. “And getting those guys to understand how to get to the soft zones of the hitters, still within the strengths of our pitchers.”
After the 2023 season, the Angels completely revamped their pitching strategies. The team found a new pitching coach and replaced many of its pitching experts on the player development side, choosing to focus on what they’ve deemed is a more holistic approach rather than strictly on analytics.
Earlier this offseason, former assistant pitching coach Bill Hezel left the organization to be the Marlins’ director of pitching, per a league source — the last bastion of the old pitching regime departing.
The team hopes that a continuity of their message, however, combined with some refining and the addition of Fasano can create a culture on the mound that far exceeds its very bad 2024 campaign.
“Adding Sal, and being able to take some things, delegate some of these areas — I think Sal will do a heck of a job sprinkling his personality and experience in every one of these areas,” Enright said.
(Photo: David J. Griffin / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
