Mike Butcher Turns Up The Heat

Now we're cooking with wood

Welcome to Warning Track Power, a weekly newsletter of baseball stories and analysis grounded in front office and scouting experiences and the personalities encountered along the way.

Baseball and pizza.

Pizza and baseball.

Throw in Spring Training games and tell me what more you want from a newsletter this week.

For Mike Butcher, well, maybe we should add a cheesesteak.

Butcher, who pitched for the California Angels for four seasons before embarking upon a 20-year professional coaching career, is bringing a different kind of heat these days and churning out wood-fired pizzas in 90 seconds, a pace that might even satisfy Rob Manfred. (Did that read like Guy Fieri should be narrating?)

“It all started about close to 20 years ago. Always being away in baseball, being away from the family, I wanted to come back home and have something for our family to do together,” Butcher, who is married with three kids, told me. “So I bought a wood-fired oven and stuck it in our backyard. I started having all my kids invite their friends over, and we had pizza parties on weekends. It just kind of blossomed from there.”

There’s something charming and fascinating about a pitching coach who has counseled the likes of John Lackey, Jered Weaver, Bartolo Colon, Dan Haren, and Zack Greinke offering: “I think it really comes down to: Do you know how to make a good dough or do you not?”

Mound visits have taught us that candlesticks always make a nice gift, but hearing a coach discuss total dissolvable solids in water, fermentation process, and fork mixers vs. spiral mixers was new to me.

It was actually softball, not baseball, that opened the oven door. Butcher’s oldest daughter played softball with the daughter of Tim Stutz, a chef in the greater Phoenix area. Butcher and Stutz became friends and, eventually, business partners.

Their business, which is mobile but generally parked in Chandler, Arizona, operates out of a trailer large enough to house the 3,000-pound, Italian-made Valoriani. It’s the Rolls Royce of wood-fired ovens.

Here’s something all of youse will like to know: Stutz is from Philadelphia. Now, I get nervous when people outside of Philly start talking about how to make a proper cheesesteak. Things are sometimes said that can never be taken back or unheard. (Pat’s is far better than Geno’s, and I won’t entertain dissenting opinions.)

So, I must admit, I was afraid about how the conversation could proceed.

“Okay,” Butcher said, “the best cheesesteaks I ever had were in the visiting clubhouse in Philadelphia.”

Instant credibility! The grill in that clubhouse is a destination. The almost-certain rain delays and long nights never diminished my enthusiasm for a road trip that included Philly. Those cheesesteaks are the best.

Butcher sources the same meat that is served in the visiting clubhouse, and whiz is on the menu. The bread comes fresh daily from a local baker; Butcher was the first to acknowledge that it’s not the Amoroso roll you’ll find in the home of the defending National League champions.

“It’s not exactly the same as their bread, but it’s fresh bread… and you can’t tell the difference,” he said. And, with that in mind, I invite all of you to join me one day at The Pizza Butcher truck to see if, indeed, we can’t tell the difference.

After we tackled his methods for making mozzarella and sausage, we moved on — naturally — to the pitch clock.

“I’m all about it,” he said.

“I always wanted all of our pitchers to be throwing a pitch in between every 12-to-15 seconds. I think the closer you are to throwing a pitch, the closer you are to repeating a pitch.”

It’s good for the entire defense, too. With a faster pace of play, he believes that the infielders and outfielders stay better focused and engaged.

I reached out to Hall-of-Fame shortstop and friend of WTP Alan Trammell to ask his opinion. He agreed with Butcher: “I believe it should favor the infielders because everything will flow quicker which is what infielders like.”

As we’ve seen already in just a couple days of Spring Training games, the pitch clock is creating a few problems for hitters, who must be in the box and alert to the pitcher with at least eight seconds remaining.

The former [Devil] Rays, Angels, and Diamondbacks pitching coach thinks that the limited time between pitches may also be better for hitters, who have so much information at their disposal these days.

“I do believe that there’s great information out there… but it’s got to be digestible information. If it’s not, it overwhelms you, and that’s when I think you see guys lock up. And that’s why I think there’s a lot of .220 hitters in the game,” Butcher said.

“They’re thinking too much,” he said of some hitters. “You can have a higher probability of a pitch coming in a certain count, but if you’re thinking like that you’ve lost so much athleticism and ability to react. So maybe this way, guys are thinking less, and they’re just gonna get out there and compete.”

See the ball, hit the ball.

I’m hopeful that the Commissioner’s desire to accelerate pace of play will ultimately have a greater impact on the quality of play. The elimination of the shift, for example, is expected to showcase players’ athleticism more often. If the pitch clock can have a similar effect, the game may return outcomes other than strikeouts, walks, and home runs.

Butcher referred to the NBA’s rule changes to project what could happen in MLB:

“You remember the NBA had the zone and the game got really slow. Nobody could shoot and the game just got boring. And they started losing fans, right? The shift, I think, has done the same thing to baseball. You have all these guys move over, you hit a rocket to right field and your third baseman is playing, like, short right field. That’s boring baseball. It takes away all the athleticism that’s on the field.

“And there’s some phenomenal athletes out there that, I think, once that shift is gone and you get to see these guys diving for balls — Machado or Arenado diving for a ball and coming up and throwing a guy out from his knees — I think that’s the excitement our game needs. And I think banning the shift is going to help that happen.”

For pizza, cheesesteaks, and hot takes, find Mike and all his social media links at thepizzabutcher.com.

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