New Browns defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz thinks Major League Baseball is onto something with the trend of pitchers throwing fewer innings, but throwing harder fastballs.
Schwartz said he’s going to rotate his defensive linemen more than they’re accustomed to, meaning they may each play fewer snaps, but they’ll be more fresh and able to go harder on every play.
“We’ll roll through eight, maybe even nine guys at times trying to keep guys fresh and keep ‘em throwing a 100-miles-per-hour fastballs,” Schwartz said, via the Akron Beacon-Journal. “You guys will get tired of my baseball analogies, but a lot of the D-line is a lot throwing relief in the major leagues now. These guys coming in from the ‘pen throwing a 100, 101. . . . The tempo that we want those guys to play, we’re going to need to rotate fresh troops in.”
Schwartz said that because they’re currently in the non-contact portion of the offseason, it’s too early to see how his players are going to do with his call for a higher tempo of play.
“It’s too soon to really get a judge of where we are when you’re not full speed,” Schwartz said. “There’s things that you can do with walkthroughs. There’s things you can do with tempo and things like that. But to really play defense, you need to be physical. That’s the No. 1 thing. You need to be physical, and we can’t do that now.”
Schwartz has always been a proponent of analytics, and the analytics movement in baseball has been behind the trend of starting pitchers throwing harder and finishing fewer complete games. Schwartz thinks going harder but playing less applies to defensive linemen, too.
