Adam Ottavino takes first steps toward putting nightmarish season behind him

Sometimes in life, things go so completely haywire, so off the rails, so far beyond what you previously had conceived of as possible, that you begin to wonder if you really know anything at all.

How can you be so certain in any kind of sense of normalcy when everything you try results in a consequence you did not foresee?

This describes the nightmarish Murphy’s Law, the horrible-terrible-no-good-very-bad season that Adam Ottavino experienced in 2017.

Coming into the year, he was seen by many as the leading candidate to close out ballgames, even after the club signed Greg Holland who would take over that role before the season began. Still, Otto was clearly the second guy on the depth chart and even spent the first month of the season racking up for holds than anyone else in MLB.

And then it all went wrong.

He began to struggle with his command, telling BSN Denver that he hadn’t felt this off since his days as a starter in St. Louis. Then came the game in Los Angeles where he almost single-handedly lost the game with some of the most brutal lack wild pitches the franchise had seen since Christian Friedrich’s three-run catastrophe.

Ottavino never fully recovered.

There were flashes at times in the second half that his slider still had all of the swing-and-miss that it did before and the fastball could still blow guys away when well located. Therein lay the problem as his walk rate ballooned to 6.58 batters per nine innings, nearly double his career high.

Otto told us on multiple occasions like he could feel himself working out his issues, but that there was simply precious little time to do so in the middle of the season and, despite his struggles, the Rockies still needed him to eat innings.

Now, one of the most cerebral players on the club—and in MLB—has been given an offseason to work out the kinks in his mechanics in order to get back to taking full advantage of the wicked stuff he still possesses.

“He targeted a little different mindset than what he had last spring,” says manager Bud Black. “We talked a number of times about the mindset he wanted to bring into this camp, continuing on from an aggressive offseason conditioning program, some things that he worked on with his delivery, wanting to keep that aggressive momentum. We’ve seen that in the early sessions and we saw it yesterday.”

Black points out that as much as there were some necessary tweaks, much of last season’s trials were challenging in a different way. “A lot of it is mental,” he says. And Ottavino has had some time to clear out the cobwebs.

His manager knows that, regardless of how he finished the 2017 season, the Rockies have a real talent on their hands and they aren’t about to put a ceiling on what Ottavino could accomplish in a bounce-back campaign.

“I’ve seen him in prior years and always thought ‘what a good relief pitcher.'” says Black. “I came on last year and thought we would get the guy that we’d seen, and I’m sure he felt the same way. And then things got off track here and there and he was never able to really gain a lot of momentum. I think a lot of that was delivery related. He was tinkering a bit. No matter what position, a lot has to do with how you feel and the confidence. And he could not seem to sustain any momentum in that area.”

The offseason breaks all rhythms, good or bad, and there was perhaps no member of the Colorado Rockies more in need of that break than Adam Ottavino. With the additions of Wade Davis and Bryan Shaw, along with the return of Jake McGee, Otto may be farther down the depth chart than he was this time a year ago. But if these few small adjustments get him back to where he was, he will be the setup man before the season ends.