FORT MYERS, Fla. — Outside of upper management, he may be the single most important person to the Twins baseball operations department, and yet there’s a good chance you’ve never heard his name. But as much as Josh Kalk would like to remain anonymous, his fingerprints are littered across the entire organization.
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Whether it’s leading the way in the big-league team’s run prevention efforts, playing a significant role in player development via pitch design, analyzing the performance of major-league pitchers or evaluating potential acquisitions, the team’s senior analyst in research and development has a far-reaching influence with the Twins.
Entering his third year with the organization and now 12th in pro baseball, the former math/physics professor and writer for The Hardball Times is widely valued by those with the Twins and outside the club as well for his contributions.
“He’s instrumental basically in all facets,” said Twins farm director Alex Hassan. “(Research and development), advance scouting, player development. His impact is felt across a number of different departments because of how skilled he is, how much baseball knowledge he has. His perspective on a variety of different fronts is just exceptional. He’s a total asset, a total beast. We’ve benefitted tremendously from his presence and the work he’s done.”
You can’t walk two feet in the clubhouse before another Twins pitching coach gushes about the impact Kalk has had on both the team’s players and coaches. A player development enthusiast since his days with the Tampa Bay Rays, Kalk is regarded as a savant when it comes to information.
What began as writing for his own blog and eventually The Hardball Times after he found a backdoor into Major League Baseball’s Pitch F/X data and researched the numbers has developed into a critical skillset required by one of MLB’s most innovative teams. A benefactor of MLB’s information age, Kalk, in the eyes of Twins general manager Thad Levine, personifies the sport’s evolution.
“Five to 10 years ago, people with Josh’s background would not have had immediate access to major-league coaches, to major-league players, to game planning,” Levine said. “He now is one of the chief architects of our pitching planning throughout our whole minor-league and major-league systems. He is a consigliere to (pitching coach) Wes Johnson, (senior pitching advisor) Bob McClure, (minor-league pitching coordinator) Pete Maki and (manager) Rocco Baldelli.”
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Similar to the players he assists, Kalk too has developed his approach since he first joined Tampa Bay in 2009. Over time, he has refined the way he delivers information to coaches and in the process has become indispensable. One of his longtime friends, Tampa Bay pitching coach Kyle Snyder, said Kalk has worked hard to improve how he conveys information and that seeing how critical those advances in communication have been to his career has driven him to encourage other analysts to work on perfecting their delivery.
“It wasn’t something that happened immediately, nor would anybody expect that it would,” Snyder said. “But the more exposure he got around other players and coaches, the more comfortable he became and the more we realized what a tremendous resource he was.”
When Kalk — who turns 44 on March 20 — agreed to do an interview for this story, it was somewhat of a shock. He’s been a constant presence in the clubhouse for more than a year and is always friendly but reluctant to engage further. When it comes to media, Kalk doesn’t seem to seek attention or desire to see his name in print.
From the outset of his nine-minute interview with The Athletic, Kalk made it clear he doesn’t want to be quoted. The Sheboygan, Wisc., native is more than willing to confirm background information, how his love for baseball began with Pete Vuckovich, Paul Molitor and the early-1980s Milwaukee Brewers and that his career began after a 2009 interview with the Tampa Bay Rays in which Andrew Friedman (now the Dodgers president of baseball operations), Chaim Bloom (now the chief baseball officer for the Red Sox), James Click (now Astros general manager) and Erik Neander (now the Rays’ president and GM) were all present.
But being quoted is a no-no.
He’s plenty talkative and heavily involved in pitcher’s bullpen sessions or when he and Johnson head to the backfield to watch Jake Odorizzi’s simulated game, but Kalk’s reasoning for keeping a low profile with the media is that he believes it makes it easier for him to perform his job.

Though almost everyone else in the organization talks on Kalk’s behalf, he doesn’t want credit for the success of a pitcher such as Randy Dobnak when a ton of coaching work went into the process and the player made the adjustments. He believes that minor-league coaches are far more critical to development and don’t receive enough credit for it. Instead of him, Kalk is much more comfortable to see assistant pitching coordinator Justin Willard, who spent last season as the Double-A pitching coach and was in Single-A Cedar Rapids in 2018, assistant pitching coordinator J.P. Martinez or Maki quoted.
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“He’s a proletariat,” Levine said. “He has been an advocate for everyone from interns to middle management and he is very rarely focused on his own personal gain and is almost exclusively focused on the betterment of the rank and file. That’s something he’s been consistent on ever since we’ve hired him.
“He makes authentic investments in people. A lot of people utilize people to enhance their own strengths and contributions. I think he’s doing it benevolently to enhance the learning and contributions and skill acquisitions of those individuals. He’s much more comfortable championing their contributions than ever speaking positively about what he himself has contributed.”
The first story Kalk wrote for The Hardball Times featured a breakdown of how Colorado’s Jeff Francis attacked Philadelphia differently in Game 1 of the 2007 National League Divisional Series than he had during the regular season by using more off-speed pitches.
Six weeks later, he penned a piece on the work he’d been doing researching the “gold mine of information” available via Pitch F/X data. Via his computer skills, Kalk, who did his undergrad at University of Wisconsin-River Falls and graduate work in physics at Michigan State, was one of the first people to find the backdoor into the raw data provided by Pitch F/X.
Over a 17-month period, Kalk, a double major in physics and math and a professor of those subjects at Bluefield State College (W. Va.), used Pitch F/X data and other sources of information to profile Tom Glavine, Tim Lincecum and Jake Peavy, among many others. He also investigated subjects such as whether or not relief pitchers suffered working on consecutive days, how fatigue affected a pitcher’s fastball and ways to identify if a pitcher is injured.
“He’s spent such a long time in this research space,” Twins assistant GM Jeremy Zoll said. “His ability to convey his findings in a simple manner — it’s clear when you’re talking to him how much he has dug in on various aspects of baseball research and pitching research.”
By early 2009, Kalk’s work drew the attention of several teams. The Rays emailed him about an interview and Twins president of baseball operations Derek Falvey said Kalk also interviewed with the Cleveland Indians, for whom Falvey worked at the time. Tampa Bay hired Kalk that year, and his early years were spent working strictly with the Rays’ front office.
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His work changed as Kalk became more involved in player development in 2013. Two key moments in Kalk’s growth in player development were when Tampa Bay named Dewey Robinson its roving minor-league pitching instructor and Snyder was named the pitching coach for Single-A Bowling Green. A year later, Snyder, who won a World Series ring with the 2007 Boston Red Sox, was named the minor-league pitching coordinator. Snyder, who played independent ball as late as 2011, was still close enough to his playing days that he and Kalk could bounce ideas off one another and experiment with them.
“That’s really when things started,” Snyder said. “Our relationship continued to grow in terms of marrying both worlds and integrating him into development. …
“He helped simplify it for me so I could simplify it for the player and the player could more easily make what we’re trying to bring to them more actionable. Everybody has the information nowadays for the most part. I think some organizations use that information developmentally better than others. He was tremendous not just for myself, but for Dewey, for the organization, for the department while he was here and really on the front lines of all this stuff.”
Snyder, who took over as Tampa Bay’s major-league pitching coach in 2018, and Kalk worked closely over the next few years. When Snyder was promoted to Triple-A Durham in 2015, Kalk made a point of going to North Carolina six or seven times a year for 3-4 day stints. He felt comfortable working with Snyder knowing that his ideas wouldn’t be shot down without consideration. Snyder respected the depth of the research and the level of the information Kalk possessed. He also knew their working relationship benefitted both.
“You wind up pushing one another,” Snyder said. “Just the viewpoint that he brought with the physics background and the intelligence and understanding of ways this could be applied. … I was fresh enough out of the game I could actually try some of the things he had theories on and it was just cool.
“Super guy. I would not be where I am as a pitching coach without him.”
With his contract expiring in Tampa Bay in 2017, Falvey said Kalk was looking for new opportunities. Familiar with his resume, Falvey wanted to add the senior pitching analyst to the organization because he knew Kalk could work in a variety of areas.
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“Wherever he can provide a resource, he’s willing to,” Falvey said. “That’s his mindset.”
Kalk joined the Twins in December 2017. Asked over the weekend if Kalk was the biggest free agent the Twins acquired that winter, an offseason that included the signings of Fernando Rodney, Addison Reed, Lance Lynn and Logan Morrison, Falvey didn’t disagree.
In his first year in the organization, Kalk was more focused on player development and advanced scouting. Then Baldelli was named as the team’s manager and Johnson was hired as the team’s pitching coach. With both featuring a heavy background in biomechanics, Johnson and Kalk hit it off almost immediately. Not only is Kalk now involved in analyzing pitching performance, he has become an architect in providing Johnson and Baldelli with an objective view when it comes to game decisions.

“I can’t put a price on what Josh Kalk does for me and what we’re doing,” Johnson said. “You always keep in mind that he’s a tactical guy. That doesn’t mean he’s giving you the best strategy. But multiple times a day I talk to Josh because I want to make sure our tactics are at least moving in the right direction.
“I take his tactics and then I try to develop the strategy.”
The goal of Kalk’s tactics are to remove the emotion of the game from any decision being made. As an advance scout, he can also advise Johnson on what types of pitchers work well against certain opponents.
As Baldelli noted, Kalk normally wants the Twins to make choices that “make the most sense.” In the heat of the moment, it doesn’t always work out that way. But the Twins realize Kalk is guiding them in the right direction when it comes to the big picture.
“He’s an incredibly talented guy and he’s a good communicator,” Baldelli said. “He gives a very different perspective, and that’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking for someone who is going to think about things, look at things in a way that we may not be and he does that. He’s a huge asset to everything that we do here.
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“What it does is it promotes a lot of really positive conversation in addition to everything else.”
Beyond run prevention, offering tactical advice to the coaching staff and assisting in player acquisition decisions, Kalk’s work is heavily based in pitch design with minor-leaguers. Though it’s virtually the same as pitch development, pitch design has become a trendy name for the application of analytics to the process.
Essentially, Kalk can look at all of the information generated by a pitcher’s profile and determine which new pitch would benefit him best. According to one source, the way Kalk has figured out how to apply his information to Twins minor-league coaches is a key ingredient in the organization’s recent uptick in player development.
The rise of Dobnak, who started throwing more effectively when he added a one-seam fastball, reduced the usage of his four-seamer and combined his curveball and slider into one, is a product of pitch design. Kohl Stewart also had his career revived in 2018 by the addition of a one-seam fastball, and prospect Jhoan Duran has seen his stock rise considerably since he was acquired in a July 2018 trade that sent Eduardo Escobar to the Arizona Diamondbacks, heavily due to Kalk’s influence.
“He’s a big reason why the Twins are churning out arms,” the source said.
Kalk, of course, would insist the improvement is due to the efforts of the minor-league coaching staff. And while this offseason’s purge of coaches should leave little doubt the Twins do a good job of hiring, those same individuals Kalk wants to credit are more than willing to thrust that attention back on him.
“He’s been instrumental in our pitching development and pitching programs,” Zoll said. “His ability to partner with Pete Maki, J.P. Martinez and really the whole coaching staff in the minor leagues has been so huge for the whole department. When you look back at where we were two years ago to where we are now, it would be hard to overstate the impact he’s had.”
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As the roving assistant coordinator each of the past two years, Martinez has had plenty of chances to work alongside Kalk. He said it’s Kalk’s ability to easily convey his points that makes him an effective teacher.
“The first time I sat down and talked with Josh, everything he said made complete sense, but it was nothing I’d ever heard before,” Martinez said. “It was something right out of the gate that I wanted to emulate when I talked to players; I didn’t want them to be confused, I wanted them to understand right away what point I was trying to get across. Talking with Josh about a lot of different things helped me do that.”
New York Mets pitching coach Jeremy Hefner only had two years working with Kalk. In that span, he soaked up a lifetime worth of knowledge. Hefner first worked with Kalk when he was an advance scout in 2018. Last season, the two worked closely together when Hefner moved into his role as the team’s assistant pitching coach.
“Josh helped me (and others) learn about 10-15 years’ worth of information in two-plus years,” Hefner said. “I would not be in the position I’m in if he hadn’t been willing to share his experiences and knowledge. He also knows the game. He brings a unique perspective to baseball discussions — a perspective to not be right, but to help get the team in the best situation to win.”
But it’s not just the coaches that Kalk wants to improve. He also hopes to develop the other analysts within his R&D department, Hassan said. Hassan noted that Kalk preaches to other analysts about the importance of improving their communication with coaches because of the critical role it plays in the process. If coaches and analysts can’t communicate, a player’s development could get lost in the process.
“He had to work really hard to get better at that and tailor his message and figure out how to contribute,” Hassan said.
Fortunately for Kalk, he’s found a team that allows him to contribute in a variety of ways. He’s made such a large impact on the organization in such a small amount of time that not even his reluctant ways with the media can suppress it.
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“It speaks volumes to his abilities and strengths, but also his diplomacy to able to manage that,” Levine said. “It’s a great time for our sport that he has taken such an active role.”
(Top photo of Josh Kalk (right) speaking with Bob McClure (left): Brace Hemmelgarn / Courtesy Minnesota Twins)
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