STARKVILLE — Early last week, Wes Johnson was preparing for the 2016 college baseball season at Dallas Baptist.
But Johnson’s plans changed Tuesday when he received a phone call from Mississippi State baseball coach John Cohen. That’s when the Patriots pitching coach realized he might have to start a new set of preparations for the upcoming season.
Now, instead of working with the Patriots and getting ready for another season in the Missouri Valley Conference, Johnson will have to learn a new staff of pitchers and adjust to life in the Southeastern Conference. That plan was finalized Friday, when Johnson was introduced as MSU’s new pitching coach at a news conference at the Leo Seal Jr. Football Complex.
Johnson replaces Butch Thompson, who was hired last week to be Auburn’s new head baseball coach. Johnson has a little more than three months to prepare for MSU’s season opener in February. He started Friday by watching some of MSU’s pitchers throw in the bullpen.
“I actually think this is a great time to come in,” Johnson said. “We’re going to have a chance to get our guys in there, implement a system, send them home to work on that system. We’re going to bring them back and we’re going to jump right in. The biggest challenge is a little bit of time.”
Cohen interviewed California State University, Fullerton pitching coach Jason Dietrich for Thompson’s job, but Cohen and Dietrich agreed the fit wasn’t right.
Cohen said Friday that Johnson was the right fit. The eighth-year coach reached out to Johnson before Auburn hired Thompson. He wanted to have a plan in place in case Thompson earned a chance to be a head coach for the first time in his career.
“He’s going to get to know our pitching staff and catchers and really our whole club one-on-one,” said Cohen, who added that Thompson has reached out to Johnson in an effort to make the transition as smooth as possible. “I think that’s really important. There’s going to be an awful lot of opportunities for him to meet with those guys. He’ll watch a ton of film, and he’ll have three-and-a-half to four weeks of opportunities to watch bullpens. He’s going to jump right into it.”
Johnson said he received texts from Major League Baseball scouts that he had 16 pitchers who could throw more than 90 mph after news broke Thursday that he had taken the job at MSU. He believes MSU can have one of the best staffs in the country this season.
If Johnson’s work at Dallas Baptist is any indication, he has an idea about how to realize that goal. Johnson, who spent the last four seasons at Dallas Baptist, helped the team’s pitching staff have the nation’s 32nd-best strikeouts per nine innings (8.3), 39th-best ERA (3.32), and 48th-best team walks and hits to innings pitched (WHIP, 1.29) in 2014. Dallas Baptist’s 2.34 strikeouts per walk ranked 65th in the nation.
“Wes is as good as they get,” Dallas Baptist coach Dan Heefner said. “He has a passion for development and doing everything possible to help pitchers reach their full potential. He is innovative, but has the ability to make the complex seem very simple to pitchers, which is how it needs to be when they are in a game.
“He is also positive and personal, which enables him to treat each pitcher as an individual and helps them come up with their own plan of attacking hitters.”
In eight years, Johnson has had 24 pitchers drafted or sign professional contacts. This past summer, Johnson had five pitchers chosen in the first 12 rounds, more than any SEC school. Johnson has had seven pitchers selected in the top 10 rounds, which would have tied for the most in the SEC in that span. Dallas Baptist had six pitchers drafted in the first 10 rounds in the 44 years (1967-2011) prior to Johnson’s arrival at the school.
MSU has 25 pitchers on its roster for the 2016 season and nine pitchers who have given commitments as part of the 2016 recruiting class. Johnson’s philosophy will be to find each player’s strength and to help him maximize it.
“I 100 percent believe in what I call hyper-personalization,” Johnson said. “I’m not going to put a kid in the box and make him throw a ball low and away when that’s not his strength. He may have a power slider and we need to pitch off that. If he’s got that power slider, that means we may pitch with the fastball out of the strike zone. With that hyper-personalization comes individual and different plans for each guy.”
Johnson said he will relentlessly prioritize every day with each pitcher to help them improve and make sure he is getting the best out of them.
“I think Wes is somebody that’s going to run our pitching staff,” Cohen said. “He’s going to be in constant contact with those guys. He’s going to do everything he can to get the most out of everyone of them.”
Prior to working at Dallas Baptist, Johnson had two stints at Central Arkansas. He also coached at Southern Arkansas. He also was the head coach at Abundant Life High School in Sherwood, Arkansas.
He said playing in the SEC is no different than playing in another league, but he said he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to coach at MSU.
“I think coach Cohen’s the best coach in the country,” Johnson said. “I love the way he does things. It’s real similar to the way I think. You know a lot about them. You know how successful they were. You look at the pedigree of the players that have come through here and where they’re at.”
Follow Dispatch sports writer Ben Wait on Twitter @bcwait
Ben Wait reports on Mississippi State University sports for The Dispatch.
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