Zach Stovall (April 9, 2026)

Numbers are emotionless, just ask the "Numbers Guy." Zach Stovall, director of baseball strategy, joins Mike Keith and Ross Kivett for another edition of Kiv's Korner, presented by Calhoun's.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Time for the show within this show. It's Kiv's Corner. Presented by Calhoun's A Taste of Tennessee. Nine area locations. And gosh, one just down here by the river is so good. The one out by me at the original location is so good. One Turkey Creek is they're all so good. I love Calhouns. Ross Kivitt, assistant baseball coach, recruiting coordinator. That's right. Lover of Calhouns. Ross Kivitt is that's why it's Kiv's Corner, in case you didn't know. Just like it's the Mike Keith show starred Mike Keith. Just the obvious things, but we need to throw them out. Yeah. I'm really interested in this one. Not that I'm not interested in the other ones? Yeah. Yeah. But I'm really fascinated by this.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

We have today the director of baseball strategy for the University of Tennessee, Zach Stovall. He's a native of Huntland, Tennessee. Do you know their nickname? No, do you? Oh, yeah. Well, you're supposed to pick me up on that.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

They're the Huntland Hornets. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

No way.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

That's where John T. Majors went to school.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

That's right. He's the shortest center on the Huntland basketball team in the history of the division.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

So how many people did you graduate with at Huntland? 46. Yeah, 46. Huntland is first of all, it's a great place. I had that in my English class. It's a great place. Yes. Everybody likes to, you know, if you're cutting around through there, if you're on the way to John Daniels place down there, you uh who's Jack Daniels? Better known as Jack. Yeah. People called. If you know, you know. See, I don't know. Shout out. And then shout out Jack Daniels.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

The reason I wanted to bring Stove on is with the portal coming and obviously in basketball, and then it's right around the corner with us. Part of this analytical transition for college, it's not just giving the numbers to the players, which he does and he does in an astounding fashion, but it's also roster management. Numerous labels, I hate to say labels, but I guess being able to uh stay within budgets and how important that is now, he's almost in de facto GM. So I think that's kind of exciting for people to know of how you also are part of roster management. Yeah. You don't have to go out there for the 88 days in the summer and go grind out the evaluations, but by golly, do you put a number on them? With the portal opening here soon, we'll get you know all of the names flooding into the portal. I mean, it's it's over 10,000. Right. So you can't go through you can't go through all 10,000, right? But uh that's where you use numbers to kind of comb through where it's you know, you're looking for, you know, say we're looking for a certain type of pitcher, whether it's a breaking ball guy, VLO guy, whatever it may be, we can, you know, kind of sort through all the pitchers and say, all right, uh, show me the every pitcher who tops out at 100, right? And we can pull all that data and boom, there you go. There's the 70 pitchers in the portal that throw 100. I don't know that there's going to be 70 this year. Well, that would that would be that would be very nice. That's crazy. What is the average fastball velocity, let's say, in the SEC? In the SEC, right now it's probably around 92. You know, which in in the big leagues right now it's 95, and the SEC's been very, very close to what the uh major league average has been.

SPEAKER_00 3:13

In the 1990s, if he hit 90, he was really throwing hard. And when R.A. Dickey was here, oh, he was mid-90s. And he was mid-90s, that was incredibly unusual. We had Tim Hudson who played for years for the A's and the Braves. He went to Alburn and you know, he was a guy who threw hard. But I mean, it wasn't there was nothing like that.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

So when you're going into the bullpen with Coach Reynolds or you're breaking down film or numbers with pitchers after their outings, what are a few numbers that people might not know about that you are you are wired focus on? Outside of production, you're looking at, you know, kind of a couple different metrics on basically just how the ball's moving. So you've got induced vertical break, horizontal break, this one, which is basically induced vertical is basically telling on a on a fastball, when a guy swings underneath the fastball, they have a lot of induced vertical break. Ride, carry, what you've always called it for years when a guy has life to his ear. Um there's now there's a number that says that, right? That says it's not just movement anymore. Exactly. Elevator. Have you ever heard that? It looks like it's on an elevator. Bore, ride, carry, all of those words basically, you know, you can boil down to a couple different numbers. You've got induced vertical break, horizontal break, vertical approach angle, which basically just says how steep or how flat the ball is coming into the zone. Let me give an example. Evan Blanco, he for a guy that doesn't throw overly hard by the naked eye, it's 90, 92. It is left-handed. Why does he get so many bad pop-up misses from other teams? He has a ton of induced vertical break, creating ride, creating uh, you know, life on his heater where guys are always underneath it. They have to really fight to get on top of it. And then when they finally do get on top of it, here comes a slider to change up that thing that gets uh below the barrel. Wow. So that is why he he gets a ton of pop-ups and and swing and miss on his fastball. Zach, how'd you learn all this? The last three years from 21 to 23 before I came back to Tennessee. I was a video manager as a student, Ross Kibbett's number one assistant. Yeah, he worked a lot of our camps, worked a lot of the Chipotle runs and the Starbucks runs as well. Mandatory. I mean, mandatory runs. Could have used Uber Eats. We will we would have, but we had Uber Eats. I was Uber Eats. I was Uber Eats. You know, I graduated in 2020, got a job with the Texas Rangers, uh, first year in Loway with the Downeast Woodducks in Kinston, North Carolina, and then two years in Round Rock, Texas in AAA in the Pacific Coast League. Through that time, you play 120 to 150 games in a year and you're getting data from every game. You just learn so much from seeing it every day, seeing how it's working, how each guy's using it, how each guy's different. All of the mentors I had from there really, really helped me in how to use it as both an analyst and as an evaluator.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Did you find something in college here at Tennessee that allowed you to kind of further that in terms of what you majored in?

SPEAKER_01 6:11

Business analytics was my major.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

So Haslam guy. Haslam, yes, sir.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

One of our best. Joe Browns.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

But with the business analytics program, uh, you know, the number one thing that they teach is being able to convey your message to whatever audience you're talking to, whether it's to a player, a coach, a uh another analyst who can speak the same technical language, um, or you know, in in professional baseball, you've got players that don't speak the same language at all. So you've got to figure out how to convey data between English, Spanish, and at times Japanese, Korean.

SPEAKER_00 6:42

What do you think? When you were in the business school at the University of Tennessee? Honestly, what I'm doing right now, I liked it.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

I loved it. When I first came to college, uh, you know, I was a sports management major, switched to business analytics just to, I knew I wanted to work in baseball, wanted to be the, I mean, everyone calls it it's a it's a cliche, but the Jonah Hill from Moneyball, right? That was one of my questions was about money ball. You know, that was always something I wanted to do. And whether it was in professional baseball, college, um, scouting, whatever it may be, like using data to help teams win games. How do you manage the old school thinkers, whether it be on the coaching staff, on Twitter, or even in the clubhouse for guys that don't know numbers, to the new school, uh, all I care about is number. And how do you kind of buffer what's too much, what's not enough, and and be able to give the information that is then processed onto the field. You're telling them how many numbers do they want to hear. If you're an old school guy, you don't want to hear numbers. You want to hear the the verbiage, rye. This guy's life on his heater, this guy's breaker's really tight, or different things like that. Uh, for a newer school guy, you're gonna break down all the numbers. Yeah, your vertical approach angle is this, and your horizontal movement is that, and this is what we need to do to get your movement into this range. For an older school guy, it might be, yeah, just throw it a little harder. What are you doing during the games? Ooh, good one. We're looking at how the game is progressing, right? So when is it mainly is when you get deeper into the games. I mean, when you're in the first through fifth innings, whatever, everyone's just playing ball. You've got the starters in there, you're not really worried about matchups or anything like that. But when the game gets deeper, you start looking at relievers that are coming in. The other team's going to be matching up with our relievers. Uh, you're basically just looking at matchups, right? Where um I've got my game sheet that has basically every number that I would like to know uh whenever Coach E lander or someone would ask me a question on hey, is this a good matchup? So you're in the dugout. Yes. He stays to Coach E. Yes, right next to Coach E lander. And a lot of the times is when we're bringing in a pitcher, and a lot of the times we've gone, you know, righty lefty, lefty righty. When we go from, you know, Tegan to Appenzeller, Mac to Appenzeller, or you know, the main question is all right, we bring Arvidson in in this spot, are they going to pinch it this lefty? Yes. Okay, do we like the R versus this righty, or do we like Mac one more batter versus this this lefty? So it's mainly just a lot of questions on what do the numbers say.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

So Josh doesn't do the Lou Brown for major leagues where he says, Give me one. No, and well, maybe he says, you know, I got a feeling. I got a feeling there's more to it than that. No doubt. Although Lou Brown, one of the finest managers in the history. So what a winner. Yeah. He's an absolute winner.

SPEAKER_01 9:32

I'm just quoting a good movie. That's all. It is. When the whole thing. Yeah. How about when you're prepping for the series or for midweek? You're looking at when when the starter may come out, right? So, okay, Mac thawing thawing on Friday night, you get six innings out of him, and you're at this spot in the lineup. Do we want to flip the ball over to our next guy or do we want to let him keep going? You're basically looking at, all right, when situations get hairy, where do guys need to come out? Where do guys need to come in? Um, it's really just as simple as that. What what's the best matchup for these guys?

SPEAKER_00 10:05

So you don't have to be emotional or scared to give sort of an a suggestion to Josh E. Lander because you're all based on numbers.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Correct. Numbers have no feelings, so the objective decision is usually swayed by a number. Is that wrong? No, correct. I mean, if it's 50-50, we're gonna go with the number at the end of the day. What about when you're building a roster? How how can you in such an emotional business between scouts that go out and evaluate and numbers that you just said don't have emotion? How do you stay centered and keep, let's say, tempers uh mended or neutral when you're making discussions on rosters? Yeah. I mean, you're looking at what you need, right, from a pitching perspective. Do you have, you know, five or six guys you think could start for you on the weekend? Do you have five or six different looks coming out of the pin? You know, I mean, our our team this year, I would say, is one of the most varied bullpins we've had from, I mean, we have a guy throwing from his ankles, and then, you know, we've got Bo Rudy throwing out of his shoulder, we've got lefties, we've got different righty looks. You want to make sure that your bullpen doesn't all look the same because when you get to Sunday, you get deep into the game, the other team's going, hey, I've seen this guy four times already.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

Right.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

But if you got a guy who's looks completely different than the guys you've been throwing, it's a different look for the guy, and it might take a while for the other lineup to get adjusted. Interesting. What what about when you guys are putting together the plan for the summer and guys are starting to get in and get out? How do you stay objective with that? The reason I ask is obviously basketball is going through that now with their portal, and they obviously have a plan. You've spoken to Scotty before. Shout out Scotty. Shout out Scotty. That guy's really smart. So is what's your ACT? 34. Bummer. Couldn't be perfect. How do you have um the ability to stay neutral with what maybe it's the demand versus what the product is? Right. No, it it can be a little hard because you're around these guys all the time, right? And when you're looking at building a roster, you know, looking at what your needs are through the portal, I try to kind of stay a little further back from the action where um, you know, I'm I I don't want to be the only one saying we need this, this, this, and this, right? It needs to be a group discussion. So when we're all on the same page about what the team needs, then it's okay, let's go look at the numbers, let's go find a couple things that fit the parameters that we're looking for and building uh a successful team for 2026 and beyond.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

Our baseball team this year has had a lot of weird things happen.

unknown 12:33

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

Well, I but I mean I just you're clearly a baseball guy. You certainly are a baseball lifer. I've I've been following baseball for over 50 years. I live and die with baseball. I love baseball. My thing is, I mean, there have been so many unusual things happen this year. Is it just me as a baseball guy saying all of this happening has been incredibly strange? Or is there a percentage that would say the numbers, which don't lie? They don't. The numbers would say, I'm absolutely right that we have had a number of unusual happenings so far in the 2026 season.

SPEAKER_01 13:11

You look at a couple of different things that could go your way, whether it's, you know, like, you know, uh the way that the games have ended for us, uh, everything's flipping on a dime, things like that. Um, there have been so many strange things happening from a number standpoint, whether it's uh you know, balls not getting out of the yard, uh balls finding holes for the other team. Um, it's definitely been the strangest year that I've been a part of. On the other hand, no excuses. We've got to go out, we've got to finish, we've got to go out and produce and and and finish games.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

But as a baseball guy with no numbers involved, I'm saying that has to turn around. Right. Yes. I mean, it just can't. The baseball gods, yes, they be they come back and be nice to us. How much does it help you in your job that you are also a baseball guy? I mean, it helps a ton. Because not every guy who does your job is a baseball guy. Some are just mathematicians more. Like in Moneyball. Yeah. Jonah Hill is not a baseball guy. Well, and his character was based on Paul D Podesta, who was the Dodgers, and then he went to work for the Browns and now the Rockies. Now the Rockies.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

I didn't have the same playing experience that Coach Kivitt, all of our current players have the players that I had in professional baseball. So I had to learn from a lot of great mentors. Coach Kivitt, Coach E Laner, Coach Vitello from the years past, uh, and then all my mentors with the Rangers of okay, I'm the numbers guy. How do I get players and coaches to trust me? Oh. And it's basically it all it always comes back to the same thing. And I don't remember exactly who said this first, and I wish I did, but I've heard it a million times. People don't care about how much you know until they know how much you care. From a numbers guy who didn't play the game, players and coaches have to know that you care about them before you go to them and say, Hey, I think we should do X, Y, and Z. The other thing I to compliment Stovall, he doesn't come in and pretend like he knows more. He's not because old school guys like even me, who I'm I went to a state school in Kansas, I'm not that smart. And I listen to him talk, I'm going, come down to Earth and give me the that in layman's terms. And he's so good at it. If we were to send him out to go recruiting right now, go evaluate a player, he knows what he's looking at. And what is so awesome about having him as a resource here at Tennessee is I know what I see with my eyes, he verifies it with the numbers. So in the summers, when he might not be on the road for the 50, 60 days, he's grinding every day with us because it'll be a midnight call. Hey, I'm driving from Birmingham to Atlanta. This is what I saw. I just sent you the track, man. Tell me if I'm right. And it's like 45 minutes in the car at midnight on a Tuesday, and it's an unbelievable resource.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

See, this is what I think I would have tried to do had this been in existence. Yeah, well. When I was nope, nobody believed in. I mean, it was literally Lou Brown saying, I have a feeling. Yeah. I mean, that was that was really how it worked. But there were always guys on the bench who would say, Hey, I remember the last two guys that Smith faced Jones and he got him out with a slider. So let's throw him all sliders. So it's always been there, but when the whole money ball thing got started with Billy Bean and D. Podesta and the guys who really embraced it, you know, I saw how it changed in my time in the NFL. Bill Belichick read a guy's paper. No way. It's 100% true. A guy wrote a paper for his master's or for something about why you should go in these situations. And based on that paper and the analytics in the paper, Bill Belichick started going for it more on force down, and it started a lot of the NFL trend. There were already some college trends and high school trends from Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, Arkansas, who were already doing that.

SPEAKER_01 17:04

That's so crazy.

SPEAKER_00 17:05

But yeah, it was all based on analytics.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

And with you, too, you kind of brought a new and it's been copied in our league now of we tear out some players, especially high school players, because some of the rankings are a little bit skewed, right? And back when Coach Vitello was doing it 25 years ago, there was no rankings. He was going out and seeing them by word of mouth or whatnot. So now that there are, we're going through and going, hey, why don't you filter this through your system? And you would be shocked at how many top 15 players are passes in the high school ranks because it's like, hey, look at these. I'm not gonna call anybody out, but look at these data points compared to this guy that's ranked like Christian Moore in the 200s. It's like I'd rather have this guy. And I'm not going, hey, Stovol was the one that got Christian Moore, but it's part of it. Sure. It's a part of it. And and I think why we've recruited so highly over the last decade has been obviously work. And then Coach E. Lander is so smart with numbers being able to balance the original 11-7, but also we're finding some guys that no one's really on because we're using the numbers, because they match you, they match us metrically. Strikes is always going to be the number one thing here at Tennessee, which is why he pulls that luscious hair out some nights when some of the free passes. But we've gotten better at it. And then strikeouts is always a thing too, but it's not always crochet, for example. He threw 84 miles per hour.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

And I did his games on TV. And I never would have thought when I saw him pitching as a freshman, I never would have thought he would have become what he's become.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

Now, aptitude and work ethic, you always talk about that too, is part of the deal. But sometimes if he spins the ball the right way, Stove, am I wrong? Pitching guys always steal the smart guys in the room. They always hoard them a little bit. So with offensively, we have to like, hey, can we schedule Stovol for today? Um, but the numbers of pitchers that have made it to the major leagues or been drafted in the first round is a lot to do with how he processes.

SPEAKER_00 19:07

So he is the University of Tennessee's newest pride of hunt. I call him Jonah Hill because he gets on base.

SPEAKER_01 19:16

What does he do? He gets on base. He has to say it every time your right gets hit. We look in the dugout. He gets on base. I'm cute.

SPEAKER_00 19:26

Awesome. Well done. What's your favorite order at Calhoun's? Definitely the bacon wrapped burn-ins.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

Nice. You don't need a number sheet for that, do you? No, sir. Every time I always, you know, I've got a ton of family coming from out of town for these games. Go to Calhoun's first thing. Give me the bacon wrapped burnouts. Yeah. Shout out Calhoun.

SPEAKER_00 19:47

Calhoun, Calhoun. Thank you for sponsoring Cube's Corner. Zach Stovol, thanks for being with us. Well done. Thank you. We got more of the show right after this.