DAVE KENNEDY/Sun-Gazette Crosscutters pitching coach Jim Gott answers questions during media day at Bowman Field before the start of the Williamsport Crosscutters 2021 season.

Jim Gott has spent more than 40 years in baseball. But he’s found in recent years he’s had to make adjustments.

The game has changed in recent years as the rise of analytics has changed how the game in both viewed and taught. Gott, now 61, has had to learn about the analytics of the game if he was going to continue to be relevant as a pitching coach.

With the Williamsport Crosscutters he’s hoping to blend a mesh of old school ideas with new-age information to connect with young pitchers looking to make their way into pro ball.

“You better evolve as a coach or you won’t be around. That’s just the way it is,” Gott said during the Cutters’ media day Sunday at Bowman Field. “There are a lot of my contemporaries who have really struggled with it. I’ve been lucky to be around some great people in Sam Fuld, Mike Calitri and Gabe (Kapler). Gabe was huge with the analytics and I learned so much in the last three years in regards to the analytics.”

Gott spent the last three seasons as the bullpen coach for the Philadelphia Phillies as they made a dramatic shift toward analytics as part of development under previous manager Kapler. Gott found himself in the middle of the shift. But it was a shift he could see coming in the game as much as 10 years ago when he began working as a minor league pitching coach in the Los Angeles Angels organization.

It was back around TrackMan technology — which tracks pitch speed, spin rate, release points among much more data — was becoming prevalent in minor league baseball. He also began to work with Rapsodo machines, which measure similar information to TrackMan but from a ground level. And he could see even then the game was taking a turn toward using this information in a developmental process.

Now, 10 years later, Gott is understanding players these days are growing up with this type of information at their fingertips. By the time they get to pro ball, they already understand how the information can be beneficial to them.

“These kids are coming from places where this is the way they’re learning the game,” Gott said. “So when I come to them and say ‘do you get this feeling with this,’ or ‘do you see what I’m talking about with that?’ Unless there’s a technological backup on that, it’s hard to get the buy-in from the player. They understand spin rate and all these other things. They might not understand how to work with it, but they understand it as a reference point.”

Learning what all the numbers mean has allowed Gott to expand his depth of knowledge about pitching. A veteran of 554 major league games with the Blue Jays, Giants, Pirates and Dodgers from 1982 to 1995, Gott still trusts his eyes. But he’s learned how to use the numbers to point him to issues he might not be able to see from the dugout.

“I’m able to make tweaks that I might not have been able to see before,” Gott said. “Whether it’s a grip or a release point or something in their body not being in the right spot, I can see it. It helps me make them the best they can be by maybe adding a pitch, subtracting a pitch or modifying a pitch. And those are things I an only do with analytics.”

Coaching in the inaugural season of the MLB Draft League is different than what Gott has been used to in the past. He’s got a stable of pitchers who are on a very minimal pitch count limit as they try to get in work prior to July’s MLB draft. He also doesn’t have the background information or rapport of having worked with these players in the past as he did when he was working with one professional team.

So that means simplifying his coaching to the most basic of terms. The goal is to find a way to make sure these players get the most of their opportunities. So he has a list of basic ideas he wants his staff to follow.

• Pound the strike zone.

• Understand how important first-pitch strikes are.

• Win the 1-1 battle.

• And keep pitch counts to a minimum.

That final point isn’t necessarily just about maximizing their time on the mound during this summer of baseball. It’s also about giving their future managers and pitching coaches options in their use.

“I’m still old school enough that we’re preparing these guys to pitch in the big leagues and as starters their value is winning games in the seventh, eighth and ninth innings,” Gott said. “I know the analytics say go through a lineup twice and then bring in someone else. But keep your pitch count down and make your manager make that decision when it comes time. And as far as a reliever is concerned, the value of having low pitch counts is you’re healthier, you’ve available in more days, and that gives you so much more value to yourself and to the team.”