Alex Wood was preparing for his first full season with the Dodgers in 2016 when then-general manager Andrew Friedman approached him in the team’s spring-training clubhouse and handed him a three-page analysis of his pitching patterns.
“The gist of it was that I was one of the best in baseball at getting to two strikes — I was elite, like in the 99th percentile, of getting to 0-and-2 and 1-2 counts,” said Wood, a left-hander who had been traded from Atlanta to Los Angeles the previous July. “But I was at the bottom third of putting guys away.