About

Brian
Bannister

Major-league pitcher turned front-office pitching architect. Three clubs, one World Series ring, and two decades spent on a single question: what actually makes a pitcher better?

The art major

He studied art before he studied pitching.

Brian went to USC as an art major. That is not a footnote. It is the whole method. Art school teaches you to look at a thing until you actually see it, to notice the difference between what you assume is there and what is there. He turned that on the pitching delivery, then on pitch design, and eventually on entire development systems. The name PA.I.NT is not an accident.

The front office

Three clubs. One ring.

He was one of the first former players to cross fully into analytics-driven pitching development, and then one of the few to run it. In Boston he built the pitching development department and won a World Series. In San Francisco he directed pitching for a staff that became a case study in what modern pitch design can do for arms nobody else wanted. In Chicago he advises on the same thing at the organisational level.

That work was documented in The MVP Machine, the book on how player development was rebuilt around data. It has spilled outside baseball too, including collaborating with engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober on the physics of pitching.

Why this exists

The process should not require a front office.

Everything Brian ran at the major-league level came down to a repeatable loop: assess the pitcher honestly, design a program against that assessment, and develop it forward while watching the workload. Big-league pitchers get that loop with a staff of specialists behind it. Almost nobody else gets it at all. PA.I.NT is that loop, built to run for a fifteen-year-old with a phone.

The record

Where he has been.

  1. Then

    Major-league pitcher

    Pitched in the big leagues for the New York Mets and Kansas City Royals, and spent the whole time reverse-engineering why the pitches that worked, worked.

  2. 2016–2018

    Vice President of Pitching Development, Boston Red Sox

    Built and ran the pitching development process for a club that won the 2018 World Series.

  3. 2019–2023

    Director of Pitching, San Francisco Giants

    Led pitching development for one of the most analytically aggressive pitching operations in the game.

  4. Recent

    Senior Advisor to Pitching, Chicago White Sox

    Advising on pitching development and acquisition across the organisation.

Start with the assessment.

The same first step every pitcher he has worked with takes: find out what kind of pitcher you actually are before you train like one.

Find your pitcher type