Robin Lund’s unusual route from college professor to Tigers pitching coach

Ryan Jacobs wishes he could have recorded a few of the conversations, talks that involved an old friend, a bright thinker, a man who, somehow, went from college professor to MLB pitching coach in less than five years.

The first of these talks came a few years ago, when that old friend, Robin Lund, called Jacobs out of the blue.

Jacobs and Lund go way back to the early 2000s, when Jacobs was an assistant baseball coach at Northern Iowa and Lund was a first-year professor. Lund dropped into the baseball office one day and introduced himself, told Jacobs he had a background in baseball.

He had played in college, coached for five years at Spokane Falls Community College and had a couple of other stops along the way. He now had a doctoral degree and was a professor of kinesiology, but he wanted to stay around the game. Lund worked for a few years as Northern Iowa’s volunteer strength coach. He assisted with the program until UNI dropped baseball in 2009. He still kept in touch with head coach Rick Heller, who went on to coach at Indiana State.

Jacobs became the softball coach at UNI, and as Lund’s daughter, Abbie, got more serious about softball, Lund’s interest grew, too. He was often conducting studies or somehow linking his classroom work in a way that could help the softball team.

So the passion for the game — that sizzle in his heart — never left. And finally, 16 years in academia had been enough. Being a tenured professor comes with a long list of great benefits, a good salary and job security chief among them. But tenure also comes with more meetings, more of the dull minutiae that consumes the academic world. Lund, basically, was growing bored. His mind was like a Christmas gift, wrapped tightly, just begging to be opened.

So he called Jacobs with a question: What do you think it would take to get back into coaching?

Jacobs was not quite sure what to say. First, he was surprised Lund would leave his tenured position. Secondly, he knew Lund was a genius of a coach, someone who could thrive at any level. But thirdly, he also knew it wouldn’t exactly be easy for Lund to convince anyone else to hire a professor 20 years removed from actual coaching.

The conversation ended, but the thought stayed in Jacobs’ mind. In the summer of 2018, he reached out to Lund, offered him a position as a volunteer coach for the UNI softball team. He told Lund the job wouldn’t have to interfere with any of his classwork.

“He was all-in by the end of the summer,” Jacobs said.

Lund’s time as a volunteer coach at UNI turned out to be short. The following January, Heller reached out and hired Lund as an assistant baseball coach at the University of Iowa.

That led to a few more conversations Jacobs wishes he could revisit now. There were administrators and other professors on campus who were shocked Lund would leave UNI. He had a six-figure salary, a cush teaching job and — thanks to Jacobs’ softball program — an outlet for his athletic passion. What more could you ask for?

“I told them, ‘He’ll be in the big leagues in five years,’” Jacobs said.

Of course, Jacobs got some odd looks.

Seriously?

“They couldn’t believe me,” Jacobs said, “until I explained to them that he’s the unique piece to the puzzle that the sport is looking for.”

Lund spent his early days with the UNI softball program sitting back, watching, observing. He was, oddly enough, a hitting coach.

“For the first month of practice, he barely said a word,” Jacobs said.

Slowly, Lund found ways to introduce new ways of thinking. Ever a student of technology, he had all 25 players on the team go through sessions, measuring data like exit velocity and launch angle with the help of Blast Motion sensors or Rapsodo radars. He compiled all the data, went home to his couch, and within a couple of hours sent out a comprehensive report.

Lund helped Jacobs reimagine the team’s offensive identity. He knew the team had some slap hitters and some power hitters. One thing they could all do was hit doubles.

“OK, what’s the anatomy of a double?” Jacobs said, giving an example of Lund’s teaching. “This is what we’re looking for. These are the metrics we’re going to use to try to get there, and if we can get into this range with all these separate metrics, that’s our goal.

“And he could present it like, ‘This is gonna work,’ and they just all bought in hook, line and sinker.”

In his short time at UNI, Lund helped revolutionize everything about the program. Suddenly every event was charted and measured. Even players on the bench had a job during games. Lund would input data from Rapsodo or Blast Motion and put it into his own spreadsheets. UNI still uses all of Lund’s systems four years later.

“He would get in arguments with Rapsosdo and Blast to make their information more user-friendly for him to take it and put into his own stuff,” Jacobs joked. “They didn’t want him to do that.”

Lund would take that data and present it to players, explaining the concepts and helping them understand how they could improve. As a professor, he taught biomechanics, statistics and anatomy. He had a holistic view of athletic performance and the best ways to measure it.

Jacobs, though, says Lund’s biggest talent is his ability to talk to anybody in any room. Academics, coaches, students, old people, whomever. Jacobs also calls Lund a master of the “15-minute PowerPoint” — adept at taking a complex concept, narrowing it down and presenting it in a way that gets through.

“Half of (the players) were in his classes,” Jacobs said. “He could stand in front of the room, and they were already at attention, and whatever he was gonna say was gonna be what they were gonna do.”

Long before anyone was even using “analytics” as a catch-all phrase for the use of technology and data in baseball, even before “Moneyball” was published, Lund was at the forefront of the game’s evolution, even if he did not fully know it at the time.

Lund was a certified strength trainer. He had a doctorate in exercise science from the University of Idaho. And beyond that, he devoted his free time to constant studying and reading, learning more about sports, craving a better understanding of how the human body works and how it can perform at its best.

“Robin was constantly doing stuff that a lot of guys weren’t doing during those times,” Heller said. “He was one of those guys at the cutting edge, and nobody knew about it.”

Said Jacobs: “His knowledge is on a different level, but if you challenge him with something he doesn’t know, that’s when you really see the wheels turn.”

(Courtesy of Brian Ray / Hawkeyesports.com)

All those changes in baseball? They helped spark a chain of events that led Lund to a bigger hitting job at Iowa.

In the winter of 2018, the New York Yankees were in the process of revamping their organization, focusing more on development and seeking out some of the brightest minds in the game. The Yankees hired away two of Heller’s assistants. Desi Druschel is now an assistant pitching coach in the major leagues, and Joe Migliaccio is the organization’s hitting coordinator.

It was early January. The college season was about the start. And Heller had just lost his two most important assistants.

“Pretty catastrophic to lose your hitting coach and your pitching coach a week before the season starts,” Heller said.

Luckily for Heller, he knew a couple of people. Former MLB pitcher Tom Gorzelanny had just retired and was hoping to transition into coaching. Heller brought him aboard as pitching coach, knowing it might be a short-term fix. He also called Lund, whom he hoped was ready to dive all the way back into the coaching world.

Lund had originally gotten out of coaching in an effort to provide a more normal life for his family. But even when Lund had been teaching, he stayed connected and visited Heller’s camps at Indiana State. He conducted studies on the program, analyzed its base running and how the team might be able to find small advantages on the margins.

“I made a call to Robin and I said, ‘Hey, you want to jump out and give up a 16-year tenured professor position to jump into baseball?’” Heller said. “The other two times I called him, the timing just wasn’t right with his family, and this time it was.”

Heller, too, had a few memorable conversations before the hire was official. He had to explain to his bosses why he was about to interview a professor for a power-conference coaching job. Heller’s administrators asked: Are you sure?

“I said ‘Hey, No. 1, when he comes in for the interview it will take him about five minutes for you to realize he knows what he’s doing,’” Heller said, “and that this will be one of the best hires we’ve ever made.”

Even Lund’s backstory is a little baffling. He lives in a world of structure and data, but his own life story is far from systematic.

He was born in the Canadian town of Peace River, in northwestern Alberta, known for its rolling hills and natural valleys. Lund fell in love with baseball, and after the eighth grade, his parents allowed him to move in with a host family in Lewiston, Idaho, so he could continue chasing his dreams in the sport. He went on to play at Spokane Falls Community College and later at an NAIA school until that road reached its end. He got a bachelor’s degree in education from Whitworth College in 1995 and a master’s degree in exercise science from Eastern Washington before earning the doctorate from Idaho.

Along the way, he became a bit of a renaissance man, an excellent chef in addition to a baseball guru and a respected professor. He’d often make lunch for his students on the last day of the semester.

Smoked pork, sautéed onions, garlic, kale and cheese! pic.twitter.com/aSzFRGeT05

— Robin Lund (@Lunderton) June 27, 2022

At Iowa, Heller often marveled at Lund — not just his knowledge of biomechanics and advanced stats, but at the easy way he went about teaching and translating concepts to the players.

It lines up with Lund’s reviews on ratemyprofessors.com, the site practically every college student consults before booking classes for the upcoming semester. Lund’s reviews on the site almost all share a common theme: Take this guy’s class.

“Dr. Lund is the best professor that I had at UNI,” one student wrote. “I was told that Biomechanics is a very hard class but Lund teaches it very well and uses real-life examples.”

Several students noted Lund’s humor and ability to tell stories.

After one year at Iowa, Heller came to Lund with another idea. He wanted him to become the Hawkeyes’ pitching coach. Again, outside the box might be putting it mildly. Here, Heller wanted to take a former professor who had specialized in hitting, and he wanted to turn him into a Big Ten pitching coach.

“I don’t know if you know it yet, but your skill set is absolutely crazy with what is going on in the pitching world, and you’re gonna kill it,” Heller told Lund. “You’re gonna be the best pitching coach there is.”

Even Lund, Heller says, thought the suggestion was a little overboard.

“He looked at me like, ‘What the heck are you talking about?’” Heller said. “But that’s what ended up happening. Robin dove in and spent time with the best guys out there and read constantly and researched constantly and watched video constantly. It wasn’t long and he was absolutely killing it on the pitching side.”

(Courtesy of Brian Ray / Hawkeyesports.com)

If you step back, it all makes too much sense. In the major leagues, baseball’s stylistic evolutions have had a cause and effect. Launch angle prevailed largely because teams employed the shift to suck up ground balls and shallow line drives. Strikeout rates went through the roof in part because of increased launch angles and in part because pitchers are throwing harder than ever. MLB just had a leaguewide ERA of 3.96 largely because the rise of technology and pitching labs have made it possible for pitchers to craft breaking balls to their liking, to measure every pitch, to watch the ball come off their fingers in slow motion and analyze everything with the help of coaches who — like Lund — almost act more as scientists.

“(Baseball) changed for him,” Jacobs said. “It combined his two worlds.”

Over the past two seasons at Iowa, Lund sent seven pitchers to MLB organizations. The 2022 Hawkeyes ranked second nationally in hits allowed, third in strikeouts per nine innings and fourth in ERA.

South Dakota State transfer Adam Mazur became Lund’s pitching Plato. He earned Big Ten Pitcher of the Year honors and was drafted 53rd overall, Iowa’s highest selection since 1990.

“I don’t think there could have been a more perfect person for me to learn from than Robin,” Mazur said this past summer. “With him having a Ph.D. and a teaching background, it really helped me learn because he was able to explain things in many different ways. If I wasn’t understanding the first way, he was explaining it.”

Jacobs was not stunned went Lund left Northern Iowa. But Jacobs never thought Lund would leave the Hawkeyes after just four seasons … at least not until he thought about it a little more.

“Once again, it was a comfort zone that you didn’t think he would leave,” Jacobs said. “But I just don’t think Robin is a comfort-zone guy. I don’t think that’s something he’s motivated by. He’s definitely more motivated by the challenge, and he wants to work with the best.”

In November, Lund accepted his newest challenge. The Detroit Tigers hired him to be an assistant pitching coach at the big-league level.

In Detroit, Lund will work closely with lead pitching coach Chris Fetter, who only a few years ago was also coaching in the Big Ten at Michigan. Lund will focus largely on biomechanics. But his job will also be to function as another set of eyes — and perhaps another invaluable voice — for Fetter and veteran assistant Juan Nieves.

“One of the things Robin emphasized when we brought him into Detroit was he doesn’t want to overcomplicate his role,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said. “He just wants to be an assistant pitching coach and help players get better. … When Fett’s looking right, he’ll look left. When Fett’s looking left, he’ll look right.”

The Tigers won only 66 games last year and have been stuck in a rebuilding phase for too long. But since Hinch (who doesn’t permit his assistants to do media interviews) took over as manager before the 2021 season, the team’s coaching staff has been among its biggest strengths. After adding Lund and revamping the hitting department this offseason, the Tigers have been promoting their “development-centric” staff to free agents.

When they added another pitching coach, the Tigers wanted someone forward-thinking, someone familiar with tech and data, someone with a thirst for knowledge and a drive to win.

There are a lot of smart people out there who fit the criteria. But they also wanted something else.

A teacher.

“He’s been teaching his whole life, whether it’s in the classroom or on the field,” Hinch said. “I love the upside of how he can reach different players and us as coaches to make us all better.”

(Top photo: Courtesy of Brian Ray / Hawkeyesports.com)