Kiefer Lord entered the pandemic with an 81 mph fastball and an abundance of time.
The senior at Menlo School in San Carlos, Calif., was “a slightly above average high school player,” he said three years later. He earned all-league honorable mention distinction for the Knights and committed to Division III Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. The plan was to play baseball, earn a computer science degree and eventually embark on a cushy software career.
But though the pandemic took plenty, it provided an unforeseen opportunity.
“I realized, ‘I’m playing baseball in college and I have all this extra time. I might as well try to learn about pitching mechanics and how to throw harder,’” UW’s ascendant ace said Tuesday. “So I started doing a bunch of research on mechanics and lifting and training to try to learn how to throw harder.
“I would go to the park, film myself and just pick one thing to work on for that bullpen [session]. I’d see how it looked and keep chipping away at that one thing until it looked better. In three months I went from 81 to 90 [mph], which was pretty absurd. That’s when I realized, ‘Oh, if I just try to figure this thing out, I can figure it out. It’s possible to learn how to get better.’”
It helped, of course, that Lord experienced a simultaneous growth spurt — from 5-foot-2 and 95 pounds as a freshman to 6-2, 165 in his senior year. That, plus copious research and repetition, yielded increasingly competitive results.
In Lord’s freshman season at Carleton in 2021, he went 1-5 with a 5.14 ERA in 42 innings.
In his sophomore season — after adding another 5 mph to his fastball — that record improved to 4-1, with a 1.65 ERA and 81 strikeouts (with only seven walks) in 49 innings.
Mechanically, methodically, Lord chiseled himself into a Pac-12 pitcher. It’s like Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding said in “The Shawshank Redemption”: “Geology is the study of pressure and time. That’s all it takes, really: pressure … and time.”
“The summer before my sophomore year I went from topping 90 to hitting 95 [mph], which was another crazy jump. I think at that point I realized I could possibly play pro ball,” said Lord, who transferred to Washington last offseason. “That’s when I started thinking about transferring to somewhere I could get more exposure, more opportunities for development and that type of stuff.
“So that moment of hitting 95 for the first time, that was definitely a turning point, I would say.”
At Washington, the 6-3, 195-pound junior has continued applying pressure. His riding four-seam fastball sits at 95 mph and tops out at 99, paired cataclysmically with a put-away curve. With two constantly improving pitches, Lord entered this weekend’s three-game home series against Rhode Island with a 3-0 start and a 1.19 ERA, as well as 31 strikeouts and just six walks in 22.2 innings.
“He’s an interesting case study, because he was a strike thrower before he threw hard,” noted UW head coach Jason Kelly. “Now with the velocity development, he really hasn’t missed a beat on the strike throwing part of it. His fastball command is kind of what sets him apart. Most guys that are 95 to 99 don’t throw as many strikes as he does, and he has pretty legit pitch characteristics.
“He’s got high spin rate. He’s got high vertical break on his ball. The development of the curveball has really allowed him to use the entire strike zone with his fastball and have a devastating pitch to throw with two strikes, or when he’s feeling really good with it and throwing it for a strike. That makes it really hard on hitters, because it really controls the height of their eyes and what they can see. They end up chasing a high fastball, because that curveball’s been a strike. So it’s been a deadly combination.”
So deadly, in fact, that Lord twirled six perfect innings and struck out 10 in a 6-0 win over Northern Colorado on March 4 — earning Perfect Game National Pitcher of the Week and Pac-12 Pitcher of the Week honors in the process. He followed that with a 5-2 win over Utah last week, surrendering three hits with zero earned runs and five strikeouts in 5.2 innings.
On Tuesday, Kelly — whose 12-3 Huskies have won 11 of their last 12 games — acknowledged that “I don’t know if ‘surprise’ is the right word, but [Lord] is way better than we thought. You think about a kid from a D3 school that had pretty good numbers, obviously. But you’re always going to doubt that and think, ‘At this level, we’ll see what happens.’ Since the day he faced our guys or faced outside competition, he’s been dominant almost every time.”
Dominant enough, perhaps, to earn MLB draft consideration this summer.
But Lord — who’s also developing both a changeup and a slider — is hardly done applying pressure.
“He’s just a really good kid to be around,” said Kelly, who returned to UW this offseason after serving as the Huskies’ pitching coach from 2013 to 2019. “He’s really intelligent and takes a view of this thing not like a lot of kids his age. It’s a very systematic view of how to get better.
“Most kids are kind of at the [whim] of their coaches. He’s not. He’s going to continue to progress. Ninety percent of the things he wants to do he brings to me and asks, ‘Hey, can we try this? Can we try this?’ He’s really taken it into his own hands.”
Three years, three schools and three states ago, Lord discovered that drastic improvement was possible.
All it took was pressure and time.
“It’s really, really surreal, for sure,” Lord said of his journey from San Carlos to Carleton to Seattle. “I look back on three years ago, what I thought my life was going to be, and I thought I was going to go to Carleton for four years, get a computer science degree and go work a software job. That’s a good career path; it’s something I’m still interested in.
“But to have everything just completely shift and have this massive change in such a short period of time, it’s pretty crazy.”