Dugout Aces: Pensacola's Pitching Coach Pairing

Off to their best start in franchise history, it doesn't take much searching to find the principle reason for Pensacola's record-setting opening to the 2019 season. 
They've got one of the best pitching staffs in baseball.
Over the first two months of the season, the Blue Wahoos have sat firmly at the top of pitching leaderboards. No team in baseball at any level majors or minors has shut out their opponents more. Their team ERA has been the lowest in baseball for most of the season. No Double-A team has struck out more batters. No minor league bullpen has registered more saves.
While the Blue Wahoos possess a pitching staff stocked with top prospect talent like Brusdar Graterol and Jorge Alcala, a pair of less heralded names have worked behind the scenes to play a major role in Pensacola's success on the mound and in the standings: Cibney Bello and Justin Willard, the team's dual pitching coaches.
On the surface, the arrangement seems unusual, both for its uniqueness in minor league baseball and for the differences between the two pitching coaches.
On paper, there aren't too many similarities between the pair.
Bello was signed by the Mariners at age 16 before he could finish high school in Venezuela. Willard has a Master's Degree. Bello has two decades of experience as a player and coach in professional baseball. Willard has coached in the minors for one season and was in elementary school when Bello's pro career began. Bello is a native Spanish speaker, soft-spoken, and overwhelmingly friendly. Willard, a Canadian, is astute, articulate, and fiery.
Despite their differences, on the field, the two function as one entity.
"We are literally one person," Willard said about the coaching arrangement. "It's very much a collaboration. In the dugout, we're always talking, we're always seeing what's next. We both have our ideas, but we collaborate and decide the direction we want to go."
For decades, professional baseball teams have had a nearly universal coaching staff set up. Each team has a manager that focuses mainly on strategy, hitting, and fielding. Alongside the manager is a bench coach, also focused on strategy, hitting, and defense. Then a hitting coach and a pitching coach round out the staff. In all, most teams have three coaches focused on hitting and just one to work with the entire pitching staff.
In 2018, the forward-thinking Twins saw what seemed to be a common-sense opportunity to even out their coaching staff at the minor league level and give their pitching prospects more resources to help in their development, pairing Bello and Willard as dual-pitching coaches with their A-affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
The experiment was an immediate success. Top prospects like Graterol, Jordan Balazovic, Jhoan Duran, Blayne Enlow, and Bailey Ober all had terrific seasons under the tutelage of Bello and Willard. The results were so impressive and the two coaches, who had only met for the first time in Spring Training before the season, worked so well together that the Twins moved the pair up two levels to Double-A Pensacola in 2019, where the results on the field have been even more dramatic.
The two work so successfully together because of the tremendous respect each has for the other as both a person and as a professional.
"He's amazing," Bello said of Willard. "He is something else. He's very good and very humble. There is no ego. It's my pleasure to have the opportunity to work with him."
Willard's praise of Bello is equally effusive.
I will tell you straight out, he's one of the most phenomenal people you will ever be around. He's an amazing communicator. He can relate with anybody. He sees the best in people no matter what. And the baseball knowledge he has is incredible."
It's also their differences that make them successful together as their unique personalities and skill sets complement the other's.
"He's an amazing communicator. I'm more analytically minded," Willard said. "I'm more process minded. I can look at the numbers and figure out what they mean and how they can impact the player to make them better. Then, we get together and get the best message to give to the player to help them get better."
Although each has unique skills, they haven't developed rigid roles and specific duties one coach does that the other doesn't over their two seasons together.
"There's never a situation where we think 'Your job is to do this and my job is to do that," Willard said. "We both have our own strengths, but we're one person, one big organization."
"We are both here for one reason, to be a pitching coach for the whole group," Bello said. "There is no difference between us. When we have a decision to make on pitch selection, on who is going in, on who is going out, we're always communicating. That has been the key part of our goals."
As more and more of the pitchers coached together by Bello and Willard find success on the field, the use of multiple pitching coaches is likely to become more frequent around the game. The Twins themselves brought on a second pitching coach at the Major League level in 2019, pairing Wes Johnson and Jeremy Hefner together, and have watched a staff that ranked 22nd in the league in ERA in 2018 jump into the top 10 through the first two months of 2019.
"I think there will be a lot of teams that catch onto it," Willard said. "It's slowly starting to trickle down in our organization and others."