Ep. 61 | Kyle Winkler, Air Force Academy

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Host Ross Hawley sits down with Kyle Winkler, pitching coach for the Air Force Academy Falcons. Winkler was an All-Mountain West and All-America right-hander at TCU, a 10th-round pick, a two-time member of a Team USA national team, and a professional pitcher for eight years before returning to his alma mater as a coach and then taking the job in Colorado Springs.

The result is a conversation that works on two levels: what it actually takes to be recruited by a service academy — the grades, the test scores, the medical screening, the service commitment — and a detailed look at how he teaches pitching at altitude, where breaking balls behave differently and the inner third of the plate becomes the most valuable real estate on the field.

The highlights:

• The 45-minute phone call that moved his family from Texas to Colorado Springs in under a week
• Why the baseball program deliberately pushes players into leadership roles other schools would never hand them
• The academic and medical bar for an academy recruit, and how it narrows the board
• Service commitments, the pilot track, and the 100% employment rate at graduation
• The academy's pro policy, and the alumni who have made it to affiliated ball
• Team USA, a gold medal game in Japan, and shaking hands with Sadaharu Oh
• Why a pitching coach is an ego manager, and how he sends pitchers into a season confident
• Pitching backwards at altitude, and why the inner third is a honey hole
• A pitching philosophy short enough for any player to repeat

A Five-Day Courtship to Colorado Springs

Winkler was on staff at TCU in 2022 and 2023, back at the school where he had played, when Air Force's head coach started asking around for a pitching coach. Winkler describes himself as a little bit nomadic — eight years of pro ball moved him and his wife through a long list of states — and the challenge appealed to him immediately. Then came the phone call: 45 minutes long, with Winkler not saying a single word. He hung up and told his wife he wanted the job.

They flew up in August, his wife got to wear a jacket at night after a lifetime of Houston summers, and the whole thing was settled in about five days. He is direct that the mission and what his players carry are nothing like TCU's, and just as direct that this is the best job he has ever had.

Coaching at a School With a Different Mission

The hardest adjustment was simply understanding what it is like to go to school there. On top of a difficult STEM curriculum, the baseball staff wants its players in leadership positions rather than sitting in the back row, and deliberately puts them in situations his previous schools would never have allowed a player to handle.

"They don't get a participation trophy just for showing up to class."

Winkler says his players will be leading a large share of the military the day they graduate, so preparing them as officers is part of the job whether or not professional baseball is in their future — which is why the program asks for more than whether a player can hit and field.

What he did not expect was how much perspective the job would give him. The program surrounds its players with people who have been in real combat situations, and most of the players want to fly or go into special operations. He has coached in Omaha and calls it the best, and he will still tell you plenty of things at the academy have been just as rewarding. One quieter perk of the job is teaching physical education classes alongside the cadets — which is also how his shoulder finally gave out, in a racquetball class about a year ago.

What It Takes to Get Recruited

Baseball ability comes first, and recruiting nationally means the staff can pull from both coasts, Texas, and Florida. After that the filters get narrow fast. Winkler is looking for students carrying roughly a 3.8 or 3.9 unweighted GPA, and he notes that the average ACT score at the academy sits around 31. He says the school is top five in every engineering program and has the number two undergraduate business program in the country, and one of his current players wants to be an aeronautical engineer and design planes. Sitting in on road-trip tutoring sessions, Winkler jokes that he majored in eligibility and could never take classes there.

The math is unforgiving. He will watch a good player, pull up a 3.4 GPA — a solid A-B student having a good high school career — and know there is no shot. Then comes the medical side, which anyone who has been through an academy application knows: diabetes, asthma, even a peanut allergy can end the process. The last filter is personality, because a recruit has to want this life.

For parents: the academies carry a 100% employment rate at graduation and a five-year service commitment, which Winkler frames as a guaranteed job for five years. A pilot track runs closer to ten years plus about a year of pilot training, and a pilot who finishes flying fighters or transports tends to be an appealing candidate to a commercial airline.

The Draft, the Pro Policy, and Life After Baseball

Air Force currently has a pro policy, and Winkler points to two players drafted last season — one the Mountain West career home run leader and academy record holder, the other a two-time conference player of the year — who were both playing well in High-A and serving in the reserves as airmen. Paul Skenes spent two years at the academy before transferring to LSU, and Griffin Jax is an academy graduate who has pitched for the Twins.

So the opportunity is real, and Winkler says he does not want to recruit a player who is not chasing it. He also knows the number of professional jobs keeps shrinking, which is exactly why the pitch to recruits does not end at baseball: a Division I experience with an out-of-conference schedule that regularly includes SEC opponents, and a degree that sets up everything after.

"If that opportunity doesn't present itself, then we've prepared you for the next 40 years of your life."

From TCU to Team USA

Winkler played twice for a national team, once as a younger player and once in college, alongside a group that included Gerrit Cole, Sonny Gray, George Springer, and Mikey Mahtook. The moment he still tells people about came in the gold medal game against Cuba in Japan, when he looked up and realized Sadaharu Oh was at the game — the man who holds the home run record, watching him pitch.

Baseball also took him to the Dominican Republic, Taiwan, Japan, and Venezuela, and to Omaha both as a player and as a coach. The lows were just as real. His sophomore year at TCU he won a super regional at Texas by pitching game three to send his team to Omaha, then lasted a combined three innings across two starts once he got there. His framing for players now is that baseball is a wave: you ride it, you go down with it, and another one is always coming.

Riding the Wave: Coaching Through Failure

Winkler tells his players that failure is the ultimate teacher, because it shows what they did well and what they did poorly and gives them something to adjust. The trickier part of the job is managing how a pitcher feels about himself.

"Especially as a pitching coach, we're ego managers."

That means propping up the pitcher who is struggling and, sometimes, popping the balloon of the one who is going well so he knows there is still room to improve. Going into a season, Winkler treats confidence as the most important part of performance — ahead of stuff, sequencing, and command — so he wants every pitcher leaving the mound having done something positive. He points out that starters almost never get pulled when something good is happening; the closer is the only pitcher who gets a handshake for finishing his job. Knowing that helps a starter keep a rough exit in proportion.

The same discipline applies after outings at altitude. When a pitcher comes in frustrated that he hung a slider and gave up two runs, Winkler's response is to ask why they are talking about the two runs instead of the six innings, the eight strikeouts, and the fact that he just worked through one of the better lineups in an offensive league.

Pitching at Altitude

Elevation does not treat every pitch the same. A changeup with a lot of spin and action loses some of it; a splitter or forkball that takes spin away plays better. A high-spin fastball at the top of the zone is not the weapon there that it is elsewhere, which is part of why a sinker-slider-changeup mix fits. Trackman reports after games make all of it plain, and Winkler admits the numbers can be eye-opening.

That shapes recruiting. Because the staff has to pitch backwards in a conference full of good offensive clubs, the ability to spin a breaking ball and command it is a priority. Winkler's own influences point the same direction: he worked with Kirk Saarloos, a Cal State Fullerton product who was not a hard thrower and carved out a long big league career, and he was a reliever with Tampa Bay at a time when a pitcher who did not throw 60% breaking balls had no chance of being used.

Pitching Backwards, and Living on the Inner Third

Pitching backwards, in his definition, is simply throwing something other than the fastball anytime a fastball would normally be used. The first pitch of an at-bat is about gathering information, and an aggressive hitter sitting first-pitch heater is an invitation to spin one. Hitters want the fastball whether they admit it or not, so throwing a breaking ball in a 2-1 count plants doubt — and buys back the fastball in the next at-bat.

The other half is the fastball in. Winkler notes that hitters at every level complain far more about a pitch being east or west than up or down, because the inside and outside halves get hard to read when a pitcher works in. Most hitters plan to drive the fastball to the opposite-field gap and pull the breaking ball, which leaves them poorly timed for a fastball middle-in. So his staff jams hitters in off counts, without count leverage, then goes back to the outer half.

The instruction is deliberately simple, and he credits Saarloos for it: when going in, forget the height of the pitch and just get it in there, because the inner third is a honey hole few hitters consistently reach. When going away, height becomes the priority. Being fine on the inner half does not work; being aggressive does, and he can live with the occasional hit batter. In the bullpen his pitchers throw to dummies and to teammates standing in, with the catcher warning the hitter when something is coming in on his hands.

A Philosophy Anyone Can Repeat

Winkler credits a former college pitching coach of his for the idea that a staff's philosophy has to be short enough for any new player to recite on command. Theirs is one sentence.

"I throw my fastball aggressively and I attack with my breaking ball."

It also matches the head coach's one-word standard — attack — which is deliberate. Winkler wants the philosophy to sound as aggressive as the way he wants his pitchers to compete.

Winning Baseball, and Advice for the Next Generation

Winkler's advice for players coming up has nothing to do with tools.

"The winning player is not necessarily the coolest player."

Baseball talks about tools constantly, he says, but the most important player on the field is often not the one with the best ones. It is the leader, the player who does the things nobody asked him to do. Jogging down the line because you hit it back to the second baseman is not winning baseball. He would rather take a slightly less talented player who has been on winning teams and played for a summer program that demanded the game be played a certain way — and he wishes more players attacked their summers that way.

He would also rather push a player to play harder than tell one to take a step back, and he sees social media as part of that shift: a genuinely useful recruiting tool with a real downside. His example is Nick Saban, where the more impressive achievement was not signing five-star recruits but getting them to prepare, play, and act like they were not five-star recruits.

Off the field, Winkler's car is a Kidz Bop operation on the way to dropping his daughter at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo camp — he sneaks her some Blink-182, and admits the low point of his day is realizing he is halfway to work with Kidz Bop still playing. Left to himself he leans hard rock on satellite radio, with detours into country and whatever dance music his players are pushing on him. His closing message is that the academy is not for everybody, and that is the point.

"I can never repay my short time here to this academy with how much it's changed me and changed my family's life."

Episode Timestamps

Tap any timestamp to jump the player straight to that moment.

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 2:04 — How a TCU pitcher ended up at the Air Force Academy
• 4:26 — Culture shock, and the responsibilities cadets carry
• 6:02 — Why leadership is part of the baseball program
• 9:58 — Teaching PE classes, and a racquetball shoulder
• 11:10 — What it takes to be recruited by Air Force
• 12:22 — The academic bar: GPA and test scores
• 14:42 — The medical side of an academy application
• 15:21 — The service commitment and the pilot track
• 17:42 — Draft opportunities and the pro policy
• 20:18 — Prepared for the next 40 years
• 22:38 — TCU, the 10th round, and Team USA
• 25:17 — The lows, and riding the wave
• 26:50 — Coaching young players through failure
• 28:56 — Leaving the mound with something positive
• 32:54 — What stands out in a pitching recruit
• 34:18 — What pitching backwards means
• 38:32 — Working on pitching in with stand-ins and dummies
• 41:31 — A pitching philosophy anyone can repeat
• 43:27 — Advice for players coming up
• 44:05 — The winning player is not the coolest player
• 47:54 — Kidz Bop, Blink-182, and hard rock
• 49:54 — Dare to be different

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Kyle Winkler is the pitching coach for the Air Force Academy Falcons, a former TCU All-America right-hander, and an eight-year professional pitcher. Subscribe to the Baseball Forward Podcast for more conversations with the players, coaches, and leaders elevating the next generation of the game.