LI's Craig Hansen on cutting edge of baseball performance
Glen Cove's Craig Hansen, a former MLB pitcher for the Red Sox and the Pirates, at his Pro Pitch and Pro Athlete Labs, a state of the art biomechanics baseball facility on Feb. 20, 2026, in Garden City. Credit: Newsday/Howard Schnapp
Former MLB reliever Craig Hansen did not necessarily envision himself developing the next generations of baseball players.
But people always asked Hansen — who starred for Glen Cove High School in the early 2000s and then for St. John’s before pitching for the Red Sox and Pirates — about going down that path.
Now that he has, it couldn’t be better.
Hansen, 42, is the co-founder of Pro Pitch Labs, a baseball performance center and biomechanics lab in Garden City that has been operating since January 2025. Located inside the Professional Athletic Performance Center, the facility also includes the Hansen-founded Pro Athlete Labs, which focuses on development for all youth athletes regardless of sport. He and his staff work with everyone from 8-year-olds to MLB and minor-league players.
“It’s definitely rewarding because you see kids that come in, and some kids are extroverts, some are introverts,” Hansen told Newsday. “You kind of get the introverts to start building up, which is great, because once they come in, now you start seeing these kids start building friendships with each other. They might not know each other before they come in, but they become friends when they’re here. So it’s good to see the growth amongst athletes and amongst my coaches as well.”
Hansen was drafted 26th overall in 2005 by Boston, which signed him to an MLB deal, and he debuted that September. He was traded to Pittsburgh in 2008 but had a career-altering injury diagnosis in 2009 and made his last minor-league appearance in 2012.
The facility — co-founded by Alex Katz, a professional pitcher who played for Herricks High School and St. John’s — is a one-stop shop featuring mounds and batting cages, a weight room, physical therapy and more. It will host a book event on March 21 for “101 Lessons from the Dugout: What Baseball and Softball Can Teach Us About the Game of Life” by former Newsday columnist Ken Davidoff and Harley A. Rotbart.
Pro Pitch Labs uses Trackman technology, which MLB teams use to collect data and build individual reports. The lab also has an area for DARI Motion, a 3D-capture system that details strengths and deficiencies with each athlete. New Hyde Park’s Brendan Cooper specializes in biometrics for the lab, and he praised its ability to show athletes how their bodies work.
“We didn’t want to just open up any baseball facility here,” Katz said. “We wanted to separate ourselves from the rest.”
Hansen was only 25 when he was diagnosed with Parsonage-Turner syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that can cause numbness and intense pain in the affected shoulder and upper arm, followed by weakness, for years.
The righthander’s velocity plummeted from the upper 90s to the low 90s in 2009 spring training. Hansen was placed on the injured list that April with neck spasms but didn’t learn the exact problem until about two months later.
“So you think [your] career’s getting started, and what really kind of hit me was when I spoke with the nerve specialist in New York,” he said. “He told me it was Parsonage-Turner syndrome, first time hearing it.
“I was like, ‘What’s the recovery process? Like, how long am I out for?’ He goes, ‘Eight months to five years.’
“I just go, ‘Hold on. What do you mean?’ ”
The news presented both physical and mental adversity for Hansen, and neither he nor the Pirates’ trainers knew much about the rehab process. There was an instance in which he threw with his right arm and then his left; it felt exactly the same.
The main nerve target was in his neck, so he had to wait for that to die off, as well as the nerves in his right arm and right side of his back. That led to muscle atrophy, and Hansen threw his last MLB pitch on April 19, 2009.
He tossed six innings in the Mets’ minor-league system in August and September 2012, but he would not have feeling in his hand when he threw.
“It became a very hard mental battle at that point,” said Hansen, who finished his career with 93 2⁄3 innings pitched in four MLB seasons and no longer experiences these symptoms. “Once I stepped away from them, I was like, ‘You know what? I got to step away from baseball.’ I wouldn’t watch baseball for a couple years and wouldn’t look it up, nothing like that.
“So that’s when I got into real estate. I was like, ‘All right, life changes.’ ”
Hansen, who also works as an agent for Premier Talent Sports and Entertainment, worked in real estate investing after playing and still does. Pro Pitch Labs provided the window he needed to get back into baseball.
“Craig always would say, ‘If I build it, they’ll come,’ ” said Michael Dorcean, one of the lab’s coaches and a five-year Division I catcher. “So he built it, and they’re definitely coming.”
Long Island Ducks pitching coach Bobby Blevins, one of the lab’s coaches, called working with Hansen a “one-of-a-kind” opportunity.
“Craig is awesome,” he said. “He’s really down-to-earth. He’s an old-school baseball player. When he was playing, the analytics and all these numbers and technology wasn’t all there. So it’s an interesting opportunity for us, and him having me come on board with him. To develop with what’s going on in the industry of baseball is a special moment.”
Ben Dickson is Newsday Sports' general assignment reporter. He joined Newsday’s high school sports staff in 2023 after graduating from Maryland, where he covered several of the Terrapins' teams.
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