TAMPA, Fla. -- Desi Druschel hoped to be overseeing big league bullpens by now, ready to tackle his new job responsibilities as the Yankees’ assistant pitching coach. Instead, he and the club’s coaches continue to huddle behind the scenes, game-planning to be ready whenever their Spring Training begins.

Though the Yankees’ coaches still cannot speak with locked-out players, Druschel said they continue to discuss the best ways to keep them healthy and ready to perform once they arrive in camp. The injury issues related to 2020’s abbreviated Summer Camp are a “huge concern,” he said.

“It’s pretty easy to see what happens every year in Spring Training,” Druschel said. “You shorten that, you take away the communication -- in the pitching world, objective No. 1 is making sure that we’ve got our hands on the pulse there. People will have a close eye on that, there’s no doubt about it.”

Commissioner Rob Manfred has said that Spring Training must be a minimum of four weeks. Druschel said that he would prefer more time, noting that the Yankees’ Minor League pitchers are currently going through a six-to-eight week buildup to their April 8 Opening Day.

Whether big league camp lasts four weeks or more, the 46-year-old Druschel said that any amount of time will be valuable, considering recent changes to the Yankees’ coaching staff.

He is joining pitching coach Matt Blake and bullpen coach Mike Harkey in working with the team’s hurlers, hoping to build upon relationships that Druschel formed in the Minors and at the Yanks’ 2020 Alternate Site. Dillon Lawson, Casey Dykes and Hensley Meulens are new additions to the hitting coach team.

“I think part of it is bringing some of the things we’ve been doing on the Minor League side, trying to filter those off,” Druschel said. “We’ve been doing a lot of stuff with Edgertronics [high speed video cameras] and Trackman [ball tracking], and that’s my expertise. We’ve done all of that on the big league side, but we’ll be infusing a little bit more of that into daily practice and some game-planning.” 

Druschel spent the past three seasons as the Yankees’ manager of pitch development, coming off five years at the University of Iowa, where he served as the school’s director of baseball operations from 2014-17 and its pitching coach from 2017-19. 

Having overseen the Yanks’ recent Minor League minicamp, Druschel mentioned pitchers Ken Waldichuk, Hayden Wesneski, Matt Krook and Greg Weissert among those who impressed. Druschel said that the organization continues to plot how best to help those hurlers and others make a successful jump to the big leagues. 

“To me, the biggest thing is that they got there for a reason,” Druschel said. “So many guys show up in a new environment, they see Yankee Stadium and they think they have to do something different. For whatever reason, they change their routine, they change what they normally do. They just need a little bit of guidance, and that’s where the coaching comes into play.”