Ivan Arteaga is in his first year serving as the Cedar Rapids Kernels' pitching coach, but he’s far from being a rookie when it comes to working with young pitchers in the Twins organization.

After bouncing around the minor leagues for much of the 1990's with the Expos, Rockies and Mets organizations, the Venezuela native began coaching young pitchers for the Twins organization in 2001 and he’s been helping to develop the organization’s young arms ever since.

Arteaga spent several years as the pitching coordinator for the Twins’ Venezuelan Academy and coached at both Rookie League levels before serving as the pitching coach for the Class High-A Fort Myers Miracle a year ago. This season, he and Gary Lucas (the 2013 Kernels pitching coach) traded assignments, bringing Arteaga to Cedar Rapids.

Several hours before game time, you can find Arteaga - often sporting a shirt with the word “ZONING” across the back - working with his pitchers in the Kernels bullpen down the right field line at Veterans Memorial Stadium.

Recently, he agreed to sit down and talk about his work with the Kernels and the Twins organization.

MSR: First things first. What’s with the ZONING shirt?

ARTEAGA: We’re trying to implement, as an organization, visualization, focus, concentration – actually throwing the ball to one spot without thinking how to throw the ball.

MSR: The secret to doing that, according to the coach, is visualization.

ARTEAGA: First, you know what you throw in certain situations and you know where you want to throw it, right? That should be how we pitch. Knowing your strengths and your weaknesses and how to apply that to the hitter's tendencies. So zoning is basically, we’ve been working for the last couple of years on having the pitchers visualize the pitch before they throw it. OK, I have an 0-0 count, I want to throw a breaking ball, I don’t want to throw it down in the dirt, I want to throw it for a strike. So I’ll visualize the pitch how I want to throw it.

MSR: Arteaga was quick to point out, however, that it’s not a cookie-cutter approach to teaching pitching.

ARTEAGA: Everybody’s doing it for the most part, (but) everybody has his own way of doing it. Getting into the process of thinking about pitching and throwing the ball, not thinking about the process of ‘How do I throw the ball? My mechanics are off, or this or that.’ You throw the way you throw and it’s kind of hard for us to change that.

MSR: It’s not that pitchers don’t need to work on mechanics, of course, but those thoughts are ideally confined to the bullpen workout sessions. Pitchers can’t afford to be thinking about that kind of thing on the mound during games.

ARTEAGA: You shouldn’t and if you’re doing that, then something’s wrong.

MSR: While he’s an advocate for the Zoning philosophy, Arteaga doesn’t believe that simply subscribing to the approach will assure a young pitcher’s success.

ARTEAGA: I don’t think that success will be dictated by the Zoning or by how you run or by how you lift or if you sleep enough or how heavy you are or how skinny you are. Success is a combination of all those factors, plus talent. Success is how you put together the whole package - mental toughness and talent all together and you apply that into the game.

MSR: Arteaga has been entrusted this season with a number of the Twins organization’s top pitching prospects. Some were high draft choices, others highly coveted international signings, but the coach sees similarities in what each of the pitchers on his staff must overcome.

ARTEAGA: Facing adversity, because that’s the main thing. The game is full of adversity. I’ve seen guys with a lot of talent, but they cannot get people out. And I’ve seen guys with lesser talent that are just great, because they’re mentally tough and they know how to apply their talent to the game and to the hitter's tendencies. So, to say that the guys that are pitching well are doing the Zoning and the guys that are not are not doing it, I don’t think that would be very smart on my part. I think that everybody’s doing it, it’s just that this is a level where everybody’s so young and so inexperienced. There’s a lot of things they’re working on at the same time. Holding runners. Getting in a routine. Playing every day. Some of these guys just worked on Saturdays or Fridays. Now they come to the ballpark every day.

MSR: While subscribing to the Zoning philosophy, in itself, won’t assure success, Arteaga believes there is one thing that a pitcher must develop.

ARTEAGA: As a pitching coach, if I have to pinpoint to one thing that is going to make these guys succeed throughout the year, it’s mental toughness. Mental toughness is part of the Zoning. Mental toughness is part of who you are as a pitcher when adversity strikes. Adversity could be having a cold, you’re sick. Maybe homesick. That’s adversity. It’s just the way it is.

MSR: It’s hard sometimes to imagine that such things can enter into the mind of a professional ballplayer when he’s on the mound during a game, but it happens.

ARTEAGA: It’ll be there. But how do you set your priorities straight, being able to put all that aside and go and perform?

MSR: One thing you hear a lot about with pitchers spending their first year or two as professionals is that organizations try to limit the number of different pitches they work on in a given season. A pitcher who threw a variety of pitches in high school or college sometimes seems to focus on just a fastball and one variety of off-speed pitch early in his professional career. Do the Twins or Arteaga take that approach with the Kernels’ pitchers? There’s no one answer to that question, according to the coach.

ARTEAGA: Always depends on the player. Always.

MSR: Arteaga does not believe there is a single right approach.

ARTEAGA: If I tell you that there’s a philosophy out there that is successful, everybody would be doing it. So everybody’s different and as a coach you have to fluctuate, not only man to man, player to player, but day by day. There are some days that will be cold, some days will be rainy. You have to learn to adjust to that and as a coach you have to let the guys pitch and learn.