Which Pitchers With New Pitch Usage Should We Care About? Part Six

May 6, 2021

Eric Samulski continues evaluating starting pitchers who have developed new pitches for 2021 to determine if these additions to their pitch mix will increase fantasy baseball value and make them breakout performers.

Throughout all Spring Training, we hear about pitching adding new pitches, or making major changes to their pitch usage. We even get to see those new pitches in action and dream about their potential impact. However, when the regular season starts, those changes can be abandoned and pitchers go back to what they do/know best. So it's important to continue to track these new pitch or pitch mix developments into the regular season to see what is here to stay and what is just a passing fad.

So far, I have covered some of those potential changes over the course of four articles already. Check them out here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

As with the other versions, the working premise of this article is simply that a pitcher throwing a pitch more isn't always a good thing. If it's similar to a pitch the pitcher already throws or is used to target the same area of the plate then it doesn't always add anything to the arsenal and may even take away from the effectiveness of a pitch he already throws. So instead of blindly celebrating that some pitchers are throwing a certain pitch more, we need to look at whether or not it makes the pitcher any more effective. From there I tried to give you a simple verdict as to whether we should care about this new development or not.

Jose Urquidy, Houston Astros

Slider

Coming into this season I was incredibly high on Jose Urquidy. He has great control metrics, and his pitch mix seemed tailor-made to make the most of each pitch, giving him an array of options with which to attack opposing hitters. The beginning of the year started out rough, but Urquidy has begun to right the ship of late, and I remain on board. However, I do have some concerns that we'll dig into here.

For starters, Urquidy's pitch mix is still perfectly tailored to work in tandem with each other.

You can see from the graphic above that his entire pitch mix seems designed to pair up his pitches. His fastball and change approach the batter at near-identical trajectories while the curveball and slider also start their journey to the plate looking like very similar pitches. That creates deception between the fastball and change as well as deception between the curve and slider. However, his fastball and curve have movement that nearly mirrors one another, while the change and slider also have movement that nearly mirrors one another. That means the fastball and curve can play well off one another while the change and slider can too.

In short, all of his pitches seemed design to work with other pitches in his arsenal to make them more impactful. We love to see that, but it also means that when one of his pitches isn't effective and he has to scrap it, it can make the pitch it plays off of less impactful as well. I'll put on my English teacher hat and use the metaphor that his pitch mix is a carefully knitted sweater, but if one thread is out of place and you start to tug on it, the entire thing can come undone.

One of the key pitches to that sweater thread this year appears to be the slider. After drastically altering the shape on the slider coming into the 2020 season (adding 10 inches of horizontal movement), Urquidy has doubled down on the slider, upping the usage from 13.1% to 21.6%. As a result, his curveball usage has dropped from 11.9% to 6.6%. These aren't big differences, but it's a bit of a curious decision considering the curveball was actually a better pitch for Urquidy in 2020 at limiting hard contact.

However, when we look at just 2021, we can see that, despite the higher CSW%, the curveball is registering minimal swinging strikes, while the slider and change-up are performing much better as swing and miss pitches. (Graphic from Alex Chamberlain's pitch leaderboard).

This is where we get to my concern from earlier. We mentioned that, based on mirroring movement, the fastball and curve play well off of one another. Well, Urquidy's fastball is averaging 91.9 mph after being 93.1 in 2020. Much of his struggles early in 2o21 have been because the four-seam was not as effective as it had been, which could also have impacted the success of the curve as he started using the four-seam less. However, in his last start, his fastball was up to 93 and maxed out at 94.7, which is a good sign. He used the fastball and change primarily in that start but still chose to throw the curve less than the slider. While the curve and slider both had CSWs over 30%, they are still not registering consistent swings and misses so far this season.

VERDICT:

Moderately harmful. I'm not sure throwing the slider more is the path for Urquidy. It doesn't get hit hard and has a solid swinging-strike rate, but it's getting hit while the changeup has been getting more swing-and-misses. Since neither one of his two breaking pitches is a true "out pitch," I think Urquidy would be better off leaning on that fastball-change pairing but throwing his two breaking pitches more evenly instead of being more slider-heavy.

Chris Flexen, Seattle Mariners

Cutter and Curve

When the MLB was shut down last year, and the only baseball on TV was the KBO, I dove in fully. I covered KBO DFS on this site and recorded games so that I could watch them later. I simply wanted baseball back in my life, but I also grew to appreciate the KBO game as well. While doesn't feature over-powering fastballs and elite athleticism like the MLB does, it does showcase craftsmanship and baseball IQ.

As a result, there might not have been a better place for Chris Flexen to spend a year. The right-hander left the majors after the 2019 season with only 67 innings under his belt. He featured a pitch mix that relied heavily on a low-90s fastball, a solid but unspectacular changeup, and a cutter that he seemed to throw all over the strike zone. None of it had led to much success.

After a season in the KBO, he's come back with an arsenal that features his cutter while also incorporating his offspeed pitches more at the expense of his four-seam fastball. In the video below, I explained why it's been a good change for him:

By throwing the cutter slightly harder and with a bit less vertical break, the pitch pairs better with his four-seam. While that hasn't made the four-seam more effective, he has seemed to make his cutter more effective, and that's what we care about since the cutter is now his primary pitch. Flexen has also showcased much better command of the cutter than before he left for the KBO. He keeps the pitch rather consistently on the outside half of the plate to righties, approximating a slider in some ways, while also allowing him to jam lefties inside.

He has also started featuring his curveball more, throwing it 15.1% of the time, after only 3.6% before he left for the KBO. It has a big 12-to-6 break and is actually a pretty solid pitch that pairs well with his cutter and changeup. It also allows Flexen to feature a pitch that attacks low and out of the zone. Since he doesn't really attack high in the zone often, he has basically taken a normal strike zone and shifted it down a few inches; however, he still is varying the locations of each of his offerings.

VERDICT:

The new pitch mix is a big improvement for Flexen. His four-seamer simply isn't a good pitch, and he should not be throwing it nearly 60% of the time. He has identified his better pitches and is throwing them more often and with better command. That is objectively a positive development. This doesn't all of the sudden make him a fantasy stalwart that you can plug-and-play in any matchup, but it certainly makes him fantasy relevant and a good streaming option in the right matchups.

Alex Wood, San Francisco Giants

Slider

Alex Wood has come out of the gates this year (albeit delayed by injury) on fire, registering a 1.50 ERA, 0.67 WHIP, and 26.6 K-BB% in three starts. His BB% is at (what would be) a career-low 4.7% and his swinging strike rate is at a career-high 14.5%. A big reason for that early success has been the introduction of a slider.

Now, Wood introduced the slider last year, but he only threw 12.2 innings, so it's tough to treat it as a full year of throwing the pitch. This year, he's added two inches more horizontal and vertical movement, which could just be a byproduct of the lighter baseball, but is also throwing the slider 10% more. He's had tremendous success with it, compiling a .118 batting average against, .147 slugging against, and 47.5% whiff rate. In fact, I looked into what the slider does for his overall arsenal below.

If we go back to Alex Chamberlain's pitch leaderboard, we can see the incredible swing-and-miss ability of the slider, as well as the way in which it pairs well with the sinker to give the sinker more called strikes than the norm.

Before adding in the slider, Wood was mainly a sinker-curve-changeup- pitcher and while the curve wasn't a bad pitch, it didn't miss bats like this slider does. On top of that, the curve had more vertical movement, which might seem good on the surface, but the more vertical movement caused the pitch to differentiate much more with the changeup and sinker, which made those pitches easier to identify and, thus, less effective.

VERDICT:

Tremendously impactful. To me, this makes Wood a new pitcher. It drastically changes his arsenal and makes all of his other pitches better as well. Considering the Giants' track record for guiding veteran pitcher rebounds, I'm buying into Wood and expect him to be an effective fantasy arm while he is healthy.

Dustin May, Los Angeles Dodgers

Update: After this was written and published on May 4th, May was injured and removed from his start. It is being reported as a UCL injury which means his season is over; this is a real bummer for a player who was breaking out. 

Curve and Four-Seam Fastball

Dustin May has been one of the most GIF-friendly pitchers since he arrived in the major leagues. However, he weirdly had a hard time missing bats for having such electric raw stuff. In 2020, May had only an 8.4% swinging strike (SwStr) and 26.3% CSW rate (called strikes plus swinging strikes). Those are both below league average rates.

In 2020, his best swing-and-miss pitch was his curve with a 16.4% SwStr and a 31% CSW; however, he only threw the pitch 13.4% of the time. In 2021, he's upped his curveball usage to 22.9%, his second-most used pitch, and it has returned a .051 xBA, .096 SLG, and a 46.2% whiff rate. It's clearly his best pitch and part of that, in my opinion, has to do with the added five inches of horizontal movement, which gives the pitch more sweep and causes it to mirror better with his sinker, his main pitch.

I covered that in the video below:

In addition to throwing the curve more, May has also upped the usage of his four-seam fastball from 5.5% to 18.2%. It is still a complementery pitch and doesn't get a lot of swings-and-misses on its own, but the value is in how it pairs with his curve and sinker.

If you look at the spin direction graphics, you can see how the four-seamer and sinker leave May's hand and approach the plate at basically the same trajectory (pictured left), yet the sinker has almost 19 inches of horizontal run, so it deviates from the four-seam on its way to the plate. By using the four-seam more, hitters aren't able to sit on May's sinker because they can't be sure which fastball they are seeing until it's often too late. That's the perk of throwing 98 mph.

The four-seam and sinker also mirror well with the curve, which we can see in them being almost on directly opposing sides of the clock in the left image. That means that the pitches move as mirror images of one another, in opposing directions. As we've discussed before, that's something that pitches strive to achieve. Thus, by using his curve and four-seam more he's not only relying more on a good pitch (the curve) but adding more deception to his most used pitch (the sinker). As a result, the sinker has seen its whiff% rise 8% and May's SwStr% is up to 16% while his CSW is up to 34.3%, both major improvements.

VERDICT:

Incredibly impactful. Somebody with May's raw stuff should not have been missing so few bats. This new pitch mix might help him become a fixture in the rotation and a fantasy SP2-3 for the remainder of the 2021 season.

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