RADIO
Eric Samulski evaluates starting pitchers who have developed new pitches for 2022 to determine if these additions to their pitch mix will increase fantasy baseball value and make them breakout performers.
I'm excited to start year number two of this column. Last year, I began the column in spring training with the simple premise that pitchers throwing new pitches is cool but that not all new pitches should be treated equally. Some can be missing pieces to an arsenal, while others can just be an unnecessary distraction. I never anticipated that this series would win the FSWA Award for Best Ongoing Baseball Series, but I was honored and giddy that it did.
Writing this kind of content is what excites me the most since it was just part of my everyday thinking as a catcher. I always wanted to know what my pitcher felt comfortable throwing or what was working that day and then spent all game trying to lay out the pieces of the puzzle. When I called a pitch, I tried to not just think about what that pitch would do in that present moment but how it could also set up other pitches two, four, six at-bats down the line. So diving into this is a labor of love, and the recognition for it was super cool.
With that out of the way, we're going to move into the new season. Be sure to also check out the rest of my articles in this "Pitchers With New Pitches" series for analysis and deep dives on more starting pitchers.
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Premise
As a refresher on the premise, I fully believe that a new pitch can be exciting on its own, but it also needs to be a complement to what a pitcher already has. Instead of just celebrating that some pitchers are throwing new pitches, we want to watch the pitch in action, see the quadrants of the strike zone where it would be most effective, and look at the Statcast Spin Direction graphics to see if this new pitch might actually make the pitcher any more effective. From there, I'll try to give you a simple verdict as to whether or not we should care about this new toy or not.
It's also important to note that for many of these pitchers, this is the first time they've thrown these new pitches in a game situation, so the overall quality and consistency may get better over time, and I've tried to take that into account in my analysis.
Finally, for the purposes of this article, I will also be including pitchers that have re-worked or revamped a pitch to make it "new" even if it wasn't technically a pitch they already threw, like Tyler Mahle's slider a couple of years ago.
Gerritt Cole, New York Yankees - Cutter
You don't necessarily look at the first pitcher off the board in fantasy baseball drafts and think, "You know, I wish this dude had another pitch." However, Cole is not Yu Darvish with an outlandish array of offerings. Last year, Cole threw 47% four-seam fastballs and then mixed in a slider 22% of the time and then a change and curveball around 15% each.
While the curve wasn't great last year, it's been a solid offering for Cole in the past, and he truly does throw all four pitches fairly well. However, as has been discussed a number of times, Cole struggled to adapt to MLB's crackdown on sticky stuff. While the right-hander did struggle with the spin rate and effectiveness on his fastball, the notion that it ruined his season is overblown. Cole had a 0.51 ERA in August and had a pretty strong month of September that was ruined by two bad games, resulting in 12 earned runs allowed in 11.2 innings to Cleveland and Toronto.
Cole also saw the swinging strike rate (SwStr%) on his fastball increase in the second half of the 2021 season, going from 13.7% in the first half to 15.5% in the second half. The pitch also had a 3.25 deserved ERA (dERA) in the first half and 3.42 dERA in the second half, so it wasn't really performing much worse. Similarly, the slider had a 34.5% CSW and 1.18 dERA in the first half and 34.6% CSW and 2.70 dERA in the second half, so his two primary offerings remained rock solid pitches.
Still, the idea of Cole adding another pitch to take the pressure of off his fastball and slider is actually a good thing. The slider, although effective, did lose two inches of vertical movement in the second half of the season, which caused a dip of over 3% in the SwStr% on the pitch. His change-up and curve remained fairly average in both halves of the season, with the changeup being the better swing-and-miss pitch, but the change did lose vertical movement and give up more hard contact in the 2nd half, so Cole could be even better with a more consistent third pitch.
So how would a cutter fit in?
Well, for starters, you can see from the Spin Direction graphics below, how the cutter approaches the ball at a similar trajectory to both the fastball and the slider but is in between both in terms of both movement and velocity.
In action, the grouping would like like this:
VERDICT: MINIMALLY IMPACTFUL. Based on the spin direction of Cole's arsenal it would seem that a pitch that moves down and in on righties would fill a gap in his movement profile, while this cutter attacks an area where he already uses two primary pitches. However, we can hope that he continues to play around with his changeup and can be satisfied with the cutter providing an interesting wrinkle in the meantime. I'm going to approach this pitch as a Call-A-Friend pitch; Cole would rather pitch without needing it, but if his fastball or slider lose their effectiveness in any start, he now has something else in the bag he can go to in order to navigate those rough starts.
Logan Gilbert, Seattle Mariners - Slider (re-shaped)
When the offseason began, I wasn't sure how to feel about Gilbert. I knew about the talent he possessed and was impressed with the way he responded to adversity last year, but I wasn't sure the leap would come this season. However, by March, I was all aboard the hype train.
There are a few reasons for this. The first is hearing about his offseason throwing program. Without any contact with the team during the lockout, Gilbert was left to his own devices, so the youngster called up fellow Stetson alumn Jacob deGrom to pick his brain. The two worked together to have Gilbert throw to the glove side more but also to re-shape Gilbert's slider to make it harder and shorter. The thought was to make the slider easier for him to control and also distinguish it more from his curveball.
I loved the initiative Gilbert showed in making this change on his own, but I also loved how he looked with the new arsenal in the spring.
He kept the fastball up and the breaking pitches down, and the hard-tight slider seemed to pair much better with his fastball. Below, you can see the difference between the 2021 slider and the 2022 slider, as well as the way the slider plays off of the curve now.
The harder, tighter slider will play off the fastball better, which will make it harder to distinguish between those two pitches. The distinction between the breaking balls is also important to give hitters a different look, and you can also see out of the hand how the two breaking balls pair pretty well coming out of his hand. This also giving him better control is just a chef's kiss.
VERDICT: ABSOLUTELY IMPACTFUL. While I think Gilbert's maturity and intelligent approach to his arsenal is almost as important as the new slider, I think the new slider could be a big deal for him. The harder velocity and minimal drop make it tunnel better with his fastball, which will create more deception between those two offerings. Differing it from the curve will now cause him to have three unique pitches that can be played off of one another in pairs. Considering he also claims to have better control over this slider, it's just a major win on so many levels.
Drew Rasmussen, Tampa Bay Rays - Cutter and Slider (re-shaped)
Drew Rasmussen's pitch mix is an interesting conundrum. Last year, Rasmussen was 95% fastball and slider. It was part of the reason he was a reliever with the Brewers, but the Rays threw him into the rotation after they acquired him and he did pretty well despite making no real changes to his pitch mix. Even as a starter, he threw his third pitch, a curveball, just 5% of the time with just a 3.8 SwStr%. Blegh. That won't work.
So the question over the offseason was whether or not Rasmussen would add a third pitch. Early reports were that he was adding a "sweeper," a slider with hard horizontal movement across the plate. However, what we saw when he took the mound was actually something different.
It seems as though what Rasmussen did this offseason was re-shape his slider to be a bit more of a sweeper and then add a cutter. His slider in 2021 had only 3.7 inches of horizontal break at 86.4 mph, but the slider he showcased during the first game had 11.2 inches of break at 85.8 mph. Not a massive velocity difference but a big shift in the amount of sweep across the plate.
The reason for that is clearly so that his cutter could fill the gap in movement in between the slider and four-seam fastball. His new cutter was 90 mph in his first start with 29 inches of vertical movement and just one inch of horizontal movement; hence, why Lance refers to it as a bullet slider above.
Lance was a huge fan of the pitch in the first outing:
However, this might be a case where we're back where we started. The cutter was pretty effective in the debut, registering a 20 SwStr% and 40% CSW on just 15 pitches, but Rasmussen's slider got hit hard. It registered just a 5 SwStr% and had three balls hit over 100 mph. In fact, on the day Rasmussen allowed 10 batted balls hit over 90 mph in just four innings en route to allowing two runs on three hits with three strikeouts. That's not great.
VERDICT: POTENTIALLY MODERATE IMPACT. I just can't fully buy in here. Yes, the new cutter is interesting and those swinging strike rates from one game are intriguing. However, Rasmussen now has a three-pitch mix that's four-seam, cutter, and slider, with three pitches that attack the same up-and-out quadrant of the plate and nothing that moves away from left-handed hitters. Also, if the new slider keeps getting hit hard then he really remains just a two-pitch pitcher. I'll certainly keep an eye on him in his next starts, but this isn't making me overly excited about him as a fantasy asset yet.
Kyle Wright, Atlanta Braves - Curve (re-shaped)
While Kyle Wright has not enjoyed much success at the Major League level, with just a 6.04 ERA across 76 innings, it's important to remember that Wright is still just 26 years old and was once the top pitching prospect in the Braves' organization. So while the clock is ticking on his fantasy usefulness, it's not yet time to give up on the right-hander. In fact, maybe we should be buying in.
At Triple-A in 2021, Wright pitched to a 3.02 ERA with a 24.2% strikeout rate in 137 innings. He also showed a much-improved 8% walk rate, which is important considering control was a big issue for him in his previous call-ups. As Elliott Baas covered in his recent article, Wright was also a jack-of-all-trades and master of none type of pitcher, with a five-pitch arsenal and not one true dominant pitch.
However, Wright looked good in the spring and had success in his first outing, throwing six two-hit innings against the Reds with six strikeouts. Part of the reason for that success may also be a declaration that Wright is moving away from the pitcher he has previously been, and it all starts with the new curveball that I discuss in the video below.
As Elliott mentioned, Wright threw the curve a career-high 40.8% of the time and generated eight of his 12 whiffs with the pitch. Since it's kind of a hybrid of the slider and his previous curve, it seems like Wright may be almost meshing the two, cutting down on the amount of pitches he throws and optimizing his arsenal for pitching pairing and strikeouts.
As you can see in the video above, the trio of sinker-curve-change could be a nice combination for Wright to attack different parts of the strike zone and remain deceptive to hitters. Similarly, the Spin Direction graphic below shows how the sinker and curve are near mirrors of one another, but also how the changeup and sinker approach the hitter at the same trajectory, with the sinker having more arm-side run.
That gives him two pairs of pitches that work well off of one another, which is something we love to see. Considering his sinker has run and was up around 95 for much of his first outing, this new pitch mix, plus renewed control, could be a big step forward for the right-hander.
VERDICT: MAJORLY IMPACTFUL. Now, remember that the major impact here is that the pitch has taken Wright from being completely off our fantasy radars to being on them. That's a huge change, but we're not rushing out to add Wright everywhere yet. I like that he has gotten rid of a bad pitch (the slider) and made a good pitch better (the new curve). I also like that he is throwing this good pitch more. I also like that he's controlling all of his pitches more and that his arsenal is now toned down and pairs well together. Sometimes, less is more. However, it's only been one start, so I need to see more, but I am absolutely moving Wright onto my watch list and I would recommend you do the same.
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