Pitchers With New Pitches - Should We Care for Fantasy Baseball? (Part Six)

June 17, 2023

Eric Samulski evaluates SPs who have developed new pitches for 2023 for Part Six of his FSWA-award-winning series. Will these starting pitchers be fantasy baseball breakouts?

Welcome to the third season of the FSWA-award-winning series Pitchers with New Pitches (and Should We Care), where we take the simple premise that not every new pitch should be greeted with praise. A new pitch, like a shiny new toy, might be exciting on its own, but it also needs to be a complement to what a pitcher already has.

So instead of just celebrating that some pitchers are throwing new pitches, I watched the pitch in action, checked in on its performance, and looked at the Statcast Spin Direction graphics to see if it might actually make the pitcher any more effective. From there, I will try to give you a simple verdict as to whether or not we should care about this new toy or not.

This is one of my favorite things to write, so I hope that you enjoy it. You can keep track of all of the pitchers I've been tracking and my evaluations here. It's important to note that this is the first time many of these pitchers have thrown these new pitches in a meaningful game, so the overall quality and consistency may get better over time. I've tried to take that into account in my analysis. We should also note (for the purposes of this article) that I will be including pitchers that have reworked or revamped a pitch to make it "new," even if it was technically a pitch they already threw.

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Logan Webb - Reshaped slider

We've got our very first mid-season pitch change to cover in this series. These are always fun but often the hardest to spot because one or two game samples could just be nothing. However, in the case of Logan Webb, we have confirmed that he did indeed change his slider beginning in his May 14 start against the Diamondbacks. In his next start, Alex Fast caught the new slider in action.

Then, when I went to Alex Chamberlain's Pitch Leaderboard, I was able to see the exact spec differences with the pitch. The top image below is BEFORE the change to the pitch and the image under is AFTER the change.

As you can see, the pitch is not meaningfully faster or with more spin, and the vertical release point is just a touch different. However, the horizontal movement jumps from 9.2 to 13.7, which is what Fast noticed in the tweet above.

So has the new slider been better?

In many ways, the answer is clearly "Yes." The pitch is allowing fewer fly balls and fewer hard-hit fly balls. It's allowing less meaningful contact overall and has far better predictive ERA metrics. The CSW jump is also massive despite Webb not actually getting more swings and misses on the pitch, which means that he is doing most of his damage on called strikes.

Considering his two main other offerings are a sinker and a changeup that bore hard in on right-handers, using a more sweepy slider that dives away would logically lead to batters freezing a bit more. As a result, the contact against Webb seems to be getting worse. Overall, Webb had a 3.46 ERA before the change with a 22.6% K-BB% and a .417 SLG allowed. Since the change, Webb has a 2.51 ERA with a 16.7% K-BB% and a .304 SLG allowed.

So this new pitch mix with a "sweepier" slider is leading to softer contact and better ratios (WHIP included) but fewer strikeouts. Considering this is now a five-game sample size, I think that's enough to go off of. His only true bad start since changing the slider was in Colorado, so we can give him a pass there.

VERDICT: MEANINGFULLY IMPACTFUL. 

Listen, you weren't drafting Webb for his strikeouts. He had just a 20.7% strikeout rate last year. The jump you saw early in the season was nice, but Webb was always drafted as a ratio suppressor and a potential source of wins on a good team. Since this new pitch mix seems to be a better avenue for him to be that exact type of pitcher, I would say it's a meaningful change. You'll lose some of the strikeout upside, but again, you probably planned for that anyway. Or should have.

Jon Gray - Slider

Last year, Jon Gray joined the Sweeper Revolution, eliminating his old slider and adding a new one that had 10.2 inches of horizontal break. He threw the pitch a whopping 35.5% of the time and actually had great success with it, posting a .157 batting average against, a 40.3% whiff rate, and a 21.1% SwStr%.

So naturally, his solution was to throw the sweeper LESS often. Wait, what? This season, Gray dropped his sweeper usage to 14.3% and added back his old bullet/gyro slider that gets just 3.7 inches of horizontal break. That new/old slider is the one he uses primarily, throwing it 20.4% of the time.

The result? Gray has been crushing it with a 2.32 ERA, 0.96 WHIP, and a .198 batting average allowed despite seeing his K-BB% drop to 15.2%. A big reason for that is that last year, Gray struggled due to a lack of depth in his arsenal. He also featured a solid changeup, but he basically only threw the changeup to lefties and threw the sweeper primarily to righties. This made him a two-pitch pitcher to each side when paired with his four-seam.

But here's the other thing, Gray's four-seam is just average. It doesn't miss a lot of bats (10% SwStr%) this year and has allowed a .275 batting average in both seasons. So by being a two-pitch guy and having one of those be that four-seam, Gray was also an incredibly inconsistent pitcher.

Now, he throws the gyro/bullet slider to both righties and lefties, which allows him to show a deeper arsenal to batters of either handedness. That has led to important success against lefties, who hit .248 off of Gray in 2022 but are hitting just .215 this year.

The tighter gyro/slider is also allowing the four-seam to play up a bit more as a swing-and-miss pitch since it tunnels better with the pitch and creates deception. In fact, the SwStr% on Gray's four-seam has improved in each month this year, going from 6.8% in April to 9.7% in May to 18.7% in two June starts. Of course, the velocity has also ticked up from 94.9 mph to 96.2 mph as well.

VERDICT: MEANINGFULLY IMPACTFUL. 

I was already going to say meaningfully impactful before we saw that strikeout upside may be coming as well. Gray's deeper arsenal makes his foundation stronger, which makes the solid ratios seem realistic. However, the added velocity on the fastball in the warm months means we could get some strikeouts to go with that, too. Now might be the time to try and buy.

Braxton Garrett - Cutter

We'll end this article with a traditional new pitch. Braxton Garrett added a cutter to his arsenal this year and is throwing it 17% of the time while dropping his four-seam usage from 24.9% last year to 7.5% this year. In fact, Garrett has only thrown one four-seam (according to Statcast) in his last three starts.

The cutter itself has been a fine pitch for Garrett, allowing a .222 batting average against and posting an 18.5% whiff rate; however, that .222 batting average does come with a .317 xBA and a .651 xSLG, which raises some eyebrows.

Considering Garrett is only throwing his cutter to righties, we should look and see if it's leading him to perform better against them this year. Last year, righties hit .280/.346/.455 off of Garrett with a 22.6% strikeout rate. This year, righties are hitting .273/.307/.459 with a 24.4% strikeout rate. So despite a small uptick in strikeouts, there are no meaningful gains there.

However, the two places where the cutter appears to help most are in allowing the slider to play up and allowing Garrett to forget about the four-seam. Considering the cutter has a more similar movement profile to the slider than the four-seam, Garrett is able to create a bit more deception, which you can see in the video below:

That has led to the slider posting a .193 batting average (down from .220 last year) and a 25.6% SwStr% (up from 22.2% last year).  Similarly, the four-seam had just a 7.5% SwStr%, a .531 SLG allowed, and a 5.30 dERA in 2022, so not throwing that pitch is certainly raising Garrett's floor.

VERDICT: MARGINALLY IMPACTFUL

I do wish the cutter itself wasn't allowing a 17.2% barrel rate with those clear x-stat gaps, but the pitch is certainly better than the one he subbed out. It makes his best pitch even better, so those are positive changes. I still think Garrett needs his slider to do most of the heavy lifting and then just hope one or two of his sinker, cutter, and changeup show up each night. It can certainly work, but it's also a tightrope to walk that could lead to some bad starts.

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