After wrapping up our position player rankings last week, we turn our attention to the league’s pitchers, starting with the bullpens in the bottom half of the reliever rankings.

It’s impossible to project relievers. The pitchers themselves are random enough, sprouting new pitches or gaining five ticks on their fastball with no prior warning. Pitchers also tend to get injured, especially the ones who go max effort on every pitch. And then there’s the randomness of 60-inning samples, where a fly ball sneaking just past the glove of a leaping outfielder can catapult an ERA from respectable to disastrous. This is all to say that the task of forecasting a bullpen’s performance over the course of a single year is destined to fail.

So I’ll take this introduction as an opportunity to encourage you to not take the order of these rankings too seriously. Less than one-tenth of a win separates some of these teams. There is perhaps just one truly terrible bullpen in the mix; every other team essentially has a mix of proven shutdown guys, solid middle-inning depth, and intriguing wild cards. With that said: To the rankings! Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not much of a YouTube guy or, really, a fan of videos in general. If you send me an Instagram reel, I’m sorry, I will not watch it. But Lance Brozdowski delivers his baseball thoughts in video form, so I am compelled to make an exception. Lance’s posts prodded me to start writing about baseball in the first place; I always learn something when I watch his stuff and tend to agree with all of his analysis.

So I was shocked — shocked! — to hear him express pessimism about Spencer Schwellenbach in a recent video. All through this offseason, I’ve had the opposite thought: There isn’t enough enthusiasm about Schwellenbach’s rookie campaign, during which he posted a 3.29 FIP over 123.2 innings. But Lance wasn’t the only one with a tepid appreciation for the right-hander. Eno Sarris ranked him as his 34th-best starting pitcher; Thomas Nestico had him at no. 36. If I were obliged to make such a list, I might be pushing him some 20 spots higher. I think Schwellenbach’s rookie excellence can be repeated and even improved upon for one key reason: When he delivers the baseball, nobody knows what to expect. Read the rest of this entry »

There isn’t much for a baseball writer in the dull days of late February. Someone added a new pitch? The pitching nerds are all over it. Somebody else set a new career high for exit velocity? I’m not sure that merits more than a tweet and/or skeet. Statistically responsible baseball writers have long concluded that attempting to find signal in the noise of spring training stats is a futile exercise.

Thankfully, Effectively Wild came to my rescue. On Episode 2288, Ben and Meg discussed the peculiar case of Justin Verlander, who is pitching in the Cactus League for the first time in his career. After allowing a home run off a hanging slider, he sought consolation from his new teammate, Logan Webb.

“I was told not to overconcern yourself with pitch shapes here and the movement of the ball because it’s tough,” Verlander told Maria Guardado of MLB.com after his start. “It’s my first spring training in Arizona, so everyone was like, ‘Hey man, it’s a little different out here.’ I’ve heard it from everyone. But I think you still need to be honest with yourself.” Read the rest of this entry »

Nobody wants to throw a backup slider. They are, definitionally, an accident. But announcers and analysts alike have noted that these unintentional inside sliders — perhaps due to their surprise factor — tend not to get hit. In 2021, Owen McGrattan found that backup sliders, defined as sliders thrown inside and toward the middle of the strike zone, perform surprisingly well.

I’ll add one additional reason these pitches are effective: They move more than any other slider.

I analyzed over 33,000 sweepers thrown by right-handed pitchers in the 2024 season. I found a clear linear relationship between the horizontal release angle of a sweeper and the horizontal acceleration, better understood as the break of the pitch. On average, as the horizontal release angle points further toward the pitcher’s arm side, the pitch is thrown with more horizontal movement.

Josh Hejka, a pitcher in the Philadelphia Phillies minor league system, told me these results corresponded with his anecdotal experience.

“I’ve often noticed — whether in game or in the bullpen — that the sliders I throw arm side tend to actually have the best shape,” Hejka said. “I believe it’s conventional wisdom across baseball that the backup sliders tend to actually be the nastiest.”

Check out all the movement Corbin Burnes gets on this backup slider from last season.

The relationship between horizontal release angle and movement also holds true for sinkers. When a sinker is aimed further to the glove side — for pitchers facing same-handed hitters, this would be a backdoor sinker — the pitch gets, on average, more horizontal movement, as is the case with this pitch from Anthony Bender.

The explanation for the relationship is straightforward enough. When sweepers are thrown to the arm side and sinkers are thrown to the glove side, the pitcher’s grip is such that maximum force is applied to the side of the baseball, allowing for more sidespin. In a 2015 interview with David Laurila, then-Royals pitching coach Dave Eiland described why sliders back up.

“They really get around it; they don’t get over the top and pull down,” Eiland said. “It’s unintentional, more of a misfire, so to speak. If you could do that intentionally, you’d have a decent pitch.”

It isn’t just sweepers and sinkers that show a relationship between release angles and movement. Back in August, I investigated the mystery of the invisible fastball. Why was a pitch like Shota Imanaga’s fastball, with its elite vertical movement and flat approach angle, so rare? I found that vertical release angles mediate the relationship between both variables. A fastball thrown with a flatter release angle gets less backspin, and so to achieve both requires outlier mechanical skills.

Release angles don’t just measure the nature of a grip, they also dictate the location of the pitch. I conclude that where the pitcher aims a pitch changes the way it moves. For fastballs, pulling down on the ball allows for more backspin. For sweepers and sinkers, getting around the ball allows for more sidespin. Analysts attempt to separate “stuff” from “location;” these findings complicate that conversation.

***

Before we go any further, it’s important to know what exactly is a release angle. Release angles measure — or, in this case, approximate — the angle at which the ball comes out of the pitcher’s hand. For vertical release angles, anything above zero degrees suggests the ball is pointing upward at release; most vertical release angles, particularly for four-seam fastballs, are negative, meaning that the pitcher is aiming the ball downward at release.

Horizontal angles work the same way, but in the x-dimension. Positive values mean the ball is pointed toward the pitcher’s left; negative values point toward the pitcher’s right. (This is a feature of the original Pitch F/X coordinate system, when it was determined that x-dimension pointed to the catcher’s right.) In any case, release angles, both horizontal and vertical, attempt to capture the exact position of the ball at release. Because they capture the position of the ball at release, they contain information about the pitcher’s aim and, it turns out, the force they’re applying to the ball.

My research finds that there is a relationship between horizontal release angles and horizontal acceleration. In simpler terms, the way the ball is released out of the hand, and therefore where it is aimed, impacts the movement of the pitch.

There are some confounding variables in this specific relationship. The Hawkeye cameras (and, in earlier times, the Pitch F/X technology) report accelerations in three dimensions. These accelerations are measured relative to a fixed point on the field, which happens to be right in front of home plate. Because these accelerations are fixed to one point, the reported values can be biased by the position of release in space. This is far from intuitive, so it might be helpful to consider an example.

Remember that Burnes sweeper from the introduction? It accelerated at roughly 16 feet per second squared in the x-dimension. Imagine that instead of throwing his sweeper from the mound, Burnes threw it from the third base dugout. It’s the exact same pitch as before — same velocity, same horizontal break — but the release point has completely changed. On a fixed global coordinate system of movement measurement, the acceleration in the x-dimension no longer describes the pitch’s relevant movement; all that sideways movement would instead be measured in the y-dimension.

This is an extreme example to illustrate the point, but on a smaller scale, this fixed point measurement system biases acceleration measurements. In order to fix this bias, accelerations can be recalculated to be relative to the pitch’s original trajectory, removing the influence of the release point on the acceleration value. These calculations come courtesy of Alan Nathan; Josh Hejka rewrote them as Python code, making my job easy.

A slight nuance:

The accelerations given by MLB (ax, ay, az) are biased by pitch location.

To make these values location-agnostic, we need to adjust the acceleration vector to be relative to the initial trajectory (i.e. the initial velocity vector vx0, vy0, vz0).

?: https://t.co/CVVNKtG3YM

— Josh Hejka (@hedgertronic) November 14, 2024

Even after accounting for these confounding variables, the relationship between release angles and movement is still present. As the plot shows, it isn’t a particularly strong relationship — when modeled, a two-degree change in horizontal release angle is associated with roughly a foot per second increase in transverse acceleration. But while the relationship is not as strong as that between four-seam fastballs and vertical release angle, it is nonetheless meaningful.

Alternatively, the relationship can be measured using good old-fashioned “pfx_x,” or horizontal movement, which is also measured relative to the pitch’s original trajectory. Why go through all this effort to transform the accelerations? For one thing, I had a good time. And also, isn’t it fun to imagine Burnes throwing sweepers from the dugout?

The plot of horizontal location and horizontal movement, with each pitch colored by its horizontal release angle, illuminates the ostensible lack of a relationship between pitch location — measured by “plate_x” on the plot below — and movement. Draw your attention to the patch of dark blue dots around the -2 line of the x-axis. There are two potential ways for a sweeper to end up two feet off the plate inside. It can be thrown with a horizontal release angle around zero and little sideways movement, or it can be thrown with a negative horizontal release angle and lots of sideways movement.

The same relationship holds true for horizontal release angles and two-seam fastballs after the aforementioned adjustments.

On the individual pitcher level, the relationship is slightly weaker; on average, the r-squared is roughly 0.04 for sweepers, with variation between pitchers on the strength of this relationship. Zack Wheeler’s sweeper movement, for example, appears to be particularly sensitive to release angles:

***

Ultimately, analysts attempt to separate “stuff,” defined as the inherent quality of a pitch, from “location,” defined as where the pitch ends up. But what this research suggests is that, to some degree, these two qualities are inseparable. (I wrote about this a bit on my Pitch Plots Substack last September.) Certain pitches generate their movement profiles because of where they’re aimed out of the hand.

These findings naturally lead to deeper questions about the interaction between biomechanics and pitch movement. While there are variables (arm angle, release height, etc.) that are commonly understood to influence movement, these findings suggest that there are even more granular factors to explore.

Is the angle of the elbow flexion at maximum external rotation the most influential variable? Is it hip-shoulder separation? Torso anterior tilt? Pelvis rotation at foot plant? How much do each of these components contribute to pitch shapes?

Thanks to data from Driveline’s OpenBiomechanics Project, it’s easy to model the relationship between dozens of biomechanical variables and the velocity of the pitch. There are about 400 pitches in the database; by attaching markers to a pitcher moving through space, points of interest can be calculated and then compared to the pitch’s velocity.

In this public dataset, Driveline does not provide the movement characteristics of the pitch. But if the force applied to the ball based on the direction of its aim affects the movement of the pitch, it follows that these variables could be measured in a detailed manner. On the team side, KinaTrax outputs provide the markerless version of these data, providing a sample of hundreds of thousands of pitches from a major league population. Imagine the possibilities.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the units of acceleration of Burnes’ backup sweeper. It is feet per second squared, not feet per second.

In his prime — and it was not a long prime — nobody hit a majestic home run like Joey Gallo. It was something about the violence of the swing, the loopy lefty uppercut, the two-handed follow-through, and the way he’d stand up straight right after contact, a confirmation that the baseball was indeed crushed.

Those high arcing blasts powered one of the more bizarre careers of his generation. In the heart of the Three True Outcomes era, he was its emperor, threatening to lead the league in either walk rate, strikeout rate, or home runs in any given year.

Sadly, time passes. Those with prominent residences on Gallo Island now fear foreclosure proceedings. The big slugger has fallen on hard times; last week, he signed a minor league contract with the Chicago White Sox. A non-guaranteed deal with the team that just set the major league record for losses carries some pretty clear subtext. Gallo is hanging off the cliffside of his career, one finger latched to a jagged rock.

It all feels too soon. He’s just 31 years old, a normal and cool age that is in no way old. As Tom Tango’s research shows, bat speed generally starts to decline right at this point, not years before. But even at his best, Gallo lived at the extremes. In his magical 2019 half-season, which unfortunately was cut short by a broken hamate bone, he posted a .635 xwOBA on contact. Across 2,865 player seasons in the Statcast era, only 2017 Aaron Judge topped that figure.

At his apex, nobody — save for one of the greatest hitters of all-time — crushed the baseball like Joey Gallo. He paired that supreme power with some of the lowest chase rates in the league, giving him enough on-base juice to offset the batting averages that made boomers want to gauge out their eyes. That excellent plate discipline allowed him to hunt mistakes in the middle of the plate, mostly fastballs and hanging sliders. His swing was geared for these middle-middle meatballs, and his 70-grade batting eye allowed him to lay off most pitches on the black. Yes, when he got into a two-strike count and was compelled to swing, he most likely was going to come up empty. But he forced pitchers to battle.

Over the last handful of years, though, the other extreme in Gallo’s game eclipsed his prodigious power. Remember those 2,865 player seasons? Two of Gallo’s seasons rank first and second across the decade in the percentage of all swings resulting in whiffs. That decade-leading 44.3% whiff rate came in the 2023 season, when he still managed, I must note, to run an above-average wRC+.

In retrospect, it all started to go downhill after that infamous July 2021 trade to the Yankees. Gallo was coming off perhaps his finest month as a big leaguer, striking out “just” 25.3% of the time, walking nearly as frequently as he struck out, and mashing 10 homers. Painfully, he hit just .160 following the trade, and despite his 16.2% walk rate and usual home run pace, his anemic batting average turned him into a villain with the Yankees. After another dismal half-season, the Yankees shipped him off to the Dodgers; things didn’t get much better in Los Angeles, where he ran strikeout rates that dipped into the 40s for the first time.

Gallo hit free agency for the first time after that 2022 season, and since then teams have made increasingly small bets on his ability to return to his prime form. It started with the Twins in 2023, who paid him $11 million for a single year’s services. Next up were the Nationals, who handed out a $5 million deal, and he turned in his worst season yet. So now here we are, with Gallo at the bleakest end of the baseball universe.

It isn’t hard to see how things ended up like this. Gallo is a big guy who swings hard, and the bills have come due for his high-impact style of play. Over the last two seasons, he battled a sprained shoulder, a strained oblique, a foot contusion, and two separate hamstring strains, the second of which forced him out of action for nearly two months. He even came down with a case of pink eye. His body appears to be breaking down rapidly, and you can almost see the effects of this as he sets up in the box, constantly shifting and readjusting like he’s in the middle seat on a Spirit flight.

Perhaps as a result of all this discomfort, Gallo’s carrying tool is showing signs of erosion. In the second half of 2023, his average bat speed of 73.9 mph ranked in the 84th percentile of hitters. That 2023 mark is the first bat speed data available to the public, and one can imagine that at his peak, Gallo could swing a few miles per hour harder than that, ranking among the likes of Giancarlo Stanton and Kyle Schwarber as one of the fastest swingers in the league.

Gallo’s bat slowed even further in 2024. His average bat speed dipped 1.5 mph, dropping him into the fat part of the bell curve, only a tick above the major league average of 71.3 mph. His once-excellent plate discipline now looks more like passiveness. White Sox manager Will Venable says Gallo will primarily play first base. He is definitively an aging slugger, and his career depends on whether he can revive his famous power skills.

It’s possible that some of Gallo’s bat speed decrease was intentional; in 2023, only Trey Cabbage squared up fewer balls, and that mark improved slightly in 2024. But it’s Joey Gallo. If you have him on your team, you don’t want him trading off power for contact because he’s never going to make enough contact for that to matter. You want him swinging out of his shoes, walloping tanks into the stratosphere.

As my editor Matt Martell pointed out, the White Sox have an institutional history of old slugger resuscitation attempts. There were the ill-fated midseason acquisitions of Manny Ramirez and Ken Griffey Jr., a deal for post-peak Andruw Jones, even the four-year deal they handed out to Gallo’s evolutionary predecessor, Adam Dunn. All these guys landed on the South Side hoping to recapture the magic one last time.

Unlike those other players, though, there are no guarantees that Gallo makes the team, especially because Miguel Vargas is out of minor league options. But let’s just dream for a minute that Gallo took up yoga or any of the other offseason workout routines that prompt players to boast that they’re in the best shape of their lives. Picture this: a .190 average, a 35% strikeout rate, 30 home runs, a permanent spot in the middle of the order against right-handed pitchers. Gallo is one of the strangest and most spectacular players I’ve ever seen. I’m crossing my fingers he gets one last go.

Let’s get this out of the way at the start: The Mariners are pretty good. Their starting pitching is incredible, and some projections systems even think they have a top-10 offense. This is not a Pirates situation, where a core led by Paul Skenes on a league-minimum contract is somehow projected to finish well under .500. In Seattle, the pieces are almost all there. Sadly for fans, “almost all there” might well define this era of Mariners baseball.

The latest expression of Seattle’s complacency came last week, when the team brought back Jorge Polanco on a one year, $7.75 million contract. (The deal is pending a physical.) According to a report from Adam Jude at the Seattle Times, Polanco’s signing means the “Mariners’ roster is effectively set.” For those counting at home, $3.5 million for 37-year-old Donovan Solano, a trade for Austin Shenton, and the Polanco deal represent the entirety of Seattle’s offseason roster upgrades. The Mariners missed the playoffs by one game in 2023 and 2024; they missed it by two games in 2021. They are always good but never great. And the team — or at least ownership — appears totally fine with that. Read the rest of this entry »

You might not know the name Jack Kochanowicz. It’s a tricky name to pronounce, after all. (Ko-hawn-o-witz). He also made his major league debut on the very day in July when the Angels’ playoff odds hit 0.0%. So if this is your first Jack Kochanowicz experience, just know that he’s capable of doing stuff like this:

Another thing you should know: No pitcher last season missed fewer bats. Out of 351 pitchers with at least 50 innings pitched in the 2024 season, Kochanowicz’s 9.4% strikeout rate ranked 351st.

I’ve been fascinated by Kochanowicz because of this contradiction. He can ramp his heater up to 99 mph, and yet his K/9 started with a three. What gives? Read the rest of this entry »

It must have been fifth grade or so when I encountered the “compare and contrast” essay prompt for the first time. I remember thinking: What the hell? These two passages were written by different people. Why is it on me to tell you what is similar about them?

Over the years, I got better at these prompts. But it appears I’ve regressed. Two relievers signed eight-figure contracts last week. What’s similar? They both closed out games for World Series-winning teams in the 2020s, will likely handle the eighth inning for their new employers, and were born in the glorious and blessed year of 1993. What’s different? One throws right-handed, one throws left-handed. One signed with a contender; one perhaps got paid a premium so his team can try to avoid an MLBPA grievance.

But there are limits to the illuminating qualities of comparison. These days, individualized analysis is required to assess the effectiveness of a pitcher, so that’s how this post will proceed today. A.J. Minter and José Leclerc will earn life-changing quantities of money to chuck leather a few dozen times. Let’s find out why. Read the rest of this entry »

It wasn’t supposed to go down like this. After a sensational contract year — striking out 30% of hitters, posting the lowest walk rate of his career, bedazzling his jewelry cabinet with a World Series ring — Jack Flaherty looked like he was set to make a boatload of money. Days after his 29th birthday, we here at FanGraphs ranked Flaherty eighth among our Top 50 Free Agents, one spot behind his former high school teammate, Max Fried.

Early in December, Fried blew away expectations, inking an eight year, $218 million deal with Yankees. And he wasn’t the only one. Starters from Blake Snell to Luis Severino landed surprisingly lucrative contracts; when Ben Clemens checked in last week on his free agency projections, he noted that he’d under-projected the deals for starting pitchers by about $17 million on average. His takeaway: “Pitchers are getting paid this winter.”

Not all of them, it turns out. As the calendar creeps uncomfortably close to the start of spring training, the youngest available starting pitcher in free agency finds himself without an employer. Every couple weeks, a sparsely sourced rumor about Flaherty bubbles up on MLB Trade Rumors — there’s “mutual interest” with the Orioles, the Tigers have “some interest” in a reunion — but for a large part of the offseason, it’s been silence on the Flaherty beat.

The most substantial of these rumors flowed from the estimable pen of Ken Rosenthal over the weekend. Rosenthal and Will Sammon reported in The Athletic that Flaherty was “open to considering” a “short-term deal” with a “high average annual value.” The hot market for starters and the comparatively cool market for Flaherty suggest that, unlike the rest of the nominal “front-end” starting pitchers at the top of the market, something about him scares teams. All of this leads me to ask: What’s the matter with Jack Flaherty?

One obvious answer is the track record. On some level, teams are going to be somewhat hesitant to commit serious resources to anyone whose last healthy and effective season before 2024 came prior to the pandemic. Rosenthal and Sammon wrote in their report that “teams perhaps want to see Flaherty put together two consecutive seasons of elite performance.” And there are the shoulder issues in 2021 and 2022 that limited him to just 114 1/3 innings over that two-year span.

But I don’t think the track record tells the full story. I think the weak Flaherty market comes down to concerns about his 2024 season itself. Specifically, I think teams are worried about his fastball.

They get there in different ways, but the three pitchers who received $200 million (or thereabouts) contracts this winter all have plus fastballs. Snell throws the prototypical ace four-seamer, averaging 96 mph with 19 inches of induced vertical break. Corbin Burnes’ cutter is one of the signature pitches in baseball, capable of missing bats and neutralizing contact quality against hitters on both sides of the plate. Fried is a bit of a different case — his fastball averaged just 93.9 mph last season — but the shape is totally bizarre relative to his arm angle, resembling Burnes’ cutter from the left side. Fried also throws five other pitches, minimizing the importance of his four-seamer.

Flaherty’s fastball was the slowest of these four primary offerings, averaging 93.3 mph. In September, that dropped all the way to 92.6 mph. At below-average velocities, even a half-tick of heat loss can be brutal. And while the shape of the fastball is unusual — Flaherty throws from a low slot and gets just four inches of horizontal movement, meaning the pitch unexpectedly cuts in a funky fashion — it doesn’t have the sink that allows Fried’s and Burnes’ fastballs to burrow beneath barrels. Also unlike Fried, Flaherty in effect throws just three pitches: his four-seam fastball and the two breaking balls. (He also flashes a changeup and sinker, but last season he used each of those pitches less than 3% of the time.)

Given the mediocrity of his fastball, Flaherty must aim for fine locations. His success can vary. (I want to caveat the following with the fact that the Dodgers have a strong organizational preference for where their pitchers locate their fastballs, which may or may not be the way Flaherty will pitch with a new team.)

I’ll start with his matchups against left-handed hitters, because these were the majority of hitters that Flaherty faced in 2024. After his trade to the Dodgers in late July, the target for his fastball was almost exclusively set up in one location: Low and away.

A handful of times per start, Flaherty tried to climb the ladder, aiming for swinging strikes at the top of the zone. But in the three starts I watched in full, he almost always targeted his fastballs low and away when facing lefties.

Now, as the plot below of his fastball location to lefties shows, his execution wasn’t perfect. Aiming a baseball is really hard. But I’d venture to say that it was pretty good — he hardly yanked any of his fastballs to the glove side, and most of his misses drifted harmlessly off the plate. In any case, the plot tells a clear story: Flaherty was looking to paint with his fastball rather than challenge hitters over the plate.

This sort of nibbling quality with the fastball is perhaps not what teams want to see from their high-paid free agent starter. Snell, Burnes, and even Fried to some extent can throw fastballs with a large margin for error. Flaherty’s margins are thinner.

This is especially true against right-handed hitters, where his glove-side command is not as good. Against righties, Flaherty also frequently targeted low and away. But as the plot below of fastballs to righties shows, Flaherty doesn’t have the same level of command to the outer edge of this side of the plate. Note the lack of dots in that low-away corner compared to the yanked misses off the plate:

To lefties, Flaherty has the luxury of his misses generally drifting off the plate for balls. When he misses his target to righties, however, the miss tends to drift middle-middle. And when you’re missing middle-middle with 93-mph four-seamers, it’s generally not going to turn out well for you. (This might explain part of Flaherty’s reverse splits last season.)

When executed well, the low-and-away target serves an important function — it sets up his two nasty breaking balls, a harder gyro slider at 85 mph and a loopier knuckle-curve at 78 mph. As this pitch plot shows, these two pitches blend together in a deceptive manner, forcing hitters to guess which one is coming:

Flaherty is at his best when he’s mixing in the low fastballs with the two breakers right below the zone. Check out this two-pitch sequence to Ryan O’Hearn. He nails his 0-0 target to get ahead:

On 0-1 — the perfectly executed fastball fresh in O’Hearn’s head — Flaherty buries a curveball right below the previous location, getting O’Hearn to swing way over the pitch:

After a couple of breaking balls in the dirt, Flaherty punches O’Hearn out on a high fastball. With hitters laser-focused on the bottom of the strike zone, that occasional late-count high heater leads to a ton of whiffs. It’s a pretty combo when it works.

But if Flaherty falls behind, there just isn’t a great option to induce weak contact. When the early-count fastball execution is less than perfect, he tends to back himself into a corner. And when he’s forced to come over to the plate with the heater, he can be vulnerable to the long ball. Just ask O’Hearn:

If Flaherty’s fastball velocity remains in that 92-93 range, it will likely be a tradeoff between giving up a few too many walks due to nibbling (as he did early in his career) or risking extra-base damage by coming over the plate.

So, yes, there are reasons to be concerned about Flaherty. But overly fixating on his fastball risks ignoring his upside.

That two-breaking-ball attack works against both righties and lefties; when he gets ahead in the count, there’s almost nobody better. That strikeout rate is no illusion. So the question becomes: How can Flaherty reliably get ahead of hitters?

One option is pitching backwards. Flaherty’s fastball usage in 0-0 counts is roughly 50%. (On the plot below, red represents the four-seamer, gold represents the slider, and blue represents the curveball.) Given the frequency of his slider usage in 3-1 and 3-2 counts (50% and 44.8%, respectively) it follows that he has the confidence to throw it for a strike when he needs it. Mixing in more breaking balls in early counts could take some pressure off the four-seamer.

Flaherty could also use his sinker more often. If his problem at present is mostly with right-handed hitters, the sinker could give him a weak-contact option and a pitch that he feels comfortable throwing on the inner-half of the plate. Notably, the sinker grades out fine by stuff models — PitchingBot, for example, gives it a 56 on the 20-80 scale.

It’s also not impossible that some of his velocity could return. Maybe he no longer can regularly dial up 95-96 mph as he did in his early 20s, but it’s also possible that his late-season swoon can be chalked up to his posting his highest innings total in five years. In the range of velocity that he sat in the later months of the season, every half-tick is crucial, but if he can consistently live at 93-94 mph with the ability to touch 96, that softens many of the concerns.

Concluding this article definitively is challenging. On the one hand, the skittishness of the clubs is perfectly understandable. But plenty of contending teams need starting pitching, and an industry-wide fear of Flaherty’s weaknesses could cost clubs their chance to add someone who just performed like one of the best hurlers in the game.

It’s roughly the midway point of the offseason, and things are starting to slow down. Most of the headline free agents are off the board, clearing the way for the Trevor Williamses, Joe Rosses, and Caleb Thielbars of the world to find their 2025 homes.

Those guys all signed in the final days of 2024, inking modest deals for National League clubs. Here’s a little bit about all three.

Trevor Williams Re-Signs With the Washington Nationals

Read the rest of this entry »