Camilo Doval Is Down and Away in More Ways Than One

On Sunday evening, Camilo Doval stepped to the mound without his usual light show. He showed the range of his game right away – after striking out the first two batters he faced, he walked Greg Jones, who promptly stole both second and third. Then Nolan Jones ripped a scorching line drive to center for a triple, Elehuris Montero stroked a line drive single, and two runs had scored just like that. To make matters worse, this wasn’t even against the Rockies – it was against the Triple-A Albuquerque Isotopes.
It’s hard to wrap your head around Doval’s sudden fall from ace closer to minor leaguer. He debuted in the magical 2021 season, picked up closing duties at the tail end of that year, and looked like one of the best relievers in the sport almost immediately. In 2022 and ’23, he pitched to a 2.73 ERA and 2.87 FIP. He was wild at times, overpowering at others, and impossible to square up in every iteration. When you have a 100 mph cutter and a tight 90 mph slider to throw off of it, you don’t need much else. He was fifth in baseball in saves, ninth in reliever WAR, 10th in innings pitched among relievers; in other words, he was a one-man back-of-the-bullpen for the Giants.
One thing always bothered me about Doval, even when he was dominating the opposition for the last two years: His cutter doesn’t cut correctly. That sounds nonsensical, or at best like a weak nitpick. But here, take a look at his cutter as compared to Emmanuel Clase’s best-in-class offering, using our pitch-type splits:
Pitcher | Velo (mph) | HMov (in) | ZMov (in) | ZMov (ex. grav) |
---|---|---|---|---|
Emmanuel Clase | 100.2 | 1.8 | 6.9 | -16.0 |
Camilo Doval | 99.5 | -4.3 | 6.6 | -16.4 |
The “cut” in a cutter refers to glove-side movement. A good cutter looks like a fastball out of the hand before the spin takes over; then it veers sharply away from the four-seam path that hitters have spent their whole lives tracking. It’s not just a matter of how differently shaped the cutter is from the rest of a given pitcher’s arsenal – just ask Mariano Rivera. Instead, it’s more about defying the brain patterns batters have built up over decades of playing baseball. That’s just not where a fastball should go, and so hitters either swing fruitlessly over it or, in the case of opposite-handed batters, end up breaking their bats when the pitch bores in on their hands.
Read the rest of this entry »