Games are shorter this season due to the pitch clock, which means that starting pitchers are usually throwing an outing’s worth of offerings in less time than they typically did in previous years. Whereas a quality start of seven innings and 100 pitches might have taken two hours and 15 minutes in the past — this before a call to the bullpen — it can take as little as an hour and 45 minutes in 2023. Those times will obviously vary, with the effectiveness of the opposing pitcher playing a major role, but the fact remains that such an outing now regularly takes place within a more condensed time frame.

How different is this for starting pitchers? Moreover, is throwing that number of innings and pitches in a narrower time frame harder, or is it actually easier? I’ve asked those questions to several pitchers since the start of the season, with their answers sometimes extending to other aspects of the new pitch clock. Here is what they’ve had to say.

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Shane Bieber, Cleveland Guardians: “Good question. To give you a real response on the impact… we’ll probably see at the end of the year after a great big body of work. Right? The number of quality starts, or whatever you want to call them. But for me, personally, I’m not finding much of a difference. I work pretty quick, especially without runners on. Last year, I think I was the second fastest without runners on base. Maybe the first. Wade Miley works extremely fast, as well. Read the rest of this entry »

After breaking their long postseason drought last year, the Mariners entered 2023 with some lofty expectations led by Julio Rodríguez, the AL Rookie of the Year, and a cadre of young pitchers. Seattle got off to a slow start in April, limping to a 12–16 record during the first month of the season. Things got a little better in May, but the team really turned on the jets over the last week and half, cruising through a 7–3 homestand that pushed its record to 29–27.

The real story of the week was Rodríguez, who earned American League Player of the Week honors by collecting 14 hits, six extra-base hits, and seven RBIs. He added another four hits and a home run against the Yankees earlier this week, raising his wRC+ from 86 to 111 in the span of these ten games.

Even though the Mariners have one of the best pitching staffs in the majors and a top-tier defense, the ongoing struggles of their offense have held them back to start this season. They’ve scored 4.45 runs per game thus far with a team wRC+ of 97, a little below league average. The slow start from Rodríguez has been a key aspect of that lack of production, though there are other (non) contributors too. Still, it seems like as Julio goes, the Mariners go.

Rodríguez got off to a similar slow start during his rookie campaign last year: through April, he was batting just .205/.284/.260 with a 61 wRC+ and a gaudy 37.0% strikeout rate. He hit his first major league home run on May 1, though, and never looked back from there. This year, his struggles were a little more pronounced and prolonged: through May 21, he was slashing .204/.280/.376, good for an 86 wRC+ with a 28.5% strikeout rate. Read the rest of this entry »

Logan Gilbert discussed his new changeup in detail when he was featured here at FanGraphs 12 months ago. Not satisfied with the one he’d been throwing, the Seattle Mariners right-hander had gone to “more of a traditional circle,” a grip he felt would yield better command and consistency. His stated goals included upping the pitch’s usage from 8% (it had been 7.8% in 2021) to 10-15%.

A certain amount of success followed — opposing hitters batted .125 with a .122 wOBA against the pitch — but Gilbert’s goals went largely unmet. The 6-foot-6 hurler never felt completely comfortable with the revamped offering, and by season’s end, his changeup usage was still a meager 8%. Instead of becoming a reliable weapon, it remained little more than an infrequently used, hit-or-miss option in his arsenal.

As pitching nerds are wont to do — and Gilbert certainly qualifies as such — he went back to the drawing board. The righty traded in his circle change for a splitter over the offseason, and the results have been just what he was looking for. He has been comfortably throwing his new weapon 12.7% of the time, and it has yielded a paltry .111 batting-average-against and an equally impressive .111 wOBA.

Gilbert explained the successful transition from his changeup to his splitter when Seattle visited Boston last week. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Miller has come a long way in a short time. A fourth-round pick by the Seattle Mariners out of Texas A&M just two summers ago, the 24-year-old right-hander came into the current campaign ranked no. 83 on our Top 100 and made his major league debut earlier this month. Moreover, his three starts have been nothing less than stellar. Over 19 innings, Miller has fanned 18 batters while allowing just one run on seven hits and a single walk. His ERA is a minuscule 0.47.

Seattle’s pitching development acumen has played a big role in his success. Miller’s 96-mph four-seam fastball is in the 99th percentile for spin, but it wasn’t until he got to pro ball that he began utilizing it in an optimal manner. He has also advanced the quality of his secondaries and is attacking hitters with a more varied arsenal than he did as an Aggie.

“In college, we had Rapsodo and TrackMan, but I never really dove into that or really even knew what it meant numbers-wise,” explained Miller. “But with Seattle being pretty deep into analytics, that changed when I got here. They really opened my eyes on how my stuff plays and where I need to throw it.” Read the rest of this entry »

Robbie Ray did not replicate his 2021 AL Cy Young-winning form last year. In fact, he struggled down the stretch, but he did make a solid contribution as the Mariners ended their 21-year playoff drought. Alas, he won’t get to help them try to repeat that feat. On Wednesday, the Mariners announced that the 31-year-old lefty will undergo surgery to repair a torn flexor tendon and miss the remainder of the season.

After a promising spring training in which he restored some lost velocity to his four-seam fastball, Ray made just one start, and it wasn’t pretty. Facing the Guardians on March 31, he needed 26 pitches to complete the first inning, during which he issued back-to-back four-pitch walks to José Ramírez and Josh Bell before escaping by striking out Josh Naylor. His fastball velocity quickly diminished and he lasted just 3.1 innings, walking five and surrendering four hits and five runs (three earned).

In the immediate aftermath, Ray didn’t tell reporters that he had felt tightness in his forearm starting in the second inning, a problem that he attributed to the cold weather. After undergoing an MRI the next day due to lingering soreness, he was diagnosed with a Grade 1 flexor strain; only in discussing the injury with reporters did he reveal his discomfort. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s the most important thing for a pitcher to do? That’s right, don’t leave the ball up in the zone for Aaron Judge. The second-most important thing for a pitcher to do is throw strikes. Throw strikes to get ahead in the count, throw strikes to challenge hitters, throw strikes to force action early in the count and keep your pitch count down… pitchers talk about throwing strikes the way health nuts talk about kale. It’s good for you. How? Let me count the ways.

Except, nobody actually throws strikes. Last season, 347 pitchers threw at least 50 innings in the majors; nobody threw more than 58.5% of their pitches in the strike zone. Devin Williams, one of the best in the business, worked inside the zone just 42.4% of the time. “It’s good to throw strikes,” then, is something to be taken seriously but not literally.

Seattle Mariners right-hander George Kirby is a greater adherent of the zone than most. Last season, he broke a big league record by throwing 24 consecutive strikes to start a game. This year, he’s working in the zone more than any other pitcher with at least 20 innings under their belt. It was not always thus. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2023 season is only a handful of days old, but already another Cy Young winner is on the shelf. After Justin Verlander was placed on the injured list last Friday, Robbie Ray joined him the following afternoon. The Mariners lefty was removed from his season debut against the Guardians in the middle of the fourth inning, having thrown 91 pitches and given up five walks and five runs. It wasn’t clear his exit was injury-related at the time, but Ray later revealed he’d been feeling pain since the second inning. He was ultimately diagnosed with a left flexor strain, which will keep him out for four to six weeks.

Even before Ray’s injury was diagnosed, the Mariners had cause for concern. For one thing, five walks in three-plus innings is certainly a worrisome sign. To make matters worse, two of those walks came in the first inning, before he began to feel sore. Ray has been notoriously wild in the past — he leads all active pitchers in five-walk games — but he had seemingly gotten his free passes under control the last two years:

In his second start of the 2021 season, Ray walked six batters in five innings of work. From that point onwards, he has posted a perfectly respectable 2.64 BB/9 (84 BB/9+). He needs to keep his walk rate in check to succeed going forward; hopefully his control will improve when his flexor strain heals. Read the rest of this entry »

Last October, I wrote a piece about Jarred Kelenic’s small sample success in the final month of the 2022 season. After a rollercoaster start to his career, he had kept pushing along trying to find the version of his swing that would allow him to adjust at different heights of the zone and be formidable against big league breaking balls. For much of 2022, he could hardly make contact against quality breaking balls, but at the end of the season, his swing began to look more connected. It led to slight improvements in breaking ball contact and contact in general against lefties. It was also a positive way to head into the offseason, where he could have more time to explore his swing and find the best version of himself. Since Kelenic was constantly tweaking during the season while jumping between the majors and minors, it was inevitable he would look at least a little different once spring came around.

That was indeed the case on his first day in Peoria, and so far in spring training, the adjustments he made have been paying off. Yes, it’s only spring training, but sometimes if you read in between the lines and try to find sticky characteristics, this month of baseball can be more than just a tuneup. And Kelenic has been nothing short of incredible at the plate. In his 38 Cactus League at-bats, he has 16 hits, eight of which have gone for extra bases all over the field — many of them crushed at over 100 mph. It’s great to see such a dominant performance from a results perspective, but one key piece of his ongoing changes focuses on the mental aspect of hitting: approach and quality at-bats. That piece has a direct influence on his swing mechanics.

In an interview he did with Seattle Sports in the beginning of March, Kelenic talked about being focused on things you can control as a hitter and battling through unfortunate circumstances. He spoke under the context of an at-bat from the day prior, where he thought the umpire missed two calls that put him down 0–2; he flushed those pitches and ended up scorching a line drive over the center field wall. This mental side of hitting is an important step in the quest to becoming a mature hitter. He talked more at length about this mentality in a separate interview with the Seattle Times. Specifically, he has focused on the idea of “winning the pitch” regardless of the count. This keeps a hitter competitive and able to maintain a short-term memory — a necessary skill in baseball. Kelenic has provided several quotes this spring that give us a better idea of how he is approaching the game, and it allows somebody like me, who has been keen to analyze his changes, to follow his story with better prior knowledge. And the changes have been quite interesting, too. Read the rest of this entry »

Some pitchers approach their craft by trying to hone their established pitch repertoire to make the most of what they’ve always thrown. Then there’s Logan Gilbert. Rather than stick with the pitches that were the foundation of his success in college and through the minors, he’s consistently tinkered with new grips and new pitches to enhance his arsenal, even after reaching the big leagues. Last year, he revamped each of his secondary offerings in an attempt to gain more consistent effectiveness with them. He hasn’t been afraid to make adjustments on the fly during the season either, all in an effort to maximize his abilities on the mound.

This spring, Gilbert debuted a brand-new splitter to replace his changeup. That older pitch was effective in limited action, but he rarely had a good feel for it, making it an inconsistent offering at best. “I’ve always tried the changeup and just kind of struggled with it, [it] just wasn’t natural for me,” Gilbert said in an interview with Daniel Kramer of MLB.com. “So I’m just trying to find basically a variation of a splitter that I can throw like a fastball.”

Before we get too deep into his new pitch, I want to go back and look at how Gilbert’s entire repertoire has evolved over the last two years. To do so, I’m going to be using the new Stuff+ leaderboards recently introduced on the site. Stuff+ is a pitch model developed by Eno Sarris and Max Bay that attempts to quantify the quality of a given pitch using only the underlying physical characteristics of said pitch. Stuff+ becomes reliably predictive very quickly — in under 100 pitches — and is extremely sticky year-to-year. That reliability means it’s sensitive to changes in a pitch’s characteristics, making it an excellent tool to evaluate someone like Gilbert.

The one constant for Gilbert has been his fastball, which possesses excellent raw velocity that plays up even higher when you take into account his elite release extension. With above-average ride and good command, his heater has been the backbone of his pitch mix. If anything, he’s leaned on it a little too much early in his career, but only because his secondary offerings have lagged behind. The graph above puts the inconsistency of those pitches in stark relief. His changeup finally found some sure footing last season, even if he couldn’t command it at all. More importantly, his two breaking balls have oscillated in effectiveness, with neither registering above average at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

Harry Ford is one of the top prospects in the Seattle Mariners organization, and he is also unique among his peers. Born Harrison Michael Ford, in Atlanta, 20 years ago this week, the right-handed-hitting catcher is the son of English immigrants. His mother spent her childhood in London, while his father — “a real Brit; he still has an accent”— came to the U.S. a little over two decades ago from Oxford. Moreover, his multi-national upbringing included his family’s having hosted exchange students from Argentina, Brazil, and Germany.

If the above list of countries has you wondering if football — soccer to us here in the States — has been a part of his life, the answer is yes. Ford’s father is a huge Arsenal fan who used to play in a competitive men’s league, while the youngster impressed on the pitch in his schoolboy days before turning his full attention to baseball. Given that Ford is a muscular 5-foot-10, 200-pounds and has been called a unicorn due to the speed that augments his frame, how good might he have been had he pursued his father’s favorite sport rather than America’s national pastime?

“I think I’d go crazy in soccer!” was Ford’s fun-loving (and quite possibly accurate) response to that question, meaning that he would excel. Instead he is excelling on the diamond, and he’s doing so at a position that belies his athleticism. How he found himself wearing the tools of ignorance was a matter of happenstance.

“I was always a third baseman, but when I was eight or 10 we needed someone to play catcher,” explained Ford, whom the Mariners took 12th overall in the 2021 draft. “I remember that there was this royal blue, really ugly gear, and I was like, ‘I’ll try it. Why not? ‘I got back there and liked it, and haven’t left it since.”

As uncommon as it is for elite athletes to end up behind the plate, it has been an even less common destination for African Americans. Black catchers have been few and far between in MLB history. To Ford’s mind, “It will be cool to change that stigma.” Read the rest of this entry »