On hiatus since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, FanGraphs’ Learning and Developing a Pitch series returns with three pitchers — Michael King, Lucas Luetge, and Jordan Romano — telling the stories behind their sliders.

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Michael King, New York Yankees

“I’ve been developing a slider since my freshman year of college. I was always bigger curveball, and then I had like seven different grips in college. I could never get consistent with anything — not consistent movement, not consistent location — and it just never felt comfortable. So I always used to say that I was a sinker/slider guy that didn’t have a slider.

“Once I got drafted in 2016, I said, ‘I don’t care what it does, I’m sticking with this grip so I can at least locate it.’ In 2018 is when I finally felt like I was consistent with the shape and the location. Then we got a new pitching director, Sam Briend, and he said, ‘Your slider is terrible. It’s located well, but it doesn’t have a good movement profile. Let’s fix it.’

“In 2019, I got hurt, and then it was the whole process of trying to change the movement profile. I wanted it to be more horizontal, more sweepy, like [Corey] Kluber’s, rather than the slider I had, which just had a little bit of depth. This year I’m finally figuring it out. Having Kluber on my team, I could talk to him about his grip, what his mentality is, what he’s trying to do at release.

“A big thing for me was, because I wanted to get that sweep and horizontal, I would get really rotational with my body to try to pull it sideways. [Kluber] said that’s the opposite of what you want to do. He said to just let the grip do the work. Read the rest of this entry »

Jimmy Nelson has had a rough few years, facing the most harrowing tribulation of a professional pitcher: persistent injuries. In 2015 and 2016, Nelson tossed 177.1 and 179.1 innings, respectively, with a cumulative ERA of 4.37 and 2.5 WAR. That WAR total over 356.2 innings put him on about a 1.56 WAR per 180 innings pace, about what we might expect from a back-end starter. Given how many innings he was able to shoulder, he was a valuable contributor. The following season, Nelson broke out. He added almost a tick to his fastball and increased the usage of his two breaking balls with great results. He posted a 3.49 ERA in 2017. His strikeout rate increased from 18.5% in his prior two seasons to 27.3% and he trimmed his walk rate by about 33% while maintaining an above average groundball rate of 50.3%. These improvements added up to an astounding 4.8 WAR in 175.1 innings, a massive leap that placed him eighth in baseball among starters.

But the end of the 2017 season marked the start of a string of injuries that kept Nelson off the mound for much of the past three seasons. The first came in September of his superlative 2017. Running the bases following a single against the Cubs, Nelson took a hard turn around first and was forced to dive back to the bag after inducing a throw from the defense. Upon extending his arm to the base, he tore the labrum and rotator cuff in his right arm, comprising his shoulder capsule and incurring nerve damage; the injury kept Nelson out for all of 2018. He returned to the Brewers on June 5, 2019, made four appearances (three of them starts) and suffered an elbow injury that forced him off the mound until September of that same year when he then made six more appearances. In just 22 innings of work, he had a less-than-stellar 6.95 ERA and walked over 16% of the batters he faced. Milwaukee did not tender him a contract that offseason.

The Dodgers signed Nelson that winter, with the intent of rehabilitating someone who was among the most effective pitchers in the majors. But Nelson suffered a back injury in spring training prior to the COVID-19 shutdown, forcing him to have surgery on his back. That injury, according to Nelson himself, was the result of “mechanical compensations that developed over time going back from the shoulder.” He missed all of 2020 but the Dodgers brought him back on a minor-league contract, hoping he could rediscover some of his prior form and fortify a bullpen that lost its second, fifth, and ninth most-used arms, including Jake McGee, who was the team’s most valuable reliever by WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Nolan Jones, 3B, Cleveland
Level & Affiliate: Triple-A Columbus Age: 23 Org Rank: 2 (66 over) FV: 50
Line: 2-for-4, HR, SB

Notes
Jones got off to a poor start and his overall line hasn’t yet recovered (he’s slugging just .405 on the season, the lowest since his first pro summer back in 2016), but he’s hit .253/.374/.495 over the last month, which is enough to quell overall concerns about him right now. He is a three true outcomes type of player and there may be long stretches where his average is hovering close to the Mendoza line but he’s going to walk a ton and hit for power while playing poor defense at several positions. Jones can be beaten with well-located fastballs at the top of the zone and he’s swung through a lot of them this year, but his swing decisions are typically very good. Per Synergy Sports, he has just a 19% O-Swing% so far this year, which would put him in the top five of qualified big leaguers. There’s real, elite plate discipline here and 70-grade power, but also a clearly exploitable hole in the swing at the top of the strike zone. How those things will interact at the big league level I truly don’t know, though it feels like that hole in the swing is a load-bearing Jenga block against big league pitchers who throw hard and often work at the top of the zone. Read the rest of this entry »

On August 3, 2020, J.D. Davis hit a hard grounder between second and first, fielded cleanly by Freddie Freeman for a simple force out of the runner heading to second. This routine play might have been forgotten if not for the fact that Mike Soroka, the Braves’ consensus ace after a sterling rookie campaign in 2019, took an awkward step while trying to cover first base and limped out of the game. Nearly a year later, Soroka has not returned to a pitcher’s mound, and now, it’ll likely be at least another year until he can do so again, as a torn Achilles tendon — a repeat of the injury that knocked him out last season — will shelve him for the rest of ’21 and probably into ’22.

Last August, Soroka was immediately sent off for an MRI, which revealed that he had torn his right Achilles tendon. You know an injury is serious when a team’s rivals are offering their condolences nearly instantly.

“It kind of makes you sick, honestly,” Mets outfielder Michael Conforto said. “I can tell you a lot of us felt that way, just the way he went down and what we were hearing it was. … We heard it was the Achilles. He’s a bright young star, and we know he’ll come back and be the same guy.”

This wasn’t Soroka’s first major injury setback. After debuting in early 2018, shoulder inflammation shut him down quickly, costing him the rest of that season. He showed few signs of that malady in 2019, throwing 174 2/3 innings with a 2.68 ERA and 4.03 FIP for an even 4 WAR — good enough of a year to rank him highly among other young pitchers in Braves history.

I was an NL Rookie of the Year award voter in 2019, and though I gave my first-place vote to Pete Alonso, I wasn’t too far from giving it to the young Braves hurler instead. As you might expect, ZiPS was also a huge fan of Soroka going into the COVID year.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last Wednesday, Trevor Bauer had a rough start. In six innings, he struck out 10 Padres, but that’s where the highlights ended. He walked four and gave up three home runs, pushing his season total to 17 homers allowed. They were all solo shots, which limited the damage, but still: three home runs isn’t a good day’s work. After the game, Bauer was understandably defensive:

"I have the worst home run luck in the league. Every time I make a little mistake it leaves the yard." — Trevor Bauer on his 3 solo shots allowed tonight. #Dodgers

— Michael J. Duarte (@michaeljduarte) June 24, 2021

Now, “little mistakes” are hard to measure. Consider this titanic Manny Machado blast, for example:

Mistake? Maybe. But how do you define a mistake pitch? That was an 82.6 mph slider, roughly two ticks faster than Bauer’s average for the pitch. Per Statcast, it had 16 inches of total break (against spin-less movement), roughly 1.5 inches less than his average slider breaks. He left it over the plate, but not excessively so; five inches above the bottom of the zone. He doesn’t locate sliders there often, but the previous three had resulted in two swinging strikes and a pop out.

So was this a sublime effort by Machado or a bad pitch by Bauer? I’d lean towards the former — though Bauer would have a better argument on his pitch to Victor Caratini later in the game. But that’s hardly a scientific way of looking at it, and I wanted to do at least slightly better. Otherwise, how will we evaluate Bauer’s claim that he’s the unluckiest man on the planet, at least when it comes to home runs? Read the rest of this entry »

Shohei Ohtani’s amazing season aside, not too much has gone the Angels’ way thus far. Mike Trout is injured, Anthony Rendon has struggled, Albert Pujols has been productive — but only after being cut by the Angels and picked up by the Dodgers — and the team’s defense has been dreadful enough to undo a rotation that appeared to be solid coming into the year. Justin Upton contributed to their miseries by playing quite badly on both sides of the ball in the early going, but after a torrid month, he’s landed on the Injured List with a lower back strain.

The 33-year-old Upton exited Tuesday night’s game against the Giants after two plate appearances due to lower back tightness. He didn’t play on Wednesday, and when he wasn’t included in the lineup on Friday, manager Joe Maddon said that he anticipated Upton returning this past weekend. When he arrived at the ballpark and underwent testing, however, trainers determined that he would need more time to heal, and so the Angels placed him on the IL, backdating his stint so that he will be eligible to return on July 3.

Upton is hitting .247/.336/.480 with 14 homers overall; his 125 wRC+ is his best mark since 2017, and fourth among Angels regulars behind Trout (193), Ohtani (174), and Jared Walsh (143). That’s quite a turnaround given his descent into replacement territory in the previous two seasons and the first part of this one:

Read the rest of this entry »

After hitting 62 home runs over his first two seasons in the big leagues — his age-21 and age-22 seasons, no less — Gleyber Torres was hailed as baseball’s next superstar. Even in lineups featuring Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, and Gary Sánchez, no Yankees player hit more homers over the 2018 and ’19 seasons than Torres. And while subpar defense limited his overall ceiling, his 5.6 WAR over that stretch still represented an impressive output for a player that young.

In 2020, however, the power that defined Torres’ offensive production all but disappeared. Torres, who posted a .235 ISO in 1,088 plate appearances over his first two seasons, slashed just .243/.356/.368 last season, good for a .125 ISO. He homered just three times in 160 plate appearances, but improved plate discipline — his walk rate jumped 5.5 points compared to his career averages, while his strikeout rate fell 5.6 — drove what remained above-average offensive output. Torres still posted a 106 wRC+, but he couldn’t outhit his defense like he had the two years prior and posted just 0.2 WAR.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some of my fondest memories of baseball have nothing to do with the game being played on the field. Every summer like clockwork, my best friend and I set out on a new baseball adventure. We wait eagerly for the arrival of the next season’s schedule and make our travel plans accordingly. One year it was driving north through Florida to visit the stadiums in Miami, St. Petersburg, and Atlanta. Another year, we melted our way through the heat of July in the Midwest, seeing Kansas City, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Chicago.

The first time I ever took a solo road trip I did it to see baseball, visiting six stadiums and numerous baseball-themed attractions along the way. I survived traffic in Pittsburgh and scientifically determined the best cupcake shops in Washington D.C. (Red Velvet Cupcakery, though if you are a fan of sweeter, richer cupcakes, Baked and Wired is for you).

In Baltimore, a stranger gave me tips on the best place to try crab. In St. Petersburg, a friendly season ticket holder named Sherry overheard me telling the guest services attendant it was my first Rays game. She insisted on bringing me and my friend into the season ticket holders area and showing us around, as if being a Rays ambassador was her job (it should be). In Kansas City, I befriended a local so lovely that she invited me to come back and stay with her the following year to enjoy more games and more BBQ, and we went on a tour of Kauffman stadium. Read the rest of this entry »

Mitchell Kilkenny is quietly having a stupendous season. A second-round pick by the Colorado Rockies in 2018 out of Texas A&M, the 24-year-old right-hander boasts a 1.47 ERA over eight starts with the Low-A Fresno Grizzlies and the Spokane Indians. Moreover, he’s fanned 54 batters and issued just five free passes in 43 innings.

His plus command is a much-needed asset. Kilkenny is more finesse than power, his fastball ranging from the upper 80s to the low 90s. At least for now. Kilkenny threw harder as a collegian, but then came Tommy John surgery shortly after he was drafted, and last year’s cancelled minor-league season only muddied the waters. No matter. He fully expects his velocity to tick back up in time, and even if that doesn’t happen, his ability to mix, match and tunnel two- and four-seam fastballs, a slider, a curveball, and a changeup has proven to be plenty effective. As Kilkenny put it, “I might not be bright and flashy, but I’m having success.”

Prior to matriculating at Texas A&M where he double-majored in Renewable Natural Resources and Forestry, he excelled in English class at Houston Christian High School.

“My one fun fact is that I won two awards in creative writing contests,” Kilkenny told me. “One was for a class project where we were to write to a favorite author of ours. I picked Bill Watterson, for Calvin and Hobbes, because that was my favorite comic growing up, I love Calvin and Hobbes. Anyway, it was just a little piece about what the author had given me, which was some of the insights you can get out of a simple comic.” Read the rest of this entry »

With nearly half the season behind them, the Giants have shown that their early success was no fluke; they possess the best record in baseball and the best run differential in the National League. Much of their success can be attributed to their starting rotation, which ranks fifth best in the majors in park- and league-adjusted FIP and ERA. Those are some incredible results considering most of that rotation was built with bounce-back candidates.

Kevin Gausman is the headliner on San Francisco’s staff, and if it weren’t for Jacob deGrom’s historic season, he’d be the front-runner for the NL Cy Young award. But his success was pretty easy to predict after his 2020 campaign. The real surprise this year has been Anthony DeSclafani.

DeSclafani has shown plenty of promise in years past. During his first three years in the major leagues, he compiled 5.3 WAR and a 3.99 ERA backed by a 3.78 FIP. But the strong start to his career was cut short by an oblique injury that cost him nearly half of the 2016 season, then a strained UCL kept him off the field for all of ‘17. He managed to avoid Tommy John surgery, but struggled upon returning from his elbow injury the following year. Things really fell apart in 2020. He started the season on the IL with a strained back muscle, was eventually demoted to the bullpen by the end of September, and was left off the Reds’ playoff roster for their first-round matchup against the Braves, ending the year with a 7.22 ERA and 6.10 FIP.

Short on suitors, DeSclafani signed a one-year, $6 million contract with the Giants in the offseason — one that has paid off handsomely for both player and team. He’s posted career-bests in ERA and FIP and is on pace to accumulate nearly 4 WAR this year, and outside of a 10-run disaster against the Dodgers on May 23, he hasn’t allowed more than three runs in any of his starts and just six total since then.

The changes DeSclafani has made to his repertoire and approach are many, so let’s start simple: his pitch mix.

His slider has always been his best weapon, and he’s throwing it more than a third of the time in 2021 — the second highest rate for that pitch in his career. He’s also upped the usage of his changeup this year, with both increases coming at the expense of his four-seam fastball.

Since returning from his elbow surgery in 2018, his slider has been a work-in-progress; the speed and the shape have deviated wildly over the last four years.

The only thing that’s stayed consistent through the seasons is the horizontal movement. In 2019, it looks like DeSclafani attempted to add velocity to the slider at the cost of some vertical movement. Last season, that velocity dropped back down to its previous level, but he was able to add more drop. This year, he’s found a healthy middle-ground; the velocity is higher than it was in 2018 and ‘20, and the vertical movement is right around where it was four years ago.

So how have these changes affected the slider’s results?

Despite all these evolutions, the slider has remained very effective. In 2019, when he added all that velocity, it actually saw its lowest whiff rate of the last few years. The next year, more vertical movement resulted in the lowest groundball rate out of the last four seasons. In 2021’s happy medium, his whiff rate has dipped a bit, but he’s inducing a lot more contact on the ground to offset the loss of those swings and misses.

DeSclafani’s changeup has also undergone some significant changes this year. That was a pitch he was committed to working on this spring, and that tinkering has had some interesting effects. He’s added more than an inch of arm side run to the pitch, but batters aren’t really swinging and missing against it, with a mere 9.2% whiff rate (surprisingly not a career low). Instead, he’s using the pitch to generate tons of weak contact. He throws his changeup almost exclusively to left-handed batters, and when hitters put it in play, they’re running a .299 xwOBA.

DeSclafani locates his changeup in the zone around 45% of the time, which matches what he was doing in 2018 and ‘19. But last year, that zone rate was just 28.6%, while its whiff rate was the highest it’s been over the last four seasons. That might just be a coincidence; he threw just 42 changeups last year after all, and the zone rate on all of his pitches was down. That loss of command was a big reason why his walk rate ballooned to 10.1%. This season, he’s gotten back to locating in the zone more often, and his walk rate has fallen back down to his career norms.

The best thing about all those additional strikes is that DeSclafani’s contact rate has continued its downward trend. It’s still a touch above average, which puts a cap on his strikeout ceiling, but he’s earning more called strikes and avoiding free passes again, and when batters do make contact, they’re not doing much damage. His groundball rate is the highest it’s ever been, and his massive home field advantage has helped him push his home run rate to well below league average.

With a long injury history to worry about and just one season with more than 180 innings under his belt, DeSclafani’s stamina could become an issue for the Giants down the road. For now, though, he’s settled in as the second-best starter in a very good rotation in San Francisco and has found the best version of himself after all that tinkering.