Chase Burns Keeps It Simple

When a meteor* slams into Earth’s atmosphere, it’s moving so fast that it compresses the air in front of it. That compression superheats the air to nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the extreme heat in turn melts the outside of the meteor. The outer layers of rock glow brilliantly as they disintegrate, leaving a trail of plasma in the meteor’s wake. By the time the flying object has descended to around 30 miles above the surface, air resistance slows it to a more reasonable speed, though still hypersonic. At that elevation, the meteor is in what’s known as “dark flight” – without the plasma trail, the remaining hunk of rock is impossible for the human eye to pick up at that speed and distance. This explains why it’s so difficult to hit Chase Burns’s fastball.

*It’s technically a meteoroid until it encounters Earth’s atmosphere, and then the rock plus the trail of plasma is a meteor until the plasma burns out, at which point it becomes a meteorite. You’re welcome, pedants.

Few pitchers release the ball higher than Burns:

Between his 6-foot-3 frame, short stride, and high arm slot, Burns lets go of the ball 6 1/2 feet above the ground, the 24th-highest mark out of 478 major leaguers to throw 100 or more pitches this year. That presents a very different look than some of the best bat-missing fastballs in the league, because release point has a lot to do with vertical approach angle. The lower a pitcher releases the ball, the less negative its angle is when it reaches home plate, for obvious reasons. If Burns and fellow phenom Jacob Misiorowski each dotted the top of the zone with a fastball, Burns’ offering would be tilted at -4.4 degrees when it crossed home plate. Misiorowski’s pitch would be tilted at -3.2 degrees. That’s despite Burns’ inducing more vertical movement on his fastball; Misiorowski releases the ball about 15 inches lower than Burns does, which ends up mattering more for approach angle.

A flat approach angle is one of the best ways to miss bats. If you’re looking for evidence of this effect, here’s an easy way to think about it: Misiorowski induces a swinging strike on 21.9% of his four-seamers, the second-best rate out of the 254 pitchers who have thrown 100 four-seamers. Burns gets a swinging strike on 10.7% of his fastballs, more or less dead average at 117th. Bubba Chandler is the only starter who throws harder than Burns while missing fewer bats with his fastball. The approach angle thing really does matter for swinging strikes.

A lot of recent advances in pitch analysis center on the weird, unintuitive reasons that a fastball is hard to hit. It’s not just about velocity anymore, and it’s not even just about spin. Some fastballs excel because of their release point, or because the arm angle/movement combination is unexpected, or because they pair well with other pitches in the arsenal. There’s VAA, and tunneling, and any number of other ways of parsing why a given pitch works. But Burns’ fastball doesn’t need weird math to explain it. You can just watch him pitch.

Swings and misses are one part of what makes a given pitch good, but they’re not the only part. Sure, batters can make contact with Burns’ fastball – but they’re making about as bad of contact as you can imagine. If you can think of a way that it’s bad to hit a batted ball, that’s what opposing hitters are doing when they offer at a Burns heater. He’s allowing barrels on a mere 6.3% of his fair-contact fastballs, one of the best marks in the game. Few pitchers allow hard contact less frequently, particularly when you take into account how hard Burns throws – of the pitchers who allow hard contact less often, only Paul Skenes throws anywhere close to as hard.

His actual contact quality allowed is comically poor – when opponents put fastballs into play against him, they’re posting a .263 wOBA off of a .229 batting average and a .373 slugging percentage. That’s a small-sample kind of statistic, but the expected numbers are nearly as good: .289 expected batting average and a .319 xwOBA. Only two pitchers in the majors have better numbers there – though to be fair, those two are a mixed bag: Shohei Ohtani and Simeon Woods Richardson.

What I’m getting at is that Burns has an elite fastball, but not in the way you’d expect. It’s not a bat-missing invisi-ball. He’s not throwing it from such a unique angle that hitters have no internal heuristic for it. But he throws 100 mph with enormous movement. Hitters can have a mental idea for where the ball is going to go – they still have to hit it. Batters can get to the fastball – they just can’t do anything after they get there.

That’s not a popular way to pitch these days, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Between the speed and the movement, even when hitters connect with a Burns fastball, they tend to be under it. The ball is coming down from his high release point, batters have to tilt their bat path up to hit it because he locates it at the top of the zone, and its backspin means that even if they track the trajectory well, the ball generally lands higher on the bat than expected. Put it all together, and he’s generating a lot of incredibly poor contact – late swings producing popups. Only Bryan Woo has gotten more popups off of fastballs. Many Burns at-bats end like this:

Hitters know that Burns is going to come after them with his fastball. He throws his four-seamer 57% of the time; among starters, only Misiorowski and Ryne Nelson feature a higher percentage of them. Every at-bat against Burns is about trying to do something to his fastball. He throws it two-thirds of the time to start at-bats, and if he falls behind, more fastballs are sure to follow. Heck, even if he gets ahead, more fastballs are sure to follow. He throws it 57% of the time in 0-2 counts, 45% of the time in 1-2 counts, 48% of the time in 2-2 counts – you get the idea. But just when hitters have battled the Burns fastball to a standstill, they’re liable to end up in a Pitching Ninja GIF:

That sharp slider is pretty much unhittable for batters geared up to get the barrel of the bat to the top of the zone quickly. Despite its high velocity – 91 mph on average – it falls 22 inches more than his fastball on its path home. Just as a shallow approach angle leads to more missed bats at the top of the zone, a steep one leads to more missed bats low, and Burns’ high release point means that his slider crosses the plate falling very steeply. To stick with the Misiorowski comp, a Miz slider that clips the bottom of the zone would have a VAA of -6.1. A Burns slider with the same location would check in at -8.4 degrees. In other words, it’s falling far more steeply, and hitters wave over it at a staggering rate.

You know how the Burns fastball misses fewer bats than you’d expect? The slider does the exact opposite. His swinging strike rate on that pitch is a robust 27.4%, the third-highest mark in baseball. Max Meyer is the only pitcher in baseball to have missed more bats with a slider this year. He’s drawn 100 swinging strikes to Burns’ 92. But Meyer needed an extra 130 sliders to get those extra eight whiffs. Dylan Cease wrote a poem about his slider; Burns is throwing one that’s just as good, only without as much press. It might not have a lot of induced movement, but that doesn’t matter; it looks like a fastball out of his hand before plummeting like a stone in flight.

That’s basically it. Those two pitches comprise 93.6% of his pitches. Every at-bat is a challenge: hit this fastball before the slider wipes you out. Batters don’t have to pick between a huge range of pitches to defend, or try to pick up variations in spin that can move similar-trajectory pitches all around the zone. Deception isn’t part of his game. It doesn’t have to be when the pitches are this good.

Burns also throws a 90-mph changeup from time to time. It’s been absolutely abysmal so far; batters are slugging .909 when they put a changeup in play. But it just hasn’t mattered. Most of his changeups miss the zone. Most batters don’t even get to see one. He just puts them in a fastball/slider bind and profits.

There’s something delightful about the simplicity of this approach. As I covered in writing about Cristopher Sánchez earlier this week, modern pitching philosophy leans heavily on variety. Throwing three types of fastballs is the new throwing two types of fastballs. Everyone who throws a slider learns a sweeper now. Everyone who throws a changeup learns another type of changeup. If Emeril Lagasse were a pitching coach, he’d be yelling “Bam!” after sprinkling a cutter into a pitch mix for seasoning.

Then there’s Burns. He’s not fooling hitters. He’s overmatching them. The old adage of not putting all your eggs in one basket? Burns subscribes to the Carnegie philosophy: “Put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket.” If he gets beaten, the batter is going to have to beat his best pitch, not a fifth offering mixed in for the sake of disguise.

Are there downsides to this approach? Most definitely! That’s why everyone’s mixing it up. Burns has allowed a .226 wOBA his first time through the order, a .298 wOBA his second time, and a .357 mark his third time. That’s in a tiny sample, but the direction is hardly a surprise. Keeping hitters off balance gets harder and harder when you don’t have anything new to show them, no matter the potency of your stuff.

A counterpoint, though: Burns is 23, and he has plenty of time to develop some countermoves when he needs to. For now, the downside is manageable. That’s not to say it isn’t real. Burns has given up seven home runs this season, and more than half of those have come during his third time through an order. That’s despite the fact that he doesn’t pitch very deep into games; only 20% of the batters he’s faced this year have come on a third trip. I wouldn’t want to lean on Burns for a long start in an important game just yet; his current approach isn’t conducive to that. But on the other hand, even with that weakness rearing its ugly head, he’s ninth in baseball in FIP-based WAR, and his ERA is 1.6 runs lower than his FIP. I’m a lot more forgiving of a guy struggling the third time through the order if he’s salting the Earth in his first two cracks at it.

I can see two paths for Burns to develop into a capital-a Ace. First, he could branch out the way that so many of the best starters have done. Skenes threw fastballs on two-thirds of his pitches during his first year in the majors, and he’s spent the next two years adding more and more alternatives. Max Fried throws six different pitches 10% of the time or more; he got Cy Young votes as a fastball/curveball type early in his career. Tarik Skubal was in the majors for several years before perfecting his ludicrous changeup and dialing in his current four-seam/sinker mix. Logan Webb added a cutter. Garrett Crochet added a cutter and a sinker. This is a perfectly normal path for elite starters to tread.

I’m hoping for the second one, though. To borrow a phrase from Ron Darling, during Jacob deGrom’s peak, he had five elite pitches and only threw two of them. He didn’t even move around the plate all that much. He simply pointed his unhittable fastball and unhittable slider at the glove-side edge and dared hitters to beat him. Chris Sale is still pretty close to a two-pitch guy. He throws a four-seamer or slider 80% of the time. Clayton Kershaw never branched out. Justin Verlander never added a sinker or cutter, and he’s actually leaned more on his slider over time.

It’s far too early to compare Burns to any of those pitching legends. Let’s at least let him get a full season under his belt first. But the early returns on him have been absolutely phenomenal. He’s not trying to fool anyone; he’s just putting his best foot forward, and hitters haven’t been up to the challenge. It’s a delightful change from the current pitching norm. I highly recommend watching a Burns start, just to see how clear it is that hitters know what’s coming and still can’t do anything about it.