Did Justin Verlander Find a New Pitch?
Justin Verlander threw an epic game in his final 2017 outing. It just wasn’t enough to bring home the hardware for the Astros. It’s wasn’t for lack of trying: he averaged over 96 mph on the 60 fastballs he threw, struck out nine, and didn’t walk a batter. He even broke out a surprise for the Dodgers, something that left many of them shaking their heads after the game.
Nobody really wanted to talk about Verlander in the Dodgers clubhouse following a win that forced Game 7, but there was one whisper. “Did you see that cutter?” asked one pitcher.
Cutter? Verlander has thrown the pitch 0.14% of the time over his career by Brooks Baseball. It’s early and the numbers haven’t been cleaned yet, but it looks like he threw as many as 10 of them last night, out of 95 pitches. And it worked for him. Mostly.
He got six strikes with his surprise weapon, two swinging. Here he is, for example, striking out Justin Turner on a cutter that almost certainly wasn’t in the scouting report.
He threw that same pitch to Logan Forsythe in the fifth and got a grounder foul. Chris Taylor whiffed on one in the sixth. Verlander threw it again to Turner in the sixth and got a foul tip. And then another foul. And then he changed the location and got a pop up from Turner, who must have felt like he was chasing fastballs.
“I saw that pitch, yeah,” said Austin Barnes, who noticed from the dugout. “Just glad he didn’t throw me one.”
“I couldn’t see anything out of his hand,” laughed Cody Bellinger. “That’s why he struck me out a million times.”
But Corey Seager wasn’t as surprised.
“Yeah, he throws his slider harder sometimes,” said Seager. “I’ve seen that before.”
And yet… the pitch occupied a velocity band and movement type that Verlander hasn’t visited much this year. Pitches between 90 and 92 with some cut? Pitches like that made up less than 3% of his overall pitches thrown this past season. He throws it, some, but he really upped the usage Tuesday night.
You can see the elusive band of hard sliders in the graph here. A mythical fifth offering for a stud pitcher.
The pitch did wonders for Verlander. Until it didn’t.
With a one-run lead in the sixth inning, Verlander allowed a line-drive single to Austin Barnes to open the frame. Chase Utley came to bat.
Utley saw a cutter on the plate. Then he fouled off a low fastball. Then he fouled off a cutter on the inside part of the plate. A third cutter to the same batter was too many.
Zack Greinke told me once that fooling with a cutter and a slider made the pitches merge and resulted in two pitches that were mediocre. Verlander maybe has been throwing his slider harder or attempting to throw a cutter and a slider, but either way, the two pitches weren’t as good as his slider has been by itself.
Since Verlander found his slider again late in the season, he’s been getting 22% whiffs on the pitch. In Game 6, he threw the cutter and slider a combined 28 times. The result? Just four whiffs. That might just be a typical “down game,” something a pitcher could laugh off. Unless it’s Game 6 of the World Series, however, and one of those errant cutters extended the rally that decided the game.
“I was trying to bury a slider there,” Verlander said after the game of the pitch, interestingly calling it a slider. “I’ve left enough sliders over the plate lately to know what happens. I just yanked it.”
But Verlander has insisted this pitch is a slider before, when he was throwing harder sliders in Detroit. Something called the Tiger Slider. So in essence he returned to a pitch that he’s thrown before, sort of. What was notable last night was that he threw the harder slider ten times, and then also had a slider that he threw softer 18 times that had three to four inches more drop.
Amazing, anyway, that the pitcher had one final wrinkle in his back pocket. And sort of tragic that it may have cost him a crucial at-bat.
This post has been updated to add additional context about the history of Verlander’s slider.
With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
He claimed last year that he doesn’t have a cutter, and that it’s just the same slider with more velo. Last night’s version looked a lot more like second half 2016 Verlander, where he was sitting around 90 mph with more cutter-like shape to it. He started this season throwing the slider around 90 mph as well, and wasn’t getting whiffs because it lacked depth. It really did look exactly like a cutter. Getting that depth back on it by dialing down the velocity, and getting a bit more downhill plane, was one of the key adjustments he made this summer after a rough start this year. I wonder if concern about the ball was leading to him over-gripping, and over-throwing the slider last night, as opposed to it being a conscious choice to adjust the shape. But if he could differentiate the two and use them both in concert? Yikes. Good luck.
I remembered I wrote about that Tiger Slider cutter thing before lol. Added in some more context. But couldn’t find the Verlander cutter comments.
Maybe a response to the slick ball? No one has really been able to consistently throw an effective slider this entire WS. That may have been his way to adjust.
well, except Game 1, and every Dodgers pitcher last night was pretty much fine.
Game 1 was 102 degrees. You’re going to find a grip when you’re sweating a ton.
was I the only one who thought that the HBP to Utley was a joke- that Utley didn’t do anywhere near enough to get out of the way?
That’s never prevented Rizzo from getting the call.
There’s a reason the guy is so high on this list:
https://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/HBP_career.shtml
And it’s not just because of where he sets up in the box, not even pretending to try to get out of the way is kind of his M.O.
you don’t have to try to get out of the way, you have to not be out of the way and purposefully get in the way.
No, that’s not the wording of the rule. Quoting from MLB Official Baseball Rules, Rule 5.05(b):
“He is touched by a pitched ball which he is not attempting to hit unless (A) The ball is in the strike zone when it touches the batter, or (B) The batter makes no attempt to avoid being touched by the ball …. If the ball is outside the strike zone when it touches the batter, it shall be called a ball if he makes no attempt to avoid being touched.”
That said, the pitch that hit Utley was a 90 mile per hour pitch with movement on it. It usually takes something quite a bit more egregious for part B of that rule to come into play. I think that’s reasonable, because a hitter’s primary focus in the fraction of a second that he tracks a pitch is to try to decide whether to swing and how to swing, not a focus on dodging an errant pitch.
Verlander had 1 whiff on 17 sliders on game 2. It’s more than just one bad game. The whiff rate for sliders has been way down across the board in this series. It’s probably why Verlander was looking for an alternative.
I expected more curveballs. Instead he doubled down on the heater. Which worked pretty well for five innings. Needed to change things up third time through the order.
https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/daniel-norris-justin-verlander-and-the-tiger-slider/
The harder slider that some labeled a cutter was a huge part of Verlander’s 2016 resurgence. This year it wasn’t working and the more typical slider did. I tend to agree that concern over the ball was probably the reason he took the harder one for a spin (pun intended), though I’m not sure whether the different release would help much with the same grip.
Man, thanks for reminding me that I wrote that piece. Added it into the piece.