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.