Goodness Gracious, José Alvarado

I might as well throw out all the usual caveats up front. It’s April. Sample sizes are still miniscule. The ball might be different. The rules are definitely different. I could go on. All of that is true, but it doesn’t change this essential fact: José Alvarado is on an otherworldly tear right now, putting up best-reliever-in-baseball numbers for a Phillies team that desperately needs the help.

Let’s start with the numbers, because they’re overwhelming. Alvarado has faced 29 batters so far this year. He’s struck out 18 of them. That’s a 62.1% strikeout rate, or as I like to call it, a made up strikeout rate. You can’t conceive of a 62.1% strikeout rate. It’s nonsense math. Nearly two-thirds of the batters who have come to the plate against Alvarado this year have walked back to the dugout with nothing to show for it but a sad face.

As you can no doubt imagine, you need to miss a lot of bats to put up strikeout numbers like that. Alvarado has posted a 20.8% swinging strike rate so far this season, seventh-best among relievers even in the small sample of April, when outliers rule. That’s a career high for him, obviously, but not by as much as you’d think: He posted a delectable 16.7% mark for all of 2022.

We’ll get back to the strikeouts later, but how about the 11 batters who haven’t struck out against Alvarado? Remarkably, none have walked or been hit by a pitch. Six have hit grounders. Four have hit fly balls. One hit a line drive. One of those fly balls left the park, and voila, you get Alvarado’s season line. One homer allowed, one run allowed, and a 0.56 FIP to go along with a 1.08 ERA. That’s silly good, the kind of streak we’d marvel at if Edwin Díaz or Emmanuel Clase did it. Alvarado isn’t quite in that elite tier; he got demoted to Triple-A last year, for example. Let’s give him his roses, then, and see if we can figure out how he’s doing it.

The book on Alvarado is simple: he throws a drool-worthy sinker, complements it with a hard cutter, and sometimes struggles with command. As Leo Morgenstern noted last October, Alvarado’s trip to the minors seemed to unlock something in him. Upon his return, he commanded the ball better, and the question with Alvarado has always been whether he can get the ball in the zone, not whether his stuff plays.

Seriously, look at this monstrosity of a sinker. Do you like pitchers who throw 100? Do you like pitchers with freakish, there’s-a-robot-steering-this-ball movement? Alvarado’s sinker is just what you’re looking for. What are you supposed to do with this pitch?

This isn’t new for Alvarado. Even when he struggled to land that sinker in the zone, the pitches that did land were visually stunning and left hitters searching for answers. Good news: He’s gone from getting the ball over the plate less than half the time to more than two-thirds of the time. The swinging strikes have exploded in turn:

It’s hard to wrap your head around a sinker that misses so many bats. If you exclude Josh Hader’s “sinker” that’s actually a four-seamer, here are the eight pitcher-seasons since 2015 with at least 100 sinkers thrown and a swinging strike rate of 16% or more:

Only Britton has done it with anything approaching a primary pitch. By way of comparison, Alvarado has already thrown 74 sinkers this year, and we’re only three weeks into the season. If he can keep peppering the zone at anything approaching his current clip, we might be looking at Britton-esque territory for the pitch.

Think that’s impressive? Alvarado is doing this while batters try their hardest not to swing at his sinker. Opponents are only swinging 50% of the time when they see a sinker, and only 60% of the time when they see one in the strike zone. It’s hard to generate swinging strikes without swings – but when opponents come up empty on 35.1% of their swings, you can do it. That’s 35.1% of their swings against a sinker. I can’t overstate how ludicrous that is. The league average whiff rate against sinkers is 15% in the last two years. No one else is within hailing distance of Alvarado in this category.

We haven’t even talked about his best pitch yet. That’d be his cutter, a hard gryo-spinning pitch that sits 93-94 mph. Batters looking for a sinker are going to be nowhere near it; it falls an additional foot on its path to the plate and has nearly a foot of horizontal movement separation as well. Here’s what it looks like when you tee off on a 99 mph sinker, only to find out that you were actually facing a 93 mph cutter:

For the third consecutive season, Alvarado is running a swinging strike rate of roughly a quarter on his cutter (28.8% in 2021, 28.4% last year, and 25.5% so far this year). His old problem with this pitch was that he couldn’t throw it for a strike. This year, he’s located it in the zone a career-high 39.2% of the time. Hitters swing at it quite a bit when it’s in the zone – they have to – but they don’t have any luck even when they do. They’ve come up empty on more than half of their swings against it. That’s been true for each of the last three years, but it’s particularly devastating when he’s locating it in the strike zone with some regularity.

I’m just saying the same thing over and over again, but I feel like that’s the only way to drive this home. This is one of the most dominant stretches you’ll see a reliever put together, ever. Here’s Alvarado’s game log, with just a few selected categories included:

Uh, yeah, that’ll play, and even his strikeout-free outing yesterday was a three-up, three-down affair. In the interest of having this not be a complete bummer of an article for hitting fans, I might as well also include a GIF of that one home run:

Majestic. No doubt. And even then, I wouldn’t be mad about that pitch if I were Alvarado. That’s a heavy 100 mph sinker at the bottom of the zone that would have popped J.T. Realmuto’s glove if Jorge Soler hadn’t so rudely interposed his bat. You can’t get through a whole season without giving up a home run, and doing it on a well-located pitch is just the cost of doing business.

How likely is Alvarado to continue this run? He’s incredibly unlikely to continue it at this level, because no one is this good. Did you see all those strikeout numbers I listed? It’s an unsustainable heater. But how likely is he to keep dominating opposing hitters and making them wish the Phillies had left him in Triple-A? It comes down to this chart, in my opinion:

Now, can he keep that zone rate up? I can’t get a good read on it. I don’t see anything different in his mechanics when comparing this season to late last season – he moved to the first base side of the rubber slightly upon his reinstatement from the minors last year. He’s just hitting the zone more frequently than he used to, and Philadelphia is profiting from it. I’m not sure how long this run will continue, but I’m enjoying it while it lasts.