Is Andre Pallante Good? I Still Can’t Tell.

Andre Pallante starts for the Cardinals on Tuesday, and if he beats Michael King and the Padres, he’ll move into a tie for the National League lead in wins.

I know we’re not supposed to care about wins, but it gives me a chance to talk about a pitcher I’ve had a hard time understanding over his five seasons in St. Louis. I should be more specific, because Pallante’s game is pretty straightforward. That I understand just fine. I just can’t figure out if he’s any good or not.

Pallante is one of the most groundball-heavy pitchers of the 21st Century. He could be one of the most groundball-heavy pitchers of all time, but we’ll never know because we only have data back to 2002. Regardless: Since then, Pallante has a 62.3% groundball rate, which is fifth highest out of the 606 pitchers who have thrown at least 500 innings in the past 25 seasons.

The four guys ahead of him only reinforce how much Pallante lives in the dirt: Zack Britton, Brad Ziegler, Brandon Webb, and Derek Lowe. In 2023, Pallante worked out of the bullpen, and in 62 relief appearances he posted a groundball rate of 77.8%, which is the third-highest figure on record for a season of at least 40 innings. (Britton beat him in 2015 and 2016.) If you’re going by GB/FB ratio, Pallante’s 2023 was fifth, trailing one season by Ziegler and three by Britton.

Generally, a pitcher runs groundball rates like that by throwing a hard sinker that ducks under the barrel of the bat at the last second. Actually, I just mentioned Brandon Webb, so that feels like a good excuse to remember his sinker.

Webb’s sinker is, without exaggeration, my favorite pitch in baseball history. I’m getting emotional just watching that highlight clip.

Britton threw about 90% sinkers. His was harder than Webb’s, and therefore lacking on that little loopy movement, but the result was more or less the same.

Pallante doesn’t do that. He throws a sinker, sure, but if you’re looking at spin-based movement, his sinker actually has about seven inches less drop than the average sinker, or five inches less total vertical movement than comparable pitches of the type. It also gets between four and five fewer inches of arm-side movement than the typical sinker.

If you look at Pallante’s four-seamer, his primary fastball, you’ll understand why.

Pallante has this crazy over-the-top arm angle, which makes him an extremely vertical pitcher. In other words, he throws a four-seamer and a big, goofy 12-to-6 knuckle-curve, with a slider in between. But all three pitches tunnel in a straight line from top to bottom, like a traffic light.

This is in contrast to a sinker-sweeper guy like Clay Holmes or Justin Lawrence, whose pitches move side-to-side, like, um, one of those sideways traffic lights.

Pallante isn’t putting any weird spin on his four-seamer, either. It’s a perfectly wholesome steak-and-potatoes backspin fastball. He just lawn darts it straight into the ground, so hitters keep getting on top of it. The knuckle-curve drops like it’s full of lead shot; it averages 62.3 inches of total movement, including spin-based movement and gravity. Out of 1,899 distinct pitch types on Baseball Savant’s leaderboard, Pallante’s curveball has the 13th-most downward vertical movement.

When Pallante is on the mound, opponents beat the bejeezus out of the dirt in front of home plate. Over the past five years, 33.1% of the balls put in play off him have traveled 10 feet or less in the air. That’s the third-highest rate out of any pitcher with at least 500 balls in play over that time. I’ll repeat that figure, because it’s mind-boggling: One in three batted balls off Pallante hits the ground within 10 feet.

So Pallante throws pretty hard, changes speeds well, and the grounds crew doesn’t have to tamp down the dirt around the plate after he pitches. He should be pretty good, then. And sometimes, he has been. He posted a 3.17 ERA as a rookie, in 108 innings across the rotation and bullpen. In 2024, he once again split time between starting and relief, and posted a 3.78 ERA, a 3.71 FIP, and a 3.52 xERA. This year, it’s much the same: a 3.88 ERA and a 3.81 xERA in 69 2/3 innings so far.

There is, however, a catch. Pallante is one of the best who ever lived at a secondary pitching skill: Inducing groundballs. But there are three primary skills a pitcher needs to survive: Miss bats, induce weak contact, don’t walk people. Do one well and you can play in the majors. Do all three well and you’re going to the Hall of Fame.

Pallante doesn’t really do any of them well. He’s run walk rates between 8.0% and 10.0% every year of his career. He’s never had a season in which he struck out 20% of his opponents, and while his mole-like arsenal keeps the ball off opponents’ barrels, his HardHit% has usually hovered around average throughout his career.

In fact, Pallante’s grounder-seeking stuff can turn into a liability in a hurry if the hitter squares it up. In 2023, that record-threatening groundball-rate season, Pallante had a 4.76 ERA. In 68 innings, he allowed only 23 fly balls, which is a ludicrously low figure. Unfortunately, six of those fly balls turned into home runs. In addition to having the fifth-highest GB% since 2002, Pallante has the 11th-highest HR/FB%.

That’s made him something of a FIP pariah; even now, he’s running a FIP of 4.46.

This year, Pallante has made a couple tweaks. He’s added a splitter, which can’t hurt, though he’s thrown it only 37 times out of 1,173 pitches. Calling it a show-me pitch would be an insult to show-me pitches. It’s more of a tease.

The big difference is in his lawn-dart fastball. It still divebombs into the ground from his high release point, but it’s slightly more spin-efficient this season. That’s taken about two inches of drop off the four-seamer, which separates it from the slider, against which opponents are wOBAing just .245.

He’s also using it less: 30% of total pitches, down from 44% last year. The sinker, curveball, and splitter have all gone up in usage slightly. Last year, nearly two out of every three pitches Pallante threw to lefties was a four-seamer; now, that usage rate is down to 49%.

As a result, Pallante is running the best HardHit% and strikeout rate of his career. But he’s had to shave the edges off of his extreme groundball reputation. His GB% this year is just 51.7%, which is only sixth among pitchers with at least 60 innings.

Do I feel at all confident that this new version of Pallante is actually good? Not in the slightest. I’ve been burned by him before, and the strikeout rate is still troubling. But he’s no longer a massive historical outlier, for better or worse. Good for him if he keeps this up all year, but it will be a bit of a bummer to say goodbye to the old Pallante, who was too weird to pitch well for long.