Jake Odorizzi’s Search for a Third Pitch

Useless and true: Jake Odorizzi is currently the major league’s pitching WAR leader. He’s made one start! Danny Salazar has made zero starts. All this means is that Odorizzi’s first start was a good one, and maybe the best so far, or maybe not. Noah Syndergaard had a pretty awesome debut, too. Jose Fernandez was sweet. Chris Archer looked good. Odorizzi was right there. He struck out 10 Blue Jays in 5.2 innings, allowing two runs (one earned) on four hits and two walks. Nice little start! Against a nice little offense.

Tampa Bay’s rotation ranked 15th when we rolled out our positional power rankings, but it’s also a rotation that figures to posses considerable upside. Everyone’s young, and everyone’s hinted at a higher level. Archer, obviously, is fantastic. Last year, he positioned himself as an ace, and even he’s got room to improve. Drew Smyly struck out a shocking number of batters last season, and with just a year of health could reasonably go from a name that just baseball nuts know to a name that everyone knows. Matt Moore will seemingly always have potential. There’s plenty of talent down on the farm. Plus, there’s Odorizzi. You could make the case for anyone here as being on the cusp of a breakout. At the very least, everyone’s doing what they can to take that next step.

Odorizzi, in particular, has something in the works, something about which he’s been vocal as of late, and something that was on display in his season debut. It’s best to be up front right now and say the results, admittedly, were mixed, but Odorizzi understands he has a weakness, has formulated a plan to combat that weakness, and is seemingly committed to seeing it out.

The weakness: Jake Odorizzi has not been able to consistently retire right-handed batters. It’s odd, because Odorizzi is a right-handed pitcher, and so this type of struggle seems counterintuitive. You’ve probably been conditioned to ignore reverse-splits like Odorizzi’s as noise. But I think in particular cases they can be revealing. For instance, when the Chicago Cubs came to Cleveland last year, manager Joe Maddon dropped the left-handed Kyle Schwarber to eighth in the lineup against the right-handed Danny Salazar, just one night after Schwarber went 4-for-5. When asked about the decision, Maddon reasoned that Salazar was a “reverse-split guy” due to his heavy reliance on a changeup, a pitch that’s commonly effective against opposite-handed hitters but bunk against same-handed hitters. And it’s true: nearly 90% of Salazar’s pitches have been either fastballs or split-changeups, and he’s actually performed better against lefties than righties in his career. When Joe Maddon puts stock in a reverse platoon split, you can too.

In terms of pitching styles, Odorizzi is Salazar’s clone, just with less overpowering stuff. Nearly 80% of Odorizzi’s pitches have been either fastballs, or the split-change he learned from Alex Cobb. Like Salazar, Odorizzi has performed better against lefties throughout his career, though his splits are even more drastic. For his career, Odorizzi has recorded a superb 2.98 FIP against lefties, and a dreadful 4.56 FIP against righties. This is a problem. Without a third pitch to use against righties, Odorizzi’s ceiling is limited. That upside we talked about earlier is harder to see, so long as three-quarters or more of Odorizzi’s pitches are fastballs and splits.

Which leads to this quote, from the Tampa Bay Times over the spring:

“I used [the split-change] too much last year in a lot of situations,” Odorizzi said. “But I worked really hard in spring on using my other three pitches, so now I’m more of a complete pitcher as opposed to a two-pitch pitcher who has two other pitches that don’t translate. I really put a lot of emphasis on that, and I’m really happy with how everything feels going into the season.”

Odorizzi has talked about experimenting with different pitches in the past. At times, he’s thrown a cutter in an attempt to retire righties, and at other times, a slider. They haven’t worked out. At the end of last season, he mentioned that he’s blended the two offerings together to give him more flexibility. But that pitch still seems like it’s in the back pocket. What we’ve heard more about is the curveball.

Last September, he was “hoping to use it a lot more in the future” and was planning on putting “a lot of emphasis on it going into next year.” In the spring, he was experimenting with “throwing [his] curveball with two strikes, trying to get a strikeout pitch.” It’s not like the curve is brand-new — he threw 41 of them when he first came up in 2013 — but Odorizzi has seemingly dedicated a heightened level of focus toward it.

In that dominant start against a right-handed heavy Blue Jays lineup on Tuesday, Odorizzi threw 13 curveballs. He never threw more than eight in a game last season. If this first start is any indication, Odorizzi is serious about this curveball thing. I made sure to include a mixed-results disclaimer early in this post for a reason, though. Odorizzi threw 13 curves. Eight went for balls. None went for swinging strikes.

One probably gets hit for a homer more often than not:

One got spiked badly in the dirt:

There were the occasional flashes of a quality offering…

…but overall, there was more bad than good.

Odorizzi was able to strike out 10 Blue Jays because he got swings and misses on four of every 10 fastballs and splits. The curve wasn’t the reason for that. But the curve is the reason for this post, because it represents an interesting development. It’s not like it hurt him on Tuesday — he pitched great. Who knows, maybe even though he didn’t command it well, it still helped. It gave everyone a different speed, a different shape about which to worry. Maybe it changed some eye levels, or helped set up some of Odorrizi’s riding fastballs that he throws up in the zone.

Even when he wasn’t commanding it well, it could still have its benefits. It’s just, we still need to see the consistency. Nothing’s changed in the velocity or movement departments from previous iterations of the curve, so the optimistic hope is that he can find a comfort level with the pitch. It wasn’t consistent in the past, which is why it’s never become a larger part of the arsenal, and Salazar himself had high hopes of integrating a curveball last year, too, before mostly scrapping it due to inconsistency. It’s tough to add a consistent new pitch at this stage in a pitcher’s career. But Jake Odorizzi is trying, and now it’s something to watch. It could turn out to be hugely important. For Odorizzi to take his game to the next level, he’ll have to solve his reverse platoon split. A consistent curveball might just be the key.