Jake Reed Has Arrived*

One quick note before you read this piece about Jake Reed: He just went on the IL with forearm tightness. He’s also been on four different teams this year, so it’s not like he’s some surefire All-Star who needs to get healthy. I probably wouldn’t have written this article if I hadn’t already been halfway through it when he hit the IL. But I was halfway through, and I think Reed is interesting. You just might, too, after reading this.

As much as I watch baseball, I haven’t seen every random reliever in the game. I was innocently watching a Mets-Giants clash last week when — well, here, just watch it:

If you’re like me, that delivery made you sit up in your seat as surely as a shot of espresso. It’s just so … sudden. It’s not that he sidearms it; there are plenty of righty sidearmers in baseball these days. It’s not that he short-arms it; there are plenty of those guys in baseball these days. But the combination! It’s like nothing I’ve seen recently, and it focuses you on how quickly batters have to go from waiting to “oh god where is the ball coming from?”

We’ll talk about how it works before long; much as I’d like to marvel at Reed’s delivery all day, I should probably discuss results. But first, seriously! Look where Reed’s hand is as he strides into his delivery:

Compare that with a sidearmer who releases the ball slightly higher off the ground than Reed does, Steve Cishek:

The camera angles are different, but even so, the contrast is stark. They end up in the same position at release, but timing Reed, after dealing with “regular” sidearmers and submariners, must be a hitter’s nightmare.

In a small sample of eight games, Reed has been excellent. His 1.93 ERA is not a particularly meaningful statistic, but his 26.3% strikeout rate is a step in the right direction. And his walk rate? A sterling 5.3%. It might not look pretty, but he has been getting the job done this year, albeit in low-leverage situations.

Oh, and he’s done it for seemingly every team in baseball. Reed’s journey has been exhausting. He was granted minor league free agency after seven years with the Twins this past offseason. He signed with the Angels but never made it to the majors (for the Angels!) after scuffling in Triple-A. He opted out of his contract at the end of May, and hey, do you want a good sign that you maybe should have used a reliever? The Dodgers picked him up and, after a month in the minors, installed him as valuable bullpen depth in July.

The Dodgers are always tight on roster spots, though. Reed was fine, but he was back-of-the-roster padding, and they designated him for assignment when they needed an extra outfielder. Another sign that you gave up on a pitcher too early? The Rays claimed Reed on waivers. When Tampa Bay and Los Angeles (actual Los Angeles, sorry Angels) are claiming you, you’re probably doing something right.

Naturally enough, he lasted all of a week in Tampa; the team needed 40-man space after acquiring Jordan Luplow and DJ Johnson, so Reed went back onto the waiver wire. The Mets came calling, and while that’s not as prestigious of an acquiring organization, it was the break he needed to get back to the big leagues.

With the backstory and the strange delivery covered, it’s worth asking: is Reed good? It’s premature to say for sure after eight major league innings, but hey, we’re here, so we might as well speculate. But instead of using major league results, let’s look at some minor league data to examine his pitches and try to come to a conclusion.

As you might imagine, Reed is a two-pitch sort. Like seemingly every sidearmer, he relies on a sinker and a slider that have roughly mirrored spin. The sinker sits 87–88 mph and tops out around 90 — again, pretty normal for someone with his arm slot. The benefit of that low slot is that the pitch gets a ton of sink. It drops roughly the same as most high-80s fastballs, but by releasing the ball so low to the ground, Reed has a very flat vertical angle on release. All else equal, you wouldn’t expect the pitch to drop much at all.

He makes up for that with the spin he imparts; it’s normal sinker spin, but tilted so low that the ball drops relative to spin-less flight on its path home. Most sinkers tail sideways and slightly up; Reed’s tails sideways and slightly down. That sounds confusing, but throwing a sinker from such a low arm slot is confusing. Here’s how it looks as it comes out of his hand:

The orange spikes on the right side show the angle of spin (from Reed’s perspective) on the sinker. He starts it with a slight downward tilt. From there, it picks up even more downward movement, and like most sinkers, his produces some seam-shifted wake. In the end, the pitch breaks like this:

Those Baseball Savant graphs are awesome, but they’re no substitute for seeing the pitch in action. Here, watch the way he produces arm-side run and coaxes an uncomfortable swing out of Will Smith:

The slider works off the fastball, naturally enough. It moves exactly opposite, which puts hitters in a tough bind; the ball will end up 25 inches apart for the same initial trajectory due to the spin on the two pitches but will drop roughly the same total amount; the sinker’s downward break makes up for its velocity advantage. The camera angle on this one isn’t ideal (it hides some of the break), but watch him spin one past Chris Taylor:

And here it is in all its glory, with a centerfield camera showing off the full sweep of a pitch that Trevor Story wishes he could forget:

Batters are no dummies. They’ve seen sinkers and sliders before — more or less their entire life, really. But they haven’t seen it from such a strange starting location. Sidearmers don’t generally induce many whiffs; they don’t throw particularly hard, and they rely on sinkers. But Reed’s minor league statistics tell a different story, as he’s run elevated strikeout rates for years now — long enough that it doesn’t look like a fluke.

Why does he have that juice? He’s less like other sidearmers than you might think, particularly when it comes to his slider. Twelve righties have thrown sliders with a release point lower than 4.25 feet off the ground this year, but Reed checks in at just under four feet, closer to the top of the scale (Cishek, 4.16 feet) than to the bottom (Tyler Rogers, 1.21 feet). One of those righties is Greg Holland, and he’s done it exactly once:

But ignore that nonsense; the other 11 are a rough cohort for Reed. And while he’s throwing a slider from a similar arm slot, he gets meaningfully different movement. His slider fights gravity slightly, as most sidearmers’ do, but no one throws a slider with the same characteristics. Everyone with more horizontal movement does something different, which makes him unique. Some throw it with a ton of rise; think Rogers or Ryan Thompson, whose slider is nearly a velocity match for Reed’s but falls five inches less on its path to the plate. Some throw it with a downward angle; Cishek’s slider drops ten inches more than Reed’s (it’s slower, which helps, and also breaks downward). Reed’s slider is somewhere in between, getting nearly ten inches of horizontal break with not much vertical movement to speak of (what it does get gives it a few inches of ride). It’s closest to Darren O’Day’s version of the pitch, and trust me, having your sidearm slider compared to O’Day’s is high praise.

Reed’s unique slider can do a lot, but one thing it can’t do is make a sidearmer succeed against lefties. He’s done better against them than righties this year in the majors, but that’s a sample size of exactly nine batters. In his minor league career, he’s been lights out against righties and merely good against lefties:

That’s not surprising given his delivery, and it’s probably not a fixable problem. But who cares? The righty numbers look real, and I don’t need any more evidence to say that his two pitches play in the big leagues. He might not have thrown ten major league innings. He might be on the shelf with an arm injury. He might have a strange delivery. But whatever qualifications you want to issue to Jake Reed, they’re qualifications around this main fact: he’s a solid big league reliever, and a joy to watch pitch.