Joe Ryan Is Off to a Swinging Start

We’re closing in on the quarter-season mark on the 2023 MLB schedule, and the Twins are off to a first-place start. Sure, that’s thanks in part to a sluggish performance of the rest of the sorry AL Central – the second-place Tigers are the fifth team out of a Wild Card spot at the moment – but Minnesota looks just about poised to run away with the division, and the team has its arms to thank. By ERA, FIP, xFIP and WAR, the Twins have one of the top three pitching staffs in baseball to this point, and despite an offense that has yet to really find its rhythm, the Twins’ run prevention efforts – led by a slew of impressive right-handed starters – have been something of a revelation.

Sonny Gray has had perhaps the sunniest start of all, allowing no more than one earned run in each of his first six starts and showing flashes of his vintage All-Star form. Newcomer Pablo López had a pair of starts he wishes he could take back at the end of April, but for the most part looks as advertised. With early injuries to Kenta Maeda and Tyler Mahle – who the Twins just announced will undergo Tommy John surgery – the depth is already being put to the test, but Bailey Ober has looked fantastic in his three outings and Louie Varland has handled his call capably, most recently allowing a single run in six frames against the Padres on Tuesday.

Then there’s 26-year-old Joe Ryan, who seems to have taken a step forward after a respectable 2.1-WAR rookie season last year. Through seven starts, the right-hander has a 2.45 ERA, 2.87 FIP, and 3.31 xFIP with 47 strikeouts and just six walks in 44 innings, leading Minnesota to a 5-2 record in those games. He’s one of just nine pitchers in the majors with as many as six quality starts; he’s allowed 1 or 0 earned runs four times and three or fewer hits four times. In just his second full season in the majors, Ryan looks as though he’s been there for years.

Through the early goings of 2023, Ryan’s success has involved some significant peripheral improvements. Most conspicuously, Ryan has jumped from the 33rd percentile to the 98th in chase percentage. That jump – from 28.0% chases to 40.1% – has been the largest for a starting pitcher and the second-largest in baseball, trailing only Pirates closer David Bednar. It’s helped Ryan improve his swinging strike rate from 11.4% in 2022 to 13.9% this year.

But he’s not just winning on the chases – he has the advantage on just about all swings. According to Statcast’s run values, Ryan has a 2.2-run advantage on swings in the chase zone. In the shadow of the plate, he has a 7.4-run edge. Even over the heart of the plate, where swings tend to do the most damage, Ryan’s pitches that are cut at have summed 3.6 runs in his favor. All told, he has a 13.5-run advantage when the hitter swings at his pitches, compared to a three-run disadvantage when the batter holds off:

This isn’t a wholly unique experience – for plenty of pitchers, generating swings in most if not all zones is going to yield results. But Ryan applies this principle to an extreme – so far in 2023, no qualifier has induced a higher overall swing percentage than his 56.1% rate, a more than five-point increase from last year. The only pitcher within two points of him is Sandy Alcantara:

He’s doing it all with a retooled arsenal. Ryan has swapped out his changeup for a splitter, which he throws just a hair slower but with much more drop. He’s mixing it in over a quarter of the time, much more than he ever did the changeup, and it has been extremely effective through his first seven outings, yielding swings on 61.8% of 170 pitches. Those 105 swings haven’t generated a single barrel, and have yielded just two “solid contact” batted balls. Batters have a .165 wOBA off the pitch, which Ryan tends to use on the lower edge of the plate and outside to lefties.

There’s also the matter of the breaking ball. Last year, his slider kept sliding more and more until it was sweeping. So far in 2023, he’s bounced back and forth start by start, sometimes slowing it down and sweeping it more across the zone, and other times throwing it a little harder and sharper, while dropping his curveball altogether. This tinkering with his secondary options has allowed his four-seamer to shine in the top half of the zone and above. Look at this batch of fastballs, which includes everything from about the belt up:

Hitters are swinging at 65.3% of these, missing on 30.9% of those swings, and generating a .198 wOBA in that broad zone, including a .211 mark on the subset of these fastballs inside the zone. That’s probably unsustainably low, but he’s doing well to keep hitters guessing at whether the pitch will stay up in the zone or dip below it. Effective offspeed and breaking options serve his upper-half fastball use well.

According to pitch modeling by PitchingBot and Stuff+ – which are new to the site this spring – Ryan’s updated arsenal has competitors waving at some of the best stuff in baseball. PitchingBot has Ryan ranked 10th among qualifiers with a 59 overall grade on the 20-80 scouting scale, issuing component scores of 48 for botStf, which measures the characteristics of his pitches themselves, and an impressive 63 – third in the majors – for botCmd, which measures his ability to locate them. That’s a marked increase from his 2022 grades, which combined a 40 botStf with a 58 botCmd for an overall grade of 50, thanks in large part to a 64 grade on his four-seamer, the sixth-highest among qualifiers.

Stuff+ agrees that Ryan has improved year over year – and also that he’s placing himself among the league’s best so far in 2023. Ryan’s Pitching+ grade, the overall score of his pitching performance, jumped from 99 in 2022 to 107 so far this year, good for 11th among qualifiers. His 110 Stuff+ grade ranks 14th in that group, and his 108 Location+ ranks fourth. Stuff+ also loves his four-seamer (111), while grading his splitter as a strong secondary option at 106. Not only do these stuff quality ratings corroborate that Ryan is off to a really solid start to his sophomore year, but they actually might mean something meaningful with respect to the rest of his year – The Athletic’s Eno Sarris, who was among Stuff+’s original developers, writes that the model’s stuff quality grading tends to stabilize particularly quickly, so we may be able to put some faith in Ryan’s step forward.

Good stuff and bad swings mean a lot of mishits, and Ryan has sprung from the 26th percentile in barrel rate in 2022 at 8.6% to the 87th in 2023 with a 3.5% rate, otherwise expressed as just four barrels in 115 batted balls. Hitters are getting their bats to the ball, even with good exit velocity – his hard-hit rate and average EV are actually up this year – but they’re failing to get the best part of the bat to the ball, and that’s made a difference. Opposing hitters’ sweet spot percentage is down from 36.1% to 30.4%, and the percentage of those hard-hit balls landing in the ideal 15 to 40 degree launch angle range (within which 98% of home runs are hit) is down from 40.0% last year to just 23.2% this year. As a result, hitters are getting less from their contact – Ryan’s opponent wOBA on batted balls is down from .348 last year to .292 so far this season. Here are all of his hard-hit balls allowed this year:

As for the impact of the splitter, just two of 18 hard-hit balls off the splitter have been hit in that 15 to 40 degree zone. Just look how much trouble hitters are having straightening the pitch out:

Ryan isn’t exactly becoming a groundball extremist – his 39.8% grounder rate is still below league average – but he has leveled out his GB/FB% to a flat 1.00 this year after seeing nearly twice as many fly balls in his previous season-plus, thanks in large part to the splitter’s 62.8% groundball rate. All that groundwork has come with a welcome drop in home runs, from 1.24 per nine innings entering this year to 0.82 so far in 2023.

Another benefit of inducing swings? You can’t walk hitters on pitches they swing at. Between all those swings and a smattering of called strikes, just 28.1% of Ryan’s offerings have been balls, the lowest rate among the 188 pitchers who have thrown at least 300 pitches this season. The chances of finding four of those before he gets you to put a ball in play or punches you out are rather slim. As a result, he’s slashed his walk rate by more than half from 2.88 per nine to 1.23, fourth among qualifiers, lifting him from league average at the 49th percentile to elite at the 94th:

It turns out getting a ton of swings and limiting the damage done by those swings is a pretty good recipe. After wOBA and xwOBA agreed on a .294 mark in 2022, this year Ryan has a .228 wOBA and .244 xwOBA, each good enough to place him in the top 8% of big leaguers. Keeping it up is the next challenge, but Ryan’s strong peripherals and his new-and-improved stuff should bring some confidence that this sophomore jump is the real deal. His contributions will be key for the Twins down the stretch, but the way the AL Central is looking, starting a playoff game in 2023 would be a reasonable goal for Ryan to set.

Stats and rankings as of May 10.