Justin Lawrence Finds Success Among Smaller Mountains

Over the 30-plus years that I’ve been following baseball, it seems like a collection of newfangled stats comes out every couple years. WAR, DiPS, wOBA, UZR, exit velocity, spin rate — America’s most rigorously empiricized sport has gone from scribblings in Henry Chadwick’s notebook to having more inscrutable acronyms than the Department of Defense.

My default position on new stats is one of interested skepticism. As a public-facing analyst, I don’t want to stake my reputation on a new metric that might still have serious flaws. It usually takes months or even years for people smarter than me — or at least, people who did more than barely pass their graduate statistics class — to iron out the kinks and figure out how to read and utilize the trendy new stats.

One example: I waited for ages for Justin Lawrence to be good.

If the platonic ideal of a modern one-inning reliever was a hard-throwing righty with a sharp breaking ball, Lawrence seemed to fit the bill. He throws from a sidearm arm slot, sitting around 95 mph with his sinker, balanced against a low-80s sweeper that comes in at around 3,000 rpm and has plus horizontal movement. The lateral difference between Lawrence’s sweeper movement and his sinker movement can be twice the width of the plate, or even more.

Wow, that sounds sick, right? Yeah, no. Because in parts of four seasons with the Rockies, he rarely did more than tantalize. Even in his best season, 2023, Lawrence posted a 3.72 ERA and a 3.74 FIP in 75 innings, which is pretty good but not much more, even in Coors Field.

What’s usually the common denominator when a bad pitcher has great stuff? Let’s not see all the same hands… that’s right, bad command. Indeed, Lawrence struggled to find the zone; he posted walk rates of 11.5%, 11%, and 11.8% in each of his three full seasons in Colorado.

Plenty of elite relievers have walk rates in that range. The Dodgers, with their limitless resources and equally infinite pool of options, have four relievers in their organization right now who posted walk rates between 11.5% and 12.5% last year in more than 50 innings: Kirby Yates, Tanner Scott, Michael Kopech, and Alex Vesia. More to the point: Andrew Friedman went out of his way to acquire the first three of those relievers within the past nine months, so you know a double-digit walk rate is not in and of itself a mortal flaw.

But even at the best of times, high-leverage relievers like that can be a little stressful to watch. If your team’s closer has a double-digit walk rate, odds are you have some personal habits that give the impression that you just quit smoking: Biting your fingernails, chewing on the collar of your t-shirt, anything to ease the jitters.

The difference between those guys and Lawrence is their ability to draw swings and misses. Yates struck out 35.9% of opponents last season, Vesia 33.1%. Lawrence’s strikeout rate was 16.1%, or lower than Austin Gomber’s. And in his wildly successful 2023 campaign, Lawrence posted a 10th-percentile chase rate, a 36th-percentile whiff rate, and a 53rd-percentile strikeout rate. If you don’t throw strikes, don’t miss bats, and play in a hitter’s park, a 6.49 ERA (his 2024 mark) is about as good as can be expected.

This March, the Rockies — hardly a team with a surfeit of knockout relievers — decided they’d seen enough of Lawrence and placed him on waivers, where he was seized upon by the Pittsburgh Pirates.

I don’t know how much credit, if any, the Pirates organization deserves for molding Paul Skenes, but I am pretty confident that Pittsburgh is a better pitching environment than Colorado. At the very least, the air is thicker. Remember: Pittsburgh is in the mountains, and PNC Park has the sixth-highest elevation of the 30 major league ballparks. But an elevation of 780 feet is in the “who cares?” band of the troposphere; Coors Field, situated in the Little Kathmandu neighborhood of Denver, sits at 5,190 feet above sea level.

Lawrence is one of those pitchers for whom environment matters quite a bit. Here are Lawrence’s career stats by location:

Lawrence’s peripherals aren’t too much worse at Coors, but he has the same affliction as Tom Hanks in Cloud Atlas: He doesn’t like high altitude because evil spirits live in the mountains. Specifically, the BABIP Monster, which might or might not be embodied by Hugo Weaving in a top hat and green makeup. Lawrence’s career BABIP at Coors is .391; at all other locations, it’s .274.

Coors Field, with its meager atmosphere and gigantic outfield, is the BABIPiest park in the league, but not by 115 points — it’s more like 60 points to the least-BABIP-y parks, and 25 to league average. And speaking of newfangled stats, Lawrence’s opponent xBA is 58 points higher at Coors than at other parks, while his xwOBA is 39 points higher. So despite having a major league career spanning some 200 innings, Lawrence still has some small-sample gremlins.

But in 2025, the small-sample gremlins are friendly. Lawrence has allowed just one earned run in 10 2/3 innings over 10 appearances, with his customary high walk rate but — get this — 14 strikeouts out of 40 batters faced.

That’ll play!

As much as I distrust newfangled stats, I trust 10-inning samples of relief work even less. I don’t know to what extent Lawrence’s excellent April is just noise, except to say I don’t think it’s all noise.

Over the offseason, Lawrence added a new pitch. That’s pretty unremarkable in and of itself, except he might be the only pitcher out there who added a four-seam fastball. For most pitchers, the four-seamer is a staple. It’s like rice, or socks, or the C major chord. It doesn’t have especially interesting qualities in and of itself, but you need it in order to establish a base to work from. You take it for granted.

Without a four-seamer, Lawrence didn’t have anything to keep opponents off his sinker last year. Indeed, said opponents hit .392 with a .629 SLG against the pitch in 2024. According to Baseball Savant, Lawrence’s sinker was 18 runs below average over 629 pitches, making it one of the worst high-usage pitches in the league.

Lawrence’s sweeper has always been somewhere between good and unhittable; what’s gotten him in trouble has been the fact that if the hitter sees anything coming in at over 85 mph, or with arm-side run, he knows it’s a sinker and can hit it to Mars.

Lawrence hasn’t thrown that many four-seamers yet — 11 in total — but that’s already more than he threw in the first four years of his career combined. At just 7% usage, it’s enough to keep hitters honest. Lawrence’s four-seamer has comically little rise and wicked arm-side run, in keeping with his arm slot, so it doesn’t go where hitters expect to see it. At least for now, the four-seamer, or at least the threat of the four-seamer, is holding back the tide.