Lance Lynn Has Emerged From His Chrysalis as a Beautiful Butterfly. Sort Of.

When anyone but an absolute superstar gets traded at the deadline, we’ve come to expect that the player’s new team sees something they can improve. Thousands of scouts, data analysts, and coaches across the sport, poring over film and charts, looking for the one player they can point to and say, with total confidence, “I can fix him.” Sometimes it’s as simple as one conversation, one adjustment to a pitch grip or a player’s swing timing or his position on the rubber, and it all clicks. Sometimes in the player’s first game in his new environs.

Predicting and identifying these adjustments can make for a fun metagame around the trade deadline, but I’ve learned the hard way not to trust the headline-making debut. In 2019, the Astros made a deadline move for Aaron Sanchez, the onetime Blue Jays standout whose career had stagnated. Sanchez brought an ERA over 6.00 into his Houston debut, and promptly threw six innings of no-hit ball. You could not ask for a clearer example of a player being remade overnight by an organization that knew what to do with him.

After the no-hit bid, Sanchez made just three more starts for Houston, in which his ERA was 7.11. He pitched for three teams in 2021 and 2022, posting an ERA of 5.29. (But just a 4.32 FIP! I can still fix him!) Two weeks ago, he was released from the Twins’ Triple-A affiliate. Now, when you look Sanchez up on the internet, Wikipedia assumes you’re looking for celebrity chef Aarón Sánchez, who is definitely the best MasterChef judge but has never, to my knowledge, no-hit anything.

I lied, though. I haven’t learned a damn thing, because I’m going to get carried away over Lance Lynn’s first start with the Dodgers. I am ready to believe again.

I’ve devoted a not insignificant portion of my career to tracking the history of Lance Lynn, so I’ll try not to get carried away while running down the highlights.

The thing you need to know about Lynn is that he’s always been a fastball-dominant pitcher. Charlie Morton’s curveball is his livelihood. His kids don’t eat without that curveball. Lynn’s curveball is like renter’s insurance. It’s nice to have it when you need it, but most of the time you’re not aware of it. Lynn has almost always thrown at least 75% fastballs, with that percentage bumping up to 90% in recent seasons:

What’s changed over the years is which fastball he’s throwing.

When Lynn came up with the Cardinals under Dave Duncan in the early 2010s, he got taught a sinker, so he threw that for a while in concert with his four-seam fastball in an attempt to turn him into Joel Pineiro. Stay on the Cardinals too long in the early 2010s and you get turned into Joel Pineiro, just like the boys on Pleasure Island in Pinocchio got turned into donkeys. By the time Lynn left in 2017, he was throwing his sinker more than his four-seamer.

That worked for Lynn through the mid-2010s, through Tommy John Surgery, and into free agency. In 2018, the Twins had a novel idea: Why not go back to what worked for you in college? That meant de-emphasizing the sinker and attacking hitters at the top of the zone with four-seamers. It also meant shifting from the first base side of the rubber to the third base side, as you can see here:

Lynn told me in 2021 that moving to the third base side helped him engage his legs in his delivery better, and in concert with his new focus on the four-seamer, it turned him into a Cy Young finalist. Not immediately, as he slogged through a forgettable 2018 after the free agency capital strike kept him from signing with Minnesota until spring training was underway, but after his move to Texas a year later.

There, Lynn’s four-seamer became a weapon. In 2019, Baseball Savant rated it as 32 runs above average, the third-highest run value for any individual pitch since the stat was introduced. Lynn just kept throwing it, sprinkling in enough sinkers and cutters to keep hitters from squaring it up, and for about three years, he just skronched through opposing lineups like they weren’t even there.

This year, things have gone south, as you might have heard. Lynn has the highest ERA among qualified starters this season. Things got so bad he even moved back to the first-base side of the rubber for a couple starts earlier this year.

There are some reasons to believe Lynn is suffering from bad luck — his opponent BABIP is the highest it’s been in years, he has the second-lowest strand rate among qualified starters, and his K% and BB% are in line with his best years with the Rangers and White Sox. On the other hand, he’s allowing a hard-hit rate over 40%, which is the highest it’s been since that stat’s been tracked, and he’s become ludicrously homer-prone. So even if Lynn hasn’t earned all of his dinnertime ERA, he’s earned most of it. Plus he’s 36, and time comes for everyone sooner or later.

The best indication that Lynn is going to turn things around: The Dodgers wanted him. The Dodgers are one of the premier pitching development clubs in the sport. If anyone can fix what ails Lynn, they could.

On Tuesday night, we got our first glimpse at what Lynn would look like in Dodgers colors. He looks great, of course. Everyone looks great in those crisp, classic Dodger home whites. I guess that’s not really relevant.

Near as I can tell, the Dodgers didn’t change anything about his repertoire. His averages in terms of velocity were within a tick of his seasonal norms on all six of his pitches. His spin rate was higher than the season average on all six of his pitches, but never by more than 100 rpm. Likewise, both his vertical and horizontal break remained about the same, as did his release point:

The only difference here, in horizontal release point, is the result of that ill-fated trip back to the wrong side of the rubber bringing down the seasonal average.

The biggest difference is so obvious I won’t even pretend it’s a unique insight: The only fastball Lynn threw was his four-seamer.

Okay, that’s not literally true; Lynn threw four cutters and three sinkers among his 93 pitches. But he threw 64 four-seamers. As a percentage of total pitches thrown, that’s the most he’s relied on his four-seamer since a 50-pitch outing at the end of the 2018 season. In a full-length start, you have to go back to two appearances in May 2015 to find Lynn relying on his four-seamer more.

That feels like an obvious adjustment to make: Take your best pitch and throw it more. But normally, when we talk about pitchers doing that, we’re talking about ramping up breaking ball usage or ripping off a string of sinkers. Lynn’s four-seamer isn’t an out pitch in and of itself; nobody’s four-seamer is, really. What made it work was Lynn’s ability to contrast it with his other fastballs in order to fool hitters, and on Tuesday night he barely threw his other fastballs at all.

Throughout his struggles this season, Lynn has experimented. He’s worked on different fastball mixes; in his second-to-last start for the White Sox, his four-seamer was his third-most-used fastball. A few starts before that, his most commonly used pitch was his slider. What he’d never tried before putting on a Dodger uniform was a curveball-heavy approach.

On Tuesday, Lynn threw 13 curveballs, making the hook the second-most used pitch in his arsenal. The last start in which Lynn’s second-most-used pitch was his curveball was August 23, 2019. Now, that’s still only 13.9% of Lynn’s total pitch count, and all 13 of those curveballs came to right-handed batters.

How effective was it? Not particularly, in my estimation. As lively as Lynn’s fastball can be, his curveball is big and slow and erratic. So much so that it’s easy to identify as a pitch that’s not worth swinging at. Opponents swung at just three of Lynn’s 13 curveballs, generating two whiffs and a foul ball. With the exception of one charitable front-door called strike against Zack Gelof that was probably a bit inside, Lynn worked his curveball away. Here’s a representative example:

You can see the huge movement and speed differential to the fastball quite easily, and so can the batter. He might not be able to square up a pitch with that much break, but who cares? He knows it’s not worth swinging at anyway.

Even though Lynn had pared down his fastball usage to just the four-seamer, he was keeping hitters off it. He got 27 called strikes and whiffs on his four-seamer, which is the most he’s had in a game since 2019. That makes sense, as he threw more four-seamers on Tuesday than usual. As a percentage, though, that’s 42.2% of the four-seamers he threw, which is the highest CSW% that pitch has generated since May.

Lynn threw seven non-four-seamer fastballs against Oakland on Tuesday. Two of them were balls, one of them went foul. Four of them were put in play, all at an exit velocity of 94.8 mph or greater. Two of them, both cutters, went for extra bases. Feels like if opponents are hitting the crap out of your cutter, you should stop throwing your cutter.

Even accounting for the ineffectiveness of his funky fastballs (sorry, I’m tired of typing “non-four-seamers”), Lynn had a 38.0% CSW% across all fastball types, his best performance in that category since last September and third-best of the entire Statcast era, dating back to 2015.

Through five innings Lynn looked different, but fixed. He’d struck out six, walked one, and scattered two doubles but no other hits. Then:

Gelof Blastoff ? pic.twitter.com/sHDGjZl9hW

— Oakland A's (@Athletics) August 2, 2023

Yeah, but who cares about a solo home run with a four-run lead? That’s no big deal. It’s fine. Every pitcher gives up the occasional solo homer…

HR by BR ? pic.twitter.com/juEQV0cRKv

— Oakland A's (@Athletics) August 2, 2023

Okay, but that’s a cutter, and we already established we’re not throwing that anymore…

(Oppo) Taco Tuesday! pic.twitter.com/bPDKkeaqGG

— Oakland A's (@Athletics) August 2, 2023

*sigh*

These things take time, okay?