Matt Bowman Throws From Way Outside

It was June 2024, and Matt Bowman was in a tough spot. He was 33 years old and fresh off his third DFA in six weeks. In his one appearance as a Mariner, he recorded just two outs, gave up one run on one hit — a home run — and one walk. As a righty reliever on the wrong side of 30 with a 92-mph sinker, he was about as fringey as they come.

That day in Seattle could have been his last time on a big league mound. Instead, he tried something crazy. Once the owner of an unremarkable delivery, Bowman now throws from the most extreme horizontal release point in the sport. And it looks like it has saved his career.

This wasn’t a gradual move. Rather, Bowman transformed over the course of a couple months. Here’s Bowman during that one Mariners appearance. Note that he’s perched as close to first base as possible; his stride is angled directly toward home plate. Bowman’s horizontal release point that day was roughly 1.5 feet to the right of the center of the rubber, ranking in just the 30th percentile of distance from that point among right-handed pitchers.

When he next surfaced, he looked like a different pitcher. Picked up by his hometown Orioles on a minor-league deal and summoned as bullpen depth in late August, Bowman had shifted all the way to the other side of the rubber. And instead of striding directly toward the plate, his first step was angled toward third base. The release point in that first Orioles appearance was 3.75 feet from the center of the rubber, rocketing him into the 98th percentile:

This year, Bowman has gone to another level. His average horizontal release point is all the way up to 4.42 feet from the center of the rubber, highest among all active pitchers. He’s pitched effectively, delivering 13 2/3 innings so far and allowing just three earned runs. He gets hardly any whiffs. He doesn’t strike anyone out. But he stays off barrels, sitting in the 93rd percentile for average exit velocity and 94th percentile for hard-hit rate.

It’s worth noting that unlike many of his peers at the distant ends of the horizontal release point spectrum — Adam Cimber, Jose Cuas, Tyler Rogers — Bowman doesn’t get there by slinging from a super-low arm angle. His arm angle is 30 degrees, much closer to “low slot” than sidearm. And unlike other pitchers that stride cross-body, such as Ryan Walker, Bowman starts his delivery from the most extreme arm-side position. Bowman, it appears, is actively aiming for uncharted release points.

Why would someone throw like this? In short, extreme release points suppress contact quality. Below is a simple plot of average exit velocity allowed relative to release point, grouped by pitcher. I fit a polynomial curve to show that for most release points, there isn’t much of a relationship between these two variables, but at the extremes, average exit velocities start to drop.

The relationship is even clearer for pitchers facing same-handed opponents. Here’s left-handed hitters when facing left-handed pitchers, for example:

The relationship between contact quality and release points, I think, is largely mediated by approach angles.

Once the purview of hardcore pitching analysts, the concept of the vertical approach angle — the angle at which the ball crosses the plate relative to the vertical release point — is mainstream enough to pop up these days on team broadcasts. (I’ve heard the Mariners and Brewers broadcasters explicitly mention vertical approach angle within the last couple weeks.) The vertical approach angle on four-seam fastballs helped clarify what makes a fastball “invisible.” It might even contribute to the recent trend of ever-lower arm angles. Flat vertical approach angles for fastballs thrown at the top of the zone are some of the best whiff-producing pitches in the sport, fueling the success of four-seamers like those of Joe Ryan and Shota Imanaga despite their unremarkable velocities.

Horizontal approach angles, by comparison, remain on the conversational outskirts. As Alex Chamberlain wrote in his definitive HAA primer in October 2023, extreme horizontal approach angles are more associated with called strikes and soft contact, less glamorous outcomes than the almighty whiff. Nevertheless, there are some pitchers who must be understood through the HAA lens. Bowman happens to be one of those pitchers.

Largely as a function of Bowman’s horizontal release point — again, nearly 4 1/2 feet from the center of the rubber — each of his pitches stands out on a horizontal approach angle leaderboard. The sinker — his primary pitch — generates an average HAA of 2.6 degrees. Only the submariner Tyler Rogers throws his sinker from a more extreme horizontal approach angle.

After shifting over on the rubber last August, Bowman’s sinker added some arm-side run and gained even more vertical drop. When Bowman releases the sinker in the video below, he’s nearly behind George Springer, who almost has to turn his head to the left to pick up Bowman’s release point. From that position, the pitch runs a foot and a half toward Springer’s hands, completely locking him up.

Off the sinker, Bowman tosses his sweeper, which lost a few inches of break but gained some lift after his move to the right of the rubber. This might be a function of the change in horizontal release angles required to throw from that release point. As I found earlier this year, sweepers get less horizontal movement when they’re thrown with release angles aimed more toward the outside of the plate. Shifting that far to the right requires a change of release angles to hit the same locations, which in theory changes the movement profile of the pitch.

Even with the reduced break, Bowman’s sweeper creates the sharpest HAA of any slider or sweeper in baseball. As Alex found in his HAA primer, sweepers and sliders breaking away from righties that have sharp HAAs produce the best outcomes, though determining how much of that is HAA and how much of that is location remains a challenge.

To lefties, Bowman most often opts for the cutter. By the tenants of HAA, this cutter counts as the ultimate called-strike weapon against lefties. As Alex found, sharp approach angles breaking toward the hitter on the outside of the plate rack up a disproportionate quantity of called strikes. Bowman’s cutter, which sits at 89 mph and bends two inches to the glove side, is thrown at a horizontal approach angle that tops all right-handed cutters by this measure.

In a world where every pitcher seems to be chasing vertical separation between their pitches, Bowman is playing a horizontal game, hunting the label or the tip of the bat. It’s hard to imagine such a drastic shift occurring this late into a career. Pitchers learn to pitch a certain way for their entire lives; completely shifting to a chaotic set of mechanics could easily backfire. But that’s what it took for Bowman to hang around the majors, and so far, it’s paying off nicely.