Matt Moore’s New Pitch Addresses Old Concerns
In his last start, the Giants’ Matt Moore did something he’d never done before. Not no-hit a team through eight innings: he’d thrown an actual no-hitter before, in Double-A in 2011, on 98 pitches on his brother’s birthday. He’d thrown a one-hitter before, too — albeit over seven innings instead of 9.2, and earlier in his pro career.
What he did this Aug. 25 against the Dodgers that he’d never done before was throw a cutter 29 times. Only twice had he thrown the pitch even 10 times, but there he was going to the well, again and again, on his way to an oh-no instead of a no-no.
Weirdly, he didn’t get a single whiff on the pitch. But it doesn’t seem like the swinging strike is the point to the pitcher. Nearly everything else is.
“It’s off of my fastball, and it looks like my fastball longer,” Moore said of the cutter the day after his no-hit bid was spoiled in the ninth inning by Corey Seager. Batters love to swing at fastballs, which have the highest swing rates in baseball. They swung at three-quarters of Moore’s cutters that night, and almost two-thirds of the cutters he’s thrown for his career, easily the highest swing percentage among his pitches.
For a pitcher who has had command issues in his career, the cutter is a strong pitch for two reasons. For one, getting batters to swing is a huge part of the battle when you’re not always around the plate. Moore got swings on over half his pitches against the Dodgers, something he hadn’t done in a start stretching all the way back to June.
Also, as nice as the lefty’s knuckle curve is, it’s not a great pitch command-wise. Batters only swing at it 40% of the time and it’s a ball 40% of the time. The cutter looks like a pitch he can command well. For his career, it’s the pitch with the lowest ball rate. Combine the lowest ball rate with the highest swing rate, and you can see why it might benefit him.
A byproduct of iffy command can be the home run. Over the last two years, Moore has been in the bottom 30 of pitchers by home-run rate. Here’s a fun fact about Moore’s cutter: nobody’s ever hit it for extra bases. It has a career isolated-slugging percentage of zero. A few singles and that’s it.
That won’t continue if he keeps throwing it, but there is something to the pitch that could help him limit the damage on the ball in play. “I noticed that movement was getting it in on guys,” Moore said of lefties, and for righties, “it’s moving it from the barrel to the end of the bat.”
For an unassuming pitcher, it’s an unassuming pitch in real time, but the lefty pointed out that this swing and quality of contact from Adrian Gonzalez on a cutter was a great example of what the pitch could do for him.
The cutter isn’t necessarily a ground-ball pitch across baseball, but for Moore it’s elicited a grounder 57% of the time. In his game against the Dodgers, he threw 29 cutters and two were hit on a line to the outfield. Thirteen were either popped up, grounded out, or fouled away.
If that foul rate seems high, it is. The league average is 15% for all pitches, and Moore is around 25% right now on the cutter. But the cutter is actually pretty good at getting fouls, which are good for the pitcher. It’s second best among the regularly thrown pitches in baseball.
| Pitch Type | Foul% |
| Four-Seam | 19.9% |
| Cutter | 18.2% |
| Sinker | 16.8% |
| Knuckler | 16.1% |
| Splitter | 15.9% |
| Change | 15.1% |
| Slider | 15.0% |
| Knuckle Curve | 12.4% |
| Curve | 12.1% |
Moore has a changeup and a curve, and so it doesn’t seem like he needs another pitch with which to battle righties. But he has had trouble late in his appearances recently, and adding another pitch is crucial to improving his late-game outcomes. Pitchers who have four pitches and use each of them more than 10% of the time do markedly better the third time through the order than pitchers who feature only three pitches, analyst Mitchel Lichtman found. “It puts another pitch in their head,” said the lefty.
Who can he thank for this new pitch, which has almost single-handedly addressed all of his issues to date? Who suggested that he throw this swing-inducing, command-improving, contact-weakening pitch? Two guys you may know: Madison Bumgarner and Buster Posey. The pitcher who’s made his career off his cutter took his new teammate aside and told him Moore’s version was good, and the catcher kept calling for it. Those two teammates “gave me the confidence” to throw the cutter, as Moore put it. The rest was almost history.
With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
The Giants’ announcers literally didn’t mention that he was throwing a new pitch all game, they were just raving about his control of the curve and the changeup (except one mention against Turner that it ‘cut on its own’). It just wasn’t that obvious, and that was what made it so effective in terms of contact management. The difference from the four-seamer in terms of speed and break is very subtle and it looked to me like the difference in break is generally different depending on where the pitch is–on the left side of the plate the difference is more vertical (producing grounders) while one the right side it’s more horizontal, jamming right-handed batters and getting lefties to hit it off the end of the bat, like Gonzalez did in the video.
Interesting, thanks. Will keep an eye on this the rest of the season. FYI, there is a typo in the sentence with the ‘markedly better’ link.
This isn’t the first time that Moore has tried to incorporate a cutter. He hasn’t ever stuck with it for very long, though. If a pitcher throws a pitch 30 times and doesn’t get a single whiff, how effective a pitch can it be?
http://www.draysbay.com/2015/7/2/8887949/matt-moores-stuff-in-his-first-start
http://theprocessreport.net/moores-new-weapon/
The point isn’t to get whiffs. The point is to get weak hits and foul balls, based on late movement and the fact that it looks so much like the 4-seamer.
Matt Moore was a #4 starter, before. Now he’s a #4 starter who happens to throw a cutter more often. It’s not like he just learned the pitch. If you read the linked articles, you’d see that he threw it a bunch when he first came back from TJS last year, and then he abandoned it, presumably bc it wasn’t that effective.
The point *is* to get whiffs. Good pitchers get whiffs. Good pitches get whiffs. Bad pitches don’t. Moore’s sample size for the pitch right now is so small that we don’t even know if it’s going to be a pitch that can induce weak contact, foul balls, grounders, etc. I get that Giants fans are desperately looking for Matt Moore to be more than he is after dealing away Duffy, Fox, and Santos for him, but the fact is that the guy just isn’t that good, and he’s still trading on his potential and top prospect status. Starting to throw a pitch that he shitcanned on two separate occasions earlier in his career probably isn’t going to change that.
Agree that the sample size is too small to make it a truth but the point *is* to get outs, not whiffs. Whiffs are better because it’s the easier out but at the end of the day the point of the pitcher is to get the batter out. Look at Buehrle, that guy made a living out of soft contact and controlling the run game.
Moore’s pre TJS potential MAY be gone but because he couldn’t make a pitch work a year ago in Tampa doesn’t mean he can’t make it work now in SF, especially working with MadBum and Posey.
Of course the sample size is small but at least this time he threw it for strikes, which didn’t happen the other two times. Bumgarner may have suggested throwing it a little differently. Who knows at this stage? Let’s see how he does today.
The Giants have a recent history of valuing pitchers who can induce soft contact (for example Kontos has the #5 rated cutter in the majors but doesn’t get many whiffs with it at all). and it’s worked out for them pretty well, so there isn’t an obvious reason to change this thinking.
For his career, Matt Moore has an above-average whiff rate on the cutter. I just asked Zack Greinke if he has a different approach to high contact hitters, and he said he absolutely goes for contact. I doubt there’s a pitcher that would agree that the point is to get a whiff on every pitch. Also, the fact that he canned the pitch before is virtually meaningless. Every new pitch that a pitcher throws was once thrown before, in a bullpen, or in a spring start, and the story of a new pitch usually takes years to write. Improvement is not linear. As for that bit about Giants fans, I’ll put it this way: I’ve always thought Matt Moore had excellent stuff. Still think it. Command is the big problem as I see it, and a pitch he can command that’s like his fastball could easily be a boon.
The Dodgers game was an unusual situation because they just hadn’t see the cutter before, the cutter breaks down more, they were looking for the four-seamer which rises a little, so they hit the cutter for a lot of grounders, but I think what’ll happen in the future is they’ll both complement each other, the presence of the cutter will make them pop up the four-seamer.
I only started paying attention when he got to the Giants but it looks to me like his problem so far as been control more than command. It’s more that he can’t throw strikes than than that he puts the strikes in the wrong places.
Thanks for the reply, Eno. The comment about Giants fans wasn’t directed to you. I guess as a Rays fan I’m just a bit jaded about Moore. I recall Matt Moore “breaking out a cutter” being a notable thing at least twice in the past, and it didn’t amount to much in the end. You’re right that this time the cutter may work for him in a way it didn’t before. I also agree about whiffs not being the end all and be all of a pitch, and whiff rate is certainly more important for some pitches than others. Still, if a pitcher throws a pitch 30 times in a start and doesn’t get a single whiff. it’s hard for me to think that it was a very effective pitch for him in that start. I could definitely be wrong about that, though.
He’s pitching right now and the Dbacks are hitting under the 4 seamers, this is the effect I would expect after people start to think about the cutter.
Matt Moore has a good rising four-seamer. He doesn’t have the same velo he once did (nor does he have quite as much rise), but the pitch has enough vertical movement to get hitters to hit under hit whether they have a cutter in the back of their mind or not.
Harry, I didn’t like it when the Giants traded Matt Duffy but he’s a great guy, fun to watch, great attitude, I check his box scores, and I wish him the best. You guys get to watch him every day, and playing shortstop where he always wanted to play. I don’t see any reason to be bitter about this.
I’m not bitter about the trade. I wish Matty Mo, well. He’s a likable player, but Rays fans have hearing about Matt Moore turning the corner for a long time. So when we hear stuff suggesting he may have turned a corner, we’re understandably skeptical.
That table of foul rates is per pitch thrown? That kind of tells us over that batters seeing at fastballs and cutters, dunnit? Which is valid, but foul/swing or foul/contact might say more about the “foulness” of the pitch.