Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In the seventh installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Jakob Junis, Kyle Ryan, and Chase Whitley — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Jakob Junis (Royals) on His Slider

“It’s technically a slider, although sometimes it has more of a curveball break because of the way I release it. I’ve always looked at it as a slider, because I also throw a curveball — a traditional type of curveball — with a different grip. The grip I came up with for my slider is fairly new.

“I started throwing a slider in Double-A, and it really wasn’t a very good one. It was with a standard, trying-to-learn grip. That offseason I went home and said, ‘This isn’t going to work.’ I knew that I needed a new grip to get more shape and to throw it a little firmer.

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This offseason, I was tasked with preparing a writeup of right fielders in the game of major-league baseball. That was quite a difficult exercise, for it requires one to predict the future, and soothsayers are, at least to my knowledge, mythical. Still, I was quite confident when I wrote this:

There are those people who believe that Nick Markakis will make a run at 3,000 hits and the Hall of Fame. I am not among those people. Granted, Markakis has compiled 2,052 hits in his big-league career. That’s good! But Markakis, now at 34, is not good. Not at all. In fact, he really hasn’t been good since 2010. Since then, Markakis’s WAR has gone 1.4, 1.6, -0.2, 2.5, 1.5, 1.1, 0.9. In other words, of Markakis’ 25.3 career WAR, almost 17 were accrued in the first five years of his career.

Markakis hasn’t been even a league-average hitter since 2015, and that year he hit three (3) home runs. He hasn’t been even an average defensive outfielder since 2008. He hasn’t added value on the basepaths since 2009. In 2017, Markakis was below average against righties (97 wRC+) as well as lefties (91 wRC+), and his only remaining plus tool is his plate discipline and ability to draw walks. That’s all that separates Markakis from being a replacement-level player, and the projections aren’t optimistic about that, either. Markakis isn’t going to the Hall of Fame because he probably won’t get a big-league deal this offseason.

Welp.

Nick Markakis must have read that, because he has looked like a Hall of Famer so far this year. Entering Sunday, Markakis, who is 34, was slashing .344/.428/.550 (all career bests) with a 169 (career-best) wRC+. He also appears to have turned around his play afield, too, posting positive defensive numbers (that is, UZR and positional adjustment combined) for the first time since the Bush administration (2008). Nick Markakis, in 2018, has been worth roughly as many wins as his 2016 and 2017 combined.

What the hell has gotten into Nick Markakis?

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Sunday afternoon, Shohei Ohtani returned to the mound for the first time in nearly two weeks. He was very good against the Mariners until the bottom of the seventh, when he failed to retire any of three batters. Still, that partial inning couldn’t spoil the appearance, and Ohtani’s ankle seemed like it must’ve been perfectly fine. To fast-forward here, I’ll note that Ohtani made very quick work of Mitch Haniger in the bottom of the second. Let’s watch that.

The first pitch, a called strike:

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On today’s edition of Effectively Wild, Ben Lindbergh and I had the opportunity to talk with Steven Brault. Brault is interesting, first of all, because he’s a major-league pitcher. In the grand scheme of things, there are not that many major-league pitchers, and surviving at the level requires one to be an expert at his craft. Aside from pitching, Brault is also a musician, and he co-hosts a podcast with teammate Trevor Williams. As an individual, Brault has a lot going on, but the reason we sought him out in the first place is because of his hitting. Brault has batted a total of 32 times in the bigs. He’s recorded seven hits, sure. But he also has yet to strike out.

Presumably, you know enough to know that’s atypical. You already understood that strikeouts are on the rise, and that, on balance, pitcher-hitters are terrible. Brault is finding himself on the same list as names like Dizzy Dean, Heinie Meine, and Sloppy Thurston. It’s not that Brault is a hitter in the way that Madison Bumgarner is a hitter. Bumgarner stands out because of his power. Brault stands out because of his contact. Among active players with zero strikeouts, Brault is first in plate appearances, with 32. Carlos Rivero is standing in a distant second, with eight.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about lying and liars, a fascination perhaps borne of our larger moment. We lie for all sorts of reasons: to get out of parking tickets, to settle the blame for muddy messes on our siblings, to defraud and defame. But we also lie to spare; our deceit can be a tool of kindness. An act of pardon. At the end of a long week, we tell frazzled partners that we think their hair looks good, actually. You’ll find work soon. I just love your meatloaf, mom. Sometimes, we reserve those niceties for ourselves and our bad baseball teams, setting down little pavers that make otherwise rough paths traversable.

After all, maybe that prospect has figured something out. Maybe all of our guys will stay healthy. This might be the year. We know on some level we’re fibbing or at least making a wish — projections and playoffs odds are so insistent with their pokes and prods toward reason — but in the beginning of the season, we can get away with it. Those smaller lies let us believe a bigger one: that there’s a reason to watch our dumb teams every day. That we ought to go to the ballpark. That this isn’t all just a waste of time we might otherwise have spent outside, pulling weeds. We do ourselves this kindness; we let ourselves enjoy baseball.

The Marlins are a bad baseball team. They’re projected to win a meager 66 games. The White Sox and Reds are actually each expected to do worse, but Chicago is rebuilding and Cincinnati is bad in a quietly polite, Midwestern way. Miami announced its mess months ago. And yet. The Marlins might be last in Major League Baseball in average attendance, but someone is going. They’ve talked themselves into something. And so if you’ll allow, I’d like to guess at a few of the lies I suspect have been told about, and possibly to, the Marlins, the fibs and half-truths the faithful, such as they are, have employed to spare themselves hopelessness and keep muscling through bad meatloaf.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Giancarlo Stanton

I enjoy spy films. The who thieving the what on behalf of which government shifts around film to film, but many of the best examples of the genre feature a training montage wherein a grizzled veteran, who has seen things, teaches an optimistic new recruit, who is excited about patriotism, an important lesson: the most believable lies hue closely to the truth. Telling an asset an elaborate backstory is a great way to blow your cover. The lies become hard to keep track of; the subterfuge buckles under the weight of imaginary relatives and school trips. Before long, our young spy has accidentally called his fake aunt “Peggy” instead of “Rhonda” and it all comes crashing down.

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This is Jake Mailhot’s first post as part of his May Residency at FanGraphs. A lifelong Mariners fan, Jake now lives in Bellingham, Washington, just a little too far away from Seattle to make it to games regularly, which is sometimes for the best. He is a staff editor at Mariners blog Lookout Landing. He can be found on Twitter at @jakemailhot.

There has been no shortage of remarkable relief performances during the first month of the season. Jordan Hicks and Tayron Guerrero are playing a game of one-upmanship with their fastballs. Josh Hader is striking out basically everyone he faces. Adam Ottavino resurrected his career in an abandoned storefront. But the most impressive performance of all might be what Edwin Díaz accomplished in April.

The ninth batter Díaz faced this season was also the first to actually put the ball in play — he’d struck out the first eight. Seven appearances into the year, he finally gave up his first hit, a single to Jed Lowrie. He gave up just one other hit the entire month. Among pitchers who’ve thrown 10 or more innings, possesses the fourth-highest swinging-strike rate and has produced the lowest overall contact rate when batters actually swing. If you prefer more traditional accolades, he’s also leading the majors in saves. His performance earned him the April AL Reliever of the Month Award. Any way you slice it, Díaz has been pretty great so far.

Díaz has shown flashes of dominance like this before — his 2016 rookie campaign was good for 1.9 WAR on the back of a 2.04 FIP — but he’s always been a little too erratic for his own good. Some of his success in April came despite the inherent chaos of slinging a projectile at 98 mph. He’s already walked nine batters and hit three more, and he’s given up a pair of home runs in May already. A quick look at his plate-discipline stats reveals that Díaz is throwing in the strike zone at the lowest rate of his career, around six and a half points lower than last season. And he isn’t really inducing any more swings on those pitches out of the zone — in fact, batters are swinging far less often at his pitches overall. But again, when batters do swing, they just cannot make consistent contact. Díaz’s contact rate of 55.2% is better than Aroldis Chapman’s, Josh Hader’s, and everyone else’s.

So what has made Díaz so effective this year when he does find the zone?

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On Friday night, in just his third major-league start, Walker Buehler delivered on the promise that the Dodgers envisioned when they made him the 24th pick of the 2015 draft out of Vanderbilt. Pitching on a rainy night at Estadio de Beisbol Monterrey, in the opener of the three-game Mexico Series, the 23-year-old righty held the Padres hitless for six innings while striking out eight and walking three. But with his pitch count at 93, one short of his professional high, manager Dave Roberts did not waver in his decision to put the brakes on the kid’s bid for a slice of baseball immortality.

Via the Orange County Register’s Bill Plunkett, Beuhler said that Roberts “told me I was out of pitches and I was out of the game.”

This wasn’t the first time that Roberts pulled a starter who had yet to allow a hit, but it was the first time that his decision paid off in full, as relievers Yimi Garcia, Tony Cingrani,and Adam Liberatore each chipped in a hitless inning, thus completing the 12th combined no-hitter in big-league history and the first in franchise history. Prior to that — and jusy five games into his managerial career, on April 8, 2016 — Roberts had removed Ross Stripling after 7.1 innings of hitless ball against the Giants. The 26-year-old Stripling, who himself was making his major-league debut, had thrown 100 pitches and had walked four batters when Roberts called for the bullpen. Having missed all of 2014 due to Tommy John surgery, he understood the precautionary move, even though it backfired, as reliever Chris Hatcher promptly gave up a game-tying home run to the next batter, and the Dodgers eventually lost.

Things worked out better for the team when Roberts pulled 36-year-old Rich Hill after seven perfect innings on September 10 of that year. Though Joe Blanton surrendered a single with two outs in the eighth, the Dodgers did get the win.

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You do something with your days, I think. You must. You get up in the morning, stretch out your arms and legs, blink a few times, maybe check your phone for a few minutes. (Try not to, though! Screen addiction is a real problem!) Then get up and do something with your day until, not that many hours later, you fall asleep in your nice warm bed and do it all over again.

Imagine this, though: imagine if, one day, you woke up and found that you were doing that thing — the thing you do with your days — better than you’ve ever done it before. Better, in fact, than most people have ever done it. That would be great, right? That’s a little bit of what’s been happening to Shane Carle recently, day over day, a little bit at a time.

You may not know who Shane Carle is, so let’s run over the resume. First of all, he’s a player with the Atlanta Braves — a reliever, in fact. He’s 26 years old. He’s 6-foot-4 and weighs 210 pounds. He’s a rookie. He throws a fastball, a changeup, a slider, and a curveball — in roughly that order of frequency. And this is where Carle is already a bit different: not many major-league relievers throw four pitches well with any regularity. If they do, they’re often encouraged to become major-league starters. But Carle is a major-league reliever. And we’re getting distracted. Let’s continue with the resume.

Carle was selected out of Cal State-Long Beach in the 10th round of the 2013 draft, by the Pirates. He wasn’t bad for the Pirates, but he wasn’t especially good, either, and he didn’t strike out very many people, even at High-A. The Pirates are pretty good at developing pitching, and after the 2014 season, they decided they didn’t want to develop Shane Carle anymore. He was traded to the Rockies, and despite exhibiting little more promise than the year before — at least on paper — he’d been promoted to Triple-A Albuquerque by the end of 2015.

And when he got there, something happened that’s had very important consequences for Shane Carle’s present: he started to strike people out. In Triple-A in 2015, Carle struck out 4.5 batters for every nine innings he threw. In that same league in 2016, he struck out 7.1 batters for every nine innings he threw. And this year, for the Atlanta Braves, against real major-league hitters, Carle has struck out 17 batters in fewer than 20 innings, and he’s got the fifth-most relief WAR of any pitcher in baseball. Here is some visual interest:

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