Speed Bumps Aside, a Mentally Stronger Ty Buttrey Was Pretty Good Last Year

Ty Buttrey had an up-and-down first full big-league season last year. The downs tended to come in clumps. In a pair of early-September outings, the Los Angeles Angels reliever was charged with seven earned runs in just two-thirds of an inning. Prior to that there was a three-game stretch in late July where he allowed seven earned runs in two-and-a-third innings. Take those stink bombs out of the equation and Buttrey would have finished 2019 with a 2.34 ERA, rather than the rocky-by-comparison 3.98 that went into the annals.

Not that he wants, or deserves, a pity party. Unlike duffers, hurlers don’t get mulligans. Once it becomes an official game, everything you do ends up on the ledger.

I caught up to Buttrey at Fenway Park a handful of weeks after his July speed bump. When I asked him for a synopsis of his season as a whole, he pointed to occasional overuse of a 97 mph heater that, velocity-wise, ranked in the 96th percentile among his big-league brethren.

“Early in the year, I was doing pretty well mixing my pitches,” Buttrey told me. “I was feeling comfortable and having a lot of success. Then I had a couple games about three months in where I start getting really fastball heavy. I was throwing way too many and ended up needing to go back to the drawing board.”

Buttrey may or may not have been referring to the late-July schneid — that was closer to four months into the season — but if it was, the numbers don’t match up with his memory. His fastball percentage over that three-game stretch was 58%, just a tick above his season average. Regardless, the overall premise was accurate. When hitters can sit comfortably on your heater, you tend to get thumped.

Unduly influenced by a skein of swings and misses, the former Red Sox farmhand would occasionally walk into that trap.

“If you’re seeing silly swings on your fastball, you might start changing your approach based off of just a couple of games,” explained Buttrey. “That’s where you can get yourself into a predicament. If you become too predictable, it doesn’t matter how good you are. When big-league hitters know you’re 75% fastball, they’re going to bet their odds on a fastball — and they’re getting paid tens of millions of dollars to do what they do.”

Still pre-arbitration eligible, Buttrey was paid a fraction of that to come out of the bullpen 72 times — only five American League pitchers saw more action — usually in a setup role. He entered the game in the eighth inning 43 times, and in the seventh inning another 25 times. There were also a smattering of appearances in the fifth, sixth, ninth, and extra frames. Regardless of the situation, his mentality was the same. Or at least that was his goal. Some things are easier said than done.

“I try to have it be the same,” said Buttrey. “When you come in to put out a fire, you’re maybe being a little more fine in executing your pitches, because there are a guy’s runs you’re trying to protect. But you don’t want to consciously think like that; you want to have the same mindset no matter what. Being new to this level, I was maybe a little a naive.”

I’d talked to the 6-foot-6, 240-pound North Carolina native six months earlier, in spring training. That conversation had focused largely on the mental side of the game. With that in mind, I asked if he’d been guilty of getting into his own head during the 2019 campaign. His answer was an amalgamation of yes and no.

“Like we talked about before, I had the breakthrough in my mental game back in Double-A and Triple-A,” said Buttrey, who turned 27 this past March. “That got me to the big league level. Of course, now everything is amplified. Hitters up here are 10 times better, there are 10 times more fans, and there is 10 times more pressure. So you have to up your mindset 10 times. That means going back to the drawing board and seeing where your routine maybe has some holes. To be consistent on a day-to-day basis, traveling six hours across the country and then getting up and playing a good team… it’s really mental. Some guys can do it naturally, while other guys have to work at it.”

He’s getting there. Again, a pair of rocky clumps represented the biggest bugaboo in his first full campaign. Other not-so-great outings are interspersed within his game log as well — that’s inevitable in a long season — but so are 55 appearances with a zero in the earned-run column. A 3.49 FIP and 10.45 strikeouts per nine innings are both feathers in his cap. When all the dust had cleared, Buttrey had more ups than downs.