The Book on Génesis

In the beginning, there was nothing. Wait, no, that’s not right — in the beginning, there was Tommy Pham. Yeah, now we’re talking. In the beginning there was Tommy Pham. Then John Mozeliak said, “Let there be a trade,” and Pham decamped for Tampa Bay, San Diego, Cincinnati, Boston, and eventually New York. In exchange, the Cardinals got a sampler platter of minor prospects: Justin Williams, Roel Ramírez, and Génesis Cabrera.

Williams and Ramírez are long gone from the St. Louis organization, but Cabrera is still going strong. That might have oversold it coming into the year — in 157.1 innings across 142 games, Cabrera had compiled a 3.95 ERA, 4.32 FIP, and 0.4 fWAR. That’s hardly an imposing line, but the Cardinals hardly had an imposing bullpen, so he fit solidly into the middle of that group heading into 2023.

He’s only pitched 11 times in 2023, but those 11 times have been revelatory. Nineteen of the 45 opponents he’s faced have struck out. Only three have walked. That’s no fluke, either; he’s so deceptive and so hard to square up that he’s recorded more called or swinging strikes than he has balls this year, by a count of 68 to 60.

That’s a huge divergence from Cabrera’s earlier career, when he struggled with both his command and with missing bats. From 2019 to 2022, he racked up 260 more called balls than called and swinging strikes. You can think of that gap as a crude measure of how much a pitcher can attack the zone or entice hitters to leave the zone without giving up too much contact. If you simply pound the strike zone with so-so stuff, you won’t get many called or swinging strikes. If you nibble ineffectually, you’ll run up a huge tally of called balls.

Want proof that this is a decent statistic? Spencer Strider checks in at +50 to lead baseball, with the top five rounded out by Jeffrey Springs, Clayton Kershaw, Shane McClanahan, and Jacob deGrom. On the flip side, Cal Quantrill, he of the 11.7% strikeout rate, is at -104 already. He’s joined in the bottom five by Jordan Lyles, Brad Keller, Blake Snell, and Chad Kuhl. That sounds like a pretty good metric to me.

Just explaining that Cabrera is good isn’t enough, though. He was bad before, or at least he wasn’t good. If he can switch from throwing far too many balls to bullying hitters without changing anything, maybe it’s not a great metric. But luckily for my story, he has changed something. In fact, he looks like a very different pitcher than in recent years.

First things first: Cabrera is throwing from a lower arm slot this year than he has in the past. Here’s his release point first in 2022 and then in 2023, using our game charts:

I’ve isolated his fastball to avoid a cloud of overlapping pitches, but you get the idea: he’s releasing the ball lower and further toward first base. Not coincidentally, his fastball now gets more horizontal movement at the expense of slightly less vertical ride. His fastball is still mostly vertical, avoiding Kevin Goldstein’s dreaded line of normality, but now it’s ever so slightly different.

From a raw pitch metric standpoint, this change hasn’t hurt Cabrera much. His vertical approach angle – the rate at which the ball is descending as it crosses home plate – has actually become less negative. In other words, despite less vertical movement, starting the ball lower has made it reach the plate at a shallow angle. It’s a tiny change, but it’s in the direction you’d like to see: flatter VAAs lead to more swings and misses as hitters misjudge fastballs at the top of the zone. It’s hardly the best fastball in the league, but the new lower shape hasn’t made it any worse.

There’s a benefit, though: whether it’s better training, more experience, or the benefit of the new arm angle, Cabrera has stopped giving fastballs away. He’s wasting only 3.6% of them this year – two out of the 55 he’s thrown – by throwing them so far out of the strike zone that they’re uncompetitive. That compares to 7.3% in his career before this year.

That’s not a giant difference, but turning three or four pitches out of every hundred from automatic balls to competitive fastballs does wonders for falling behind in the count less frequently. He’s living in the zone more with his fastball, which is important. When he’s behind in the count, he’s hit the strike zone more than 70% of the time with it, up from 56% before this year. Want fewer walks? Start throwing strikes when you’re behind in the count.

These fastball gains are nice and all, but there’s a much bigger change afoot here. Cabrera has gone from fastball-first to slider-first. Also, now he throws a slider:

That slider has gone from not even present to afterthought to the focus of everything he does. This isn’t a pitch classification change either; it’s not as though he used to throw curveballs and now systems are calling the same pitch a slider. He throws his slider 10 mph faster than his curve, and with a completely different shape: it’s a gyro bullet rather than a two-plane sweeping breaker.

How has the slider performed? Well, Cabrera has a 2.31 ERA and is striking out 42% of opposing batters. Remember that strikes vs. balls number from up above? He’s not doing that with his fastball – he’s doing it with this outrageous breaking pitch. Opponents have swung and missed at a third of the sliders he’s thrown this year. Not a third of the ones they’ve swung at – they’ve missed 58.7% of those – a third of all the sliders he throws period. That’s the second-best swinging strike rate for a slider in all of baseball, and the third-best whiff per swing rate.

What’s going on with this pitch? To explain it simply, Cabrera throws it very hard and with enough movement to keep it deceptive. Even in an era of increasing velocity, not many sliders flirt with 90 on the radar gun. Only three lefties – Reid Detmers, Yusei Kikuchi, and Snell – throw their sliders harder, and all three have a similar shape to Cabrera’s (Snell’s has more ride, so it’s not an exact match). And hey, wouldn’t you know it, all three of those sliders are great. In fact, if they weren’t starters, I’m sure that all three would use their slider more often, the way that Cabrera can in relief.

You probably want to see a pitch like that in action, so here’s a look at it, courtesy of Colorado’s pristine camera angles:

That’s a lot of horizontal movement — some from arm angle and some from pitch movement — for a pitch with that much zip. I’m not surprised that Stuff+ rates it as his best pitch and am equally unsurprised that batters are getting fooled by it. Like many hard sliders, it works well with his fastball thanks to its speed and release point. By the time batters realize they shouldn’t swing, it’s too late. As a bonus, this style of slider performs well against both lefties and righties, which means Cabrera doesn’t have to throw his below-average changeup against opposite-handed hitters. That pitch got him in trouble last year, and simplifying his arsenal without sacrificing platoon versatility feels like a great move for someone with control issues.

Another benefit of the slider: it gives him a trio of pitches that describe a movement and velocity spectrum, from fast and arm-side (fastball) through the slider to slow and glove-side (curveball). It looks something like this:

This excellent article on pitch tunneling, a SABR analytics nominee, came up with three rough criteria for fastball/slider pairings. The best pairings have 6-14 inches of horizontal movement separation, 8-16 inches of induced vertical break separation, and 6-11 mph of velocity separation. Cabrera’s old fastball/curveball pairing didn’t do that. His new fastball/slider pairing does, and as an added benefit, his slider/curveball pairing does too. That’s not the exact thing being studied, but it surely can’t hurt.

Put it all together and Cabrera looks like a completely changed pitcher. His new pitch mix blends together much more delightfully than his old plan. Leaning on the slider first and foremost makes sense; that way, both of his other pitches play well off of it. It’s a thoroughly modern plan: pitch off of the middle of your movement/velocity profile and vary off of that, instead of basing everything around your fastball because that’s how it’s always been done.

With that hagiography out of the way, let’s pump the brakes at least a little bit. Cabrera has made 11 appearances this year. He’s throwing a new pitch that might take batters some time to adjust to, which could be flattering his results. It’s still unquestionably a good pitch, but it might be playing up right now while hitters compile tape. His command has a lot to do with his surge, and reliever command is anything but stationary. He might lose track of the strike zone tomorrow and be more above average than unbeatable.

At the end of the day, even with those caveats, I can’t look at Cabrera’s recent form and be anything other than optimistic. Or, if you’d prefer it in the biblical terms that his name evokes, listen to Ecclesiastes 3:12: “I commend the enjoyment in life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad.” Stop sweating the future when it comes to Génesis. Focus on the glorious present – and maybe have a hot dog and a cold one while you’re at it.