(Un)necessary Analysis of Johnny Cueto’s Different Deliveries

This being primarily a numbers site and all, we tend to try our hardest to deal with objective truths around these parts. If it’s not backed by, y’know, evidence, why say it? That’s one of the primary reasons this whole sabermetrics thing got off the ground in the first place. But, hey. We’re human beings. We’ve all got a little hot take in us, whether we care to admit it or not. Inside all of us, there’s a little pool of hot take magma, bubbling up over time until we can’t hold it down anymore and we’ve got no choice but to let it spew out and suffer the consequences. Anyway, it’s been a while since I fired one off, and I can’t hold it down anymore. Here it comes!

Johnny Cueto Is the Most Entertaining Player in Baseball.

Whew! That felt good. Johnny Cueto, yep. Most entertaining player in baseball. Try and stop me. I’ve even got a list of four subjective reasons as to why Johnny Cueto is the Most Entertaining Player in baseball, and, yes, I’d put them in a slideshow if I could.

Reason number one: dreadlocks. They’re awesome and baseball needs more of them. Let Cueto’s brothers play too. Number two: he yells on the mound a lot. Yells at himself, yells at the umpire, yells at opposing batters after he strikes them out. If I can go against the hot take grain for a second, I’d like to put forth that the more emotion in baseball, the better. Number three: the unpredictability of his performance. Never know what you’re gonna get from Cueto! All-time postseason clunker, or all-time World Series great? How about both, in back-to-back starts? I’ll tell you who the most boring pitcher in baseball is — that Clayton Kershaw. Yawn. Where’s the fun in watching a guy who’s just awesome every time out? (Crosses “Call Clayton Kershaw boring” off outline.) Last, but certainly not least: he has four different deliveries! Four! And one of them is called “The Rocking Chair”! If anybody else strays from their typical mechanics by even a hair, they have to sit down with their pitching coach the next day to fix it and someone on the internet writes 1,000 words on how that pitcher is now broken. Cueto does this on purpose!

And it’s awesome. So, of course it needs to be broken down. It’s something I’ve been meaning to look at for a while, and I figure there’s no better time than now, after Cueto just threw the first World Series complete game by an AL pitcher since Jack Morris in ’91, and might not even pitch again this year, what with the Royals already being up 2-0 in the series.

So, after the conclusion of last night’s game, I went back and charted all of Cueto’s deliveries in a spreadsheet alongside the PITCHf/x data provided by BrooksBaseball. Jeff Passan has named the deliveries: the Tiant, the Quick Pitch, the Rocking Chair and the Traditional (this essentially just means he’s in the stretch).

First, the most basic numbers. Usage:

• Quick Pitch: 48%
• Tiant: 25%
• Rocking Chair: 7%
• Traditional: 20%

The Johnny Cueto motion you’re used to is the Tiant. That’s the one he came up using in Cincinnati, where he turns his back to the hitter before delivering. Seems that’s been usurped as the go-to delivery by the Quick Pitch. The pitches, themselves, don’t seem to change much, between the two. The fastball went 93.4 with the Quick Pitch, and 93.7 with the Tiant. With the Quick Pitch, the four-seam had a bit more rise, and the sinker a bit more sink. The changeup was more fade-heavy out of the Quick Pitch, and more drop-heavy out of the Tiant. Surely, in such small samples, the differences could be a product of noise. It’s also not hard to imagine the different deliveries resulting in differently shaped pitches.

Cueto’s first pitch of the game looked like this:

That’s the Tiant. Vintage Cueto. Makes sense. If you think about it, a quick pitch is really only quick relative to what you just saw before it. Would be kind of weird to start a game out with a quick pitch. Then again, Cueto’s pretty weird, so who knows.

The first pitch of the game was a Tiant, and so were the next six! The Traditional excluded, because that’s his only stretch motion, Cueto’s seven consecutive Tiants to begin the game were the longest run of same-style deliveries all night.

On the eighth pitch, and the first two-strike pitch of the game, Cueto Quick Pitched a changeup to Daniel Murphy:

That’s not a very good pitch! Cueto changed his motion for the first time all night, and he threw a bad pitch. Correlation? Causation? You decide! This is all silly anyways.

Something interesting I noticed, from the pitch right before that one:

See that? Cueto gives just a little extra pause before going into his leg lift. He doesn’t usually do this on the Tiant. Even his four different deliveries have their own micro-deliveries! This makes me think that Cueto knew the next pitch would be his first Quick Pitch. Right before the fastest motion, why not show the slowest motion? Seems trivial, but if you’re already going to these lengths to play mind games with the batters, why not take it an extra step?

After the initial Quick Pitch, followed by one more just like it, Cueto busts out the Rocking Chair for the first time, and freezes Murphy on a beautiful two-seam fastball:

Murphy got the works. To recap, that at-bat went:

• Tiant, fastball, ball
• Tiant, fastball, strike
• Tiant, fastball, strike
• Quick Pitch, changeup, ball
• Quick Pitch, fastball, foul
• Rocking chair, fastball, strike three

There don’t seem to be many trends to the Cueto Delivery System (CDS), but I did notice one. I mean, maybe. This could also not be a trend. Did I mention this was all silly?

First pitch delivery, windup only, by times through the order:

• First time through: Tiant, Tiant, Tiant, Tiant, Tiant, Tiant, Tiant, Tiant
• Second time: Quick Pitch, Quick, Quick, Quick, Quick
• Third: Quick, Quick, Quick, Quick, Quick, Quick, Tiant!, Quick, Quick
• Fourth: Rocking Chair, Tiant, Quick

The first time through the order, Cueto was mixing in all four deliveries, but every batter started out with the Tiant. The second time through the order, every batter was started with the Quick Pitch. Seems like if there were ever going to be a method to this madness, it would be on the first pitch. It’s the only pitch that is guaranteed to happen in every at-bat, and the only one that doesn’t have a pitch preceding it off of which to build.

With two strikes, Cueto relied heavily on the Quick Pitch. His QP% skyrockets from 48%, overall, to 72% with two strikes.

In the fifth-through-eighth innings, Cueto settled into something of a groove. During those innings, over the course of 47 pitches, Cueto almost always went Tiant, Quick Pitch, Quick Pitch, Tiant. Two quicks between every Tiant. Sometimes it would be three quicks, to keep from becoming too predictable. Sometimes, the Tiant would be substituted for a Rocking Chair. The every-third-Tiant seems to be something like the platonic ideal for the CDS, though.

Hey, wait. Before we wrap this up, you want to see the Rocking Chair again, don’t you? You do. It’s the unicorn of Cueto deliveries. If you caught a glimpse of a unicorn once, you’d want another look, to make sure the memory lasts.

Amazing.

I can’t recall any other pitchers who varied their delivery quite like Cueto in recent history outside of Bronson Arroyo. Thing about Arroyo, though, is that he wasn’t super good, so the varied arm slots didn’t have quite the same magic. In Cueto, you’ve got one of the best pitchers in baseball, who also happens to be completely unpredictable on any given pitch. That, in itself, is a treat. The complete game two-hitters in the World Series are simply the cherry on top.