What’s the Matter With Jack Flaherty?

It wasn’t supposed to go down like this. After a sensational contract year — striking out 30% of hitters, posting the lowest walk rate of his career, bedazzling his jewelry cabinet with a World Series ring — Jack Flaherty looked like he was set to make a boatload of money. Days after his 29th birthday, we here at FanGraphs ranked Flaherty eighth among our Top 50 Free Agents, one spot behind his former high school teammate, Max Fried.

Early in December, Fried blew away expectations, inking an eight year, $218 million deal with Yankees. And he wasn’t the only one. Starters from Blake Snell to Luis Severino landed surprisingly lucrative contracts; when Ben Clemens checked in last week on his free agency projections, he noted that he’d under-projected the deals for starting pitchers by about $17 million on average. His takeaway: “Pitchers are getting paid this winter.”

Not all of them, it turns out. As the calendar creeps uncomfortably close to the start of spring training, the youngest available starting pitcher in free agency finds himself without an employer. Every couple weeks, a sparsely sourced rumor about Flaherty bubbles up on MLB Trade Rumors — there’s “mutual interest” with the Orioles, the Tigers have “some interest” in a reunion — but for a large part of the offseason, it’s been silence on the Flaherty beat.

The most substantial of these rumors flowed from the estimable pen of Ken Rosenthal over the weekend. Rosenthal and Will Sammon reported in The Athletic that Flaherty was “open to considering” a “short-term deal” with a “high average annual value.” The hot market for starters and the comparatively cool market for Flaherty suggest that, unlike the rest of the nominal “front-end” starting pitchers at the top of the market, something about him scares teams. All of this leads me to ask: What’s the matter with Jack Flaherty?

One obvious answer is the track record. On some level, teams are going to be somewhat hesitant to commit serious resources to anyone whose last healthy and effective season before 2024 came prior to the pandemic. Rosenthal and Sammon wrote in their report that “teams perhaps want to see Flaherty put together two consecutive seasons of elite performance.” And there are the shoulder issues in 2021 and 2022 that limited him to just 114 1/3 innings over that two-year span.

But I don’t think the track record tells the full story. I think the weak Flaherty market comes down to concerns about his 2024 season itself. Specifically, I think teams are worried about his fastball.

They get there in different ways, but the three pitchers who received $200 million (or thereabouts) contracts this winter all have plus fastballs. Snell throws the prototypical ace four-seamer, averaging 96 mph with 19 inches of induced vertical break. Corbin Burnes’ cutter is one of the signature pitches in baseball, capable of missing bats and neutralizing contact quality against hitters on both sides of the plate. Fried is a bit of a different case — his fastball averaged just 93.9 mph last season — but the shape is totally bizarre relative to his arm angle, resembling Burnes’ cutter from the left side. Fried also throws five other pitches, minimizing the importance of his four-seamer.

Flaherty’s fastball was the slowest of these four primary offerings, averaging 93.3 mph. In September, that dropped all the way to 92.6 mph. At below-average velocities, even a half-tick of heat loss can be brutal. And while the shape of the fastball is unusual — Flaherty throws from a low slot and gets just four inches of horizontal movement, meaning the pitch unexpectedly cuts in a funky fashion — it doesn’t have the sink that allows Fried’s and Burnes’ fastballs to burrow beneath barrels. Also unlike Fried, Flaherty in effect throws just three pitches: his four-seam fastball and the two breaking balls. (He also flashes a changeup and sinker, but last season he used each of those pitches less than 3% of the time.)

Given the mediocrity of his fastball, Flaherty must aim for fine locations. His success can vary. (I want to caveat the following with the fact that the Dodgers have a strong organizational preference for where their pitchers locate their fastballs, which may or may not be the way Flaherty will pitch with a new team.)

I’ll start with his matchups against left-handed hitters, because these were the majority of hitters that Flaherty faced in 2024. After his trade to the Dodgers in late July, the target for his fastball was almost exclusively set up in one location: Low and away.

A handful of times per start, Flaherty tried to climb the ladder, aiming for swinging strikes at the top of the zone. But in the three starts I watched in full, he almost always targeted his fastballs low and away when facing lefties.

Now, as the plot below of his fastball location to lefties shows, his execution wasn’t perfect. Aiming a baseball is really hard. But I’d venture to say that it was pretty good — he hardly yanked any of his fastballs to the glove side, and most of his misses drifted harmlessly off the plate. In any case, the plot tells a clear story: Flaherty was looking to paint with his fastball rather than challenge hitters over the plate.

This sort of nibbling quality with the fastball is perhaps not what teams want to see from their high-paid free agent starter. Snell, Burnes, and even Fried to some extent can throw fastballs with a large margin for error. Flaherty’s margins are thinner.

This is especially true against right-handed hitters, where his glove-side command is not as good. Against righties, Flaherty also frequently targeted low and away. But as the plot below of fastballs to righties shows, Flaherty doesn’t have the same level of command to the outer edge of this side of the plate. Note the lack of dots in that low-away corner compared to the yanked misses off the plate:

To lefties, Flaherty has the luxury of his misses generally drifting off the plate for balls. When he misses his target to righties, however, the miss tends to drift middle-middle. And when you’re missing middle-middle with 93-mph four-seamers, it’s generally not going to turn out well for you. (This might explain part of Flaherty’s reverse splits last season.)

When executed well, the low-and-away target serves an important function — it sets up his two nasty breaking balls, a harder gyro slider at 85 mph and a loopier knuckle-curve at 78 mph. As this pitch plot shows, these two pitches blend together in a deceptive manner, forcing hitters to guess which one is coming:

Flaherty is at his best when he’s mixing in the low fastballs with the two breakers right below the zone. Check out this two-pitch sequence to Ryan O’Hearn. He nails his 0-0 target to get ahead:

On 0-1 — the perfectly executed fastball fresh in O’Hearn’s head — Flaherty buries a curveball right below the previous location, getting O’Hearn to swing way over the pitch:

After a couple of breaking balls in the dirt, Flaherty punches O’Hearn out on a high fastball. With hitters laser-focused on the bottom of the strike zone, that occasional late-count high heater leads to a ton of whiffs. It’s a pretty combo when it works.

But if Flaherty falls behind, there just isn’t a great option to induce weak contact. When the early-count fastball execution is less than perfect, he tends to back himself into a corner. And when he’s forced to come over to the plate with the heater, he can be vulnerable to the long ball. Just ask O’Hearn:

If Flaherty’s fastball velocity remains in that 92-93 range, it will likely be a tradeoff between giving up a few too many walks due to nibbling (as he did early in his career) or risking extra-base damage by coming over the plate.

So, yes, there are reasons to be concerned about Flaherty. But overly fixating on his fastball risks ignoring his upside.

That two-breaking-ball attack works against both righties and lefties; when he gets ahead in the count, there’s almost nobody better. That strikeout rate is no illusion. So the question becomes: How can Flaherty reliably get ahead of hitters?

One option is pitching backwards. Flaherty’s fastball usage in 0-0 counts is roughly 50%. (On the plot below, red represents the four-seamer, gold represents the slider, and blue represents the curveball.) Given the frequency of his slider usage in 3-1 and 3-2 counts (50% and 44.8%, respectively) it follows that he has the confidence to throw it for a strike when he needs it. Mixing in more breaking balls in early counts could take some pressure off the four-seamer.

Flaherty could also use his sinker more often. If his problem at present is mostly with right-handed hitters, the sinker could give him a weak-contact option and a pitch that he feels comfortable throwing on the inner-half of the plate. Notably, the sinker grades out fine by stuff models — PitchingBot, for example, gives it a 56 on the 20-80 scale.

It’s also not impossible that some of his velocity could return. Maybe he no longer can regularly dial up 95-96 mph as he did in his early 20s, but it’s also possible that his late-season swoon can be chalked up to his posting his highest innings total in five years. In the range of velocity that he sat in the later months of the season, every half-tick is crucial, but if he can consistently live at 93-94 mph with the ability to touch 96, that softens many of the concerns.

Concluding this article definitively is challenging. On the one hand, the skittishness of the clubs is perfectly understandable. But plenty of contending teams need starting pitching, and an industry-wide fear of Flaherty’s weaknesses could cost clubs their chance to add someone who just performed like one of the best hurlers in the game.