The season has started and that means I’m having conversations with players that don’t always lead to full columns. Caught Looking, a monthly column that debuted last year, aims to be a place where I can take those snippets and put them together.
Let’s go to the clubhouse.
Clay Holmes’ plan against lefties
The Yankees’ right closer actually has two plans against left-handed bats.
The first surfaced when we were writing about the pitfalls of the sweeper, the trending pitch that boasts the second largest platoon splits among pitch types. Holmes throws a sweeper but added a cutter so he can throw anything other than a fastball at lefties.
“I threw both a sweeper and a spinning top last year,” Holmes said. “My expected numbers on my top are really good and they want me to throw it to more left-handers.”
But there are plans, and then there are plans. So Holmes ended up doing something else.
“That was the plan last year, but then you get some results for your lefties, and then you look up and you threw 87 percent board lefties,” he laughed.
Just a right-hander or two throws a higher percentage of boards at left-handers, depending on your minimums. Usually that’s a bad idea because of the platoon splits, but Holmes did well, allowing a .417 slug which worked given his dominance against lefties. But Holmes became curious.
“Right-handers for left-handers,” he said. “Is there anyone who could throw this most of the time and have succeeded? Every model says it can’t be done.”
No, no right-hander has really thrown 80 percent plummet to left-handed and succeeded. But a few are close! One name in particular stands out: Jared Hughes threw 73 percent sinkers to lefties and enabled a line that was better than the league average. Holmes and Jared Hughes exchanged messages while Holmes tried to figure out how to tighten his seam-shifted caster sinker. There are qualities the two share on this pitch and Hughes gave him some tips.
“I spoke to Jared Hughes quite a bit during Covid when he did a lot of stuff with Barton Smith,” Holmes said. “At the next spring training session I sent him in slow motion. There’s a lot of variance with the sinker and what’s going on with the very best. The really good ones, I’ll notice. Some days it’s better than others. I’ve learned a few things with the handle when it’s off. When I’m a little too behind the ball and I just need to think a little more spin on the ball to reduce spin efficiency. A little more football.”
But there is something else. The league is getting better at the forms they see over time, and lefties don’t see as many sinkers from righties anymore.
“Nobody tells pitchers to throw sinkers at lefties,” Holmes pointed out. “There is some kind of deception with my slot. What if you don’t see many boards, and then you only see good ones. Another thing is that the sinker is not the same every time. There are swing-and-miss models, flatter ones. Variability within a pitch, everyone throwing a ton of a pitch, that’s a big component of that.”
He’s right that lefties see fewer sinkers from righties. And there’s some evidence that he’s also broadly correct. The train split on the sinker has gradually improved over time:
It’s not much different, but in two of the last three seasons, the Sinker has seen its smallest platoon splits in the last decade and more.
Holmes still throws the sinker at lefties 76 percent of the time, and his slider is four ticks taller and has five inches less sweep against lefties, so he throws the gyro slider/cutter at them too. He has two plans!
Last year, in August of his breakout season, we caught up with the Cubs shortstop and spoke to him about the relationship between seeing the ball and hitting the ball forward to gain power. His pull rates had gone up, and he attributed that to walking and getting the ball a little more.
“I have an aggressive mindset,” he said then. “Try to start something earlier and give yourself a chance to do more. Be a little sportier. Those outward cues of being explosive through the middle of the field.”
The result was an improvement in his pull and power rates, which gave an indication that if he were able to continue these trends, an even bigger breakout was to come. The guy is batting in the high 300s this year, but when I spoke to him last week, he wasn’t homer and the pull rates were down again.
“It’s a long season,” he said. “I’m sure there will be weeks where I pull a little more and the hitting is there too.”
He hit two home runs over the weekend. Both on the pull side, although fastball’s was more left center.
And would you watch that? Its pull rate is trending up again.
While it’s not quite where it peaked at times last year, you can see from this chart that the tide is going to be ebb and flow. But the contact is always there.
Nobody is throwing harder than Sean Manaea this year compared to last year.
|
player |
team |
vFB 22 |
vFB 23 |
differential |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Parents |
91.2 |
94.2 |
3.0 |
|
|
brewer |
92.5 |
94.4 |
1.9 |
|
|
Angel |
93.2 |
94.9 |
1.7 |
|
|
Twins |
93.5 |
95.0 |
1.5 |
|
|
oriole |
93.5 |
95.0 |
1.5 |
Manaea credits a new commitment to arm care and an off-season trip to Driveline Baseball in Kent for the new speed.
“One big thing was having a special arm program, staying healthier and feeling stronger,” said the left. “You did a good job.”
A weighted ball program is usually the foundation for improving a veteran’s speed, but with the benefit of an on-site motion capture lab, Driveline can test all of their drills to ensure they’re doing exactly what they’re hoping for. For Manaea, they identified suboptimal trunk rotation, and that’s an aspect of delivery that correlates strongly with fastball speed. One of the prescribed drills was a drop step drill:
“I’ve improved my torso speed by doing hill things like flipping and throwing,” Manaea said of his work there. “It’s one of the three main exercises I do now on high-speed days.”
The rest of the arsenal flowed from his efforts to improve its mechanics. His fastball has more horizontal movement than last year as he tries to have a square that moves evenly in two directions. Which is funny because half the systems out there refer to it as a sinker.
“They are all four sailors,” he said. “I’m trying to match my vertical to my horizontal.”
That two-plane movement and extra speed improved his secondary stuff without too much effort.
“For the slider it’s just: have this grip and stay up,” he said. “I’m not trying to set it in motion, I’m just trying to throw it in an imaginary circle where the break begins.”
So far this season, results have been inconsistent, and a crowded rotation has meant some brief appearances in bursts. But something is cooking under the hood for this left-hander in San Francisco.
• Speaking of bikes, there’s this Mason Miller guy that everyone across the bay is watching as he currently *averages* 100 mph on fastball (leading starter) and 95.7 on cutter (according to Graham Ashcraft) is – the most amazing thing about it, however, is that the kicker is that the pitch that got him five puffs on 23 pitches and wowed everyone on his first start and put Miller in the top three among starters in Stuff+ was a pitch he first got into started throwing again this spring. (“They didn’t want me messing with that when I came back from injury,” he said in the Arizona Fall League.) Who knows how many innings he’ll have this year, but every one of them will be a must-try for them bike alone.
• Max Scherzer is in the news for other reasons, but also interesting is that his release point is down more than an inch this year, the biggest season-to-season drop of his career. It doesn’t bother him! “It’s on purpose,” he said when I met him in San Francisco. It hasn’t had a positive impact on his Stuff+, but the pitcher doesn’t care about that stat (he made that very clear in our conversations) nor is it as much about tweaking his mix in this way. He’s a familiar being, and the League has seen him time and time again. “You’re racing. mile one. mile two. mile five. Mile 26,” he said of a veteran starting his career as a pitcher. “It’s on purpose,” he repeated. Sounds like the idea is to give the league a new look after 2,700 regular-season innings in his career.
• When he signed, there were some concerns about Jose Abreu’s regressive slugging in general, but also his work against fastball in particular. Not counting the quality of fastball, his hitting the court has dropped from .664 in 2020 to .454 in 2021, .408 last season and .267 this year. But oddly, he’s hitting .500 on fastballs over 95 mph this season, suggesting the problem isn’t entirely summed up by a loss in racquet speed. None of this season’s numbers would be sample enough to really believe if the rest of the trendline weren’t there, so it’s just something to watch at this point, but Abreu is currently showing his worst strikeout rate, walk rate and barrels pace of his career, the evidence is that he’s at least pushing.
• Ray’s closer Pete Fairbanks has the second best fastball of his career by speed, vertical movement and Stuff+; He credits working up from injury and also a funky looking ball losing its sides: “I’ve been recovering from a sprain and throwing a lot of bullpens, I’m throwing my clean fuegos a lot and now I feel good going through the.” Pull baseball, and not too early, pull through baseball and down,” he said this spring. Other teams have developed their own spin coaches, using regular balls and darkening parts of the ball to act as a spin guide for pitchers, but using the ball to give pitchers instant feedback about their spin axis – instead making them wait to watch the slow motion video – seems to be gaining popularity.
(Top Photo by Holmes: Elsa/Getty Images)
