Ray finds an old friend
There’s a strongly held belief all across baseball that a starting pitcher needs at least three good pitches to succeed. To simplify, the belief is that a pitcher needs (at least):
Pitch 1: A hard fastball he can command.
Pitch 2: Something hard that bends or sinks.
Pitch 3: Something softer to throw the hitter off balance.
The generic three-pitch pitcher throws a fastball, slider and change-up. Or fastball, sinker and change-up. Or fastball, cutter and change-up. Or … the point is the third pitch is usually a change-up. That seems to be the easiest third pitch to teach. And if your fastball is good enough, even a so-so change-up can be pretty devastating.
Robbie Ray was a promising young left-handed pitcher in search of that third pitch. His fastball popped even in high school. He threw a pretty good curveball then too, but the Nationals decided that high second pitch should probably be a harder one, a slider. That worked: Ray showed a pretty good feel for the slider right away.
And then, that third pitch: Everyone seemed sure it would be a change-up.
Baseball America, 2012: “Ray has very good feel for his change-up which projects as a slightly above average pitch.”
Baseball America, 2013: “His change-up made considerable progress in 2012, and it projects as a solid pitch.”
Baseball America, 2014: “His change-up came along nicely in 2013, showing flashes of being an above-average pitch in the low 80s.”
The Nationals traded Ray to Detroit that year, 2014, for Doug Fister. And when Ray got his first call to the big leagues with the Tigers, well, he was one change-up throwing Tennessean. He threw his change-up more than a quarter of the time.
And though he only got six starts, hitters teed off on it (and everything else). The change-up is pretty easy to throw, but it’s very hard to throw well. Everything has to be in sync. The change-up motion must perfectly mirror the fastball motion. The pitch must have some natural movement. A great changeup devastates. A poor one is basically a batting practice fastball. Ray’s resembled the latter.
Detroit dumped him immediately in a three-way deal with Arizona that brought them Shane Greene (and somehow got the Yankees Didi Gregorius).
Ray made 55 starts for the Diamondbacks the last two years … and his numbers never quite added up. He always SHOULD have been better. He struck out 10 batters per nine innings and in 2016, he had the 11th-lowest contract rate in baseball, which seems really good. But his ERA was 4.32, he threw quality starts less than 40% of the time and the Diamondbacks went 19–36 in his starts. Something wasn’t adding up.
In 2016, hitters batted just .211 and slugged .322 against Ray’s four-seam fastball.
They hit .206 against Ray’s slider and swung and missed it more than 20% of the time.
So … what’s left? Oh yeah. The change-up. They hit .415 and slugged .780 against Ray’s change-up. And there it was: That dreaded third pitch.
Ray was at a loss for how to get that change-up working, and finally he sort of gave up on it and started throwing his old curveball, the one that the Nationals had him give up a few years ago. I hope you’ve read Tom Verducci’s wonderful piece on the curveball in Sports Illustrated this week. The pitch is almost as old as baseball, and at different times through the years it has been forgotten. Ray’s story is a familiar one; lots of teams will have curveball throwers move on to sliders. Lots of pitching coaches teach sliders instead of curves.
But the curveball is a fantastic pitch in its own right, and every now and again (like now) it has a renaissance. Ray’s first efforts at throwing the curveball again were not great; even he admitted that you could not really tell the difference between his curve and slider. But this spring, he worked hard on giving his curveball definition and shape. He started to get a feel for it before the season began.
And now, suddenly, Robbie Ray is all but unhittable. He threw a beauty Tuesday night in Pittsburgh, a complete game, four-hit, 10 strikeout, no walk shutout. In his last three starts, he has throws 23 1/3 innings, allowed eight hits (only one of them for extra bases), struck out 25 and walked three.
And that curveball, yes, that curveball seems to be making all the difference. Ray has shelved the change-up entirely, replaced it with a curve that he throws 17% of the time, and the league is hitting .158 against it. On Tuesday, he threw 27 curves, velocity anywhere between 77 and 85 mph, and 11 of those curves were either called strikes or swinging strikes. The one above against Josh Bell is so nasty that Twitter should ban it.
“It keeps them off balance,” Ray says, and that seems to be exactly right. There was just the tiniest thing missing the last couple of years for Ray. That curveball is filling that void. As hitters adjust, he will have to adjust, but at the moment the three-legged pitching world of Robbie Ray is in perfect balance.
One Away From 600
You will sometimes see people refer to a player as the “greatest right-handed hitter.” People used to say this about Frank Thomas a lot, I remember: “He has a chance to become the greatest right-handed hitter ever.” Pujols has heard some of this as well.
You never hear this about left-handed hitters. The thinking, I suppose, is that left-handed hitters have this natural advantage because, of course, most pitchers are right-handed.
I’ve always wondered — would the greatest left-handed hitting team be significantly better than the greatest right-handed hitting team?
Well, you decide:
Left-handed hitting team:
- Joe Morgan, 2B.
2. Ty Cobb, CF
3. Ted Williams DH
4. Babe Ruth, RF
5. Barry Bonds, LF
6. Lou Gehrig, 1B
7. George Brett, 3B
8. Yogi Berra, C
9. Arky Vaughan, SS
Pretty darned good — outfield heavy. Had to leave off so many good players, Griffey, Speaker, Musial, Boggs, Cobb, Yaz, Ott among many others.
Right-handed hitting team:
- Ricky Henderson, LF
- Honus Wagner, SS
- Henry Aaron, RF
- Willie Mays, CF
- Frank Robinson, DH
- Albert Pujols, 1B
- Rogers Hornsby, 2B
- Mike Schmidt, 3B
- Johnny Bench, C
Whew, had to leave off a bunch of great players again — DiMaggio, Kaline, Clemente, A-Rod, Foxx, Miggy, Cal, Edgar.
I don’t know. That right-handed hitting team sure seems to me like it could hold its own. Sure, hard to beat Williams, Ruth, Bonds, Gehrig middle of the lineup. But Aaron, Mays, Robinson, Pujols ain’t chopped liver.*
*I love that “chopped liver” expression and will do all I can to bring it back even if it means using it every day.
Bauer Power
Cleveland’s Trevor Bauer remains one of the absurd mysteries of baseball. His fastball hits 97. His curveball is often a Bugs Bunny pitch. He throws a cutter, throws a change-up, used to throw a slider, mixed in various pitches that seemed uncategorizable, if that’s a word (which it is not).
And yet, when hitters connect with Trevor Bauer, they connect big.
Coming into Tuesday night’s game, Bauer had the second highest barrel rate in baseball according to Statcast — he was giving up a barrel (those impossibly hard-hit balls) on more than 12 percent of his pitches. Eleven of those barrels, not incidentally, went for home runs. That might help explain his 6.30 ERA coming in even though he was striking out more than a batter per inning and had a more than three-to-one strikeout to walk ratio.
Well, Tuesday night Bauer was dealing. He struck out 14 in seven innings. He got 26 called strikes — Bauer is actually second in all of baseball in called strikes this year, behind only Tampa Bay’s Alex Cobb. In addition, he got 15 swinging strikes, which is pretty special. The Oakland hitters only managed to put 13 balls in play.
But once again — three of those 13 balls were barrels, a crazy high percentage. On this day, none of the barrels went for home runs (it was only the second time all year he did not allow a homer), but it remains a mystery. Trevor Bauer is hard to hit. But when you hit him, man do you hit him.
