Photo by Kirsten Shmitt, courtesy Milwaukee Brewers
Brewers players are finding all kinds of ways to pass the time while the MLB season is on hold, from Corey Knebel spending time with he and his wife’s new baby to Josh Hader playing in MLB The Show tournaments to Jedd Gyorko showing off cornhole tricks. Given all this extra time, it seems likely some pitchers have also had time to think about and tinker with their arsenals.
As the Brewers overhauled their pitching staff this winter they continued to trend away from a long-popular pitch that has fallen out of favor in recent years: The sinking fastball. In 2019 the Brewers had nine pitchers throw at least 30 innings while using a sinking fastball at least 20% of the time. Six of those pitchers are no longer in the organization. The Brewer who threw the most sinkers in 2019, Zach Davies, was traded in a deal netting a pitcher who doesn’t throw one at all, Eric Lauer.
It’s commonly suggested that a sinking fastball plays into hitters hands as strategies at the plate have evolved in recent years. When hitters are swinging at an upward angle as they’ve increasingly done lately, the theory suggests, then throwing them a fastball with downward action provides a pitch that lingers in their plane of attack. This may have been part of the undoing of Jhoulys Chacin, a frequent sinker thrower who went from Opening Day starter to in-season release with the 2019 Brewers.
There are some counterexamples to this trend, of course: Cardinals pitcher Dakota Hudson threw a sinker nearly 50% of the time in 2019 (down from 58% in 2018) and had a big season, although peripheral data suggests luck might have played a factor in his success. Similarly, Braves rookie Mike Soroka used a sinker around 45% of the time in 2019 and posted a 2.68 ERA across 174 2/3 innings, also overcoming a relatively low strikeout rate. Longtime sinker thrower Dallas Keuchel was effective in a partial season with the Braves, while Jake Arrieta of the Phillies saw his ERA climb up over 4 (it was 4.64) for the first time in six years.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
If MLB conditions are going to continue to favor pitchers who work up in the zone and avoid sinking fastballs, then here are three Brewers that might want to consider getting away from theirs:
Brandon Woodruff
Woodruff bucked this trend by adding a sinker to his arsenal in 2019: Brooks Baseball suggests he used the pitch sparingly in 2018 but went up to using it over 23% of the time last season. He also added a bit of velocity while using the pitch more often, which is unusual. The data suggests that Woodruff’s two fastballs, the four-seamer and two-seamer (sinker), were his best two pitches in 2019 by a wide margin. He leaned heavily on the sinker in the first pitch of plate appearances, throwing it over 30% of the time, and opposing hitters batted .381 with a .595 slugging percentage in 2019 when they put his first pitch in play.
Adrian Houser
While Woodruff uses a sinking fastball for about a third of his fastballs, Houser’s sinker is his most used pitch at 36% of all offerings. It was also the only pitch in his arsenal that rated significantly above average in 2019, a year when his secondary offerings (a changeup, slider and curve thrown more than 200 times each) were all hit relatively hard. Houser threw the sinker for almost half of all pitches against righties and leaned on it especially hard when trailing in the count, using it 63% of the time. He faced 252 right-handed batters in 2019 and held them to a .617 on-base plus slugging (the NL average was .735), so in this case it’s hard to argue with his results.
Alex Claudio
Coming out of the bullpen for short outings Claudio uses his 86 mph fastball relatively sparingly, throwing it just 46% of the time. When he throws a fastball, however, it’s always a sinker and has been every year since 2016, when he abandoned his cut fastball. Claudio’s fastball was pretty close to being a league average pitch in 2019 and, like Houser, he threw it a lot after falling behind in the count. According to FanGraphs’ pitch data Claudio’s best pitch in 2019 was his slider, the pitch he used third most often, and it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for him to lean on that offering more often.
