Corbin Burnes’ Incredible Career Turnaround

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Photo via Corbin Burnes/Twitter

Corbin Burnes

Corbin Burnes

If someone had polled Brewers fans following the 2019 season and asked them which pitcher from that squad was most likely to win a Cy Young Award someday, they probably would have gotten an array of responses. Brandon Woodruff’s name likely would have come up often, and Josh Hader and Zach Davies may also have received some support. Only the most optimistic of fans would have chosen Corbin Burnes, but his incredible career turnaround might take that next step this week.

By any measure, Burnes’ 2019 season was a disaster. He threw just over 900 pitches at the MLB level but a fair number of them landed him in trouble: He allowed 17 home runs in just 49 innings pitched, logging an 8.82 ERA. There was some bad luck in there, but not enough to explain it away. Baseball Savant (which collects MLB’s Statcast data) ranked Burnes among MLB’s worst performing pitchers when it came to avoiding solid contact (11.7% of the balls in play against him were “barrels”), expected slugging percentage against (.508) and expected ERA (5.94). 

Looking at that 2019 season with the benefit of 2021’s context, however, another number stands out: Just 0.9% of the pitches Burnes threw during that challenging campaign were classified as cutters, and it’s possible a few of those were labeled that way by mistake. This year Burnes threw that pitch 52.3% of the time, and he might be about to ride it to a Cy Young Award.

Burnes’ sharp turn to stardom after an offseason at the Brewers’ pitch lab has been well documented, even if the specific steps that caused his breakout remain unknown. There are certainly other examples around the sport of pitchers who reinvented themselves and changed the trajectories of their careers, but Burnes might be the most extreme case: He now throws a cutter, a virtual non-entity in his arsenal two seasons ago, more often than any other starting pitcher in baseball. 

Even as hitters have gotten multiple opportunities to look at the pitch, however, they’ve still found it all but untouchable. David Adler of MLB.com listed one offering Burnes threw to former Cubs slugger Javier Baez as one of the nastiest pitches in all of baseball this season, saying “You can’t hit that. You can’t even try.”

Spin Rate

Burnes’ cutter moves in a way that would have seemed unlikely if not impossible before phrases like “spin rate” and “spin efficiency” became part of the common baseball vocabulary. It comes in at an average of 95 miles per hour, significantly faster than the typical MLB cutter, but also generates more than ten inches of movement, often appearing to “break late” as it nears the plate. As Adler noted in the article linked above, no pitcher had recorded more than 100 strikeouts on cutters since at least 2008. Burnes had 117 this season. When opposing batters put Burnes’ cutter in play they rarely did so with authority, with an average exit velocity just over 85 miles per hour.

Burnes’ Cy Young case is a study in quality vs quantity: Both Zack Wheeler of the Phillies and Nationals/Dodgers pitcher Max Scherzer pitched more than Burnes, with Wheeler throwing close to 50 more innings. Burnes was easily more dominant than even those two spectacular performers, however, leading the league in earned run average, strikeout percentage and strikeout-to-walk ratio. Burnes logged a no-hitter, broke an MLB record for consecutive strikeouts in a game and opened the season by striking out 58 batters before allowing a walk.

Until the results come out on Wednesday night it will be impossible to know how voters balanced Burnes’ dominance against his relatively light workload. Even if he doesn’t win the award, however, he’ll be the first Brewer to finish in the top three in the voting since Teddy Higuera in 1986. It’s a pretty impressive feat, considering where he was two years ago at this time.