Under The Knife 4/5/24

Changing Shapes

The game of baseball is, at heart, a one on one battle between the pitcher and the batter. Over the past decade, pitchers have gotten better, faster, and used every advantage to really take their winning edge even further. At the same time, hitters haven’t had quite the same tools, losing some of the edge of swinging hard and hitting it far by missing more. While a strikeout is of little additional cost, there is a mental cost to missing it by a mile.

Enter the Trajekt. The robo-thrower is now giving hitters a look not just at pitches, but actual pitchers. Add in the video of pitchers and they can re-create entire at bats, leading many hitters to take on pitchers they’ve never faced and lose that “first look” advantage. There’s no reverse technology either, unless you consider some of the pitch sequencing and heat mapping the equivalent. (Surprisingly, I couldn’t find a lot of good footage of the Trajekt being used.)

So what do pitchers do to dull that edge? An MLB pitching coach told me he’s trying something he calls “fast shaping.” In talking with another pitching analyst about this concept, he called it “intentional mistakes.” Basically it’s making pitches less repeatable, which has always been the intent of most coaching and even recent work on pitch design. A grip, an arm action, and the resultant movement was designed to do a certain thing, to work against a hitter or to give similar looks with different movement.

Now, pitchers may need to adjust to make the slider slide a bit more, or less and for the sinker to move a bit differently. This is usually the result of grip changes. “I don’t want the pitcher aiming or changing angles,” said the MLB coach. “Just a bit tighter or looser, a nudge of angle of the ball. We’re still figuring out how to chart it, but we have a camera trained on the hand.” He imagines other teams - including opponents - are already doing this to his pitchers.

The idea that being inconsistent might bring better results is going to be difficult. It’s unlearning a skill and even small alterations might lead to command and control issues for some pitchers. Some might need to abandon the idea and simply go with their best stuff, which should work more often than not.

The cat-and-mouse is always going to be there, but it’s intriguing that a big dollar tool is being countered by a zero dollar alteration. Now we’ll have to see which pitchers, coaches, trainers, and perhaps teams do this well and start showing different shapes to different hitters. We’re already seeing journalists like Lance Brozdowski who explain this well, or maybe Rob Friedman who simply shows it, in this space and we need more of that, especially on broadcasts. (Hint, hint, Brian Kenny.)

For now, on to the injuries:

EURY PEREZ, SP MIA (sprained elbow)

Eury Perez is headed for the same procedure as Sandy Alcantara, but the Marlins treated both very differently. Alcantara was the ace; Perez was the prospect. Alcantara was the workhorse; Perez was the coddled colt. They ended up in the same place, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the Marlins and about the state of the science of keeping pitchers healthy in 2024.

The Marlins brought in specialists a few years back to revamp their systems. Perez was shut down, sent to Double-A and de-loaded, and yet, here we are. All of that didn’t work and worse, wasted time when Perez might have been healthy and effective for a team that finished the season with the same record as the Arizona Diamondbacks. If they have Alcantara and Perez, maybe they don’t get swept out by the Phillies in what became a wild card World Series.

For Perez, this is like Tommy John for any pitcher. The hope is that the new front office isn’t like the last front office, or the one before that. Some of the insane restrictions on pitching technologies have been lifted, but we don’t have any of the results to know that new is better. Perez is done for the season and into next year, whether or not he has an augmented repair. The hope is he comes back as a good, not quite as young starter and we see how good he can be, for a team that can use the talent.

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