=== Cutters and Sliders ===
A normal fastball fades armside about six inches. A "cut" fastball is a very hard little slider that breaks the other way, gloveside, from 0-4 inches ... a very important 8 inches' delta off the regular fastball.
I found nine pitchers in baseball who can throw their cutters within 2-3 mph of their fastballs. This essentially gives these pitchers two identical-looking pitches -- which break in opposite directions just as the hitter swings.
Those nine pitchers include Dan Haren, Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Jon Lester, and Chad Billingsley.
But I wasn't counting these three guys, who now can do the same thing: Jamey Wright, Jason Vargas, and Doug Fister. They can throw cutters at the same velo as their two-seam fastballs.
Vargas and Fister just now started doing it, in 2011, and, by a remarkable coincidence, they have been among the best starting pitchers in baseball.
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=== Vargas 2011 vs Vargas 2010 ===
An interesting discussion thread down there in the sidebar, on the cyber-idea of Vargas for Brett Gardner (who scored about 5 WAR last year).
The reigning king of SSI roto proposed a theft of the Yankees' 5-WAR man ... Dr. D expressed his reservation about 'soft' 5-WAR skills like those advertised by Chone Figgins ...
Several 600-lb. Gorilla commenters reminded that any big acquisition needs to be as bat-first as possible. We've got our glovework... what we needs is our Ortiz to go with Justin "Manny" Smoak... we digress. :- )
Then the champ frankly clarified that he hadn't been watching Vargas much, and that the New Vargas may be a different kettle of fish. Just so!
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2011 Vargas has leaped a big plateau. We need to stop thinking of the 2010 Vargas, who was different, and the 2009 Vargas, who was much different still.
Dr. D has no qualms about admitting it when he's giving an opinion or an assessment. But Vargas' plateau leap isn't opinion - it's a verifiable fact.
He did not use the cutter last year, and did not use the Marshall 33-33-33 pitch mix. He's a new pitcher in 2011, a much better one.
Which is okay by us....
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=== Electron Microscopes In the Bleachers ===
It's a funny thing. Now that Jamey Wright, Jason Vargas, and (partially) Doug Fister have given us live-action demo's of The Mike Marshall Theory of Pitching ...
It's funny, rolling back through the years in your mind, how many ML pitchers talked about cut fastballs as the key aspect of their games.
Mark Langston hurt his elbow and complained, ever after, that he couldn't throw his cutter the way he wanted to. Andy Pettitte had several ineffective years for exactly the same reason. Tons of guys.
The cutter is a slider-type pitch that torques your elbow ligament, but if you can throw it, it's a vicious pitch -- and it makes all the other pitches better. Provided you roll dice to choose pitch sequences.
Pitchers have always talked -- huge -- about the cutter being key to their games. I never heard them. Did you? It's an aspect of the on-field battle that is opaque to us as fans. The tiny little break of the ball, just as a hitter swings.
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=== NL Cy Youngs with 88 Fastballs, Dept. ===
You can believe me, or you can look it up - I don't care which. But Cliff Lee became Cliff Lee when he started throwing his cutter off his arm-side fastball.
Halladay and Haren also base their superstardom primarily off the cutter/fastball tactic.
Mike Marshall has been screaming from the rooftops that the Lee / Halladay / Haren way to pitch is the correct way to pitch. The C-O-R-R-E-C-T way to pitch. Do you know that Marshall might be right?
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In Seattle, your #4 and #5 starters have adopted the Mike Marshall No-Talent Easy Squeezee path to stardom.
The cut fastball has been the unsung hero of the Mariners' miracle rotation. It brought our #4-5 guys up toward the level of the #1-2-3 guys.
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=== Und Take Zis Mit You, Dept. ===
It would be bad enough if Vargas simply had (1) fastball, (2) same-speed cutter and (3) changeup, mixing them all randomly, like in his last start (graph from Brooks):
But now think about it. Vargas also has two other plus-plus weapons. His changeup [fades and dives] much harder than other changeups do - it's statistically one of the best pitches in baseball. It's a Jamie Moyer deadfish change.
Vargas' change is also only about 5-7 mph off his other two pitches, and breaks like Bedard's curve -- adding to the incredible confusion when he's on the mound.
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And Jason Vargas has superb command within the strike zone. That's an entirely separate weapon.
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I'm stopping on a dime and giving you nine cents change, because one week ago I didn't believe Vargas would even finish the season in the rotation. But once you get the guy, you start to wonder about a Jamie Moyer career.
The glass ceiling is that he throws only 87 mph. Moyer showed us where such starters cap out ... as the 10th-, 15th-best starter in the league. Yearly.
Vargas is rising toward that, but bumps into the glass at #10-15, and it's not a given that he hits the glass.
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=== Read It And Weep, Dept. ===
Top rotations in baseball, the last 30 days (since Bedard came up to speed):
That 2.37 is a little bloated. It'll probably come down tonight.
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Be Afraid,
Dr D
Both Fister and Vargas have vastly improved peripherals this year. I hadn't noticed that they added cutters until I looked over the pitch f/x. Fister is throwing less fastballs in general.
Its still only several weeks in, but both look like above-average SPs right now, and cheap.
They throw among the fewest FB's in baseball, running that 2.37 rotation ERA.
He has used it to great effect in a few games, but not at all in others, such as the Angels game.
Don't want to characterize Fister as a Haren/Halladay/Lee/Vargas (lol) pitcher, because he hasn't completely assimilated the cutter. For him, the overhand yakker has been the key 3rd pitch.
But that cutter is LURKING for him, is weighing in to some extent already, and he's not far from being a poor man's Greg Maddux IMHO.
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What a Yahtzee roll the M's have gotten in their rotation!
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Didn't Lee develop his lethal cutter under Wedge and Willis? Hmmm...
Boy, would we love for Baker to ask them that one...
Billy Martin and Art Fowler used to bring the spitter everywhere. :- ) Wedge and Willis bringing the cutter?
The cutter is not a new invention, obviously, but there are cutters and then there are cutters the way that Vargas, Fister, and Wright are throwing them, the Marshall way...
Seriously, three guys with the 2011 Mariners taking plateau leaps off one pitch?
Not all lefties...the ones that have the potential to crush a fastball of his.
Do you remember the game against the Sox where he removed David Ortiz's bat by ripping off the big man's arms one cutter at a time? Remember it got to 3-2 with two on and two out in the 1st and he looked to be struggling a bit with his command...and Ortiz was all geared up to crush the fastball...and Fister run a cutter with 5 inch gloveside break in off the plate...and Ortiz struck out with a weak arm swing and looked at Fister with an expression that read: "You don't have that pitch! What was that pitch?!?!"
I think Fister will probably always treat the cutter like a lefty-equalizer and therefore only feature it against power hitting lefty-loaded line-ups.
It never even occurred to me that this pitching staff might be Willis' doing...it should have...but it didn't. Maybe they think they can teach Gray the cutter...he is, afterall, pretty similar to Wright.
As y'know, it's the armside fade that gets RHP's crushed by LHB's.
Counter-intuitively, it's a jam-type effect that works best for RHP's. Exactly so - if Doogie wasn't afraid of any Angel LHB's, then he wasn't going to throw nickel sliders onto the bats of RHB's.
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That explains that -- 100 cpoints --
Still would wonder why so few 12-6 curves and changeups that day. Either, negatively, he didn't have a feel for his offspeed, or, positively, he was going to keep throwing the 90 swerveball till they showed they could hit it.
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Completely off topic, but what is your take on pitchers using long-toss (throwing the ball in an arc 200 to 300 feet) as a major part of their workout regime? Apparently it's very controversial, with a lot of people swearing by it while a bunch of major league teams ban it.
Auto-archive, here we come... thanks for the BP fastball man...
Is how worried pretty much everyone was that Eric Wedge would come to Seattle and have a tin ear to pitching changes, but here we are, 2 months later, talking about how he may have created the perfect starting rotation while taking a bullpen that no one has (or has any reason to have) faith in and somehow making it work with 3 never were's and a guy with potential that telegraphs his pitches.
Because the data is hard to deny from his Cleveland stint...it may be that Wedge just never had good talent in his pens in Cleveland, but the fan consensus there was that he was a bad bullpen tactician when last he managed. Maybe that was all nonsense. It sure seems to not be true anymore.
I haven't disagreed with a SINGLE THING that Wedge has done all year with his pitchers. The only problem I have with Wedge is his continued riding of Jack Wilson.
Twice as often as previously in his career, per Matthew at LL.
http://www.lookoutlanding.com/2011/5/21/2183082/erik-bedard-is-getting-s...
As for the actual pitch results, Erik Bedard has four pitches: a change, a primary fastball, a sinking/cut fastball and his renowned curve. One of the changes that's occurred is a much more even usage split between his two fastballs. Before, Bedard leaned on his four-seam over twice as often as his cutter, but of late he has thrown them in equal proportion. Both pitches have seen increased effectiveness along with an uptick of about one mile per hour in speed.
Welcome to the cutter as a weapon for the pitching staff, it looks like. And as Lee and Mariano Rivera can attest, it can be a really good one.
~G
Only thing SSI did right on Wedge, in its cyber-distant quick take, was qualify that it didn't know much about him...
Only thing out of alignment in his stats was the BQS, and I made a lot of that, and shot myself in the foot doing so...
Up-close look at Wedge gives a much better impression of his work with a pitcher, provided there's some talent there to work with...
Good post Malcontent -
Personally might zag a bit the other way as far as Matthew's opinion on Bedard's cutter...
Hadn't noticed much of a cutter effect to Erikkk's game and, sho' nuff, here is a chart on the horizontal movement of Bedard's pitches...
"Both" of Bedard's fastballs have a lot of armside fade... F/X at times will create a differentiation between "two pitches" which are in reality just variations of the one pitch...
the light blue pitch in that graph, the FC that does have cutting action, is the one that Bedard almost never throws (6%). The green and navy lines on the chart, the 26%/23% fastballs, don't have much differentiation in armside run.
Key to Bedard in my view may lie elsewhere...
But the broad point, that the staff is Grand Cutter Central, no doo'ts there :- )
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