Bryce Miller's NEW Curveball. Spencer Arrighetti's Early Count Change

Bryce Miller, Spencer Arrighetti, Carson Spiers

• Mariners Bryce Miller has a new curveball. He broke out the pitch for the first time on June 29. Over his last 3 outings, his usage of the pitch has increased, now sitting at 13-14%. The pitch is 85 mph with -6” induced vertical break and 1-2” sweep. It’s caught in between a slider and curveball from a shape perspective. The average curveball has -10” vertical at ~80 mph. The average slider has 2” vertical break at 86 mph. This hard, big-drop breaker is commonly called a “death ball.” He’s throwing the pitch more to lefties than righties, but his righty usage is still above 5%. It’s more of a deep-count pitch for swing-miss. His command of it has been great down in the zone. 🔱

  • Why did Miller add the pitch? I think the reasoning is pretty clear: he was having breaking ball issues versus lefties. His hard bullet slider and sweeper were allowing xSLGs over .500. He was leaving a lot of them middle, command was poor. I think he could’ve just jacked up splitter usage, but I like the idea of going to the new shape. He allowed a .536 xSLG to lefties from May to June. Since adding the new curveball, his xSLG is down to .374. I’m curious to see how much he pushes the pitch’s usage as we near the final months of the season.

Bryce Miller’s Pitch Plot since July 1. The light blue circle is his new curveball.

• Astros Spencer Arrighetti is taking a distinct approach with his four-seam in early count situations versus righties. The pitch used to be more middle to middle-in. Since early July, it’s been more down-away (see heatmaps below). I’m assuming this is a way to try and steal called strikes on a pitch that has above-average vertical break (15”) for his extremely low release (5.1’). I could also see it helping his cutter and sweeper off the outer third of the plate by setting up a similar visual line to work off. There isn’t much of a result change here for Arrighetti with this new early count fastball location, which is disappointing because the adjustment is interesting (perhaps it’s just his mechanics being off, pulling the pitch glove side?). The swing-miss is down on the pitch, which could force him back up into the zone with the pitch if he runs into more damage. 🤠

Spencer Arrighetti’s four-seam location to righties with less than 2 strikes (May/June vs July/Aug). EDITED at 4:14pm CT on 8/5/24 from a prior version of the image that flipped the heatmaps.

• Reds Carson Spiers with a respectable 4.23 ERA, 4.35 FIP in his first 7 MLB starts. The standout pitch here is a nasty sweeper—81 mph with 16” sweep, about 3” more than the average sweeper at similar velocity. It’s crushing righties with a 38% swing-miss rate (33% is average). FanGraphs Stuff+ thinks everything else he throws is well below average. Unsurprising to see a big sweeper arm like this struggle with lefties. He’s allowing a .548 xSLG right now with an average swinging-strike rate. His approach is to mix them to death with 5 pitches 10%+. Four-seam and cutters up with sinkers and changeups down and sweepers in zone. Anything that comes in on lefties is where most of the damage occurs. I presume this is due to the low-ish velocity he sits (92 mph on the four-seam).

  • I’m a bit worried about the mix independent of park, due to the lack of velo. He’s similar in a way to Clarke Schmidt. The one distinction between them is that Schmidt has a nasty curveball, something the Reds haven’t given Ashcraft (but probably should) and I’d guess they wouldn’t toy with one on Spiers. If they do, it could provide an interesting down-in pitch that could potentially help everything he’s trying to spot away to lefties. There aren’t many big sweeper arms that rely more on locations as a starter. Spiers is one of them. 👍