Kenta Maeda's Chameleon Slider. An Odd Stuff+ Jump for Tarik Skubal
Kenta Maeda, Tarik Skubal
Twins Kenta Maeda has been great in the month of July. 2.78 ERA with a 3.11 FIP over his last 4 starts. His slider has some of the largest sweep variation in baseball. He throws some with 18” sweep under 80 mph and others with <5” sweep around 81-82, all within the same amount of vertical break (or lift). Yesterday was a pretty good example of that. Swing-miss on a big sweeper down-in to Mike Ford. The overall grade of the pitch is above average by FanGraphs, but perhaps more important is that his command of the offering also grades out well, 110 location+ via FanGraphs, which is more than 1 standard deviation above the average.
He’s backed off the four-seam usage this year as well, down 6 percentage points compared to 2022 and brought up his splitter usage as a result, which grades out as his best offering (134 FanGraphs Stuff+). He’s faced a lot of bad lineups, but even with a mediocre fastball, he’s throwing his slider+splitter 65-70% of the time, both with strong locations, so I don’t see why you’d bet against him being a sub 4 ERA guy rest of season.
Tigers Tarik Skubal with a stuff gain across the board yesterday. He had been pitching well, but the underlying stuff didn’t look particularly strong — the only above-average pitch was his slider. Yesterday, his four-seam and sinker posted their highest grades of the season. The interesting thing with the fastball improvements is that there isn’t a striking change? The four-seam picked up <1” vertical break, <1” arm-side movement and <1 mph. His release was down about 1-2” as well. Mix that all together and the four-seam grade went from 75 to 97 on FanGraphs Stuff+ and 85 to 112 on FanGraphs Stuff+. Sinker grade jumps looks to be primarily from a similar <1 mph velo jump but a 2” gain in arm-side movement and a release point there that was 2-3” lower than his prior start. He didn’t use the pitch much at all yesterday, but the grade went from 91 to 110 on FanGraphs and 84 to 128 on Driveline Baseball’s Stuff+.
Feels like a situation where multiple subtle changes pushed the grade up. I also think there’s an element to being a left-handed pitcher which matters. Driveline Baseball’s Stuff+ seems to do a better job of capturing that than FanGraphs. Perhaps those more subtle changes in lefties have a larger resulting effect on pitch performance? I have always wondered whether Stuff+ is a less-accurate metric for LHP than RHP.