Kyle Wright Back From IL... Not Fixed? Gavin Stone Moves To His Sinker

Kyle Wright, Dane Dunning, Gavin Stone

• Braves Kyle Wright looked pretty off in yesterday’s return from the IL with a shoulder injury. Most apparent is that his extension was down ~4” compared to April/May of this season but his release height actually decreased. This implies to me that there’s some material flattening out of his arm angle / lowering his arm slot. Generally, if you hold arm angle constant, lowering extension would lead to some kind of release height increase. His four-seam is showing the biggest effects. The pitch lost 2” vertical break and 6” arm-side movement as it appears like he’s cutting the ball considerably (sinker arm-side also down 2” arm-side as well). FanGraphs Stuff+ on the four-seam of a 66 (…not good). His velocity actually looked fine relative to earlier in the season, but is still down about 2 mph from last year. Feels like there’s still something mechanically / health-wise lingering here too. Bummer to see. ❤️‍🩹

• Rangers Dane Dunning has come crashing back to earth after a strong mid-season run. 6.80 FIP in his last 5 starts compared to a 4.61 in his prior 13 outings. I don’t see anything dramatically different with velocity or shapes, slight lowering of his release height feels like natural fatigue at the 150+ IP mark. He’s throwing a tad more sinker, throwing his cutter slightly harder with a bit more backspin, and toggled down his slider usage slightly. His primary regression has come from contact quality of his slider and cutter to righties. .351 xwOBA on contact to .504 on the slider. .503 to .878 xwOBA on contact on the cutter. He’s brought his cutter a bit more down in the zone to righties and it appears like he’s missing arm-side more with the slider than he did when he was rolling.

  • To lefties, he’s actually gotten better. His cutter is now his primary pitch to them, holding a .140 xwOBA on contact over his last 5 starts, backed off changeup slightly. No drastic change in location here, cutter has been working well up-in, misses coming in off-plate to protect it. Overall, this feels like an arm that was pitching ahead of his peripherals for a decent stretch and it’s snapped back to now pitching worse than his peripherals. The end result is probably somewhere in the middle, a league-average arm who will run into outsized good/bad stretches because he relies on contact so much. 🤠

• Dodgers Gavin Stone made his sinker his primary fastball to righties yesterday. He threw it 6% of the time to righties on Aug 27 and 35% yesterday. Back in May, he didn’t throw the pitch at all. There was no swing-miss on the sinker yesterday, but contact quality in a really small sample looked great (.190 xwOBA on contact). He also picked up 1” vertical break on the sinker but maintained the arm-side movement on the pitch. FanGraphs Stuff+ has the pitch quality dropping from 101 to 82 in this outing, but I believe that’s because the pitch was down in velocity (~1 mph). I like the idea of more sinker because the four-seam to righties was getting decimated. My half-baked thought here is that I’ve noticed multiple pitchers coming up with four-seam fastballs that underperform in the majors relative to minors, only to see those arms toggle to more sinkers at the expense of swing-miss. Bryce Miller and Brandon Pfaadt come to mind, Gavin Stone is now another. 🎬