Wind Affected Buehler & Severino. Cole & Bibee Broke Out New Weapons

Walker Buehler, Luis Severino, Gerrit Cole, Tanner Bibee

Walker Buehler

Game 3 @ NYM: 4 IP, 3 H, 2 BB, 6 K

Buehler’s fastball averaged 20.1” vertical break, his highest average vertical break in a game since July 28, 2020. The question is whether Buehler changed anything to achieve this added movement. My impression is he did not. Citi Field has an odd tendency to inflate vertical break in individual starts. It grades as a slightly inflating park (link) from a Stuff+ perspective. I’d be curious to see each stadium’s individual variance on a game-to-game basis. My hunch is that Citi Field’s is high early and late in the season. We ran into this exact vertical-break inflation in Freddy Peralta’s first start of the year at Citi Field. He had 19” of vertical break on his fastball which is normally around 16”. This greatly impacts pitch quality, especially when release height and extension remain materially the same.

Buehler’s fastball averaged 16.4” vertical break in August and September and ticked slightly higher to 17.2” in his NLDS outing. I would confidently bet that his vertical break falls back below 18” in his next, non-Citi-Field outing. If his fastball break wasn’t enough to convince you there was some environmental impact playing a part on his movement, it affected all of his other pitches as well. His sweeper had 5” more sweep than it did over his last 7 starts, his cutter picked up 4” vertical break, and his curveball was dropping 4” more than usual. Luis Severino appears to have been affected too, adding 3” sweep to his sweeper, but the wind had less impact on his four-seam.

See below for a comparison between Buehler’s shapes. Watch how everything moves away from the center of the plot, that implies more movement.

Luis Severino

Game 3 vs LAD: 4.2 IP, 3 H, 2 R, 0 ER, 4 BB, 3 K

Severino leaned heavily on his cutter last night. He threw the pitch a quarter of the time to both lefties and righties. This was a dramatic deviation from his prior 7 starts where he threw the pitch <10% to either handedness. I think this was an approach focused on switching things up. Severino had extreme split issues to close out the season, performing worse versus lefties than righties by 200 points of expected slug. In this outing, he supported the increase in cutter usage by pulling down his four-seam versus lefties. He cut over 20 percentage points from his four-seam (51% to 30%) and moved nearly all of it into his cutter.

Severino’s cutter grades out as a 92 per FanGraphs Stuff+, his 2nd-best fastball, barely in front of his sinker. Although the cutter missed a minuscule number of bats, I bet the strategy was more to put ball-in-play and see what happens in the cool, windy conditions. Despite the loss, I would argue the strategy worked.

Gerrit Cole

Game 2 vs CLE: 4.1 IP, 6 H, 2 ER, 4 BB, 4 K

Cole threw 6 sinkers Tuesday night, a pitch he didn’t throw from 2022 through August 2024. In September of this season, he integrated the pitch lightly (12 total thrown). And in his first two postseason starts, he matched his September total.

The most interesting thing to me is that he’s throwing the pitch to lefties and righties. Generally, sinkers work to opposite-handed hitters when they have exceptional drop. Cole’s sinker is more of a true two-seam fastball, possessing 14-15” vertical break, 6-7” more than the average sinker. More vertical break means the pitch is dropping less. His usage of the pitch is sporadic too, not focusing it as a behind-in-count pitch where I would expect it to be used. Cole is using the sinker in two-strike counts as well, where sinkers are rarely used.

Mixing in pitches 5-10% that you normally don’t throw when the postseason hits feels necessary. I call these punch-in-the-face pitches, or those that the hitter isn’t expecting and is rendered shocked at the occurrence of. I wonder how much this should seep into regular season gameplanning. Or perhaps postseason pitch-to-pitch is so important in terms of championship probability that holding all your cards until those moments makes sense.

Tanner Bibee

Game 2 @ NYY: 1.1 IP, 5 H, 2 ER, 1 BB, 2 K

Bibee integrated a sinker into his mix late in the regular season just like Gerrit Cole. He threw the pitch 8 times in September and 25 times in his 3 postseason starts. He’s mostly using the pitch to righties when he’s behind in the count, so the usage is more predictable than Cole’s. His sinker is also more two-seam than true sinker, possessing 10-11” vertical break, 2-3” more than the average sinker. FanGraphs Stuff+ grades the pitch as an 89, just a hair below his four-seam (92). The move here probably isn’t to out-stuff his opponents with the pitch, but rather to cause both the four-seam and sinker to play up by simply having the combination of the integrated into his mix.

The more interesting thing is that Bibee has moved off his four-seam to righties in the postseason. He threw his four-seam 41% of the time in August and September. In his 3 postseason starts, he’s only thrown 19% four-seam. His preference instead has been for this new sinker and more cutter.

To toot my own horn for a second, it’s not surprising Bibee is throwing a sinker. He fits a category of four-seam heavy pitchers who don’t have great four-seam shape, a video I made about 8 months ago (link). Great to see it happen. I expect it to be a weapon for him next year. I do, however, expect his righty four-seam usage to come back up as one of his main strengths as a pitcher is his ability to cover 160-plus innings. In an ideal world, he can do that with 20% four-seam to righties, but this may not be an ideal world.