Even though Spring Training has wrapped up, that’s no reason for us to stop looking into pitchers who are throwing new pitches. In fact, this is when the fun begins. Many pitchers will test new pitches in the spring but then abandon them when the regular season starts. It can often be more informative to see which pitchers have drastically changed their pitch mix or pitch shape after a few starts in the regular season.
With that in mind, we will continue with the premise of the series I had called Pitchers with New Pitches (and Should We Care) by breaking down notable changes in a pitcher’s pitch mix (hence “Mixing” it up). We’ll look at pitchers who are throwing a new pitch, have eliminated a pitch, or are showcasing a different shape/velocity on a pitch.
I’ll continue my analysis with the simple premise that not every new pitch should be greeted with praise. A new pitch, like a shiny new toy, might be exciting on its own, but it also needs to complement what a pitcher already has and fill a meaningful void in his current pitch mix. We want to check and see if he has any splits issues. We want to see what his best pitch(es) is and see if this new pitch would complement that. Then we want to see what this new pitch type is generally used for (control, called strikes, etc.) and see if that is something this pitcher needs help with. We can also now see the pitch in action to look at the shape and command and see if it’s actually any good. Once we’ve done all that, we can decide if the pitch is a good addition or not.
If you missed any of the previous editions of this series, you can click this link here to be taken to the tracker, which I’ll update as the season goes on. It will also include links to the original articles so you can read them in full if you’d like.
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Reid Detmers - Angels (Four-seam fastball, Slider, Change-up)
I feel like I’ve been writing about Reid Detmers forever. Back in August of 2021, I made a video focusing on Detmers’ MLB debut and came away with the conclusion that if Detmers could find consistent velocity or command on his fastball it would take some of the pressure off his breaking balls. It’s been almost three years since that video, but have we finally reached that point?
Last season, Detmers had an Induced Vertical Break (iVB) on his fastball of 15.2 inches. Since iVB measures the vertical break on a fastball, or how much the fastball fights against gravity and seems to “rise” on its way to the plate, it’s an important metric. In 2024, that number for Detmers is now at 18 inches, which is well above the league average. Detmers also lost three inches of arm-side movement, which is a good thing because, as a left-hander, his four-seam fastball would move back over the plate against righties.
So far, the pitch has shown tremendous improvement when it comes to missing bats. In 2023, Detmers had just a 10.2% swinging strike rate (SwStr%) on the four-seam, but through two starts in 2024, that number has skyrocketed to 22.7.% So it’s a good thing that he’s now throwing the pitch more, up to 53% so far this year from 43% last year.
Some of that additional success could also be due to the way he has changed his approach. Last year, he threw his four-seam inside to righties 41% of the time, but this year he’s throwing it inside just 19%. On the surface, I don’t like that change. Since Detmers doesn’t throw his fastball overly hard, I think he’s opening himself up to more damage by keeping his fastball up and away. It allows hitters to get their hands through the ball and drive it for power the other way if they can keep their hands on top of it.
However, the one saving grace is that not all “high fastballs” are created equal. In 2023, Detmers threw his four-seam in the zone 49% of the time but that number has dropped to just 35% this year. When you look at his heat maps, you can see that it’s because he’s throwing the fastball over the top of the strike zone and getting more chases. If he can continue to do that then I don’t mind that he’s not going inside the righties as much; however, if that fastball starts to come down a bit and find the top of the strike zone, then he could be in trouble since he is still giving up a decent amount of hard contact on the pitch.
Additionally, it seems that Detmers has also tweaked his slider. Last year, he was throwing the pitch at 89 mph with just 1.3 inches of horizontal movement and 32 inches of drop. This year, the pitch is just 86 mph and has more break, both vertically and horizontally. Through two starts, the pitch has graded out the same but has seen a slight bump in SwStr% up to 21.2%. Yet, the concern is he has just a 27% zone rate and 63% strike rate on the pitch this year, while he had a 44% zone rate and 67% strike rate last year. That now makes two pitches that he is having success with because he’s not throwing them in the zone often. What will happen if hitters stop chasing?
Another change that pitch grades dislike is the added vertical movement to Detmers’ change-up. Through two starts, Detmers is throwing the change-up 12% of the time, as opposed to 5% in 2023. He introduced the pitch late last season, and we loved seeing it, but it seems that Detmers has lost run on his change-up but added drop. PLV dislikes the move, dropping Detmers’ change-up grade from 4.79 to 4.35; however, the pitch has a higher zone rate and is missing more bats than last year, so there might be something here. It’s possible that he doesn’t have pinpoint command of the pitch - hence the poor grades - but simply having it and being able to throw it for strikes will be a meaningful boost for him.
VERDICT: POTENTIALLY IMPACTFUL. It’s two starts, so we don’t want to read into location changes too much, but, for now, it seems that Detmers has set himself up for success with his new fastball shape and attack plan. If he’s able to consistently miss more bats with it, he should have more strikeout upside and more fantasy upside. The pitch will still get hit hard at times, but at least now we’ll have strikeouts to offset that.
Jordan Hicks - Giants (Splitter, re-vamped sinker)
When the Giants signed Jordan Hicks this offseason and claimed they were going to give him a shot to be a starter, many people met the news with cynicism. This was a 27-year-old who had never thrown more than 77 innings in a season because he had never been healthy enough to last as a starting pitcher. He never missed the number of bats people thought he should given his high velocity, and he didn’t have a deep enough pitch mix to last as a starter. Certainly, the Giants were going to just use him for three to four-inning stints and call him a starting pitcher.
Well, through two starts, Hicks has gone five innings once and seven innings another time and has allowed just one earned run on eight hits while striking out 11. A big part of that has been the introduction of his splitter. Hicks threw some version of a fastball (sinker or four-seam) 75% of the time last year and his sweeper made up the majority of the rest of his arsenal. However, the four-seam graded out poorly, and Hicks had some career issues with splits, giving up more contact and harder contact to lefties. What he needed this year was another pitch to deepen his arsenal and also attack left-handed hitters.
The splitter is a perfect answer for that.
Through two starts, he’s using the splitter 15% of the time, while posting a 19.2% SwStr%. If you toggle that to be just against left-handed hitters, it’s a 20% usage with a 20% SwStr%. Considering his primary pitch is a sinker that has movement away from a lefty, the splitter is a good complement as they both dart away, but the splitter also has the bottom drop out of it.
However, the concern with a splitter is that it’s not a high strike-rate pitch. Through two starts, Hicks has only thrown it in the zone 23% of the time, which is below league average. Adding another pitch that doesn’t consistently land in the strike zone could be a problem for a pitcher who averaged 4.7 walks per nine innings for his career.
However, the saving grace for Hicks so far has been a tweak he made to his sinker, which has bumped the zone rate up from 52% in 2023 to 61% in 2024 and has had the strike rate go from 66% to 75%. Part of what he’s done has been to take off velocity as he moves from the bullpen, but he’s also adding a bit more vertical and horizontal movement at the lower velocity and taken off a significant amount of iVB, going from 7.5 in 2023 to 5.7 in 2024. That’s good for a sinker and PLV loves the change, improving the pitch grade from 5.19 to 5.87 (where 5.01 is average).
This new arsenal now gives Hicks three pitches that grade out as plus (sinker, sweeper, splitter) with a four-seam that he uses sparingly but throws up in the zone 86% of the time which will, in my opinion, eventually lead to solid swinging strike rates.
VERDICT: IMMENSELY IMPACTFUL. Considering I didn’t believe in Hicks as a starter at all, the fact that we’re seeing this level of performance from him is a big change. It does hinge on the sinker command though. The splitter is a solid pitch, but he needs to pound the strike zone with the sinker to allow the splitter to flourish. If he begins to regress in terms of his sinker command, the tower could fall.
Spencer Turnbull - Phillies (Sweeper, re-vamped curve)
It wouldn’t be April if we weren’t talking about an out-of-nowhere starter who has jumped onto the fantasy radar. For us, it’s old friend Spencer Turnbull who backed up a solid COVID-shortened 2020 season by coming out of the gates in 2021 and posting a 2.88 ERA and 0.91 WHIP in nine starts before getting hurt and missing all of the 2022 season. He was brutal when he returned in 2023 and things really soured between him and the Tigers off the field. However, an injury to Taijuan Walker allowed him to claim a spot in the Phillies’ rotation, and he has had two solid starts to begin the year.
So what, if anything has changed and what needed to change?
In truth, it’s hard to say what needs to change. We’ve only seen Turnbull throw 31 innings since 2021, so we didn’t really know who he was as a pitcher coming into the season. As a result, we need to skip over that part and focus more on what did change. The two keys are a new sweeper and a re-vamped curveball.
If you look at this graph from Brooks Baseball, you can see that both his slider and curveball have added horizontal movement this season. Now, Brooks Baseball doesn’t distinguish between a sweeper and a harder slider, so they are treating this as growth on Turnbull’s old slider when, in fact, he is now throwing two different versions.
The primary slider for him is a new sweeper, which averaged 83.4 mph with 16 inches of sweep, which is better than the league average. He had started to tinker with this last season, but the movement and command were both inconsistent. In 2024, the sweeper has league average zone rates and strike rates while posting a 13% SwStr% which is, wait for it, also league average.
Now, the pitch grades out as a 5.72 on PLV, which is above the league average of 5.61 on sweepers. I think a lot of that has to do with location. Turnbull keeps the sweeper low at an elite 74% and throws it glove side, or away from righties, 72% of the time. His locations on the pitch are elite as Pitcher List hasn’t logged him for one “mistake” on the pitch so far this year and he’s given up just a 33% Ideal Contact Rate.
However, if the sweeper isn’t missing bats, how has Turnbull struck out 13 hitters in 11 innings? Enter the new curveball.
Last season, Turnbull threw his curve 78.6 mph with 12 inches of horizontal movement and 57 inches of drop. In 2023, the pitch is averaging 77.5 mph but has nearly 16 inches of horizontal movement and 61 inches of drop. Turnbull also keeps the pitch low 84% of the time but will throw it both arm-side and glove-side. Since he also now has a sweeper that he keeps low, this version of the curve with more movement allows it to play better off the sweeper, which is six mph faster.
I think Turnbull knows this too because he throws the curve just 9% of the time, but he uses it in two-strike counts over 53% of the time. It was rewarded him with a 25% putaway rate, which is well above league average, and a nearly 27% SwStr%. Theoretically, if hitters caught on and started to look for the curve more in two-strike counts, Turnbull could go to the sweeper, which he is currently only throwing 35% of the time in two-strike counts. Those two breaking balls now give his arsenal more depth and deception, which is a good thing.
VERDICT: MARGINALLY IMPACTFUL. Look, this has been through two starts and Turnbull can certainly help you in a lot of formats. However, in addition to these breaking balls, Turnbull has a sinker and a four-seam that are both not thrown hard and don’t miss many bats. Neither one has elite command or location, so this feels like a slightly above-average arsenal that requires proper sequencing and everything to work in order for the results to be there. Sometimes it simply won’t and he’s going to have rough starts, but I think he will be firmly on the 12-team streamer radar as long as he has a spot in the rotation.
Louie Varland - Twins (Curve)
Louie Varland intrigued many people last year after a solid 2022 season that saw him flash upside in 26 MLB innings. He then followed that up with good results at Triple-A in 2023 and while he struggled in 56 innings as a starter with the Twins, he looked lights out as a reliever so people hung onto hope. The spring injury to Anthony DeSclafani gave Varland another shot at the rotation, but he needed a few things to clean up.
For starters, he needed to find another consistent pitch in his arsenal, and preferably one for right-handed hitters. Varland made his hay in 2023 with a strong four-seam fastball that graded out well and had a solid vertical approach angle with mediocre locations and slightly above-average iVB. He also had a solid cutter, but his slider and change-up both graded out poorly. The cutter and four-seam were a decent enough combination against lefties, but he could use a third pitch, and he needed a better second pitch to righties than the slider.
This is where his new curveball comes in.
The pitch has the 12-6 break that people now refer to as a “Death Ball.” He gets practically no horizontal movement on it, but has 45 inches of drop and comes in at 85 mph. He has used it 18% of the time in his first two starts and thrown it to both righties and lefties. So could this be the pitch he needs?
In many ways, yes.
Through two starts, the pitch has a 20.6% SwStr% and isn’t allowing much hard contact with just a 25% ICR. He’s throwing it in the zone just 33% of the time, but he has an above-average 62% strike rate and he hasn’t made many mistakes with location, according to Pitcher List. The PLV rating on the pitch is also 5.74, which is well above average. Considering he’s also throwing it with success to both righties and lefties, it does check all of the boxes we were looking for above.
The curveball was the only pitch he really had working for him against the Dodgers on Tuesday. The pitch posted a 44% whiff rate and 42% CSW, but he couldn’t get consistent whiffs on any of his other pitches and also struggled to find the zone with his cutter. It’s no surprise that the Dodgers finally caught up to him after a solid first three innings.
All of that crystallizes that the bigger obstacle to Varland’s success may be that the rest of his arsenal is not as great as we wanted it to be.
He throws both his four-seam and cutter low in the zone and now has a curveball that attacks low in the zone as well. I know his fastball doesn’t have the iVB or vertical approach angle to be as successful up in the zone, but I’d like to see him at least flash the four-seam up in the zone more regularly than he’s doing now with just a 27% high location to right-handed hitters.
As it stands, his pitch mix allows hitters to not have to consider the upper third of the strike zone and just key in on stuff by the belt and below. Anytime you can allow hitters to eliminate looking for a part of the zone, you’re setting them up for more success.
VERDICT: MINIMALLY IMPACTFUL. This isn’t even a knock on the curve, which I think has looked good through the first two starts. I’m just not sure the rest of Varland’s arsenal meshes well, and I’m not sure the way he attacks hitters sets him up for success. I do believe there are some individual components here that could make for fantasy success, but a few more changes need to take place before we’ll likely see it.
