Article: Chad Green Has a Red Flag

[Davy Andrews]

Chad Green lives and dies by his four-seam fastball. Unfortunately, he might need to tweak the pitch (again).

When Mike LeSage wrote up his first version of his projected Opening Day Blue Jays lineup, Chad Green slotted in as the number two arm in the bullpen. FanGraphs’ depth charts show the same thing, projecting Green to throw 63 innings in 2025, just behind Jeff Hoffman’s 65 and just ahead of Yimi García’s 61. The bullpen doesn’t project as a strength, and the Blue Jays will need Green to be at his best. Unfortunately, his 2024 numbers contained quite a bit of helium. Let’s talk about whether he’s due to come back down to earth in 2025.

Green debuted with the Yankees in 2016, and spent seven seasons with the team, running a 3.17 ERA and putting up 7.8 fWAR over 272 appearances and 383 2/3 innings. He was consistently excellent, but he underwent Tommy John surgery in 2022 after just 14 appearances. He signed with the Blue Jays in January 2023 and debuted in September, getting into 12 games. Green fully returned in 2024, running a 3.21 ERA that was almost exactly in line with his career mark of 3.23 over 53 appearances. However, his underlying numbers set off some alarm bells. His 4.29 FIP, was the worst full-season mark of his career, as was his 22% strikeout rate. Before 2025, Green had a career strikeout rate of 32.4%, more than 10 full percentage points higher!

Why didn’t those worrisome numbers show up in his ERA? Because he had a bit of luck on his side, running an extremely high 81% strand rate and an extremely low .236 BABIP. Those kinds of numbers can make a pitcher look better than they really are. Let’s go back to Green’s strikeout rate. Why did it fall so precipitously in 2025?

At various times over the course of his career, Green has thrown a four-seamer, slider, cutter, changeup, sinker, splitter, and sweeper. The four-seamer has been the only constant, and he throws it 60% of the time. As the four-seamer goes, so goes Green.

Since joining the Blue Jays, Green has brought back his slider and ditched the other pitches, making him a two-pitch pitcher. Unfortunately, in 2025, the four-seamer registered disastrous 18% whiff rate. That’s not just the lowest mark of his career, it’s 10 points lower than his previous low, and and more than 11 points below his career mark. All of a sudden, his four-seamer just cannot miss bats. Why? Its velocity has stayed roughly the same since 2020, so that’s not the problem. I think the problem is its horizontal break. Take a look at the very right side of this graph. Can you see the way the slider and four-seamer both trended down in 2025?

Both of Green’s pitches moved further to his arm side in 2025. For the slider, that meant less horizontal break. For the four-seamer, which already moved to his arm-side, that meant more. I know that in a vacuum, more break sounds like a good thing, but it’s not that simple. That four-seamer has always been Green's superpower, defying gravity and rising over bats. Now it’s got less rise and it’s tailing to his arm side quite a bit. Here’s a GIF that shows the difference in its movement from 2021 to 2024, courtesy of Baseball Savant.

Over the past few years, you might have heard pitching analysts talk about something called the dead-zone fastball. What they’ve discovered is that using a pitch’s traits – release point, arm angle, velocity, spin rate, spin angle, and so on – you can calculate how a batter will expect it to break. The dead zone is the spot where a batter will expect a pitch to end up. When a pitch ends up there, it’s predictable and it gets hammered. That horizontal movement is moving Green’s pitch into the dead zone.

The screenshots below are from Max Bay’s Dead Zone app, once again comparing Green’s four-seamer in 2021 and 2024. The pink oval is Green’s four-seamer movement, and the light blue oval is the dead zone, where the movement of a pitch becomes easy for a hitter to predict, and therefore to crush. In 2021 on the left, the pink oval barely overlaps with the lightest blue oval. In 2024, there’s a lot more overlap.  

Green still has an electric fastball, but ever since his arm injury, his arm angle has dropped a bit – going from 50 degrees in 2021 to 45 degrees in 2024. He’s also getting more arm-side movement and less rise on his fastball. He'll need to find a way to reverse that trend, killing some of that arm-side run and bringing back the unexpected rise that has helped him succeed for so many years.

The good news is that this isn’t the first time that happened. As you may have noticed from the first graph in this article, Green’s four-seamer averaged seven inches of arm-side run in 2019, nearly as many as the eight it averaged in 2025. Perhaps not coincidentally, Green ran a career-worst ERA and FIP in 2019. In 2020, he killed some of that arm-side run, got a bit more rise, and knocked well over half a run off his ERA. He may need to repeat that trick if he’s going to succeed in 2025.

 

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[Laika]

Damn, that sucks. I was wondering why the whiffs were gone when the velo was 100% back. 

The bright side is that this might be fixable. It does look like it's just arm slot. 

Arm slot is one of those weird little injury nuances. A guy can be healthy, able to pitch, have his old velocity, but for some reason he can't come out of quite the same arm slot.