sliderguy35

i think the biggest hill the jays will have to climb going into this series is their relief pitching vs the dodgers' lineup. the dodgers obviously have a deep lineup but one of their defining features is that they had the 3rd lowest chase rate in the league. the blue jays bullpen gets a ton of swing and miss, but they do so by working mostly outside of the strike zone. they have the lowest Zone % of any bullpen in baseball by over a full percentage point and were bottom 10 in the league in both First-Pitch Strike % and BB%. if they're playing in a bunch of close games this series, the late game advantage is going to be on the dodger's side. that being said, im pretty confident the jays will be able to hit in this series. the brewers got held to a ridiculously unlucky .167 BABIP despite the fact that they had a higher line drive rate than the mariners & a higher hard-hit rate than both the mariners & blue jays in the LCS. it'll probably just come down to if the jays can slug their way to where the bullpen weakness doesn't matter as much

to all my fellow jeff hoffman believers, ITS OUR TIME what a series & what a team. just 4 more!!!

this feels like the most likely outcome. if there's even remotely any resistance first time through the order, kirby's not going to get to see vlad a 2nd time. nervous because of how good their bullpen is but excited nonetheless. will always remember this as the greatest blue jays team of my lifetime (so far). go jays!

i'd argue that he's already earned himself a significant payday, no matter how the remainder of his blue jays starts go. it's such a relatively small sample size with toronto that teams are probably going to ignore a lot of the hard hit rate / home run stuff and focus on what's meaningful moving forward: the raw stuff is back up to where it was in 2022 when he was a 5 WAR player he's still getting an groundballs at an above average rate his swinging strike rate is well above average for a starting pitcher nate eovaldi & sean manaea both got 3 for 75M and they were both significantly older with more risk involved. if bieber were to opt in, he's only making 16M and is a year older during his next free agency. bieber probably gets a similar AAV to those guys but more years tacked on b/c of his age & the nature of the free agency bidding war. my guess is probably something like 6 years for anything from 140-160M.

seeing IKF in the lineup vs realizing how funny an IKF revenge game would be in new york

I don't think he's thrown a single curveball this year in the big leagues or minors. it's probably the next step in his development though to see if he can get anything that moves with negative vertical break to a usable velocity. comps are weird. he throws like mat latos but he doesn't pitch like mat latos (latos could get the ball to move glove-side). i think the comp i've landed on is robbie ray, but if you traded a slightly worse fastball for an elite 3rd pitch. they're both heavy pronators with spotty command and carry fastballs that are effective through playing with angles (ray is more cross-fire with his delivery, yesavage is just straight over the top). ray's slider doesn't have as much arm-side movement as yesavage, but he struggles to get to the glove-side too. already having the elite 3rd pitch is huge though. i'm on record saying that I don't have a lot of faith in how the jays develop pitchers internally (they're really good at maximizing what pitchers already do well, but not so much at helping them develop new weapons) so i'm hoping that he's able to keep getting better.

great post, to add onto this a little bit: yesavage is considered a "pronator" aka his hand stays behind the baseball really well when he throws. when you combine this with the high arm angle, it creates really elite 4 seam vertical movement. the downside of this is that with this tendency combined with the arm angle, he physically can't get to the side of the ball to spin it in a way that moves laterally to the glove side (at least not at a workable velocity). he's almost certainly gripping it like a slider and cue-ing it like all other pitchers do with their gyro sliders (throw it like a football is the most common one for reference), but his physical limitations prevent him from getting movement to the glove side. but like laika said, everything is relative. if like chris bassitt were to throw that arm-side slider shape, it would probably get absolutely annihilated because its almost like a bad mix of his sinker & cutter. but because the slider is playing off of yesavage's elite fastball carry & a splitter that runs away from them, it works for him specifically. side note: i was at the game yesterday and it was absolutely electric, even up in the bleeders. can't imagine what it would have sounded like down at field level. yesavage is also making me re-evaluate how heavily I should be weighting outlier approach angles when i'm looking at pitcher effectiveness. the analytics community has known for years that you want to be as flat or as steep as possible when entering the zone, but it really does seem like if you're able to throw to an outlier angle, with just average velocity, pitch shape doesn't really matter.

as someone who grew up on mid 2000's forum culture, this post had me feeling like this: with how much the internet & baseball discussion has changed over the years, i'm glad there's still Guys Like This willing to post their takes on nothing but vibes. I hope you're enjoying the division win Doug. Go Blue Jays!

i kinda think they have to bring yesavage up out of the pen because of just how insanely gd WEIRD he is (which is a compliment when you're talking about pitchers) prospectsavant has him at 72(!) degree arm angle & statcast says that his release height is almost 7.2 feet above the ground. i tried looking for a pitcher in the last 5 years who threw more than half their pitches with an arm angle over 70 degrees and a release height over 7 feet and the ONLY player that came up was2025 scott kingery, a position player for the angels who was pumping cheese in the high 30s/low 40s (& funnily enough struck out nick kurtz lmfao) earlier this year my long term comp for yesavage is gen-z mat latos if he can cut the walk rate by a few points, but it's clear that he doesn't really have anything left to prove in the minors. at this point in the season (especially out of the pen) weird is GOOD and the jays should use that to their advantage

being in the bullpen has gotta suck man hoffman's essentially the same guy from a stuff & location perspective as he was when he was nails for the phillies in 2023/4 but he's having an all-time unlucky HR/FB season so people think he sucks now. that's not to say there isn't anything they can do moving forward though. I don't understand why the jays have junked so much of his slider usage for more fastballs. he was well over 40% sliders with the phillies & that's down below 30% now with the jays. his slider's been his best pitch this year and the fastballs been the thing that allowed the most damage! you'd think they would have ID'd that earlier this year and pushed the usage back to where it was with the phillies, but this org has consistently showed that they're not in the upper echelon of teams in modern pitching dev. s***'s frustrating e: maybe its a biomechanics / shoulder thing? the orioles and braves passed on him b/c of health concerns, i wonder if limiting throwing so many high velo sliders was part of the jays plan to manage that. a lot to consider

it's not a satisfying answer but the answer is that it's only been 200 PAs. free swinging pulled flyball guys that whiff a lot tend to naturally have a lot more variance in their game (think of how PCA has dropped off over the last 2 months). the denominator of total batted balls is just going to be smaller b/c of the whiffs, & the batted balls they do hit (flyballs) are naturally going to XBHs or outs. if they're having a bad month, they'll be outs, if they're having a good month, they'll be off the wall or over the fence. the best pulled flyball hitters like lindor & jose ramirez are the best at what they do because they're able to have high pulled flyball rates while also making a ton of contact. guys like montgomery / PCA / matt wallner (my montgomery comp) will usually rate out as above average hitters over a large sample, but it'll come with a lot more variance

technically they aren't lying since his batting average is over .300 on 97+ mph pitches this season specifically problem is that it's on a grand total of 17 batted balls....

ikf vs 97+ mph in his career: .302 wOBA / 13% whiff rate / 28.9% hard hit rate / 0% barrel rate blue jays 3rd basemen as a whole vs 97+ mph in 2025: .414 wOBA / 11.3% whiff rate / 41.2% hard hit rate / 5.9% barrel rate please keep the bad man away from my hot corner

i'd say he doesn't use it more because it's relatively new for him compared to the rest of his mix. he went from 3% last year to 6% this year, so they're definitely not telling him to not use it. if you look at the splits of berrios throwing it when he's behind in the count in 2025, it's been his best pitch this year (albiet INCREDIBLY small sample). i'm less concerned about the raw movement profile of his cutter since they naturally stay off barrels & are a complement to the entire mix. nathan eovaldi's cutter is practically the same shape / velo wise and it's been one of the most effective pitches in baseball by a run value perspective. merrill kelly's cutter is actually WORSE from a shape perspective and it's also been incredibly effective at generating weak contact. it also acts as a bridge between his current fastballs and his sweepier breaking ball which will probably help it play up as well.

spin goes down because velo goes down and the 2 are directly correlated. the problem with berrios is that he's considered a "pronator" aka he throws his fastballs with 95+% spin efficiency. being a pronator is good for getting carry on 4 seamers and arm-side run on changeups but limits your potential overall mix because it makes it hard to throw breaking balls with velocity or pitches that utilize seam shifted wake (aka sinkers / cutters with late movement). his sinker right now especially is pretty awful, it gets basically no spin axis deviation to keep it off of barrels & just isn't an effective groundball pitch anymore. personally, I think you could see a lot of improvement with a pretty simple mix change. I would lean more into breaking ball & cutter usage & use the sinker as more of a change of pace option rather than the primary pitch. bad sinkers are still decent against righties when used sparingly. something like breaking ball 30% / cutter 20% / sinker 10-15% / 4-seam 20% / changeup 15-20% would probably help him to stay off barrels & be a bit more in-line with what we're seeing from smarter pitching dev orgs.

went away for the long weekend, glad to see that everyone has acted Very Normal about this baseball team in the meantime on the other hand, they did re-acquire My Personal Nemesis IKF, so maybe the vibes really are terminal for this season

i think defensive WAR not being considered as valuable is a combination of 2 things: 1, because the margins for defensive value are so small and so dependent on opportunity, there's a lot of noise in the data year to year. myles straw went from 15 FRV in 2022 all the way down to 3 FRV in 2023 in a similar # of innings. that seems like he regressed majorly as a defender, but in reality he was just a slightly worse defender with a really unlucky season in terms of opportunity. in 2022, he had 91 opportunities on balls with a catch probability of 90% or lower. in 2023, that number was all the way down to 67 in essentially the same number of innings. you rack up defensive value by making difficult catches/plays, if you don't get as much opportunity to make those plays, your defensive value is gonna suffer. 2. offensive value is not only reliable to measure but also tends to multiply in value the more you have of it. hitters in 2025 have a .310 wOBA and 22.7 K% with the bases empty, & a .320 wOBA and 21.2 K% with runners on base. having a team full of elite defenders isn't going to make each of those defenders individually more valuable by themselves. having a team full of above average hitters is a force multiplier that's just going to make every individual hitter in the lineup better since they're hitting with runners on more often

Pitching+ tries to do exactly what you're referring to here in terms of the trade-off & they're sitting at a 101, so right around league average this year. the standard deviation for Location+ for relievers is about 6 points, so on the season they're a standard deviation lower than average (a 40 on the 20-80 scale). it's also not nearly as sticky as Stuff+ (80 pitches vs 400 pitches) so I feel a lot better about full season bullpen results vs 1 poor month.

this feels a bit reductive... if a prospect has plus stuff & command, the org is essentially always going to stretch them out as a starter. homegrown prospects basically only end up as relievers unless they have warts. looking briefly at the top 50 qualified relievers by Stuff+, 14 of them have above-average Location+ numbers. (28%). stuff and location are just generally gonna be inversely correlated with one another (it's really hard to command nasty stuff!) the jays were always going to experience some kind of BB% regression. Prior to august they were league average in BB% (9.3%) despite being in the bottom quarter of the league in both First-Pitch Strike% & Zone rate their zone rate is the same in august as it was in the prior months & their FPS% is only down about 2 points in august. despite that, their BB% is up more than 5% for the month. it's frustrating as a viewer that they pitch without count leverage so often, but it's also true that they're just not a true talent 15% BB rate bullpen. it's been a rough month for sure, but they get enough whiffs & strikeouts that it makes up for it in the long run. even after a month of having the worst bullpen walk rate in baseball, they're still top 5 in K% - BB% and SIERA for the entire season among all bullpens. keep the faith!

that's definitely how it used to be when i first got into reading about this stuff, but ever since they put IVB into Savant last year, i don't think i've read or seen any analysis that uses statcast vertical drop anymore. positive ivb meaning drop is blasphemous 🤮 where did you see that??

it comes down to gravity everything drops no matter what because of gravity, vert is just the ball fighting against gravity bigger vert = fighting more against gravity = less drop 0 vert = not fighting against gravity at all = more drop negative vert = working with gravity = a lot more drop the numbers just refer to a world without gravity. i.e if a pitch has 20 vert, it would rise 20 inches from the release point IF it was being thrown in a place where there was no gravity

the numbers are referring to inches. i don't normally use the +/- but prefer to just denote arm/glove side if it's not obvious (generally all changeups will be arm-side). which movement is "better" is highly dependent on pitch type and is often tied to velocity. less vertical break (more drop) on a changeup generally makes it more effective whereas less vert on a 4 seamer usually makes it perform "worse". more glove-side movement on a sweeper is usually good, but might not be worth it if you lose 5 mph of velocity to achieve it. having high velocity allows pitches to still play up even if the shape isn't typically "good" (i.e paul skenes' 4-seamer). having higher velocity with "good" shape is when you get truly elite outlier pitches (i.e paul skenes' splinker is 94mph but still has almost 0 vertical break / lots of drop). all these pitch shapes are cross-checked against historical results to see how effective each pitch shape is, which is how Stuff models are generated (which are what people nowadays use to determine if a pitch is "good" or not). bieber being able to throw a changeup with more drop but at the same velocity will almost certainly raise its Stuff grade, which in turn /should/ make it more effective based on similar pitch shapes historically. that's the basics of it, there's a lot more nuance if you start to involve arm angles / extension / release points & how pitches are "expected" to move vs how they actually do. if you're interested in that kinda stuff, lance brozdowski has an awesome youtube channel. take a look and spend a few hours down that rabbit hole

Lance does great work but i think he's undervaluing how platoon-neutral a purely vertical arsenal can be. when your pitch plot looks like a stoplight, it works against both handedness pretty well. yesavage is going to need something that gets below the zero-line consistently though if he wants to make that kind of arsenal work (ideally something that sits around -8 or -9 vert around 80 mph). surprised I haven't seen this comp yet but yesavage is basically just gen-z mat latos (blue jays legend), who was a really nice player (three 4+ WAR seasons!). he's almost certainly going to be one of their best 5 starters next year

great comp. 2015 greinke's changeup was also 2 & 12 @ 89 mph playing off a 92 mph fastball (although greinke's fastball was way more cut-ride, it only had 2 inches of horizontal). greinke's command of it was much closer to what bieber's doing with his slider though (they're both freaks)

hell yeah, bieber day i took a look at the 3 rehab starts he made in buffalo (aka the ones we actually have data for) and came out super impressed. here are the highlights: Fastball was averaging 92.8, up about a full tick from his brief appearance in 2024 and a tick-and-a-half up from 2023. his fastball has always been elite when its 92+ in terms of whiffs & contact management shape was identical even with the velo increase which is a good sign (usually more velo = less vert) was commanding it really well to the glove side Slider literally exactly the same shape / velo-wise as 2024, with essentially robotic command to the low glove-side to play off the fastball yup that's 80-grade command alright Curveball / Cutter curveball / cutter shape and velocity are the same as they were in 2024 in 2022 & 2023 his curve had gotten a lot more horizontal than 12-6. he mentioned in an interview with dallas braden that he was trying to avoid that. good to see that the shape is still consistent Changeup bieber's completely reworked his changeup based on what i've seen. previous shape was 6 Vert / 16 Horizontal @ 89 mph. The new shape is 2 Vert (!) and 12 Horizontal at the exact same velo (!!). frankly this shape is absolutely bonkers at that velo and is more comparable to something like frankie montas' or chris martin's splitter (+2-3 mph of velo) than it is to any changeup I could find. he hasn't quite been able to command it like the other offerings in his arsenal, but if he does it'll be murder on left handers obviously shapes can only tell us so much but it's a great sign that his command on his primary offerings looks as good as it does. i'm pretty confident that he's going to look like the #1 option that we traded for down the stretch