00:00:01
Speaker 1: Hello, everybody. J.J. Cooper, Jeff Ponce, Ian Cundall on the Baseball America Prospect Podcast. And today, it's all about stuff. We love stuff all the time. But today, we're diving into Stuff Plus because we have our own, like many out there, we have our own stuff model. Thanks to the wonderful workings of Dylan White and Jeff and Ian and a little bit of myself doing a project this week where we're going through all week and highlighting some of the standout pitches. Then we're going to get to hitters. And then we'll look at organizations and farm systems at the end of the week that stand out as far as on the metrics. And before we dive into, though, and talk about some of the great pitches, some of the excellent standouts, Jeff, I'll just ask you the very simple question. For someone who doesn't know what this is, what is Stuff Plus, our version of Stuff Plus, and why is this useful?

00:00:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, so essentially the easiest way to describe it is it's an all-encompassing metric that looks at power, so velocity, and the combination of movement with that velocity. Now, there's some other wrinkles that have been baked in over the course of several years in terms of release height and you know, more ideal pitch shapes that drive certain outcomes. So like, you know, with a fastball, with a four seam fastball, ideally you're looking for a pitch that's going to miss a lot of bats. Now, when I look at two seam fastballs, the bat missing components don't matter as much as heavy sink and something that's going to create a lot of top spin contact, which ultimately is going to lead to a lot of weak contact, a lot of ground ball contact. When you go to breaking ball types, and we have four different breaking ball types that we'll break down today in terms of cutters, more traditional sliders, and that's a very general and loose term. We'll get into that a little bit later. Sweepers, and then of course, like more traditional curve balls. All of those pitches, we're also looking for swing and miss and chase characteristics. And, you know, there's some tying in historically in terms of what sort of traits drive these sort of outcomes that are baked into it. But I think the most simplest form of Stuff Plus and the way to understand it is a measurement of velocity and movement. And the more outlier your velocity is and the more that pitch moves at the higher velocity, and this is kind of across all pitch types, that's ideal. There's some different things when we're talking about change-ups and and splitters and off-speed. A lot of that has to do with how it plays off of the fastball playing and the type of drop and some of the different components it can create. There's a little bit more batted ball stuff baked into the change-up side of things. So I think just understanding it, though, from a total picture, I know I went a little bit more in the weeds than you probably wanted me to, is just think about it as it's just pure stuff. How hard do you throw? How much does it move? We're not thinking about strikes. We're not thinking about, you know, pitch ability or deception or any of those sort of things, really.

00:03:19
Speaker 3: Right.

00:03:20
Speaker 1: Those are not because those aren't important, but this is trying to measure the nastiest of each individual pitch and not really also the correlation between the pitches either.

00:03:28
Speaker 4: Right.

00:03:28
Speaker 1: So like you said, with the change up, change up is partly dependent on how it compares to your fastball in a way that Okay. That's why stuff plus models have generally not been as good about change-ups than they've been about fastballs and sliders and curve balls and things like that. But if you're wondering, okay, so what's the value of this? We did the same exercise last year. Number one on the best four seat fastball last year was Jacob Mizorowski on the stuff plus model.

00:03:55
Speaker 5: Okay.

00:03:56
Speaker 1: Second was Brody Hopkins. We'll talk a lot more about Brody Hopkins in a few minutes. But yes, so Again, that doesn't mean every pitcher on there is going to end up being a star, but it does flag, like, it's not hard to understand. Like, so you're saying that Jacob Mizorowski in the minors stood out for his fastball? Why? Well, because he has more extension, throws it harder with great movement than anybody.

00:04:18
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:04:18
Speaker 1: That makes sense.

00:04:19
Speaker 3: Yes, Ian. Well, and I think we've seen in the playoffs and that it's something you've done a tough reporting on is just how much fastballs have improved and how much harder pitchers are throwing. And, you know, you watch some of these games and I think it was, what was the last series? Was it Padres Brewers where the average fastball velocity was around a hundred miles an hour for a game or something?

00:04:36
Speaker 1: 98.3 for every fastball and then 95 for every pitch in the game.

00:04:41
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:04:41
Speaker 1: It's just the hardest game ever.

00:04:46
Speaker 3: When it gets to October, this is the kind of stuff that stuff matters. And you want the biggest possible stuff in bullpen rolls, starters, wherever you can, you need velocity. And so that's why this stuff is no pun intended. is good for giving you kind of some insight into, or giving listeners insight into players that have that quality of fastball that teams are looking for that plays in October.

00:05:07
Speaker 1: Okay. So we're going to dive into the best fastballs in the minor leagues by Stuff Plus right after this quick break. So Jeff, best fastballs by Stuff Plus. You said when explaining this, hey, this is measuring the quality of the pitch, not where it lands. not how often you throw it for strikes. I think that's important to mention because of the number one player on this list. So, Reinald Navarro, number one for four-seam fastball stuff plus. But explain, Navarro, why it's so good, but also why we have caveats to this.

00:05:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, you know, the biggest clear caveat is strikes. Even on the four-seam fastball, which is his best commanded pitch, It's really a three-pitch mix. He has one slider listed here, but I doubt that's necessarily a pitch you'd want to grade as part of his arsenal. But it's foreseen curveball changeup. It's a 57.8% strike rate, which for a curveball would be a pretty decent, about average, maybe slightly above average strike rate.

00:06:18
Speaker 6: For a fastball, that is... Well below average.

00:06:21
Speaker 1: You're looking at 63%, 65% ideally. Yeah, exactly.

00:06:25
Speaker 6: Ideally, you want somewhere in there.

00:06:27
Speaker 2: You start to get 66% to 67%, 68%. You're committed in the fastball pretty well.

00:06:33
Speaker 1: Jacob Nasrowski, 102 plus. When he's 102 plus, it's 77% just to give you that. There you go.

00:06:39
Speaker 2: It's what makes him so special. Navarro throws really, really hard. Average this year was 96.1%. He touched 99. He does that while generating a lot of induced vertical break. Now, some of these numbers, I believe, were actually on Hawkeye, but it was with the minor league ball. So there's some adjustment that's going to happen probably with this pitch. But it's around 20 inches of induced vertical break somewhere.

00:07:06
Speaker 1: Can I jump in there? This is one place where I can contribute because I'm running a study on this. And we'll have a piece on this coming next week, I think. But if you're going from the minor league ball to the major league ball, about 0.8 inches of IVB that you lose and on a fastball, four-seam fastball, and about 80 RPM as far as the spin of it too. So it does take a hit.

00:07:32
Speaker 7: Yeah.

00:07:33
Speaker 2: So he'll probably lose a little bit, but still is somewhere around 19. I think one of the things for him that's ideal is, There's spin efficiency here, but it's also high spin. He's around a 2,500 RPM guy. Usually, at least with just the studies and the conversations I've had with Lance Brozdowski, who's done some work on this too, the guys that are kind of in that 2,500 RPM threshold tend to take a little bit less of a hit. Also has really good fastball playing. It's about a couple standard deviations better than average, which is really good. And then to cap all this off, he's left-handed. We typically will see really good fastballs like this thrown by right-handers. We don't see a lot of lefty Vigolo with vert like this, heavy spin, good angles. And it's a higher release, which kind of adds to some of the mystery of it too. Had a 17.5% swing strike rate this season. It did perform well. If it was in the zone 65% of the time, I think this guy's a totally different pitcher. So it's a really interesting fastball. It's interesting stuff, but it's pretty low grade pitch.

00:08:46
Speaker 6: Ability at this point. And that's why Ronald Navarro isn't a highly ranked prospect.

00:08:51
Speaker 1: Okay. So to add a little bit on the lefty righty thing. So this past year in the major leagues, if you're saying, okay, how many lefties through, I'll quiz y'all. How many lefties do you think in the majors had a pitch, one pitch, a hundred miles an hour or harder?

00:09:11
Speaker 6: Definitely enrolled as Chapman.

00:09:13
Speaker 1: That's one. Mason Montgomery is an easy two as well.

00:09:16
Speaker 3: I was trying to just run through my head because I think it's single digits.

00:09:19
Speaker 1: 10. I'll take you all out of your misery.

00:09:23
Speaker 7: 10.

00:09:23
Speaker 1: How many right-handers? How many right-handers? 88.

00:09:26
Speaker 6: You have to say 50 plus. Yeah, there you go.

00:09:29
Speaker 7: 88.

00:09:29
Speaker 1: So you have 88 right-handers through 110 lefties. So there is a very big difference between premium velocity for a lefty when we talk about that real top-tier velocity. Jeff, before I go to Ian on this, I did forget to ask you a question I wanted to ask. When we talk about fastballs, you talked a little bit about it, but what is it that makes a good fastball we're looking for analytically? And I might as well add to that. And you hear about dead zone fastballs. What makes, what's kind of the flags of a dead zone, a fastball that is not a particularly good pitch.

00:10:07
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:10:07
Speaker 2: So I think there's a bunch of components. I've always kind of broken fastballs down to like three elements.

00:10:14
Speaker 6: One is velocity. We talked about how important that is. The studies have been done. JJ can, tweet at you for hours about that.

00:10:21
Speaker 2: If you'd like, um, the other component is movement and that's kind of a sliding scale. So, um, people could kind of lock in just strictly on the, the, the raw vert number, the induced vertical break number.

00:10:38
Speaker 6: Is it above 18? Is it the side number?

00:10:41
Speaker 2: But a lot of that will depend on the release height guys with lower release heights, um, that often have big extension. Jacob deGrom is a perfect example of this and his peak, you know, he's getting seven feet of extension. He's close to a hundred, you know, it's maybe 15 or 16 inches of induced vertical break, but from his release height, that's actually a lot of induced vertical break. It's what often allows four seam fastballs to play well at the top.

00:11:07
Speaker 6: Of the zone.

00:11:08
Speaker 2: There's some release elements in terms of how low, how far you get down the mound, Your arm angle, of course, matters into some of this stuff as well in terms of how that plays. And then also, you backspin, you kind of propel a baseball, right? You don't really throw it like you throw a football. You want to get that backspin on your foreseam. The cleaner you get that backspin, the more efficient that backspin is, the more it rides, the more it stays on plane and kind of tricks a hitter because hitters have seen so many fastballs.

00:11:38
Speaker 6: Over the course of their life, millions probably by the time they're in.

00:11:40
Speaker 2: The majors, and they're used to their fastballs breaking and coming down a little bit, right? Like everything moves down just based off of gravity. When you can kind of play with those properties a little bit so it doesn't drop as much as expected, it allows you to often miss bats over them and, you know, for certain guys underneath, et cetera. Arm side runs important, you know, and depending on release heights, it all varies. There's guys that are very, very high, very steep. That can create different types of playing, create different types of ride. There's other fastballs that are effective that are really hard with a lot of arm side run. Tends to be in the two seam side, but you will see it from some lower slot guys on their four seams as well, where they get marked as sinkers or two seamers, but they're actually four seam grips. So there's a bunch of different properties, but I think movement, velocity, just think that in a vacuum.

00:12:39
Speaker 1: And when we come to dead zones, Ian, again, I don't want to oversimplify, but what Jeff said really is true here, is that you want to be unusual, right? And so unusual, even for a four-seamer, but especially for a two-seamer as well, unusual means that your pitch is not like everyone else's. And if you said, what are some markers to me that tell you it is like what everyone else's? Okay, if your velocity is the same, For whatever level you're at, right? Okay, we could say like, oh, he throws 94. Got bad news for you now. If you're a right-hander who throws 94 in pro baseball now, you are ordinary. I can't believe I'm saying that, but it is absolutely true. You are an average velocity pitcher. You're a reliever. You better have some really good secondaries because you're below average. And then when we talk about movement, we can talk about IVB. We can talk about arm setter. We can talk about horizontal break, induced vertical break. You don't also want those to kind of be very similar, right? Like that's one of the things is if your break, especially if you don't have a whole lot of induced vertical break and you have a similar amount of horizontal break, that's generally going to be like you really want to either have almost no horizontal break or a lot of horizontal break if your IVB is in a pretty normal range. the more you're kind of in that mid range. That's where you get in real trouble, right?

00:14:02
Speaker 3: Yeah. The way I think of it is with outliers is you want outlier stuff and except it's a bell curve. You can be on either end of the spectrum. And I think extensions, another good example of this is where you either want to be high or you want to be extremely low, which is because it makes you really weird. You don't want to be that generic, you know, six, two, six, three, right in the middle extension. And so, yeah, I think the easiest way to think about it is you want you want to be on the extremes, but doesn't really like you can be on either extreme. You know, it's you could be, as you said, like huge IVB. You know, you see the guys that are 20, 21 inches IVB with the ghost fastballs. The flip side, of course, is you can also have the guys that are. Yeah, you're just throwing like power sinkers with hellacious, you know, arm side run like that, that that kind of that can work, too. And that's not going to have that's going to be single digit IVB.

00:14:48
Speaker 1: That's fine.

00:14:49
Speaker 3: You know, where you run into trouble is when you're throwing 95 with, you know, 14 to 15 inches IVB and, you know, nine inches of horizontal. That's where it's like, yeah, it's not really where you want to be. And yeah, so I think it's just the easiest way to just visualize it is just think of it as a bell curve and just think of you want to be on the down slope or the up or the up slope. You don't want to be in the middle where the majority of people are.

00:15:11
Speaker 1: Okay. But before someone says like when on that, that's when we talk about movement. I got bad news for you if you're on Velocity again, and I know that I'm someone who loves it, but you want to be on the one side of the bell curve on Velocity because, yes, there is actually some extent of if you're the position player pitching going out there, when you say, oh, this guy got a strikeout, sometimes it is because you're just not used to seeing 42 or 45 or whatever, but you have enough time. There's also physics or undefeated here, right? Which is that there is a time-space continuum here, which is as a hitter, The less time I have to make a decision, the harder my job is. The more time you give me to make a decision, the easier it is. But Ian, with that, I want to kind of go to a repeat. We said we're going to talk about Brody Hopkins on this. The Rays have two guys who really stand out on the fastball stuff plus metrics. But I got to start with Brody Hopkins, who I would say, and Jeff, feel free to nod or disagree, disagree if you do. But I feel like We saw him very prominent on this list last year. I would say again this year, if you said who has the nastiest assortment of pitches stuff-wise in the minor leagues and now in the major leagues, it's Brody Hopkins. What is it about Brody Hopkins' fastball, Ian, that makes it stand out so much?

00:16:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's funny because actually Jeff had a great note in the article, which I'd highly recommend checking out on Baseball America, but He mentioned that his stuff plus actually was better in the majors than it was in the minors. And I was just double and I was just looking at it. And it was because in the minors, his average fastball velocity this year is ninety seven point four miles an hour in the majors. It was ninety nine point nine miles an hour. And I think he's a great example of what JJ was talking about. Guys, you throw extremely hard. Great starting point to build off that, though. He has his average spin rate on his fastballs over twenty five hundred RPMs. What Jeff was talking about, like really high spin efficiency, like he could really spin his fastball. And he gets solid IVB. He was just under 16 inches in the minors. He goes up to the majors, and his IVB was almost 18 inches. So he actually improved with IVB in the majors. How much of.

00:17:26
Speaker 1: That do you think is a starting versus relieving component?

00:17:29
Speaker 3: I think that's a huge aspect of it. He went from throwing 60 pitches in three innings to throwing 20 pitches in an inning. He could just max out, which is why I think a lot of people think he's a reliever long term. With that said, you can see the quality of this stuff. You know, this is a guy who's fastball. He can run it up to 100 and 203 miles an hour. He'll sit in the high 90s. It's above average ride. He's extremely low release height. Kind of what we were talking about with the outlier. It's a five, three release height. So you're talking and this stuff like he's an extremely good athlete, too. So you're talking about like a plus athlete with a low release height with extensions only. It's more like average issues. It doesn't really stand out. But with the release trick characteristics, the spin efficiency and the velocity, that combination just makes him why he's such a premium prospect and why he's so highly regarded, even though his fastball strike rate this year in the minors was 56%. Like he just did not throw enough strikes. Yeah, doesn't throw enough strikes. But when he does throw strikes, I mean, it's a 30% whiff rate. So, you know, on the fastball, which is well above average. So it's his swing strike rate is obviously going to be lower just because there's not a lot of, you know, times, not a lot of strikes, not a lot of competitive pitches. But yeah, I think that Hopkins is just a, it's just a really good example of someone who checks, you know, he doesn't have to check every box, but he checks the majority of boxes and that's why he grades out so well in this stuff plus for fastballs.

00:18:51
Speaker 1: But he's not the only one. So what is it about Jacob Kuhn? Another Rays prospect that really stands out?

00:18:56
Speaker 6: Yeah.

00:18:57
Speaker 3: He was interesting because he was someone I actually saw him this year at the end of the season with Augusta or excuse me, with Charleston when they were playing Augusta, which that Charleston team, by the way, just absolutely loaded. But I think it's a testament to the race system that he's, I don't know if he might make the back 30, but probably not. And that's how good their system is that a guy like this, I'm like, eh, maybe, you know. But yeah, I mean, it's a mid-90s fastball with another guy with a low release height. He's up to 100 miles an hour. The big difference with him is just there's just extreme arm side run on his fastball. So he's got ride and run. It's over 11 inches of horizontal break. It's just under 17 inches of IVB. So you combine those two things, and then it's another high spin fastball. If you're sensing a trend here, that would be because it is a trend. Just under 2,500 RPMs of spin on this fastball. good news is it's a higher strike rate too. So yeah, he really checks all the boxes except for extension here. And he's got more of the arm side than Hopkins does. But it's just a really lively fastball. And it was one of those fastballs when you see it in game and when hitters are taking swings and you're like, they definitely are not picking this up well. They are behind it. um that was a great example i think you know and it shows and i think what makes fastball so interesting is there are different ways you can do this like we saw with alex vesey in the playoffs especially last night facing garrett mitchell garrett mitchell had no chance against him and vesey was thrown 91 to 92 so it's there are different ways to make a fastball work and i think just coon has a fastball that that checks a lot of boxes with what you're looking for and he's probably a long term but very promising arm um in the race system who i think it goes under the radar.

00:20:39
Speaker 1: Okay, so we've got a lot of guys we could talk about, but I want to make sure we have, because we've got a lot of breaking balls to talk about too. So Jeff, I'm going to tee you up next on Tanner Franklin because he shows up on the fastballs list and he also shows up prominently when we get to the variety of breaking balls. What is it about Tanner Franklin? We'll start with his fastball. What is it about his fastball that really stands out?

00:21:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, a guy that the Cardinals did a really good job just in terms of targeting in the drafts and believing that they could move him into the rotation and did it pretty successfully. Like had a really good season end of the year in double a in their rotation was getting deeper into starts showing more pitch ability, but the stuff was always there. I mean, that was one of the reasons that he was a prospect. It's one of the reasons that Tennessee brought him in in his junior year, after a couple of years at Kennesaw state. Um, but the four seam fastball as a starter sits 95 to 97 miles an hour. Um, he's been up to a hundred point six. So I guess if you want to roll it up a hundred and one on some guns, a hundred.

00:21:48
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:21:48
Speaker 2: Uh, throws, you know, uh, throws this four seam fastball, um, you know, fairly efficiency efficiently, excuse me, uh, with a lot of spin, he's a 25 to 2,600 Roth. RPM spin guy. The height adjusted VAA is excellent. I think it's one of the flattest fastballs when you go to like sort of height adjusted, which looks at locations in the zone. Because obviously, if you're throwing a fastball at the top of the zone, it's going to be a lot flatter than you know, something you're throwing at the bottom of the zone, which obviously would impact playing, but.

00:22:23
Speaker 1: Unless you're, unless you're Trevor Rogers, you know, if you're, I mean, if you're going underneath, then you can get a, get a flat plane on the bottom, but it's pretty.

00:22:33
Speaker 6: Absolutely. But yeah, I mean, it's like six. Yeah.

00:22:38
Speaker 2: It's like 60% flatter than the average fastball in the minors.

00:22:42
Speaker 6: It's one of the flattest fastballs.

00:22:44
Speaker 2: He has above average extension. There's, an average number of strikes here as well. He misses a lot of bats. The fastball had a 14.4% swing strike rate, which on a four seam is quite high. Um, and then, you know, has a deep arsenal of pitches that he throws.

00:23:01
Speaker 6: He has six different pitch shapes. Um, kind of has that you want to.

00:23:05
Speaker 1: Get to next. That's, that's, I'm going to cut you off now because that's where we're going to get to next. Okay. Because after the break, we're going to dive into breaking balls and we're going to start with Tanner Franklin because Tanner Franklin is, also shows up over there. By the way, there are a ton more fastballs. We're giving you a taste of all the fastballs on Stuff Plus. And we're going to do the same with the breaking balls. But there's so much more over at BaseballAmerica.com. And we'll be back right after this quick break.

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00:26:19
Speaker 3: And we're back.

00:26:20
Speaker 1: So Jeff, I'll let you just kind of continue. We're going to talk about breaking balls, but we're starting with cutters. And I'll ask the same question we just asked about with basketball. And again, our apologies to the two seam sinker guys out there. That's over there as well in the Stuff Plus story. But but Jeff on the cutter side, what makes a good cutter?

00:26:43
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:26:45
Speaker 2: I think it's funny because within the cutter designation, there's kind of a wide variety of pitches and you'll see that kind of from the four seam fastball, it bleeds into a certain higher end of velocity within that cutter designation and And then kind of the bottom end of that cutter designation bleeds a little bit into the sliders. And there's kind of like some almost overlap, I think, in terms of shape. So it really just comes down to grip and what the pitcher calls it and how it's sort of tagged. So it's kind of a funny question because I think you start to see throughout these pitch types, particularly within like the breaking ball slider cutter area, there's some overlap.

00:27:32
Speaker 6: And some layers on top of each other.

00:27:34
Speaker 2: Um, typically with an ideal cutter, it's going to be thrown really, really hard. It's going to be the hardest breaking balls that you're going to see. Um, a lot, there's a lot of guys that have sliders that are kind of really cutters. Like I wouldn't even call Jacob Mizurowski slider, kind of one of those cutters. Um, but they have some fastball properties in the sense that they typically have more ride than a curve ball or a typical slider or a sweeper. They could be anywhere from six inches up to 12, 13 inches of ride. The more ride, the better. I also think the more cut, the better. Now, what does cut mean? I think it's misused sometimes.

00:28:17
Speaker 1: It's kind of.

00:28:20
Speaker 2: The neutral area between arm side run and glove side movement or horizontal movement. Ideal cut typically has ride and kind of sits in between the two. So at times that pitch will cut. excuse me, will run a little bit. And then at other times it will move horizontally a little bit. And I think ideally that's sort of the range that you want to be in because it makes the pitch a little bit more predictable. And it's typically a breaking ball that pitchers could throw really hard.

00:28:52
Speaker 6: I think with the modern.

00:28:54
Speaker 2: Attack plan, with guys that throw four seams and two seams and cutters, they'll sometimes call that like the triangle of fastball.

00:29:01
Speaker 6: Fastball triangle, yeah.

00:29:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's kind of an interesting pitch in the sense that it can blend into both. Tanner Franklin's a great example of this because he throws his cutter 90 to 92 miles per hour on average. He had it up to 97 this year. It's really high spin, which isn't ideal within a cutter, though not all good cutters have really high spin rates. It has a 26 to 2700 RPM spin rate. It's got interesting plane. It rides a little bit. So he kind of toes that line between, is this really a breaking ball? Is this really a secondary fastball? It's his most thrown non-foreseen fastball pitch. Generated a lot of swinging strikes, generates some chases. He commands it very well and did not give up a lot of hard contact. So he also throws a sweeper, Tanner Franklin. That's an excellent pitch. Didn't grade within the sweeper designation. Probably doesn't sweep enough. but it's also a really, really good pitch. This guy has, you know, alongside Brody Hopkins, I think this guy, when I do the Arsenal article on Thursday, he's going to be prominently featured and written about a little bit more because it's a really, really nasty Arsenal.

00:30:13
Speaker 1: This is the thing that I've kind of taken from this is that I've had to relearn something here, right? Which is I've been around maybe too long in some ways in that I used to think that a quality breaking ball, even a quality cutter was about the movement. And I've come to realize, like you said, like I've had to kind of relearn. We talk about the fastball triangle. Again, when we talk about, this is something Stuff Plus does not, you know, we're not using this in this, but the pitch interactions, right? So when you talk about pitch interactions, if you throw a four seamer and you throw a two seamer and you throw this kind of bridge cutter, or sometimes the cutter can also be If you throw one kind of fastball and you throw a sweeper, right, so you've got a lot of run, then you've got a lot of sweep, and then you throw this cutter, a lot of this can be about the power of it and the ambiguity of it, right? So I remember Ellie writing about Matt Brash years ago and kind of making the point where it's like he had this fastball of a ton of run and he had a sweeper, and that's what he had. And so he's actually making the job of a hitter a little bit too easy because it was either you read slider and you took because it was not going to end up in the zone. Or if it was a fastball, you said hit. Okay, swing. Having this, adding this kind of sense of confusion to a hitter where it's like, is this pitch going to run on me? Is it going to pull away from me? Or is it going to just go straight down the middle? That kind of adds, that can be a really good pitch just because of the other pitches you have Ian, kind of coming to you on this, again, talking about similarities like Tanner Franklin and Brody Hopkins and why they're going to both be very strong on Arsenal. We don't even need to go into much detail on it, but Brody Hopkins' cutter is really good because he throws it really hard, right?

00:32:10
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:32:12
Speaker 8: Yep.

00:32:13
Speaker 3: It falls in the same boat, I think, yeah, what you were saying. And the thing that I think there's some with the cutter that needs to be understood is that It's also not necessarily a big whiff pitch. The cutter's job, as Jeff kind of alluded to, is to bridge the fastball and then probably your primary breaking ball. And so that's why I think the way it's sequenced and the way it's used a lot is either to get ahead or as a pitch design to generate weak contact. And that's, I think, more what you're looking for with the cutter and why it can be a little tricky for evaluating with the models like this. Because it's like, if you look at the raw swing and miss stuff, which obviously does factor in with when you're talking about the secondaries, cutters are not going to be up there. Like Luis Perales is the highest graded. uh, cutter in our, in our model and his swinging strike, uh, swinging strike rate was 9% on his cutter. And so, you know, if you compare that to an actual breaking ball, that's pretty poor, but that's not what this pitch was designed to do. Um, and I think Hawkins falls in that same camp, you know, he's just like low nineties up to 97. Um, just it's, you know, really high spin and his is a higher, higher swinging strike rate, but it's not a chase pitch. It's like, its goal is to get ground balls and that's, you know, just get weak contact, get, get ahead, get out early. And it's, you know, again, with him, it's, it's about the quality of the strikes. That's the area he still needs to improve, but the cutter, when it does, when it is on, he can throw some nasty ones. It's just a, that's a matter of if, because some outings it's not, and you'll see the results because the locks totals usually.

00:33:41
Speaker 1: The best example I can give of this is, is that the 90 cutter of all cutters, if you said 20 to 80 scouting scale, what's the 90 cutter it's Mariana Rivera, right? Mariana Rivera rode, probably the best cutter that's ever existed to a hall of fame career as a closer. He wasn't a huge strikeout.

00:33:57
Speaker 3: It was, what was it known for breaking bats?

00:34:00
Speaker 7: Yes.

00:34:01
Speaker 1: It was like his strikeout rate for his career was 8.2. He had one season in his career where he had 10 strikeouts per night. Now it was a slower strikeout era at that time, but not dramatically. So, but that's not what it was. It's like, you could know the cutter was coming. which you knew, you knew the cutter was coming and it did not matter because you could not square it up. You would aim thinking you were going to hit the sweet spot and instead it would break your bat. And that's kind of what we're talking about. This is not every pitch is about swings and misses. And again, the interactive effects here are very important as well. That's why we're kind of excited about Franklin and Hopkins is when you have these interactions of incredible fastball and other break, you know, secondaries that are great. well, then you've made the hitter's job a lot tougher. I want to kind of go right from that into sliders, which is, Jeff, I would say we could spend the next hour just trying to talk about pitch classifications with sliders because a slider is a term that you both kind of know what it is, but at the same time, depending on the different pitcher you're talking to, they could be throwing the exact same pitch but the exact same movement. And maybe it's a slider to one and someone's a sweeper or some it's there's like, or someone's a curve. Like it's, there's a spectrum of descriptions. So when I say what makes a good slider, I know I'm asking a question that's like, what makes a good sandwich? Like you could go a thousand different ways on that. Yeah.

00:35:40
Speaker 2: You know, and like you have, you have the hot dogs and hamburgers that are the sandwiches that No, it's a sweeper, but it looks exactly like that slider sandwich that you're giving me.

00:35:51
Speaker 1: It's kind of the same. My daughter may not have strong opinions on sweepers versus sliders, but she will give you a dissertation on whether a hot dog is a sandwich. So yes. Okay.

00:35:59
Speaker 6: Well, there you go.

00:36:01
Speaker 2: So I think it's funny because the only true slider is a gyro slider. I firmly believe that. That is always a slider. There is never anyone that throws an 87 mile per hour pitch that has bullet spin, that has, you know, one to two vert, maybe negative, you know, one to two horizontal pitch. that's always a slider. That is, that is truly a slider. The harder you throw your gyro slider, the better. That's the easiest, the tighter it is, is great. But the harder you throw it, if you throw that gyro slider at 92 miles an hour, it's probably going to be better than a guy that throws an 87 miles an hour.

00:36:39
Speaker 3: Yes.

00:36:40
Speaker 2: There's obviously the command component and how it plays off the fastball and all that sort of thing. But in a vacuum, that's typically what's ideal. Now there's a few other designations. A lot of, the sliders that are on this list are sweepers. Our stuff model still loves horizontal break. It tends to be sweepers that are more 9 to 13 inches. When you get above 13 plus, I think that's always a sweeper. That's kind of how it would break it down. But even within the sweeper measurement, depending on how hard you throw it, If you throw it really slow, it's 75 mile per hour sleeper. That's probably going to get marked as a curve ball. So it's kind of funny because there's also slurves that are kind of like these death ball curve balls that would have been called sliders years ago or slurvy sliders.

00:37:33
Speaker 1: That's the slider I think of.

00:37:36
Speaker 2: Now we're kind of called curve balls again, right? And I think we see that when we go to the curve ball designation. So slider term is a little bit of everything, right? it's kind of like a pizza broken up into like four different styles of pizza into one, right? You can get a bunch of different slices. There's guys that throw multiple different types of sliders. There's guys that throw gyro sliders, that throw cutters, that throw sweepers, that maybe, maybe have like a two point curve ball.

00:38:02
Speaker 6: That's kind of slurvy as well.

00:38:04
Speaker 2: So I think the ideal thing to think with sliders is throw it hard. You want it to move a lot, a lot of spin and, is better than not.

00:38:15
Speaker 1: Okay you want to move a lot unless it's a gyro slider where the feature of it becomes that you're expecting it to move is it like because i think someone may hear that and go wait you're saying it doesn't move at all and so that makes it effective but like you could literally have a gyro slider that has zero inches of vertical and zero inches of horizontal break and with power that could be effective because again being unusual the hitter you may it may To our brain, you may say, oh, but that just means it's a flat fastball. It's like, no, there's no such thing as a fastball that moves like that. So that's, you know, like they always have at least some run or some ride, like there's going to be some movement to it. So that's why it's good. So, okay, Ian, you saw Luke Gabrish with the Mets. He's number one on our slider board, if I remember correctly, stuff-wise. What is it about him that stands out?

00:39:09
Speaker 3: Well, it's a sweeper.

00:39:10
Speaker 1: I know, right?

00:39:13
Speaker 3: No, because it's like 82 to 85 miles an hour with 17 inches of horizontal. So it is one of the sweepiest sweepers you'll see. But I think, though, this illustrates what the issue, the slide that Jeff was talking about is that and even when you talk to teams, too, you'll get different answers. You can talk to a player and they'll tell you it's a slider. Then you'll talk to a pitching coach and they're like, no, it's a sweeper. It's obviously a sweeper. And then you talk to a scout who saw him. It's like, oh, yeah, you know, I put it in as a curveball. Oh, OK, thanks. That's really helpful.

00:39:44
Speaker 1: So that is all. And again, everyone has a reasonable reason for saying that. because they all, and especially you might see one great one that you would say fits one category and see a less impressive one that fits another category. And it's like, he's throwing the same pitch, same grip. It just one time move more than the other. Right.

00:40:06
Speaker 3: Well, and then that's the tricky thing with the modeling too, is that if you lump a pitch in with a, like, like a, the slider that is maybe more of a sweeper, it's going to have some outlier traits. Whereas if you put it in with the sweepers, you might not have those same outlier traits, but, In Gabrush's instance, it's, it's high spin rate. Um, it's just, yeah, really, it, uh, long, it's like almost, I think 2,800, 2,900 RPMs, huge horizontal break. There is some depth component to it. So I can see why it's classified as a slider. Cause when I think of a sweeper, I think of pure horizontal. Whereas if you have more depth, that's where I think it runs into sweepy slider territory. And, um, it just, yeah, really effective pitch, uh, 16% swinging strike rate this year. Um, You know, he's someone who another one who probably like I think is a believer long term. But you could see and I was just looking back at the outing. I saw the majority of swing hit the swing strikes in this outing because he was working as a starter. We're off the sweeper. And, you know, he's throwing up as kind of what we're talking about. He was throwing a cutter also at 88 to 91 miles an hour. You know, he's got the fastball. He's got the changeup. But it was the sweeper was really what he was pitching off. And it's a very promising pitch. It was easy to see why a team like the Mets would target someone like him at the deadline when you have the quality breaking ball that he does.

00:41:18
Speaker 1: Okay, this one I'm going to go to Jeff, but now both of you could talk about him because you both have done work on him. But Sandra Santana, which I think is kind of like, if you said among lesser known names, and again, I know that there's listeners who are like, I know everything about Sandra Santana, and I'm not saying you don't. But among that have not broken through at the more prominent levels of everyone's talking about them, I feel like this is the guy who we're all really intrigued by. But what is it, Jeff, about Sandra Santana's slider. And now tell me that it's a sweeper or it's a bullet or, you know, like.

00:41:52
Speaker 6: But tell me, you know, it's, it's a, it's a sweeper.

00:41:56
Speaker 2: I mean, the first seven, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven pitches in the slider designation of sweepers.

00:42:05
Speaker 6: It's not till you get to Carlos, the grand hay that you actually have like more of a traditional bullet slider, right?

00:42:11
Speaker 1: Slider.

00:42:12
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:42:13
Speaker 2: His is more of like a cutter too. That's the funniest thing. Like it's just, it's, it's yeah, it's, It's a nonsense designation. It's why I only did sliders last year and didn't do sweepers and stuff. But I wanted to write about more pitches and share more with the fans and the readers. So that's what I'm doing. But Sandra Santana, first off, credit to Ian. So Ian, he's traded at the deadline. Ian planned on adding him to the D-backs top 30. He comes to my house and more or less kidnaps me and says, if you don't rank Sandra Santana, there's going to be problems. Ian's huge too. If you guys don't know, he's like six, three, six, four big guys. So it's like, Oh, I got to listen to him. But no, really, he, he really put me onto him. You start to dig into the video and you're just like the fastball is hard and it's left-handed and he's undersized. You're like, yeah, he's a reliever, but he's just dominating people, right?

00:43:05
Speaker 6: He's lefties. It doesn't matter. Good hitters, bad hitters.

00:43:08
Speaker 2: He's just stealing people's souls with this, you know, sweepy hard slider and It sits 83 to like 85. He ripped off a couple in the playoffs that were like 89.

00:43:20
Speaker 6: To 90 miles an hour. A little bit of drop, but it's pretty flat.

00:43:24
Speaker 2: So it is your traditional sweeper somewhere in like the 12 to 14 inch range on average. It's super high spin, 2,700 RPMs and up. Had one of the higher swinging strike rates of any of the pitchers that, you know, we broke down this year.

00:43:39
Speaker 6: Excuse me. I broke down this year in these articles.

00:43:41
Speaker 2: 28.6% swing and strike rate against that slider with a 41.7% chase rate. If you prefer miss rate because it looks way more gaudy, 60.1% miss rate against that slider. And by the way, he threw it 427 times. He almost throws it one for one with a four-seam fastball. You know it's coming and you're still swinging and missing.

00:44:05
Speaker 3: Exactly. He can actually locate it. Because we talk about a lot of these pitch, a lot of these breaking balls are going to be chase pitches. his strike rate on it was 66% this year. Like he can, he has like insane feel and he's, he also falls on the spectrum of what we were talking about where you would be extension. He's five, three extension, which has got to be one of the shortest striders in baseball. So yeah, like it's just, it's just outlier stuff and just an electric arm. It didn't, I think, you know, we it's credit to the Cardinals that they were able to get someone like, like the identification that they do where, They were able to go out and get three really good arms, but with that trade, I would not be surprised if Santana's the best of the bunch. His stuff is big league quality probably next year, beginning.

00:44:46
Speaker 1: Of the season.

00:44:47
Speaker 3: I wouldn't be surprised if he breaks camp with them.

00:44:49
Speaker 1: We could do this for twice as long, but we do have a hot sheet show we're getting ready to record, so I'm going to move on to curveball. And Jeff, okay, we just talked about how sliders are curveball. I will say this. In my mind, when we first started talking about sweepers, I said to my mind a good– because when I think of a good curveball, I think of Tom Gordon going back. where you're talking about that down, like, and again, it's gotten, then I learned about, you've got to watch to avoid the hump at the top of it. Cause if it goes up before it goes down for curveball, professional hitters recognize that in a way amateur hitters don't and all that. But I always thought of sweepers almost like take a good curveball and then flip it on the side. And then like it sweeps, you know, kind of like that as in, but take that away. What makes in 2026 for a good curveball? And what makes it a curveball also?

00:45:35
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think drop.

00:45:39
Speaker 2: Like anything more than a couple of inches of drop, I think you really start to get into the curveball designation. Some of the best curveballs typically have double digits of like negative induced from vertical breaks.

00:45:52
Speaker 6: So the opposite of what a forcing.

00:45:54
Speaker 2: Fastball would have, but also have heavy amounts of horizontal break in addition to that.

00:46:00
Speaker 6: So they're kind of what I call.

00:46:02
Speaker 2: consistently when we talk about pitches on every podcast, you hear me use the term two plane banger.

00:46:08
Speaker 6: And that's what I mean. It's like, it's thrown hard.

00:46:11
Speaker 2: It probably spins somewhere in the 2,700 to 3,000 plus RPM range. And the harder you throw that, the better it's going to perform. I actually think just like from eye test, just watching a good pitch, a good curve ball that's thrown well, that's commanded well, I think it's kind of, easier to see like, oh, that's nasty, maybe even more so than some of the other pitches because curveballs, and we're seeing more of them again after.

00:46:38
Speaker 6: Seeing less of them.

00:46:39
Speaker 2: And I think some of the reason for that is they tend not to have as harsh a split issues as like some of the sweepers have. It's what's ideal about gyro sliders as well. And it might be a tweak we end up making to like the slider model going forward that, you know, sweepers are heavily like sort of like your same sided handedness thrown.

00:47:00
Speaker 6: You don't throw them against the opposite. And this one should backdoor in the heck.

00:47:03
Speaker 1: Out of it. Two neutral pitches are really valuable.

00:47:05
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:47:06
Speaker 2: But I think that curve balls tend to be higher spin. There's a lot of drop on them. A lot of the ones we're talking about here are thrown in the mid low to mid eighties. Anything above that is just crazy. You don't see anybody other than Brody Hopkins.

00:47:21
Speaker 1: Brody Hopkins. There are two curve balls, but Brody Hopkins curve is like, I remember last year at this time, Jeff and I talking about it. It's like, this pitch just defies classification by normal standards because it's not a pitch thrown by mortal men. Like it was that kind of like, he's throwing this at like four miles an hour harder than anyone else's with this kind of break, but we're not going to talk about Brody Hopkins curve, although we can talk about for a long time, but Jeff, instead I'll ask you, why is Pierce George at the top of this list?

00:47:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, I think when you look at, at George, yeah, kind of like an ideal reliever. And if you just watch the white socks bullpen, you know, they did a pretty good job. Like they, they have a lot of interesting, like power arms in that pen. And I kind of wonder if Pierce George could be like the next one coming sometime next year. Cause he sits upper nineties. He touched one Oh 1.8. So get it up to one Oh two.

00:48:18
Speaker 6: And the curve ball.

00:48:21
Speaker 2: Sits 83 to 85 miles an hour, had a couple of 86, 87 this year, negative 14 with negative induced vertical break with 14 inches of horizontal break, 2,700, 2,800 RPMs that had a 50.6% miss rate this year, 16.3% swing strike rate throws it for a strike a fair amount of the time. I mean, he throws his curve ball in the zone more than right over Navarro throws his fastball in the zone.

00:48:49
Speaker 6: So, take that with a grain of salt. Also has a pretty good slider as well.

00:48:53
Speaker 2: That's more of like a cutter gyro kind of hybrid pitch in the upper eighties, low nineties. So just throws all of his breaking stuff really hard. And that's what makes this curve ball so special is it's got tons of movement, a lot of velocity, a lot of spin and he lands it.

00:49:09
Speaker 6: So it's effective.

00:49:09
Speaker 8: Okay.

00:49:10
Speaker 1: Ian, I'm going to tee you up on another top 100, not another top, Pierce George is not top 100, but Gage Wood is. Philly's pitcher, maybe a reliever, could be a starter, probably a reliever, but Gage Wood has a hellacious curveball. What stands out about it?

00:49:26
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think he's the perfect example of what Jeff was talking about with the two-plane break because his has depth and tilt. It's negative 17.4 IVV, negative 11.4 horizontal break, just under 2,800 RPMs. um you know really high whiff rate it's just a very viable pitch and his is really impressive because it's both good at getting whiffs and generating weak contact so he does a really good job of locating he doesn't throw it in the zone a ton but he doesn't have to because when it's competitive but not in the zone it's still very tempting and that's why hitters this year like yeah the expected outcomes against it were extremely poor it's like a sub 200 x world against it and so when you factor in, you know, this is a guy who's, who's not very big, but he has really high spin capacity, um, good extension for a size. And yeah, it's like a lower release height and you combine all that with, uh, or not a lower release height for a size, but you know, it's a sub six foot release height still. And then you combine that with the ability to rip off 2,800 RPM breaking balls with substantial depth and tilt. That's where you get, you know, a guy who has one of the best breaking balls in the minors and that's what Gagewood has.

00:50:35
Speaker 1: Okay. We're going to wrap this up with one more, which is, I'm going to start with you, Jeff, but both of you guys are kind of intrigued by it. Josh Knoth, why does he stand out?

00:50:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, we talked about spin rates. And it's funny, like a few years ago, everyone kind of got off of just like raw spin rates of like, oh, big deal. Like it's about like what the spin does. And then I think we started to understand that. the capacity to create lots and lots of spin gives you multiple pathways to success and pitch shapes. And you can just do a lot.

00:51:12
Speaker 1: I would say this. We got off of spin rates at one point because there was a time when spin rates were very artificially generated.

00:51:23
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, that's true too.

00:51:24
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:51:24
Speaker 6: So like when we packed.

00:51:27
Speaker 1: Back because there was a time where it's like, they started checking to make sure that.

00:51:31
Speaker 8: When you're breaking balls afterwards, with that said, Josh North has spider tack type of spin rates and he's getting checked.

00:51:43
Speaker 6: He spins the heck out of the ball.

00:51:45
Speaker 2: So his curve ball on average spins at 3,300 RPMs.

00:51:53
Speaker 6: I like almost never seen that. Um, He'll be up to 35, 3600.

00:51:57
Speaker 2: I was going to say during the heck out of it.

00:52:00
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:52:01
Speaker 6: Throws it hard.

00:52:02
Speaker 2: He gets 17 to 18 inches of negative induced vertical break. So it drops a ton. It's got some horizontal break as well. But he spends his forcing fastball at 2700 RPMs. He's got a slider at 2800. He's got a sweeper at 3300. So he kind of shows you that when you have that kind of spin capacity, you can throw three really good breaking balls and an interesting forcing fastball, especially if you've got power. And he's got weird angles too. He got some decent extension for his size. So it's a really, really good curve ball. It's funny because it's actually more of a ground ball pitch for him than it is a swing and miss pitch. It's very low swing and miss numbers, but it had a 70% ground ball rate.

00:52:50
Speaker 6: Which can be a reason that someone would throw a curve ball.

00:52:53
Speaker 1: Ian, anything you want to add to that?

00:52:57
Speaker 3: No, I just think that, yeah, the reports coming out, I think it was Instrux, too, was like he was just ripping off 35, 3600 RPM breaking balls, which I just it just doesn't feel real. Because, you know, you see with a breaking ball, if I'm seeing a guy in the 2800, 2900, I'm like, OK, that's really interesting. And then you've got this one kind of he is the outlier of outliers, I think, when it comes to spin capacity for breaking balls right now in the minors. And why he's such an intriguing guy in a loaded brewer system.

00:53:24
Speaker 1: We could have done this a lot longer, but we do have to head to Hot Sheet. We're literally going to jump from this. You're going to see, if you watch Hot Sheet Live today, you're going to notice, hey, Jeff and JJ look very similar. We are going straight from one to the other. But that has been the Baseball America Prospect Podcast with Jeff and Ian and myself, JJ. Thank you again for checking it out. Do please subscribe on our various feeds. Do like, leave comments. I try to respond to a lot of them on the YouTube channel every week. And do check out, obviously, the stories on this over at BaseballAmerica.com. By the way, also, we have the Dynasty, James Anderson's Dynasty 500. If you're enjoying this, I'm going to guess that that probably might intrigue you as well. So for Jeff and Ian, I'm JJ. So long, everybody.