Thanks to Trip Somers’ PitchF/x tool, we can attempt to visualize a slider like this, though we’re taking a guess at the seam orientation without high speed video of Treinen’s release on the new slider. It drops less and moves more sideways than expected.
As you can see, the ball moves as if it’s spinning more around a horizontal pole, while having spin that suggests it’s more vertical. On the right is the spin you’d expect based on the movement of the pitch. For the visual learners, let’s blow up those last two pictures, which depict this phenomenon. But if you tried to predict what sort of spin his ball had just by movement, you would say it spun around the 8:45 axis. Treinen turns 40 percent of his spin into movement, and spins his slider around that 7:45 axis. Maybe a look at Treinen’s new slider through Savant’s visuals will help. That unexpected movement is up and out, so these sliders generally have less drop and more sweep than they appear they will as they spin out of the hand. And then, for most Dodgers sliders, the difference between the spin axis the batter sees, and the movement he expects from that spin axis - a phenomenon known as seam-shifted wake - is significant. Most Dodgers sliders spin around 8:00 as Savant has it, give or take a half-hour. Spin axis describes the axis around which the ball spins. Most Dodgers’ sliders use about half their spin for movement. Spin efficiency represents the degree to which spin is turned into movement. That said, if you look at the particular way their sliders spin, it does look like there are some commonalities, particularly among the pitchers that have added a new slider or significantly changed their breaking ball shape recently. There are as many unique combinations of arm slots, hand slots, and pitching mechanics as there are pitchers on the Dodgers. Not every Dodger has a sweeping sideways slider consider White’s story. The thing that is most difficult about analyzing pitching, however, is that there are so many different pathways to excellence.
The slider is his biggest horizontal weapon. Mitch White’s slider doesn’t look to have the same horizontal excellence in the raw numbers, but he’s got a very vertical approach otherwise, with a straight fastball and a curveball that has four inches less horizontal movement than average. average among right-handers last year, according to Savant. Kenley Jansen worked hard to develop a new slider to go along with his cutter - it has the sixth-best horizontal movement vs. It was perhaps notable that he was down two inches of horizontal movement on the slider - and he gave up four runs in 3.2 innings. In Tuesday’s Game 3 of the NLCS, Buehler didn’t have his best stuff. In this overlay, this August slider is yellow. How did he do it? He added horizontal movement to his slider, almost three inches between April and October. This year, he’s improved all three to the point that he was the only pitcher in baseball in the second half last year with three breaking pitches that had Stuff+ numbers over 109, basically the only pitcher with three breaking balls that rated a standard deviation better than average by their physical metrics. Walker Buehler has three breaking balls, and he’s always working to differentiate more among them. Old curve first, old slider second, new hybrid last, then overlay with the new pitch in white. In this overlay, you’ll see his old curve first, his old slider second, and then the new hybrid breaking ball (with a flatter, more sideways plane) last, and then an overlay with the new slider in white.įrom the Super Pod with and the revelation that Julio Urías has turfed one of his breaking balls… which only makes me love him more.
Urías worked on his curveball, not his slider, but over the last two years, he’s reduced the vertical movement on his curveball and increased the horizontal movement. Looks like maybe the Yankees were picking up what the Dodgers were laying down, but Treinen is not the only Dodger who has undergone this transformation recently. Almost nobody in baseball added as much horizontal movement to their slider as Treinen did between 20. The velocity on the pitch declined, but it really was the break that mattered, and the type of break in particular. Treinen went to work, and saw immediate success in the spring, as he struck out the side in consecutive appearances in April.
“I wanted to learn a new slider.”īiggest Stuff+ improvers from 2020 to 2021, min 400 pitches in both seasons: “I said I couldn’t go back into the season expecting to be the same role, same results, or being even better, with the same slider,” Treinen told Jorge Castillo in September. The pitchers who have changed their sliders most recently might give us a peek into this open secret behind the Dodgers’ league-best breaking balls.
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