Article: I Bet You Missed a Really Good Julian Merryweather Podcast Appearance Last Week

[Matthew Trueblood]

As the Cubs look ahead to their first season with Craig Counsell at the helm, one key question is whether (and to what extent) they can weaponize his brilliance with regard to bullpen management. One of his key assets for 2024 will be the slender, slider-slinging sage who struck out 98 batters in relief in 2023.

Image courtesy of © Sam Greene/The Enquirer / USA TODAY NETWORK

In a lengthy appearance on the Elite Baseball Development Podcast, Julian Merryweather told the story of his development as a pitcher and a person, how his mentality and arsenal have evolved, and what he did to achieve the breakout we saw from him this past season. The Cubs recently tendered Merryweather a contract for 2024, alongside fellow arbitration-eligible relievers Mark Leiter Jr. and Adbert Alzolay, so everything he had to say feels important.

First of all, Merryweather's demeanor on the show was exactly what you'd expect, given the one he assumes on the mound. There, he always looks stoic (lower-case 's'), like he regards retiring opponents as a grim duty, although perhaps not a regrettable one. On the show, he was affable and engaging, but there was no hint of goofiness or irrepressible energy to him. On the contrary, in talking about his personal development, he mentioned spending time reading books about Stoicism (capital 'S', belonging to the famous philosophical tradition). He came off as the same even-keeled, intelligent creature he seemed to be when the Cubs called upon him so many times at key moments throughout the season.

Interestingly, while Cubs fans quickly became familiar with him as a slider maven, he and host Eric Cressey recalled that Merryweather was primarily a fastball-changeup guy in his amateur days. Merryweather explained that he just didn't much need anything else, at those levels. Since he's been in pro ball, though, he's typically been a four-pitch pitcher, which is unusual for relievers. As the two noted, Merryweather's move to the bullpen had as much to do with the pressure the Blue Jays felt to justify acquiring him for former MVP Josh Donaldson as with anything else, and some of his injury issues stemmed from that transition, rather than the injuries forcing the move.

Now, he seems to have full command of his three most important offerings. He threw his slider more often than any other pitch in 2023, but he not only utilized the changeup to great effect, but expressed his continued faith in it as a weapon--including in right-on-right confrontations with hitters. That's not unwarranted confidence. Last year, there were 386 offspeed pitches thrown at least 50 times by their owner. Merryweather's spin-deadening changeup yielded the sixth-lowest expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA) in that cohort, according to Statcast. The pitch might have limited utility, now that he's a reliever and will be asked to face righties more often than lefties, but it remains devastating. So is his slider, which has almost unbounded value.

The challenge for Merryweather in 2024 will be to locate his fastball better. That was the pitch on which he got hit hard, and that's always been his problem. He throws hard and generates good spin on the pitch, but it flattens out at times and gets hammered. It doesn't yield significant numbers of whiffs, especially for such an aesthetically impressive offering. That was the one topic Cressey and Merryweather neglected a bit during the show.

However, they lent some wonderful insights into the difficulty of being a big-league reliever, and into how Merryweather made both mechanical and training changes to become more durable in 2023. With some changes to his delivery (especially in his lower half), Merryweather felt that he got stronger and more efficient in his movements, which helped avoid a kinetic chain reaction that contributed to oblique injuries in previous campaigns. Even more interesting, though, was the long conversation between the two about the routines Merryweather developed to deal with the vicissitudes of being a reliever and having to be available every day. 

Merryweather spoke specifically about doing daily work, without wanting to be spent when the call came down to the bullpen. He's wired well for the gig he now has, in that he doesn't like to go more than a day or two without getting on a mound to make some pitches, anyway. However, he had to learn (as most big-league relievers do) how to stay fresh on a daily basis. His regimen and his thought process in creating it were fascinating to learn about.

Check out the whole show here.

What do you think of Merryweather as a co-ace of next year's relief corps? The insights he shared here allow for a little greater confidence that he can repeat 2023's success, but there's always risk around a hard-throwing reliever. Let's chat about the Chicago bullpen.

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