Article: New Cubs Reliever Yency Almonte, and Why it Matters What You Call His Breaking Ball

[Matthew Trueblood]

Though he quickly became a secondary consideration once the full scope of the trade was known, the Cubs added an interesting relief pitcher in Thursday's trade with the Dodgers. Let's talk more about him, and about how modern pitching analysis works.

Image courtesy of © Eric Hartline-USA TODAY Sports

For parts of the last two seasons, Yency Almonte has been downright dominant. At other times, he's looked almost helpless. That's partially because he's dealt with (and sometimes tried to pitch through) injuries, but it also has something to do with his skill set--and the inherent weaknesses in his game.

Almonte, who will turn 30 in June, has two years of team control remaining. He can't be optioned to the minors, which somewhat limits his roster utility, but if he pitches the way he did throughout 2022, that won't matter. That year, he allowed fewer than four baserunners for every five innings pitched and had an ERA of 1.02. None of that is quite sustainable, but if used carefully, he can be something on the comfortable side of the wide spectrum between those numbers and the 5.06 mark he put up in an uneven 2023.

Although his season ended early due to a leg injury, Almonte had a great summer last year. His ugly overall numbers were mostly the result of a hideous April and early May, during which his ERA crested at 9.00. From May 20 through the injury in August, though, he allowed just a .577 OPS and had a 2.70 ERA. It was all thanks to finding a previously missing feel for his sweeper, which will be the star of much of the rest of this discussion.

When Almonte's sweeper was beyond his command, and especially when it was a bit short on downward movement, he got into a lot of trouble. Once he cleaned that up, he regained his effectiveness, but he still issued a lot of walks and doesn't strike batters out the way you expect a flamethrowing modern reliever to. What gives?

In short, Almonte's problem is a platoon issue. He has the capacity to dominate right-handed batters, but limited answers for lefties. That hasn't shown up in his raw results based on handedness over the last two years, but it's true. 

Yency Almonte, 2022-23, Platoon Splits

Split	AVG	OBP	SLG	K%	BB%	HR%	BABIP
vs. LHH	0.202	0.314	0.288	16.5	12.4	1.7	0.232
vs. RHH	0.204	0.293	0.332	27.9	8.6	2.7	0.264

Right-handed batters got more hits and a few more home runs against Almonte since the start of 2022, but it's lefties who run up his pitch count, draw walks at a high rate, and against whom he doesn't miss bats. Opponents' contact quality doesn't support the idea that he's simply throwing more hittable meatballs against righties, either. They just got luckier than lefties did over a short sample.

Almonte is a righty-killer because he primarily uses a sweeper. That's the pitch at the heart of his arsenal. Against righties, in fact, it's one he throws a healthy majority of the time. 

Yency Almonte, 2022-23, Pitch Types by Opposing Batter Handedness

Split	FA%	SI%	SW%	CH%
vs. LHH	38.2	7.9	34.5	17.9
vs. RHH	1	41.3	56.8	0.1

As you can see, though, even against lefties, he leans heavily on the sweeper. That's his pitch; it's how he went from a fringe big-leaguer to a (however inconsistently) nasty relief weapon. If you had this pitch, you'd throw it a lot, too, and forget about who was up.

Here's the thing, though: as you would guess, that result isn't quite typical. Against lefties, this is a much more representative sweeper from Almonte.

There's good, tight break even on that pitch. It's just that, given the angle a left-handed batter gets on the ball out of Almonte's hand and the shape of the movement, it's much easier for them to lay off than it is for righties to do the same. That's compounded by the fact that (understandably) Almonte tries to dot the outside edge with a backdoor version of that sweeper to lefties, only to see it really get away from him. It's just not a pitch that lends itself to being thrown with good command on the arm side of the plate.

Yency Almonte, Pitch-By-Pitch Outcomes, Sweepers, 2022-23

Split	Ball%	Called Strike%	Chase%	Whiff/Swing%
vs. LHH	43.7	25.8	22.3	44.6
vs. RHH	36.8	34	35.6	49.8

You can't throw a pitch that results in a ball over 43 percent of the time once every three pitches, but that's exactly what Almonte has done against lefties over the last two years. He can't land the sweeper in the zone consistently, which is fine when hitters expand the zone to fish for the pitch at a 35-percent clip, but when they can identify it early and only chase outside the zone 22 percent of the time, it spells trouble. Even though lefties didn't rack up gaudy numbers against him, they extended at-bats and innings by working him for walks and staying alive until they could try to square up one of his other offerings.

This is normal, and it's a good entry point for a short conversation that feels long overdue. This week on 670 The Score's Bernstein and Holmes show, host Laurence Holmes pleaded with the baseball world to "get together on what's a slider, and what's a sweeper, and are they really different?" It's been bandied about a bit since the sweeper took the league by storm a couple years ago, but that question hasn't been adequately or satisfactorily answered until now--at least, not in terms that lay people can grasp.

For an instructive contrast, consider Almonte and new teammate Adbert Alzolay. Last year, Alzolay broke out as the Cubs' relief ace, and it was largely thanks to his ability to pair each of his fastballs with his slider--a pitch with some tilt but a pretty vertical shape. He could attack lefties with that offering, because it worked naturally off of his heat even as it moved toward the opposite-handed batter.

Almonte's breaking ball isn't a slider, like Alzolay's. It's a sweeper. It's probably time to stop thinking of sweepers as a version of the slider. For a long time, we put what should really be called two different pitches into one bin, because there were few good ways to reliably differentiate them. Now, we can do so pretty well, and we ought to. Here's Almonte's heaters, paired with his sweeper.

Feel free to study those two charts for a bit, but the differences should really jump right out. Alzolay's slider is a pitch with greater gyro spin--what's sometimes called a 'bullet' slider, because it has that football-like rotation that contributes only inefficiently to movement, by slowing the ball down so that gravity can act on it and pull it downward. Almonte's is a sweeper, with far more tilt, and the movement he gets comes from the spin he applies. As you can intuit (or see by the spread of the pitches shown in the plots above), the slider Alzolay throws is an easier pitch to command, which is crucial when trying to get out opposite-handed batters with a breaking ball. It also has a more vertical movement differential from his fastballs, whereas the relationship between Almonte's heaters and his sweeper is pretty horizontal. 

By and large, you get out same-handed hitters with horizontal movement, and you get out opposite-handed ones with vertical movement. Thus, a sweeper (which will, all else equal, always be a more horizontal pitch than a gyro slider) can be highly effective against same-handed guys, but is rarely so against opposite-handed ones. True, old-fashioned sliders are more versatile. They're not as nasty. Alzolay will never miss as many bats, on a per-swing bases, as Almonte does. Alzolay can throw his more effectively to lefties, though.

Why did Almonte use the pitch so often, so stubbornly against lefties, then? That answer is simple: He doesn't have a useful changeup at this point. He's comfortable with both the sinker and the sweeper against righties, but against lefties, he really needs something to complement his four-seamer. Since he doesn't get the movement separation he needs on the changeup, he tries to find his outs by pairing the four-seamer with the sweeper, instead. He only induced whiffs on 8.8 percent of swings against his change from 2022-23. Hitters don't hammer the pitch, but they can easily fight it off when he does land it in the zone, and he doesn't do so nearly often enough. Only 10.4 percent of the changeups at which opposing lefties did not swing were called strikes. When you're never in the zone with a pitch, hitters don't have to respect it.

So, to get lefties out, what should Almonte do? It starts with changing the areas of the zone he targets most often. Here's where he threw his four-seamers and sweepers against them over the last two seasons, using TruMedia tools. You can see the way he favors the glove side of the plate with the four-seamer, a result of the angle he creates for himself by lining up on the extreme first-base side of the pitching rubber, and obviously, too, the way he tries to break the sweeper off of that pitch.

That's where his pitches go against left-handed batters. Now, consider where he finds his whiffs against them:

Changing location patterns isn't as easy as identifying the need to do so, but Almonte clearly needs to let his four-seamer run more up and away from lefties. Maybe, once he sets their sights up there, the sweeper down and in will look a bit more enticing.

Even then, though, don't expect an extraordinary forward leap from Almonte. It looks like control will remain a bugaboo for him, and while he had a handsome strikeout rate against righties over the last two years, he's never had a gaudy one, by modern standards. That's thanks to the sinker he uses against them, rather than the four-seamer that has a little more deception and life at the top of the zone. The sinker doesn't miss bats, though it does help Almonte minimize hard contact in the air. He has great velocity and good spin on the fastballs, which helps him induce harmless contact. The breaking stuff is tasked with getting the whiffs.

Instead, think of Almonte as a right-handed reliever who should be highly effective against fellow righties, but shielded from lefties. To shore up that weakness a bit, the Cubs and their new pitcher might work together to add a splitter in place of his ineffectual changeup, or to realign him a bit on the rubber, as the team did with Jose Cuas after acquiring him last summer. The former would let him deemphasize the breaking ball against lefties and balance out his profile. The latter would help him change the sights a bit on his four-seamer and sweeper, but the sweeper is too good to tweak much, and that means accepting the vulnerability to lefties that it brings with it. Craig Counsell might just need to manage around Almonte's shortcomings and get the most out of him, and given the new skipper's track record, that's not an unreasonable thing for which to hope.

Where do you envision Almonte fitting into the 2024 bullpen hierarchy? Do you trust him more or less than Cuas, or Daniel Palencia? How about Julian Merryweather? Chime in below. 

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