Article: A Slider and a Splutter: Drew Smyly's Path Back to the Starting Rotation

[Matthew Trueblood]

In recent days, the Cubs have taken a couple concrete steps to upgrade their bullpen, especially in its ability to get out left-handed batters. What could that mean for their most expensive reliever, who began last year as a starter and wants to be one again?

Image courtesy of © Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports

It came as no great surprise when Drew Smyly opted into the second year of the deal to which he and the Cubs agreed in late 2022. He had a rough and bizarre 2023, with a tremendous first couple of months in the starting rotation and a fierce finish in short relief sandwiching a long period of struggle. Overall, he had a 5.00 ERA for the season, and there were several signs that he was unfit for a starting role. After a couple months of pleading from fans, the team made the move, and he did thrive with better velocity and nastier raw stuff in the bullpen during September.

Justin Steele, Shota Imanaga, Jameson Taillon, and Kyle Hendricks are locked into the rotation for 2024, and for most fans, the focal players for the fifth spot are youngsters Jordan Wicks, Javier Assad, and Hayden Wesneski. If (because of injuries or failure by any of the above) the Cubs were forced to reach even farther down their depth chart, many folks would find prospects Ben Brown or Cade Horton more satisfying and intriguing than Smyly. In the minds of Cubdom, he's been permanently re-categorized as a reliever.

Some pitchers do embrace that kind of lane change, but Smyly has never been content to do so. Last season wasn't the first time he was shuttled to relief by a team who determined that he couldn't help them as a starter, where his fastball sits in the low 90s and he's not much of a strikeout artist. He's always sought out chances to return to starting, though, including by signing with the Cubs prior to 2022. This winter, he went to Driveline, to try to save another starting opportunity that seems to be slipping away.

Let's take a look at a small snippet of a session in which he worked on pitch design there, which the famed training academy shared on Twitter.

Drew Smyly looking great in a recent pitch design session with @langintots13 ? pic.twitter.com/nq7o52gne3

— Driveline Baseball (@DrivelineBB) December 16, 2023

These videos obviously give us incomplete and imperfect data, but they're sometimes fascinating--and especially so in the case of Smyly, who's such an unusual pitcher in the first place. In this video, we see him working on a splitter, and on the shape of a couple breaking balls. It looks like he's almost training toward a sweeper, although in reality, it's more of a true slider, with some gyro spin and significant but not exceptional lateral movement.

The movement isn't huge in an absolute sense, at least, but with Smyly, everything is relative. Let's take a step back and talk about his arsenal and style a bit, because it's vital to understand what makes him unique before trying to grasp what he was working on in the video above. In short: Smyly throws three pitches, but he badly needs to add a fourth, although he might also need to get rid of one of his existing ones, and none of these pitches move the way you'd think, so it makes sense that he's now working on another one that would be weird, too.

A Very Sinky Fastball, or a Very Fastbally Sinker
Any pitcher's repertoire centers, in some way, on their fastball. Some guys have four-seamers, and some guys have sinkers. A few even have cutters that operate as their heaters. What no one quite has is Smyly's offering, because he throws it with a two-seam grip, from a high release point, and then it pretty much moves like a four-seamer--albeit one with quite a bit of run.

Because of the seam orientation and the armside movement, everyone classifies Smyly's fastball as a sinker. Taken as such, it's a real outlier of a pitch, in terms of horizontal and vertical movement. He's way out on a frontier he shares with (strangely, at first glance) Josh Hader.

Like Smyly, Hader has been the subject of study and discussion in this regard in the past. His own sinker was, for a long time, treated as a four-seamer, because it moves more like one that like a typical sinker. Notice, though, that both guys are quite close to the trend line on this chart. In other words, the relationship between the vertical and horizontal movement on their pitches neatly fits the one described by the broader population of left-handed sinkerballers.

Here's a similar chart, for lefty four-seamers, with Smyly roughed in as a red 'X'.

Maybe it's fair, then, to say that his sinker behaves a good bit like a four-seamer. On the other hand, maybe it's also fair to note that he and Hader fall into a bit of a dead zone on this plot. Pitchers rarely find their way to average run on the four-seamer while sporting substantially above-average vertical movement. There's something to this interaction. The hitter really does, I think, experience the Smyly-Hader fastball more as a sinker than as a four-seamer, even if it be a less heavy, later-breaking one than others. It runs away from right-handed batters in a way they're not at all used to, in combination with so much resistence to gravity.

The Amazing, Tumble-Fade Curveball
In a strict sense, Smyly throws a pretty traditional overhand curveball. You could even categorize it, loosely, as a "Deathball," the newly en vogue term for a gyro-spin, short-action, 12-to-6 curve. The problem with that is, it's really more like 12-to-7:30, if you're looking at the clock from the pitcher's side, and that's radically unusual for a left-handed hurler.

Here's a chart of Smyly's pitch types by spin direction, showing what direction of movement we would expect based purely on the spin axis identified by Statcast.

Neither his sinker nor his cutter is perfectly spinning toward 12 o'clock, but the curve has nearly perfect topspin at release, suggesting that Smyly is still getting around the ball and throwing it off the inside of his middle finger, as any good curveball guru would instruct. Here, though, is what actually happens as the ball sails toward the plate.

Seam-shifted wake effects and the unusual angle of his release (plus, perhaps, a unique timing to the release of the ball from each of his active fingers) make the ball do very strange things out of his hand--things the raw spin data couldn't predict. A good number of his curves take off to the arm side, albeit by a small amount (remember, it's still an over-the-top motion and, thus, a very vertical movement profile), while his cutters and sinkers ride more than you'd expect, given the spin.

Let's situate his horizontal and vertical movement relative to other lefty hooksters, as we did with the fastball above. It's no less of a jolt to see than that was.

Nationals southpaw MacKenzie Gore is the only other pitcher whose curveball goes the "wrong" way, and at least he gets much closer to having average depth on the pitch. Smyly's is a real fadeaway, without trying to be. Obviously, when he's commanding this well, it's devastating against right-handed batters, but it's more strange than dominant, at least in the context of his current repertoire.

A Cutter Worth Cutting
Last year, Smyly's big problem wasn't getting right-handed batters out. His curve did that pretty well, and again, the sinker gives righties such an unusual look that it can sometimes flummox them, even when not thrown with overwhelming force. Righties hit .241/.312/.446 off of him, which is hardly ideal, but you can live with it. If that's the line for a typical pitcher when the batter has the platoon advantage, they're in good shape. The league hit .253/.328/.428 with the platoon edge favoring the offense in 2023. 

No, Smyly got wrecked, instead, by lefties--hitters you'd expect him to handle better, as a lefty. They crunched him to the tune of .338/.405/.576. Was that solely because they slugged .690 against his cutter? No. His unusual sinker is much harder to keep out of a left-handed batter's happy zone, and his breaking ball actually (at least on average) broke toward his same-handed opponents, so he wasn't in great shape, anyway. 

Still, the cutter wasn't good.The big reason, if I had to pick one? It doesn't cut.

You really don't want a cutter that leaks almost four inches to the arm side. Relative to his sinker, it does cut, but the margin is small, and it also drops more than a cutter with so little glove-side progress should (as you can see, from that trend line). The pitch doesn't have a big velocity separation from his sinker, and it doesn't stay on plane with it well enough to fool hitters of either handedness consistently. It's just not working for him.

Picking Out New Toys
Understanding all of this, we can start to see why the good folks at Driveline had Smyly working on the things he was working on. Here's a chart showing the scatterplot of his pitch movements in relation to one another, with the average of each pulled forward and highlighted.

As you can see, even without absolute gloveside movement, both the cutter and the curve do get a little bit more in that direction than the sinker. It's important to keep that in mind. The deceptiveness of his overall delivery and movement profile--even if most of it is born not of any particular in-a-vacuum quiddities, but of hitters' unfamiliarity with the overall effect--makes this trio of offerings work fairly well for righties. Smyly needs a better way to attack lefties, though, and to do so, he might have to give up on something that worked ok against those righties. So, let's take another look at the pitch break chart, but add in (indefensibly, we admit!) the splitter and the slider we see him designing in the video, assuming the captured movement data on those offerings to be representative of what he could achieve taking them into games.

Oh, hey. This is a whole different thing, now. You can hear the exclamations of (presumably) Driveline Director of Pitching Chris Langin, with whom Smyly was working at the time, over that splitter: "That's such a weird [horsefeathering] pitch," he says. "It does kind of cut." And after another: "That looks like it's cutting."

As the data shows, the splitter isn't cutting, in an absolute sense. It's very much doing so relative to his fastball, though, which is highly unusual. First of all, only 37 pitchers threw at least 150 splitters or forkballs last year, and of them, only Chasen Shreve was left-handed. It remains a rare weapon for southpaws, although Smyly will have a fellow splitter-slinger from the left side (with a high slot and a quirky fastball, to boot) in new teammate Shota Imanaga in 2024, should he choose to move forward with the pitch. More tellingly, though, none of those 37 sp;itters had less run (or more cut, as it were) than Smyly's. Only the Reds' Fernando Cruz came close.

We're in the delightful position, then, of being able to identify and name a new pitch--assuming Smyly actually deploys it. Maybe you've heard of Twins relief ace Jhoan Durán's fearsome "splinker," which is a kind of hybrid between a sinker and a splitter. Say (a provisional) hello to the splutter, which blends splitter and cutter, and which would obviate the cutter Smyly has been throwing, lo these many years. It comes in about 9 miles per hour slower than the cutter does, too, and with an inch of extra dip to boot, it would miss bats in a way his cutter doesn't, if he can land it anywhere near the strike zone often enough to get chases on it.

Now, let's talk about that plunging, sweepy thing at the end of the video. That's a true slider! It's not a sweeper, which would be nearly impossible for Smyly to throw from his established slot, but it breaks the invisible barrier and actually gets moving to the glove side! What a revelation.

Here's the very strange thing: Smyly really doesn't release this anything like the way most pitchers cut loose their slider. Here's his hand just as the ball is coming off his fingertips on the pitch from which I pulled the Driveline-supplied data, at the end of the clip:

Unsurprisingly, that's a modified version of the curveball grip Smyly always uses, with the index finger bent at the knuckle to keep it out of the way as much as possible. What's interesting, though, is how behind the baseball he is. He's "turning the doorknob," in old slider parlance, but there's little elbow torque here. Look at the wrist, essentially square to the plate toward which he's throwing.

Compare that, to pick one easily accessible example, to this screenshot of Mariners righty Matt Brash, right at the moment that he releases a slider in front of a similar camera.

If anything, we've caught Brash a hair earlier in his pitch, but you can see so much more of the baseball here, because his forearm and wrist are already getting around the ball more. This is more typical of the modern slider. Smyly's is almost more cutter-like, by historical standards. Here's another, boilerplate slider grip at release, for further comparison.

Down and around the ball, these sliders go. Not Smyly's. It's often hard for guys who throw from a very high arm slot to pronate (turn their hand outward, their thumb turning downward and their palm twisting toward the arm side). That's why famously high-release aces like Justin Verlander and Clayton Kershaw have never bothered much with changeups, preferring their dominant combination of high-spin, high-rise heat and breaking balls. Smyly has similarly favored breaking stuff to offspeed solutions throughout his career, but when you watch this video, it's somewhat clear what makes all his stuff so strange: He's a high-slot guy who struggles to supinate (the metaphorical karate chop, palm turning toward the glove side, pitchers use to throw breaking stuff), or at least has a motor preference for staying neutral and behind the ball.

That only makes the splutter a more compelling substitute for the cutter, but it raises the question of how he got all that sweep on the slider, and whether he could do so consistently in competitive settings. I think he can. As noted above, there are subtle things about the way the ball comes off his fingers that affect the tilt of the ball out of his hand, and they can be tweaked without forcing a larger arm movement that might be uncomfortable or that could risk injury. He and coaches can also play with seam orientation to magnify the effects of those adjustments.

A Smyly who finds some comfort throwing his high-riding sinker; his fadeaway deathball; the splutter; and this slider is a pitcher who could reprise some of the success we saw early in 2024. He'd be set up to fan more batters even while pacing himself for starter-length outings, and he'd be more likely to succeed at neutralizing both lefties and righties. For good measure, he was also doing some work to boost his velocity at Driveline, which we saw pay off for Hendricks in 2023.

Drew Smyly looking great in a recent plyocare velo ?? pic.twitter.com/HluZUhPjB6

— Driveline Baseball (@DrivelineBB) January 8, 2024

If he brings these new toys to camp, he deserves a serious look in the rotation, even if it means sending Wicks back to Iowa for a bit or trading away someone like Assad or Wesneski. Those guys could help the Cubs get better in other areas, and Smyly (while unlikely to have much trade value, given his salary and last year's numbers) might be a diamond in the rough, for the third or fourth time in his career.

What do you think, pitching people? Is it too crazy to dream on a restored Smyly as a starter in 2024? Is there hope for the splutter?

Research support provided by TruMedia.

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[CubinNY]

I think he's as much a DFA candidate as he is a potential starter. 

[Irrelevant Dude]

This was too much for me to read, as I think any idea of Smyly as a starter is a non-starter.

[Bertz]

A lot of really great stuff here!  I especially want to see Smyly move towards a real slider.  Like you pointed out his death knell last year was the reverse splits.  I'd love for him to get back to getting lefties out even if he gave back some of his ability to handle righties.  Having a lefty long man that we could piggyback with Taillon would be pretty savvy IMO.

One thing I'm trying to be very mindful of this year though is not buying too much into any pitch design stuff.  I think the Taillon sweeper saga was my "fool me twice, shame on me" moment. When this stuff was newer there was a ton of low hanging fruit and the success rate was extraordinarily high.  But now that it's been a few years I think we've reached the "there's no free lunch" zone.  Guys will obviously make changes and level up, but I need to see it in real games before I buy in too hard.

Either way, I don't love Smyly getting another shot at the rotation.  I'm not as down on him as most, but I think in order to forego leaving a lane open for Wicks/Brown/Assad I would need someone who has a reasonable shot of throwing up 3 WAR.  If Jed wants to do a late trade for Bieber or Luzardo cool, but we don't need Smyly in the rotation, don't need to sign a Hyun Jin Ryu, etc.  There were scenarios where Jed purged some pitching depth in trade where a vet #5 starter made sense (e.g. Soto), but it looks like we're past the possibility of anything like that happening.

[Matthew Trueblood]

1 hour ago, Irrelevant Dude said:

This was too much for me to read, as I think any idea of Smyly as a starter is a non-starter.

Heh. That's fair; it's a big bite. I will say, unless he's traded, Smyly is going to come to camp looking to fight and scrap for the chance to start. We might as well acquaint ourselves with the things that would have to happen for that to pan out.

[Matthew Trueblood]

28 minutes ago, Bertz said:

One thing I'm trying to be very mindful of this year though is not buying too much into any pitch design stuff.  I think the Taillon sweeper saga was my "fool me twice, shame on me" moment. When this stuff was newer there was a ton of low hanging fruit and the success rate was extraordinarily high.  But now that it's been a few years I think we've reached the "there's no free lunch" zone.  Guys will obviously make changes and level up, but I need to see it in real games before I buy in too hard.

Yup. I can't remember what my moment of revelation on those lines was, but a few years ago. I tried to tell people at the time of the Taillon signing that if that deal was predicated on him continuing to be a mid-rotation guy with a balanced skill set, it was fine, but that if it was predicated on him going into the Pitch Lab and coming out some kind of Darvish clone, it was bad. Haha. And certainly I wouldn't give Smyly even one more dollar today than before I dug into all this. I find these kinds of dives interesting just because of what they can teach us about pitching, plus what I said to @Irrelevant Dude: He wants and intends to start, so let's make sure we know what him succeeding in that endeavor would look like.

TYLER CHATWOOD! That was my "pitch design isn't a panacea" moment. Lol. And it was a painful one.