Justin Steele May Be Taking His Game to the Next Level

[Jake Russell]

The work of becoming and then being an ace is never done. Last year, the Chicago Cubs got ace-caliber production from Justin Steele, but he's not resting on his laurels. A new campaign has brought with it a new version of Steele--and maybe, in time, the best version yet.

Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-USA TODAY Sports

Justin Steele finished his second full season of MLB service time with some great numbers. In 30 starts, he threw 173 1/3 innings with a 3.06 ERA, and finished fifth in NL Cy Young Award voting. The underlying numbers were awesome, too. He was 7th in fWAR among pitchers, 14th in K-BB%, and got a ground ball in nearly 50% of all batted balls. What’s more, he was 85th-percentile in Barrel% allowed, and had a very impressive 3.50 xERA, according to Baseball Savant. Steele did all of this while almost exclusively throwing two pitches: a four-seam fastball and a slider.

Those two pitches accounted for 96.6% of his total pitches. He sprinkled in a few sinkers, curveballs, and changeups here and there, but they were few and far between. Despite that, he pitched to those aforementioned, incredibly successful results–a truly difficult feat, especially when you consider his stuff isn’t exactly overpowering. He averaged just 91.8 MPH on his fastball, a pitch that acts much more like a cutter than a fastball. His slider was actually the hardest left-handed slider with at least 14 inches of horizontal movement. Basically, his slider slides a lot in a shorter amount of time than most sliders, and these two pitches led him to success.

Steele surely could have sat back, felt good, and not tweaked anything. However, in a league that is always adjusting, you have to try and beat the curve–and that is exactly what Steele has done this year.

First, let’s look at what may have spurred a change in pitch mix for Steele. For starters, Steele was a reverse-splits guy last year. He struggled to limit damage on contact against left-handed hitters, allowing a Barrel% at 9%, a hard-hit% of 47.2%, and an average exit velocity allowed over 92 MPH. Left-handed hitters had a .337 wOBA against him, while righties hit for just a .280 wOBA. Why, you may ask? Steele’s cut-ride fastball naturally makes it a bit easier for left-handed hitters to find the barrel, and may neutralize righties a bit more. The nature of a cutter allows opposite-handed batters to more easily get jammed, while it may run into a same-handed batter’s barrel. His fastball averaged 1.3 inches of cut last season–it’s not hard to see why that happened.

Even that being said, Steele (or the Cubs) could have let it be, and let Steele continue to be a two-pitch pitcher. However, in his last few starts (specifically, since May 16th, his fourth start of the season and second against the Pirates), the sinker is his most used pitch against lefties.

Actually, he has only thrown three sinkers to right-handed batters all season–and it should, and more than likely will, stay that way. The pitch offers a lot more armside run than his four-seam fastball. Typically speaking, these types of pitches are able to neutralize same-handed batters more effectively than opposite-handed batters. Because they are more horizontally-oriented pitches, they can much more easily cause same-handed batters to mishit baseballs, whereas a sinker to an opposite-handed hitter might run into the barrel--not unlike the way Steele's cutter plows into lefties' barrels sometimes.

The early returns on Steele’s sinker have been very promising. Of course, small sample size caveats apply here, but Steele’s sinker has produced a 2.4 RV/100 pitches–a mark in the upper 20th percentile among all sinkers. He has also dropped his Barrel% against lefties to 4.8%. Obviously, his fastball is a good pitch, but it just doesn’t quite play as well against lefties as a sinker may.

This type of change to his arsenal could help the lefty to leap to yet another level of pitching. I know the results have been disappointing so far, but Steele is still running strong peripheral numbers, with similar walk and strikeout rates as last season. We saw Steele have great success Monday in Milwaukee, and part of it was increased confidence working inside--even against lefties, whom he struggled to crowd last season the way he did righties.

It also seems as if Steele is throwing his changeup ever so slightly more to right-handed batters. It’s worth noticing that, while Steele was throwing changeups almost exclusively late in games last year, this year he seems to be throwing it more often, earlier in the game. He’s already thrown three changeups the first time through the order; last year, he threw just four all year. It’s not huge, but maybe there are signs that Steele is just beginning to develop feel for this pitch–and that could be a game-changer as well.

Of course, I’m not saying that these changes are going to elevate Steele to “best pitcher in baseball” status, but the ability to adapt to the league around him is very important. If he can elevate his sinker and changeup from change-of-pace pitches to legit parts of his repertoire, he can be even better than he already was. It’s an ever-changing game, and if you don’t adjust, the league will.

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