Since Joining Cubs Organization, Jack Neely is Throwing Whatever Lies Beyond a Gyro Slider

[Matthew Trueblood]

This is going to be fascinating. It might be insane, or it might just be ugly, but it won't be boring.

Image courtesy of Somerset Patriots

On Tuesday, the Cubs cut Héctor Neris loose, designating him for assignment and immediately releasing him, after he'd previously cleared waivers. The move makes way for the addition of Jack Neely, the tall, mustachioed, hard-throwing reliever the team acquired in exchange for Mark Leiter Jr. just before last month's MLB trade deadline.

Neely. 24, stands 6-foot-8, with a fastball that sits at 96 miles per hour and touches 98. He's an imposing and impressive mound presence, and since the Cubs got him, he's pitched 6 2/3 innings for the Iowa Cubs, giving up just one unearned run. In 25 batters faced, he had one walk, allowed four hits, and racked up 13 strikeouts.

It's not the fastball that should garner the greatest attention for Neely, though. After arriving in the Cubs organization, he changed something about his gyro-style slider, and it now has a chance to be a bat-missing mega-weapon--or a total disaster.

Neely really only throws the fastball and slider; he keeps things very simple that way. The Cubs haven't introduced a new pitch to the mix, and they haven't attempted a major change of fastball shape. As you can see, his pitches have moved in largely the same way since he changed organizations, with just a slight increase in the depth on some of the sliders he's thrown since coming to the Cubs.

The Cubs also haven't made a major change in his mechanics; his horizontal and vertical release points and his extension at release are all virtually identical from his time in the Yankees system this year to his tenure with Iowa. However, there has been a change to his slider, which runs a bit deeper than the sheer movement on it. Here's the spin direction of the ball out of Neely's hand for each of his pitches, from the pitcher's perspective, for each of the organizations with whom he's pitched this year.

That's a meaningful change, explaining the difference of a couple of inches in vertical movement on the slider, on average. (Note that he's also made an adjustment to stay behind the ball and get a bit truer backspin on his fastball.) Neely has always had a low-spin, gyro slider, meaning the pitch relies on cement-mixer spin direction to get its downward movement. A bit more of that spin pointing downward, though, would figure to be a good thing. Indeed, Neely's whiff rate and batted-ball data on the slider have improved this month, in the limited time he had at Iowa. He's throwing the pitch at exactly the same velocity he was before, so naturally, more downward movement is yielding more extreme outcomes.

Here's where things get a bit crazy. Above, you saw the spin direction out of Neely's hand--the spin he imparted on the ball as he let it go each time. Here, by contrast, is the same histogram, but for the direction of the pitches' actual break. In other words, regardless of what initial spin direction might have predicted, this is where the ball actually went.

The plot on the right shows that, thanks to that gyro action, Neely's slider consistently resisted the effects of gravity during his time with the Yankees' affiliate in Scranton-Wilkes Barre. This only shows the frequency of each direction of break; it doesn't show you that that resistance was very slight. Nonetheless, the pitch had a consistent shape.

The plot on the left is chaos. It's pure chaos. With slightly higher spin rates and a hair more in the way of downward sidespin, Neely has the slider breaking in utterly unpredictable fashion. It's also not as controllable, but that doesn't necessarily matter. If it's sufficiently difficult for hitters to pick it up, they won't be able to hit it, and if he can throw his fastball for enough strikes, they won't be able to lay off the slider, either. As has been said by your favorite color commentator dozens of times (no matter who your favorite color commentator is), if you could reliably throw a backup slider, it would be one of the nastiest pitches in baseball. That's kind of what Neely is flirting with.

Here's a scatterplot showing the break direction of Neely's pitches, by pitch type and organization. It's similar to the chart above, but gives you a greater understanding of how widely the slider break varies since he came to the Cubs.

Average movement numbers, obviously, can't capture this turn toward chaos--at least, not very well. It's the variation that makes it so hard for a hitter to anticipate what's coming. Here, for the sake of a different kind of comparison, is how Pirates reliever Hunter Stratton (whose average spin direction and break direction on the slider are almost identical to Neely's) slider moves.

Stratton's slider comes out of the hand with very similarly clustered tilt to that of Neely: sidespin toward the glove side, slightly downward.

It's just that once it leaves Stratton's hand, it reliably takes just a little extra lift, acting like a traditional, tight gyro slider. We could look at the same plots for momentary Cubs pickup Vinny Nittoli, or for Brewers starter Freddy Peralta, and we'd see similar things: a fairly tight cluster of spin direction out of the hand, more lift and a bit more scatter to the break direction, but basically a gyro slider, swerving off the path of the fastball. The wide variance in the direction of break and in the overall spin rate is especially wild. It sure looks like there was a grip change, and now, Neely is throwing a chaos ball.

Will that mean an extraordinary number of strikeouts, or will it just mean a struggle to hit spots? Will hitters pick up a pattern in all this noise on which they can lock in, to make hard contact against the breaking ball? Will Neely throw enough strikes at the top of the zone with his fastball to make use of this unique breaking ball? It's hard to say. Chaos means more questions than answers. The difficulty in testing the efficacy of this change by any means other than introducing it to big-league batters only augmented the urgency of bringing up Neely, though, which helps explain the timing of this move. Over the final six weeks, we'll see whether the Cubs have a new and strange weapon at the back end of their bullpen, or just another weird arm whom the league will forget about within a year or two.

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