The Des Moines Special: A Pitch Pairing the Cubs Are Teaching More Than Any Other Org in Baseball

[Matthew Trueblood]

There's some real value in zigging where everyone else zags. When it comes to pitching, though, there's also real risk to consider.

Image courtesy of © Lily Smith/The Register / USA TODAY NETWORK

There might not be any organization in MLB who likes a cut-ride fastball more than the Cubs. That's so true that, even if you're a Cubs fan who isn't ordinarily inclined to a lot of granular nerdiness about the game, that turn of phrase--"cut-ride fastball"--is probably at least familiar. In short, it's the kind of fastball Justin Steele throws. In some cases, it can have good carry, like a typical four-seam fastball, but its defining and less variable characteristic is cutting action, relative to most four-seamers. A cut-ride fastball looks like a cutter to a hitter. It runs away from a same-handed batter, or in on the hands of an opposite-handed one, hard and with enough backspin to defy gravity more than the batter expects.

Cut-ride fastballs can be excellent weak-contact generators. They can miss bats nearly as well as elite rising heaters, when well-located. The Cubs value them highly. You knew that, though. Here's something you might not know: at the top levels of the organization, at least, the team is assiduously attempting to give the same pitchers who throw those cut-ride heaters hard changeups with lots of armside run. In fact, no other team in the league is doing so anywhere near as aggressively as they are.

Of the 843 pitchers who have thrown at least 50 fastballs (four-seamers and sinkers, for these purposes) and five changeups at the Triple-A and/or big-league levels this year, the one with the largest difference between the horizontal movement on his heaters and that on his changeup was Cade Horton.

Horton is, of course, the Cubs' top pitching prospect, though he's been shut down for the year with a subscapularis strain. He came to them with a potentially devastating slider and a fastball shape they liked; they worked with him to create this hard, running changeup.

It's not just Horton, though. Four of the six right-handed pitchers with the biggest gaps in horizontal movement between fastballs and changeup spent some time with the Iowa Cubs this year: Horton, Brandon Birdsell, Zac Leigh, and Carl Edwards Jr. That's to say nothing of Frankie Scalzo Jr., who ranks 22nd on that list; or Steele, who's fifth-highest on the list for left-handed pitchers.

It's not necessarily the case that any of these guys are throwing changeups with crazy amounts of horizontal movement, on their own. It's just that, relative to their cut-ride fastball shapes, the changeup really changes lanes in an extreme way.

You can see exactly why the Cubs are so dedicated to this project, too, when you glance at the hurlers' pitch break charts. Above was Horton's. Here's Birdsell's.

Those two each have tight, angular breaking balls, designed to play off their natural fastballs. Scalzo and Leigh have a greater spread, with bigger breaking balls and bigger velocity differentials from the heater on them. Here's Scalzo:

You can see some scant evidence of him trying to mix in a cutter to act as a bridge from his fastball to the breaking pitches, and in Leigh's plot, you can see an even more concerted effort to do the same:

There's a theme, here. With all of these guys, the breaking balls are the natural secondaries. That makes sense, given the shape of their fastballs. They like to supinate, to use physiological jargon. They're most comfortable applying some spin and pressure to the outside of the ball at release. Their heaters and their breakers each come from a natural motion that moves the ball that direction--away from a same-handed batter.

This is why Steele persists in calling his very cutterish fastball a four-seamer. It's his natural way of moving. Baseball people talk a lot, these days, about motor preference. A natural supinator will easily find feel for a breaking ball or two, and often, they'll have a cut-ride heater. A natural pronator will specialize in sinkers and changeups. The Cubs collect natural supinators.

Each motor preference comes with problems that demand to be solved. For pronators, it's finding some version of a breaking ball that works. Remember the talk about the death ball during last year's postseason? That's one example of a version of the curveball that can work for a natural pronator. For supinators like the Cubs' collection of homegrown hurlers, though, the problem is getting something they can command on the outer half of the plate to opposite-handed batters. If you have anything less than peak Steele-caliber command of a cutting fastball, aiming it for the outside corner to an opposite-handed hitter is dangerous, because you're likely to miss right over the heart of the plate sometimes, with the ball moving right into the swing plane of the guy with the lumber. Breaking balls, as we all know, tend not to be as effective against opposite-handed batters--but that goes double for the kind that come most naturally to heavy supinators, because those breakers tend to have wide horizontal shapes, and it's vertical movement that best fools opposite-handed batters.

The Cubs' answer to this has been to simply break motor preference, and get their supinating specialists to pronate hard on their changeups. Revisit the chart of all qualifying pitchers, above, to notice that all six of the hurlers highlighted have less of a velocity gap between their fastballs and their changeups than the average for the league. These are power changeups. They seem to have simply told these players to throw the hell out of the ball, albeit from a modified grip. They're trusting the fact that these guys' arms don't want to turn that way to slow them down through release, enough to create at least a modicum of velocity separation. The rest is just about having a pitch move the opposite of the direction that everything else does.

It's an interesting experiment, and it's not without merit. Given the competence of each of these pitchers when it comes to fastball and breaking ball execution, they wouldn't even need to have exceptional command of their changeup in order to get value from it. Forcing opposite-handed batters to cover the whole plate, getting a good number of ground balls, and occasionally earning an extra strikeout along the way, each of these guys could benefit from having this pitch in their arsenal.

However, there's noteworthy risk to the approach, too. and the team might be feeling the backlash of that risk right now. The only pitcher whose chart we haven't looked at, yet, among those named above who are still in the organization, is Steele.

This chart looks subtly different than it did a year ago. In about 800 fewer pitches, Steele more than doubled the number of changeups he threw, from 28 to 66. Right now, though, Steele is unavailable, after elbow soreness scratched him from his latest start. That brings us full-circle, since Horton, too, had his season cut short. Sometimes, when you break motor preference, the body breaks back.

It's not nearly time to say for certain that forcing running, power changeups into the arsenals of cut-ride fastball guys is leading to injuries on a patterned and persistent basis. The sample sizes here are much too small, and much too noisy. However, broadly speaking, there are reasons why other teams aren't developing pitchers with this massive gap in horizontal break, born of a supinator's fastball shape and a heavily pronated change. It's a valuable skill to add to a pitcher's résumé, but only if they can stay on the mound while doing it.

A more common solution for the changeup problem in natural supinators is the splitter, which is on the rise throughout pro baseball, anyway. It comes with its own risks, in some cases, but a splitter doesn't necessarily break motor preference for a guy who favors cutting action on the heat. Commanding splitters can be difficult, though, and unlike high-run, power changeups, misplaced splitters often end up in the seats. The Cubs believe they can overcome the inherent risks of asking a pitcher whose arm naturally moves in one way to move in another, or at least that the benefits of doing so outweigh the risks. It's too early to tell whether they're right, but it's a fascinating position.

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