Driveline Baseball -

Baseball may not be inventing many new pitches. Some argue there are no new pitch shapes that haven’t been thrown before. But the industry is getting much better at reproducing and scaling the ones that already exist.

Christy Mathewson may well have thrown a changeup that enjoyed the invisible turbo boost of seam-shifted wake. Lefty Grove might have thrown what we’d call a sweeper today.

What changed in recent years is the industry’s ability to teach and scale pitches, thanks to pitch-design science — the high-speed camera and spin-tracking feedback loop pioneered in large part by Driveline.

Whatever the debate about which pitches are truly new, pitches can now scale. They can proliferate across baseball in a way that wasn’t possible before this data- and tech-rich era.

We’ve seen the sweeper spread rapidly. Then the splitter. What’s next?

It might be a pitch that’s barely being thrown today — one that’s already extraordinarily effective, with characteristics suggesting it isn’t especially difficult to acquire.

Meet the vertical slider. 

It’s a hard, gyro-heavy slider that doesn’t move much horizontally but gets meaningful downward movement.

We apply this label if the offering is within 10 mph of a pitcher’s fastball, meaning there’s less velocity tax than with other breaking ball variants. The pitch must also be gyro-dominant in terms of spin — like a death ball — but with just enough tilt to convert spin into depth. By our definition, it must feature four inches or less of horizontal movement to qualify. And unlike a gyro/bullet pitch, which features several inches of ride or positive induced vertical break, this pitch must have downward break.

Griffin Canning, 88 mph back-foot slider. Via Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja).

Not New. Newly Scalable.

The pitch wasn’t just invented. It didn’t materialize out of nowhere.

Luke Jackson is an active pitcher who made a career out of throwing it for years. A number of other pro arms throw it today, including Clay Holmes, Griffin Canning and Andrew Alvarez.

Canning’s vertical slider grades as his best pitch. He said he didn’t copy the grip from anyone — he wasn’t able to study high-speed frames of other pitchers, because there simply aren’t many throwing a shape like his.

“Our (hitters) guys tell me it’s like a cue ball. They cannot see any spin,” Canning said.

Driveline director of pitching Connor White even notes that in the MLB Power Pros video games of the 2000s, “vertical slider” was literally a pitch type.

Again, the pitch isn’t new. What’s new is the opportunity to scale it.

“Right now, it’s early in the adoption phase,” White explained. “This year is the highest rate we’ve seen, and it’s around one percent of pitches getting into that window where it’s getting drop while still being thrown hard relative to its movement, with a really high whiff rate.”

Usage is climbing slowly. We should expect that rate to accelerate.

Why the Shape Works

The pitch owns the No. 1 whiff rate among all breaking ball shapes every year since 2015, according to our analysis.

A related insight from White and Driveline’s Jack Lambert: all five of the highest-whiff movement profiles in baseball are gyro breaking balls with less than three inches of IVB and less than three inches of horizontal break. The No. 1 shape among them — the vertical slider — adds six to nine inches of drop at around 84 mph.

“The difference between this and a curveball, power curve, or knuckle curve is that you’re getting the drop without sacrificing the velocity that traditionally a curveball would,” White said. “You’re getting that fast, tight dropping pitch with heavy gyro.”

So unlike the sweeper, which spread quickly through pro baseball, this is not a big, breaking pitch.

“It looks like a heater a little bit longer,” Canning said.

Yet it still gets swing-and-miss because of its shape and speed — and it can perhaps be better employed as a called-strike pitch.

“That’s also something that a lot of pitchers are looking to add right now, kind of coming down from the sweeper phase,” White said. “Everybody is looking to generate more movement, more velocity on the pitch. But then it’s not getting the same whiff rate.

“So then (the vertical slider) can also be used as maybe more of an early-count, take pitch. ‘I need something a little bit tighter so that I can land reliably, and generate those in-zone or shadow-zone whiffs with it.’

“A lot of guys are looking for cutter, gyro slider, and I think this pitch fits really neatly into that part of arsenals.”

The beauty of this offering is that it’s not just a chase pitch. The vertical slider has:

• Enough velocity to be difficult to square up
• Enough depth to generate whiffs
• Enough tightness to land in the zone
• Less extreme movement than a sweeper

As more pitchers realize this, there will be greater efforts to adopt it. That raises the next question.

How Easy Is It to Adopt?

“I don’t think too many guys have been able to throw the gyro very hard,” Canning said. “So I think it’s been harder for guys to just pick up, as opposed to like a sweeper.”

Still, White believes a large number of pitchers ought to be able to access the pitch.

“From looking at the players who do it most from an arsenal standpoint, guys who favor the supination shapes tend to be more likely to throw this,” White said. “But I do think that the pitch isn’t dependent on being able to get glove-side sweep. You could throw a slider where it’s actually going arm-side, but it’s still getting effective drop and velocity.

“So right now, the guys who are accessing it the most are biased toward supination, but I don’t think that’s a hard rule. You can throw a pitch that does this job; it just might not look quite the same for you.

“Depending on how strict you make the boundaries of a pitch, there’s always the question of where a sweeper turns into a slider, or where a splitter turns into a fork. But when you think about what the job of the pitch is in the arsenal, I think it’s something that a lot of guys can access relative to their slot, their release and all those individual characteristics.”

That there are so many candidates to adopt the pitch — combined with its success — suggests we should soon see more and more pitchers emerge with it in their arsenals.

Perhaps we’ll see a spike after next offseason’s tinkering in pitching labs and facilities around the country. Maybe we’ll see it spread through the game like the sweeper, and to a lesser extent the splitter.

The Sweeper Warning

Consider what happened to the sweeper when it swept through baseball a few years ago. It became less and less effective. Its whiff rates and overall performance decayed.

As the sweeper’s usage increased by more than 11 times from 2018 (0.7% MLB usage) to this season (8.2%), its whiff rate declined by eight percentage points (38% in 2018 to 30% this year).

It makes sense that in baseball’s constant cat-and-mouse game, hitters adapt to the new-and-improved mousetrap over time. That’s especially true with modern tools like Trajekt, which let hitters prepare for games with game-like practice.

Hitters preparing on a Trajekt machine. Via Eric Hosmer (@TheRealHoz35).

The opportunity: extraordinary performance leads to adoption.

The warning: widespread adoption gives hitters more exposure, which gives them more opportunity to adapt.

Should There Be Urgency to Be an Early Adopter?

White believes the vertical slider might not be subject to the same loss of alpha as the sweeper.

“I think it’s something where you’ll see the edge erode over time, but not as significantly as something like a sweeper, where it’s such a distinct shape,” White said. “With a sweeper, the big shape is visually distinct to a batter. You might have a pitch that’s moving 19 inches horizontally at 86 mph, and when it’s just off the corner, you think, ‘How on earth is he not swinging?’ But the hitters are so good, and when it is distinct, they’re able to recognize it now.

“Something like this is going to play within an arsenal. It’s a component of the arsenal. It’s not stretching — if you’re picturing the X-Y movement plot — toward the extreme. It’s something that’s kind of in the middle.”

The vertical slider doesn’t need to become the next sweeper. Its appeal may be precisely that it isn’t an extreme pitch. It occupies an unusually effective part of the movement-velocity spectrum without announcing itself to the hitter.

And if modern pitch design has taught baseball anything, it’s that once the game discovers an efficient pitch, it doesn’t take long to figure out how to reproduce them at scale.