Welcome to Mixing It Up, a weekly column where I look at starting pitchers who are making noteworthy changes to their pitch mix or pitch shape/velocity. In this column, I’ll break down three to five pitchers each week who have shown a change in their profile that has me intrigued. It won’t always be a pitcher who requires an immediate add but could be somebody who has worked his way onto our fantasy baseball radars or a pitcher I think is set to begin a productive stretch. I’ll always try to make sure we have enough of a sample size to work with and I’ll be mixing in both shallow and deep league targets, so there should be a little something for everyone.
In the last few weeks we identified some positive changes in Luis Medina , Steven Matz, Freddy Peralta , Cole Ragans , Brandon Williamson , and Chase Silseth before major breakouts so hopefully we can hit on a few more arms making intriguing changes.
With that said, let’s dig in to this week’s pitchers of note.
Lance Lynn – Los Angeles Dodgers
If we’re being honest with ourselves, we all knew it was coming.
Before the Dodgers acquired Lance Lynn a few days before the trade deadline, he had been one of the more unlucky pitchers in baseball. He had a career-high strikeout rate but was vastly underperforming his ERA predictors based on a career-high BABIP and HR/9. All of that led to an egregious 6.47 ERA in 21 starts with the White Sox this year.
In four starts with the Dodgers, Lynn has a 1.44 ERA, 0.88 WHIP, and has struck out 25 hitters in 25 innings.
So what’s changed?
For starters, the Dodgers have streamlined Lynn’s arsenal, pumping up his four-seam usage from about 36% on the year to 53.2% in August. They have also drastically cut back on his cutter, which went from basically 26% usage prior to coming to Los Angeles to just 10.5% in August. They also got him to use his curve and slider slightly more (both up 3-5%) while easing up slightly on the sinker and change.
It’s easy to see how this has worked. In fact, it’s so easy that it’s a wonder the White Sox didn’t see this and push for it.
On the year, Lynn’s cutter has a .271 batting average against, .521 slugging percentage, 16% swinging strike rate (SwStr%), 12.5% barrel rate allowed, and 5.44 Defense-Independent ERA (dERA), which projects what a pitcher’s earned run average would have been if not for the effects of defense and luck.
All of that tells us that the cutter is not really a good pitch. Yes, it misses some bats, but Lynn was missing bats with a few pitches, posting a 17.3% SwStr% on the four-seam 15.1% SwStr% on the curve, and 17.7% SwStr% on the slider. He didn’t need another pitch that missed bats if that pitch also gave up lots of hard contact. The curve and slider also induced groundballs, so the Dodgers seemed to figure they could get the benefits of the cutter without the damage.
They also made a tweak to Lynn’s four-seam fastball. There have been some reports that Lynn has changed where he stands on the rubber which could account for the difference, but what we do know is that the vertical and horizonal approach angles on the four-seam have changed slightly in August, and Lynn has picked up a bit more horizonal and vertical movement on the pitch. The result is a slight drop in SwStr% down to 14.7% but a far better performance with a 2.39 dERA on the four-seam.
So while Lynn is missing fewer bats with the Dodgers, he’s also inducing more soft contact to help mitigate some of the home run risk that will always plague him. While I don’t expect Lynn to maintain a sub-2.00 ERA, all of these changes can be tied to improved results, so I think we’re done with the White Sox version of Lance Lynn for the rest of this season.
JP Sears – Oakland Athletics
Sometimes a pitcher changes his arsenal or approach for justifiable reasons but the results simply don’t follow. That’s what we’re seeing happen to JP Sears.
In the first half of the season, Sears registered a -0.72 dERA on this slider with a 16.8% SwStr% and no barrels allowed. Despite only throwing it 8% of the time, it was his best performing pitch, missing more bats than his sweeper and inducing more soft contact. As a result, Sears decided to drastically up his slider usage.
The move has not worked.
In the second half of the season, Sears’ slider still has a solid 14.6% SwStr%, but it’s allowed a 15% barrel rate and has a 5.89 dERA. Meanwhile, the sweeper is posting a 19.7% SwStr%, has not allowed a barrel, and has a -0.66 dERA. If anything, now it seems like Sears should be scraping his slider and relying on the sweeper more.
So what happened?
One potential answer is that Sears appears to be throwing the slider a bit harder (just 0.5 mph), but you can see from the graph below that the pitch has lost both vertical and horizontal movement. (Side note: Alex Chamberlain, who created the Tableau pasted below lives in Hawaii and has been raising money to support the relief efforts in Maui. You can go to Alex Chamberlain’s Pitch Leaderboard to get more info).
It’s entirely possible that the slightly harder and tighter slider simply isn’t working for him. It’s unclear if this was a conscious change on Sears’ part or simply the impacts of fatigue in his first full season in the big leagues. What we do know is that Sears has been able to find success with one version of a slider all season but has not been able to land on a second consistent pitch in his arsenal, which has continued to hold him back.
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Luis Severino – New York Yankees
This has been a really rough year for Yankees’ starting pitching with injuries to Carlos Rodon , Nestor Cortes , and Frankie Montas . However, there are at least clear instances to blame for their inability to perform. What has happened to Luis Severino is more confounding. He simply seems to have “lost it.”
Severino was the Yankees’ ace in 2017 and 2018, posting ERAs of 2.98 and 3.39 respectively in over 190 innings. Then the injuries struck. Severino pitched just 18 innings over the next two seasons, but he looked solid in his return last year, pitching to a 3.18 ERA and 20.2% K-BB% in 102 innings off the IL. So nobody expected what happened this season.
In 67.2 innings, Severino has a 7.98 ERA, 1.88 WHIP, and just a 9.3% K-BB%. In his search for answers, the right-hander has decided to introduce a sinker and rely more on his cutter of late.
On one hand, this move makes sense. His four-seam has an 8.44 dERA on the season with a 14.7% barrel rate, 10.7% SwStr%, .361 batting average against, and .712 SLG allowed. That is absolutely a pitch that you want to throw significantly less often. His cutter also makes sense as a replacement since it has a 3.64 dERA, .190 xBA (.276 batting average allowed), .345 SLG allowed, and has not given up a barrel on the season. In August, Severino has even upped the SwStr% on his cutter to 12.9%.
But none of that has really helped.
The right-hander has a 10.22 ERA in 10 innings in August and while his dERA is slightly better than what we saw in July, a 7.63 mark isn’t getting anybody excited. The cutter has still been a good pitch, and the sinker shows some promise, but he’s thrown just eight this month. The rest of his arsenal continued to get hit hard and not miss many bats. As a result, the move to the cutter is intriguing, but it’s not enough to boost Severino back into fantasy usefulness unless he can figure out the rest of his arsenal.
Zack Littell – Tampa Bay Rays
The Rays have seemingly done it again. Injuries have crushed their starting rotation, so the Rays decided to simply make another starter, turning career reliever Zack Littell into a starting pitcher, much like they did to Drew Rasmussen and Jeffrey Springs before him.
Last season, Littell had a 5.08 ERA in 39 games out of the bullpen for the Giants. San Francisco let him go and Boston picked him up in the offseason. He then posted a 9.00 ERA in three games for Boston to start the season. The Rays grabbed him and he’s pitched to a 3.65 ERA in 18 appearances and seven starts in Tampa Bay. If we take that even a step farther, Littell has posted a 3.00 ERA in 30 innings as a starter, striking out 24 batters with just one walk and allowing a .258 average and .383 SLG.
What is this Tampa Bay voodoo magic? Well, in part, it’s just a pitch mix change.
Since coming to Tampa Bay at the end of May, Littell has cut back on his split finger and four-seam usage, added a sweeper, and also started throwing a sinker this month. On the season, the four-seam has a 5.22 dERA and just a 9.2% SwStr, so it makes sense to rely on it less.
While the sweeper has yet to be a really impactful pitch, with just a 9.5% SwStr%, 16.7% barrel rate allowed, and 5.50 dERA, the changes have worked overall. Littell misses slightly fewer bats than he did as a starter (12.2% SwStr% as a reliever and 9.9% SwStr% as a starter), but has been able to produce solid results.
Another part of that success could be slight changes Tampa Bay has made to Littell’s pitch shape and release point.
As you can see from Alex Chamberlain’s chart above, the movement profile on Littell’s four-seam has changed, which has been the result of a release point shift since becoming a starter (the SP section at the bottom of the chart). While the pitch itself is only performing slightly better and has seen a noticeable drop in SwStr% down to 6.7%, it also now more closely mirros the release point of his other offerings. That added deception could be the reason why both the slider and splitter have played up in his move to the starting rotation.
Littell is still tinkering with his sweeper, dialing back on the horizontal movement in August, but he’s yet to find consistent success. He also just introduced the sinker in his last start, but it posted a 16.7% SwStr% that could be intriguing as a potential replacement for the four-seam against right-handed hitters. All of this means that Littell is really a two-pitch pitcher right now with a slider and splitter, but has a couple other average offerings he’s working on modifying to round out the arsenal.
There are obviously still changed being made which could alter Littell’s performance, but Tampa Bay has a track record of success with these moves, and Littell has already shown improvement. He’s thrown at least five innings in each of his last four starts, and has the foundation of a strong pitch mix as a starting pitcher. He will likely never be the strikeout asset that Rasmussen and Springs turned into, but I think he is firmly on the radar in deep leagues right now.
