Pitch Movement Synergy Notes - San Diego Padres

Blake Snell's FF-SL Pair is Magic

I’m going to go through all 30 starting rotations, sorted by fewest runs allowed, within the lens of pitch movement synergy. Please read that article first, as these notes assume the reader has the context from that article.

Yu Darvish

Yu Darvish has at least 5 plus pitches by my numbers, and can basically throw any of those pitches from a variety of arm angles.

We see that Yu’s cutter, slider and and sinker have the most deception. Let’s see if that’s synergy based.

On the vertical plane, his FF, splitter and sinker have tremendous synergy. However, the splitter moves much differently than either pitch.

The cutter and slider look rather similar, and while they don’t have synergy in the FF-SL sense, their vertical movement is pretty much identical after 0.10 seconds. If the batter doens’t pick it up out of the hand, it’s going to be quite difficult to pick up later in the ball flight.

The curveball is great, but also batters are making good decisions on it. Yu Darvish is a great pitcher, but in my opinion, he isn’t fully leveraging pitch movement synergy.

Blake Snell

Blake Snell has an elite FF-SL pair that reminds me a lot of deGrom’s.

He doesn’t have the elite velocity of deGrom, but visually, there are a lot of similarities, to my eye.

I really think Snell should just throw two pitches (fastball-slider) and he’s immediately one of the 10 best pitchers in baseball. Snell having poor deception on his FF-SL pair, despite incredible movement synergy might be due to poor command. Focusing on just the two pitches could help with that as well.

Michael Wacha

I have Wacha with a mediocre fastball, but a great changeup.

He doesn’t have much vertical separation on the fastball, however the FF/CH deception appears to be leveraging pitch movement synergy on the vertical plane. Wacha’s changeup and fastball maintain movement synergy almost until the point where the eye can no longer track the baseball (the batter cannot get any meaningful information during approx the last 1/3 of the flight of the ball). The horizontal synergy could be improved, but the impecabble vertical synergy is clearly enough.

The FF/CH chart shows why the fastball is not a great pitch on its own, as it doesn’t have enough rise. Ultimately, this will always be a limiting factor for Wacha, no matter how good the changeup is.

The cutter pairs well with the FF-CH pair, and splitting the plate in 3 with the fastball. I can’t help but wonder how much he could improve if he tweaked his horizontal movement to have Bieber-esque synergy on the horizontal plane as well.

Nick Martinez

I have Martinez with a great sinker and changeup, but a mediocre four-seam fastball.

The FF/CH don’t synergize well on either plane.

The sinker and changeup at least have some horizontal movement synergy.

The FF/FC pair has very good synergy, but I don’t really see any reason why he should be throwing his FF more than his Sinker.

Seth Lugo

Is Lugo a viable starter? Don’t know. The FF/SL pair is nice, but doesn’t have elite bat-missing vertical separation.

In fact, all his non curveball pitches have tremendous vertical synergy, however they accomplish that mostly by not having late movement differentials. This looks like a starter’s profile on the surface, but I’m not buying it.

Concluding Thoughts

Dear Snellzilla, please just throw your fastball and slider; Spencer Strider did that for an entire season and was fantastic.