For Cole Ragans, It's All About The Pelvis

A journey to the center of pitcher mechanics

I was left with a thought I couldn’t dislodge after watching an excellent video by the pitching analyst Lance Brozdowski last week. In the video, titled “Short Form Pitch Movement & the Fingerprints of Pitchers,” Brozdowski dives into the relationship between a pitcher’s arm slot and shape of his pitches.

Logan Webb, for example, has a distinct east-west attack profile due to his sidearm release. None of his pitches move up or down (relative to gravity), but all of them move significantly side-to-side. The sidearm release facilitates this pitch profile — it is hard to generate much vertical movement from Webb’s arm slot, but it does allow for significant horizontal break, as the plot below demonstrates.

That idea made intuitive sense to me. But I couldn’t as easily reckon with his observation about the pitch plot of Kansas City Royals ace Cole Ragans.

Brozdowski notes that Ragans has a unique pitch plot: instead of an east-west profile like Webb or a north-south look like Tyler Glasnow, Ragans’ movement plot assumes a diagonal form. The reason, Brozdowski says, is the fact that Ragans is a “very rotational pitcher.”

I didn’t know what this meant, so I spent some time this week trying to figure it out. Many adventurous baseball fans, at this point, are well-acquainted with results-based metrics like FIP or K-BB%; even process-based metrics like Stuff+ are starting to become just as familiar as these early advanced pitching stats. Mechanics feels like the next frontier, one that is mostly unfamiliar to fans and even hardcore fantasy baseball players. All of the juice in the results-based data has been squeezed, and process-based stats seem to be bumping against the limits of what can be accomplished with public data. But mechanics influences both process and results, and most of the knowledge lives with teams, coaches, and pitching labs. The role of mechanics on the movement profile of a pitcher’s arsenal, at least to me, feels like largely untapped territory in the public sphere. And so I decided to start here, with Cole Ragans, to understand what it means to be rotational — and how it potentially explains part of the Cole Ragans story.

Tread Athletics, helpfully, produced a video some years ago titled “What is The Ideal Stride Length?” One of the first things we learn is that there is a tradeoff between linear (or straightforward) movement and rotational movement. There are elements of both in the delivery of a pitch — each delivery features a linear move first and a rotational one second — and the ideal delivery allows for a perfect transition from one to the other. Naturally, there will be variation between pitchers emphasizing one type of movement. More rotational pitchers generally have shorter strides, while more linear pitchers release the ball closer to home plate.

That is certainly true of Ragans — despite being 6’4”, his 6.1 feet of extension on four-seam fastballs is in the 16th percentile of 2024 pitchers. (For comparison: Bailey Falter, who is the same height as Ragans, averages 7.2 feet of extension on release.) A short stride reduces the effectiveness of Ragans’ fastball — a longer extension makes the pitch look faster to the hitter — but it, combined with his three-quarters arm slot, also opens up a wider variety of shape possibilities.

Below is a called strike on a four-seam fastball from Ragans in his first start this year against the Twins. I recommend adjusting the playback speed to 0.25 by clicking the three dots in the lower-right corner of the video, and really focusing on the movement of his front leg prior to the release of the pitch. It’s hard to get a great view from the centerfield camera angle, but at a certain point, it is possible to see that his hip is rotating so far inwards that the bottom of his spikes become visible.

Compare this to Colin Poche of the Rays. Poche is another lefty, but unlike Ragans, he has huge extension — he’s in the 90th percentile extension on his four-seam fastball — and gets there by coming straight up with his front foot and moving directly toward the plate.

The main difference mechanically, as far as I can tell, is in the “pelvic loading strategy,” in the words of Tread Athletics’ Ben Brewster. As a rotational pitcher, Ragans does not engage in a “sustained linear move” — the focus in the load is on the hip and pelvic rotation, and the stride occurs within the flow of his body, almost as an afterthought. Poche, by contrast, emphasizes the stride, “holding the tension” on his back foot as he carries through his delivery.

Poche’s linear movement style combined with his extreme over-the-top delivery results in an equivalently linear pitch plot:

Poche’s fastball is an excellent pitch, especially at the top of the zone, where he marries elite extension with similarly elite induced vertical break, or IVB. Ultimately, however, it seems like Poche is limited in the types of shapes he can access with his stride form and his arm slot.

Ragans, on the other hand, is unconstrained. Here’s the plot from his aforementioned first start against the Twins. Because of his stride mechanics and his three-quarters arm slot, Ragans can get to arm-side fastballs with above-average IVB, gyro sliders that fall off the table, and loopy curveballs breaking below the zone on his glove-side:

The shapes appear to even match Ragans’ preferred locations for each of these pitches. In that start against the Twins, the four-seamer tailed high and away to right-handed hitters, while the changeup dropped right below the four-seamer on the same plane. The cutter and slider, meanwhile, burrowed low and inside to righties. Ragans wasn’t working east-west or north-south; he was working corners, befitting his diagonal pitch plot.

None of this points, necessarily, to a right or wrong way of doing things. But while understanding the relationship between mechanics and pitch shapes may not reveal much about why a pitcher is good at pitching, it certainly goes a way toward uncovering the how. For Cole Ragans, a large part of that story appears to be in careful study of his “pelvic loading strategy.” Who knew?