Pablo Lopez, Logan Gilbert, and Joe Ryan: A Tale of Three "Sliders"

Joe Ryan's quest to find his shape

In most of Pablo López’s 2023 starts, he was making some of the league’s best hitters look extremely silly with the sweeper.

For Lopez, the addition of this sweeper in 2023 was a perfect complement to the rest of his arsenal. While the physical characteristics of the pitch are not particularly remarkable — it has roughly average horizontal and vertical movement, compared to the league average sweeper — it was the first time in his career that he had a pitch that moved as far glove-side as his sinker/changeup combo was moving arm-side. You can see the horizontal movement to the glove side in the progression below (his cutter is in blue in 2022; the sweeper is in yellow-green in 2023):

In 2022, López did not have that glove-side weapon that could generate reliable swings-and-misses to right-handed hitters. The cutter and the four seam fastball had too much overlap, spin-wise; the curveball, while moving glove-side, moved on a separate horizontal plane than his sinker and changeup, likely making it easier to pick up out of the hand for batters. The 2023 sweeper, on the other hand, had virtually identical induced vertical break (IVB) to his sinker and changeup, allowing for more of a disguised look when the pitch was released from the hand.

Extreme sweep, however, is not the only way to create a successful slider. While López, between 2022 and 2023, committed to creating more horizontal break on his glove-side breaker, Logan Gilbert pursued the opposite strategy. Look how the horizontal movement decreases over time, so the pitch moves less horizontally in the 2023 season:

In 2022, Gilbert’s slider was in a sort of no-man’s land. It didn’t have the ridiculous horizontal movement of López’s sweeper, but it moved enough that it was not easy for Gilbert to throw it reliably in the strike-zone. Here’s one well-located example from May of 2022:

In 2023, he killed all horizontal movement on the pitch, throwing one of the purest “gyro sliders” in the game. The shape change increased the average speed from 87 mph to 89 mph, and he racked up nearly twice as many called strikes on the pitch as he did in 2022. As with López, the change worked well as a pairing with his own primary pitch, the workhorse four-seamer, which he likes to use up in the zone, playing with hitters on more of a north-south game plan in contrast to López’s east-west attack. Here’s the new slider with less glove-side movement:

Lopez and Gilbert both made significant changes to their slider shape between 2022 and 2023. For López, it was creating a swing-and-miss option; for Gilbert, it was finding a secondary offering that he could reliably land in the strike zone. While the difference in ERA wasn’t remarkable, the change in peripherals was: Lopez upped his K% by six percentage points, while Gilbert dropped his walk rate from 6.4% to 4.7% while increasing his strikeout rate.

In 2024, Joe Ryan has the opportunity to make a similar jump. As his pitch plot from 2023 shows, Ryan had issues commanding any of his secondaries.

The fastball/splitter combo can work for certain pitchers. Kevin Gausman famously rode the two-pitch fastball/splitter combo all the way to insane strikeout rates and Cy Young votes in two consecutive years. Gausman’s problem, of course, is his batted-ball outcomes. In 2022, he allowed a .363 BABIP; in 2023, it was still pretty high at .324. Gausman generally does not want to throw his splitter for a strike, meaning that hitters can assume the pitch is a fastball if it’s in the zone. Gausman has a nasty swing-and-miss profile, but he’s too predictable when he falls behind in the count and needs to throw a strike.

Ryan in 2023 had a similar problem. 85% of his pitches were either fastballs or splitters, and like Gausman, he mostly wanted to use the splitter as a chase pitch. The big difference: Gausman sits at 95 mph on his four-seamer, while Ryan sits 92. When hitters sat fastball on Gausman and guessed right, the result was usually a hard liner, not fully squared up. For Ryan, a fastball thrown at the wrong time meant it was getting launched. Ryan allowed 32 homers in 161 innings, resulting in a 4.51 ERA despite his pristine strikeout-to-walk ratios.

The solution, as Ryan and the Twins excellent pitching development staff have recognized, is the development of a “gyro slider.” Let’s look at that 2023 pitch plot again. Look at the dark green and light green dots on the left side of the plot, representing his “sweeper” and “slider,” respectively.

Unlike López and Gilbert, the shapes are fuzzy. He couldn’t reliably repeat a big bendy sweeper or a tighter gyro offering. Often, there wasn’t much distinguishing the sweeper or gyro. My takeaway from looking at this chart is that Ryan simply did not have a clear idea of what he was intending when he threw any kind of slider. While he’d only thrown roughly 80 pitches in front of Hawkeye cameras this spring as of Saturday, the early results look promising. It looks like Ryan is generating distinct shapes between his gyro offering and his bendy sweeper (yellow and blue, respectively, in the plot below):

There’s even a suggestion that Ryan might be trying out a cutter — in Ryan’s last start of the spring, he threw a couple of high velocity/low horizontal break pitches that hit nearly 10 inches of IVB.

A potential cutter might just be icing on the cake. If Ryan can truly throw both pitches — a Gilbert-esque gyro slider for strikes and a López sweeper for chases from right-handed hitters — he could easily make a run at Cy Young votes in 2024.