Back in 2019, after a disastrous stint with the Yankees, and before he got his career on track with the Reds, Sonny Gray admitted in a candid conversation that he was a curveball guy. The slider that the Yankees wanted him to throw was just his curveball thrown harder. And that caused problems with the way they wanted him to throw the pitch.
"I don’t know how people throw sliders for strikes that are still tight, good pitches. I’m at 2-0 and I’m throwing a slider, and either I’m throwing a s----y slider in the zone, or I’m yanking it into the dirt and it’s 3-0 and I’m screwed either way."
Something must have changed since then. Gray is now throwing the slider more than he's ever thrown it before. He's also throwing them in the zone more than a third of the time, which is more than he's done in five years. It's harder than it's been in the last five years, too. He's been adding sweep to it over time and has referred to it as a sweeper, but it's not the sweepiest it's ever been. It's just nasty.
“(The sweeper) was getting a lot of swings because it was moving like I’ve never seen it move,” catcher Ryan Jeffers said after a start in July. “It was just silly how much it was moving.”
Maybe some of the key for Gray has just been calling the sweeper a sweeper instead of a slider. There's been some blowback against the sweeper as a thing, and some of the criticisms can ring true. This pitch has existed before, and it is just a type of slider.
But there's real benefit from being more precise with our pitch names. Catchers need to be able to call two different types of sliders now, naming one a sweeper makes it easy. Advance scouts and analysts need to know if a guy has two sliders. Hitters need to know what shapes they will see at the plate.
And pitchers benefit from it too. In our conversation in 2019, Gray had a revelation — if he just called his fastball a cutter, he'd do different things with it. He'd think about it differently.
“What if you just called your four-seam a cutter?” Gray remembers his then-pitching coach Caleb Cotham asking. “For me, mentally if I call it a cutter, I can manipulate it more, I can throw it 88 or I can throw it 94, and I can throw it straighter or I can pull on it and get more depth.”
We have some facts here. Gray is throwing his harder breaking pitch more often, more in the zone, getting more swings, and limiting the power on it better than he has in his career. This, despite his slider not having more sweep on it than it has before in his career.
It's possible he just has more confidence in the pitch. He used it a whopping 39 percent of the time in his last postseason start. And maybe, when he's thrown in his bullpens and prepared for his games, maybe it's helped to call this pitch a sweeper, maybe it helps him mentally re-coordinate how and when he will use it.
Either way you name it, the pitch is nasty and will be a huge key for him in today's Game 3 start.
ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57y6KtnmWSobyov46mo5tllJ7Dqr%2FIqKVmq5Wntqa%2FjKucrK2cqcBurtGamqSdpGScs7%2FMeq6tfJ2MoZJ70qigsqFhaMaSos6gZg%3D%3D