There’s no one archetype for great relief pitchers. This has never been the case. Sure, maybe there’s a common concept that comes to mind when you think of one in a general sense, likely a guy who throws super hard with a nasty breaking ball who is entirely untouchable. Realistically, though, not everyone can be that guy. The good news is that they don’t have to be.
Especially for relievers more than starters, you can find success simply by doing things that other pitchers aren’t. None of the three guys featured in this article are flamethrowers. In fact, their max velos this year range from 95.8 to 96.2. They all average around 93, which is below the standard for most relievers in the modern game. It has not stopped them from being excellent. When you can’t dominate in the traditional sense, you have to find something else that works for you.
Drafted in a round that no longer exists, and traded just 12 innings into his first season as a professional, Anderson had humble origins to his baseball career. He worked his way up through the Rangers’ farm system as a multi-inning relief pitcher, racking up strikeouts with varying levels of overall success. He made his MLB debut in 2023, a few weeks shy of his 26th birthday, and struggled to find the same whiffs in his first stint in the majors.
2024 was a disaster season for Anderson. Hopping onto the trends of the time, Anderson looked at his arsenal and realized his sinker was getting hammered, and as a sidearmer capable of cutting his four-seam to get an ultra-flat VAA on it, he started throwing it more to try to capitalize on the whiffs it was getting. He also switched to a sweepier slider to get a better east-west approach for when he did want to use his sinker. In theory, this was a great plan. His K rate did go up… unfortunately, so did his home run rate. He allowed more than double from the previous year in fewer innings.
I touched on the subject of non-linear progression around the start of the season, and Anderson’s transformation since his debut seems to be a shining example of why it’s important to be patient while pitchers experiment to find what works. He did get unlucky in 2024, but the poor execution of his new game plan put him in the position to get unlucky in the first place. This year, he’s further refined his arsenal and is laying waste to unsuspecting hitters.
You are reading that correctly. Anderson has a 45.2% whiff rate on his fastball this season. For context, hitters whiff on Kodai Senga’s forkball 43.2% of the time. Anderson is running this clip with a fastball. The next highest whiff rate on a qualified fastball this year is Aroldis Chapman’s sinker at 40.8%. You know, the pitch that averages 99.8 mph with 17.1” IVB and 11.0” of run? Anderson’s got it beat with his choppy-looking sidearm 93. Those of you with some knowledge of pitch design already know why this is, and I mentioned this pitch’s flat approach angle earlier. More than just its incredible +1.8° HAVAA, he locates it exceptionally well. He drills the upper half and area above the zone relentlessly, maximizing the utility of the angle he creates.
That’s not all, either. He releases the ball with his arm almost parallel to the ground, at a 6.4° angle. Despite that, he’s getting 1:45 observed movement direction on this pitch. It rises substantially more than it looks like it should be able to. When you watch the pitch, it’s like it’s defying gravity and rising the whole way to the plate. So while his 11.8” of IVB isn’t anything crazy for his low release height of 4.5’, it’s way more than you’d expect from a pitcher with that arm angle. You have to go up 6° in arm angle to find the next qualified pitcher (Edwin Uceta) who gets as much rise on their fastball as Anderson does.
While his fastball has been his most dominant pitch, it’s not the only one getting the job done. His sweeper has been nearly unbeatable as well. This is a new pitch for him this year, leaning even further into the change from last season now with a slower, purer sweeper at 80.2 mph with 14.0” of HB rather than something in between like last year’s iteration at 82.1 mph with only 7.4”. It’s running the same whiff rate as last season while also forcing weak contact and avoiding barrels.
The rest of his arsenal consists of a sinker with a lot of separation from his four-seam, despite coming out of his hand at extremely similar release points and spin directions. It does its job, inducing ground balls albeit in much less spectacular fashion. He also has a changeup with screwball-like movement that he hasn’t figured out how to locate consistently, so he doesn’t throw it much. It would be an incredible pitch if he could develop that. Anderson’s functionally a three-pitch guy with a sweeper he can use in all situations, a sinker he can use to get out of jams, and an invisible four-seamer that racks up whiffs at will. It’s been a small sample this year, but he looks like a relief ace right now, even if he won’t close over Trevor Megill.
In hindsight, it should’ve been even clearer than it was at the time that getting a flyball pitcher with a 24.7% K%-BB% and .204 BAA out of GABP as his home ballpark would lead to a breakout. In fairness, Cruz was 35 with no track record of major league success outside of a comically high strikeout rate after making his MLB debut at 32 a few years earlier.
Cruz’s story is a fascinating one. He transitioned from the infield to the pitching mound at 21 after being unable to hit his way out of rookie ball. The Royals released him after two seasons of unproductive performances. He spent the next two years out of MILB entirely, only appearing in some Puerto Rican Winter League games, though performing well in them. He spent one year in the Cubs system after that, pitching poorly as a prospect far older than the average player at the level he was in. Another three years went by, pitching in Indy Ball with brief detours to winter leagues and the Mexican League. Then another two of just winter leagues. In 2021, he played his first full season in the Mexican league and pitched his way into the closing role for Guadalajara, the regular season’s best team.
This was enough to get the Reds’ attention, and they signed him to an MILB deal in 2022, where he pitched in Triple-A and did well enough to eventually earn a call-up in September. Two seasons of gaudy strikeout rates and disappointing ERAs later, he was traded to the Yankees. That brings us to the present day, in which Cruz leads all qualified relievers in K rate, but also has the results to match his obliteration of batters.
It starts and ends with the splitter. Cruz’ splitter was already an enigma, and the Yankees, being the Yankees and employing Matt Blake as their pitching coach, found a way to improve it after acquiring him.
They took an already elite, near one-of-one pitch, and pushed it to a further extreme. The truly stunning thing about this is that he’s throwing it far more often this year than he did last, and it’s still getting better-than-elite results. Throwing a pitch 59% of the time and it still being the one with the highest whiff rate (60.2%) among all qualified pitches should not be possible. Hitters are completely incapable of tracking this thing as it tumbles toward the catcher. At its 814 RPM spin rate and low active spin percentage, it’s like a mini-knuckleball. While its movement doesn’t vary to the extent of a true knuckler, it spins in a way that is nearly impossible for hitters to follow.
The meanest thing about this pitch is that if you try to sit on it, you’re still probably not going to do anything with it, and you open yourself up to being blown away by his four-seam, which has seen a huge spike in whiff rate and bad contact since being used less. It also has a ridiculous 39.6% called strike rate because hitters see it coming and assume it’s a splitter that’s going to fall under the zone. This is three-card Monte except there are only two cards, and you know the answer is the one on the left three times as often as the one on the right, and you can guess correctly, but still lose.
He also has a sinker and a slider. The sinker isn’t great, and he should probably throw it a bit less. I don’t fully understand why he throws it the way he does. He raises his arm slot a bit; it actually has a higher spin direction than the four-seam. The slider is fine. It has below-average stuff, but it should play off of the rest of the arsenal well enough. He just needs to locate it better.
In a Yankees bullpen with Williams and Weaver, Cruz may not be in line for many saves. But, if you need a strikeout in a big spot, there’s not a pitcher on any team you want in the game more than him right now.
I don’t even know where to start with this one. If you thought the last two were unique, you have seen nothing yet. We can take a quick look at his background, like we did for the other guys. Unlike those two, Little was a highly touted prospect, a former 27th overall pick by the reigning champion Cubs. His development was a bit slow, hampered by injuries and losing a year to the cancelled 2020 MILB season. He was starting to come into his own as a reliever, getting called up for the first time in 2022, where his debut went very poorly and he was subsequently sent back down. He didn’t appear in the majors in 2023 and was traded to Toronto for cash.
Little played his first full major league season with Toronto in 2024, putting up a respectable 110 ERA+ in low-leverage outings in the back of the Blue Jays bullpen. He was visibly unique already, with a funky short-stepping delivery, heavy sinker, and a hard hammer of a curveball. Going into this season, he decided to lean into what made him odd, and it has paid massive dividends. He is now as chaotic as they come, but it’s working. His 14.9% BB rate is enough to drive fans and managers mad. However, his ability to force ground balls and get strikeouts at an elite clip (35.1% K rate) has carried him to a 1.94 ERA this season. He does this with maybe the most bizarre two-pitch mix I’ve ever seen.
A sinker is supposed to sink. Makes sense, right? It’s a bit of a misnomer; sink mostly refers to the pitch moving in a way different from that of a four-seam. If a four-seam is “rising”, or viewed as the standard, a sinker looks like it’s moving down and to the side in comparison. It’s not common that a sinker actually has negative induced vertical movement. Even our aforementioned sidearmer Anderson’s sinker is vertically neutral. Would anyone care to explain to me how in the world Little is throwing a sinker with -2.0” of IVB from a 26.1° arm angle?
I understand the results of what he’s doing, and I can interpret the data. I do not understand how he is getting into the position to put up said data. This shape allows him to create an impossibly steep attack angle at -7.60°. It’s good for -1.22° VAAAA, or -0.4° HAVAA. He is the inverse of Anderson. Even with SSW putting an hour’s worth of spin direction vs observed movement direction disparity, the 9:44 spin direction he starts at is baffling.
In a comparison that should feel familiar to a previous section, you have to drop to Jason Alexander’s 19.0° arm angle to find a sinker with a lower starting spin direction than Little’s. Even then, Little still has less IVB due to his stronger SSW. The pitcher with the next highest arm slot to average negative IVB on their sinker is Yennier Cano, whose arm angle is 16.6°, nearly 10° lower than Little’s. This is an alien pitch. I’ve never seen anything like it to this extreme. It’s probably part of how he’s run a 36.3% whiff rate on a pitch that is theoretically supposed to be for forcing bad contact. That’s a slightly higher whiff rate than Mason Miller’s four-seam, or Garrett Crochet’s sweeper. That’s the territory we’re in with a sinker. There is nothing else like it.
Much like Anderson from earlier, Little’s absurd fastball is not his primary pitch, and benefits from that. He’s largely been a two-pitch guy this year, throwing his sinker 45.6% of the time, and his curveball 49% of the time. The curveball is somehow just as nasty as the sinker. Coming in hot at 87 mph with -7.3” IVB and 2.3” of glove side horizontal, this is a tight 12-6 hammer curve with a slider’s speed.
Despite the shape, it’s not a gyro curve. It only averages 1,831 RPM, but with 76% active spin. Fittingly, this is another pitch that doesn’t have anything you can compare it to because of how unique it is. Little’s curveball is the lowest-spinning curve among those qualified this year. Furthermore, it’s the fourth hardest qualified curveball, and you have to drop nearly three mph until you reach George Kirby’s curve to find one with an active spin percentage this high.
Generally speaking, super low-spin breaking balls are either gyro breakers or bigger, loopier pitches thrown by guys who don’t have the aptitude for a better sweeping breaking ball. This is neither. It’s shaped kind of like a gyro curve, but it would look different out of his hand. The top-down spin that his curve has, instead of the bullet spin you’d associate with a gyro curve, is the difference here. I have to imagine this is confusing hitters almost as much as it confuses me. That would further explain this pitch being second only to Cruz’s splitter in whiff rate for individual qualified pitches this year.
It doesn’t even matter that he doesn’t bother to sell the pitches with his release. His arm slot raises 14° to throw the curve. That should theoretically be some kind of giveaway, and it just isn’t. His high walk rate is a result of throwing out of the zone as often as he does, not his ability to draw chases. His 40.6% O-Sw% on the curveball is good for the 83rd percentile among relievers this year. The sinker slots in at the 54th percentile in the same metric. It’s the 11th and 14th percentile zone rates causing the problem. I imagine the whiff rates would likely drop somewhat if he threw more strikes, but it might be worth it to cut down the walks just a little bit.
His least-used offering is a frankly insane cutter, because, of course, his third pitch doesn’t make sense either. Why would it? It’s a cutter with a near-slider shape thrown just as hard as his sinker. Yeah, I don’t know. I can’t explain that one. I guess when your fastball comes out of your hand on that much lower of an angle than it has any right to, this is what your cutter looks like? It has 6.1” IVB and 1.3” of arm-side movement on average, though it tends to flip-flop across that horizontal neutral line. I think I’d get a headache if I tried to project how this pitch would play alongside the rest of his arsenal. I might have to, though. He’s not half bad at throwing it off the glove side of the zone; he just hasn’t needed it, so he doesn’t use it much. It was a slightly bigger part of his arsenal last year, and it was fine but not special.
I’ve never had a pitcher vex me quite like Little does. It’s not that I’m confused as to why his pitches work; that part is obvious in his case. It’s that I don’t understand how he does what he does. It doesn’t seem like it should be possible. It’s like he’s an extraterrestrial doing his best to mimic a normal pitcher but not quite getting there. As long as it’s working, maybe I don’t have to understand it.
Brief Thoughts On Pitching In Odd Ways
One of my favorite aspects of pitch design is how pitchers try to make the most of what they have to offer. Finding something abnormal that suits a pitcher’s aptitude is the tricky part. Not everyone has freakish pitches in their range like these guys. Generally speaking, though, the more a pitcher can push their arsenal away from things hitters are used to seeing, the better the results.
As mentioned, none of these guys throws super hard. They make the most of what they have via any number of means at their disposal, be it natural physical biases, strange mechanics, or even something as simple as pitch grips. Their ability to craft world-class pitches by embracing the most unique aspects of their skill sets has allowed them to find big league success for the first time in their careers. Here’s hoping it continues for all of them, and I look forward to seeing more pitchers with baffling new pitches follow in their footsteps.
