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A Pitcher List Conversation with Cal Quantrill

For Quantrill, adding a splitter brought a key pitch into his arsenal.

Renee Dechert
Pitcher Interviews 7/25/2024

Pitcher List Conversations are transcripts of interviews with professional baseball players—and sometimes, players discuss topics other than baseball. This has been lightly edited for clarity.

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Any DAF’d pitcher looking to “prove it” coming off a rough season surely hopes they won’t be picked up by the Colorado Rockies. After all, pitching at elevation is notoriously difficult.

However, that’s what happened to former Cleveland Guardian Cal Quantrill after he was DFA’d last fall. A Rockies team always desperate for pitching claimed Quantrill and made the trade.

At the end of the 2023 season, there were already signs that Quantrill had gotten healthy and figured things out. The question was whether that progress could continue in Colorado.

It has, with Quantrill’s new splitter quickly becoming his calling card. Rumors suggest that his last days with the Rockies may be coming as the trade deadline approaches.

I spoke with Quantrill in the Rockies clubhouse on July 5, 2024, to learn about his splitter, pitching at elevation, and how being an engineer affects his approach to the game.

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Renee Dechert: Nick Pollack has been fascinated by your splitter. So I wondered if you could talk a little bit about it—it’s been a transformative pitch for you. How did you develop that?

Cal Quantrill: I think at the end of the 2022 season, I had a very good year, but I had to be so good with the fastball. I had to be so smart with how I pitched. I was still kind of lacking a pitch that I could go to in tough situations and feel really good about, a free out.

I started working on it in that offseason, kind of looking at other examples across the league of guys who had added a splitter.

RD:  Who did you look at?

CQ: Kevin Gausman added a splitter and went from a very good pitcher to a borderline Cy Young. And then I played with a couple of guys with good splitters. David Miller had a really good splitter in San Diego with me. Kirby Yates is another one. And I kind of toyed around with some different grips I’d seen from them and then tried to implement it in the same way that Gausman added his.

Unfortunately, my shoulders didn’t play nice last year. I had intentions of adding it last year. I just couldn’t get my shoulder right. So I had to delay it a year, which probably was a good thing. I think I got into a much better spot by the time I brought it into play this year.

Now it’s been a pretty big part of my mix.

Cal Quantrill’s splitter grip

Cal Quantrill’s splitter grip

RD: How did you change your mindset, moving into your splitter and adding it to your repertoire?

CQ: I think from the outside it might not look like this, but I feel like my whole career, I’ve been willing to make big adjustments to continue to succeed.

I’ve had stretches in my career where I’ve eliminated the two-seamers and thrown only four-seamers. I’ve had stretches where I’ve been strictly a sinker-slider guy. I’ve had stretches where I didn’t throw a curveball, I’ve added a curveball. I’ve had different windups. I’ve always been willing to do something, add something if it makes sense to add something, to try and get better. And I know that I’m athletic enough to learn pretty much any pitch.

I just think the hardest part is being able to implement it effectively at the highest level.

Anybody can throw a good pitch in the bullpen. But can you throw it against good hitters? And I think that for me, some of those other things I’ve worked on in the past, some have stuck, some haven’t.

The splitter I could tell right away it was going to be a difference-maker, and I think it’s because the changeup was always a good pitch for me coming through the system. It just wasn’t nasty enough at the big-league level, and the splitter was.

RD: So, you’re an engineer. What kind?

CQ: It’s called “Management, Science and Engineering.” It’s a mix. I took some civil engineering classes, electrical engineering classes, and then some business classes.

RD: Do you think your background as an engineer has affected how you approach pitching?

CQ: I think my background as an engineer has affected how I’ve gone about learning how to pitch, not so much how I pitch on the mound.

RD: Can you explain that?

CQ: In the offseason, in the lab, in throwing bullpens, I do think that I’m a pretty analytical guy trying to take four or five, six different data points and come up with a solution that I think looks best. I’m willing to try just about anything to make it look good. But I’ve always felt like I did a good job of leaving that in the bullpen.

When I step on the mound, it’s full compeat, and I don’t really care one day if I have to throw 80% fastball or 70% splitters. Whatever is working, I’m fine with throwing. So yeah, I mean, I think it’s certainly helped me. It’s a way of learning and getting better but try and leave the nerd inside.

RD: What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced with your splitter?

CQ: I think most guys with a splitter will tell you this, that it can be a little bit fickle.

It’ll work. It’ll be so good for a month-and-a-half, and then you’ll wake up some random Tuesday and suddenly it’s not splitting [laughs].

I think for me so far this year, it’s been pretty good.

The days that it’s not good, it’s about trying to find that out faster instead of letting up a couple of doubles before you realize it.

And then still feeling confident enough with the rest of your repertoire that you don’t become reliant—where it’s like, “This is all I can do to get out of this.”

I thought my last start, I didn’t have a very good splitter yesterday. I kind of kept trying to find it—like, you know, I think I need this—and I just realized by the time we got to the sixth or seventh batter in the game, I was “I’m just gonna have to do it a different way today.”

I still felt like I’m learning that part of throwing a splitter as a starter.

RD: Merrill Kelly told me one time that sometimes pitches just leave him, and it takes a while. Has that been some of your experience with this?

CQ: That’s the perfect explanation. Kelly hit it on the head.

Splitter guys, I think, will tell you that is the most common one to lose is a splitter, but sometimes when I’m throwing the splitter a lot, I’ll lose a different pitch. Like, I’m throwing 45% splinters, and suddenly I can’t throw a cutter.

You’ve got to take your warm ups very seriously when you have six pitches and say, “I gotta get through them all, so I know that I can do it this next inning.”

RD: You’ve made Pitching Ninja with it. What’s that feel like?

CQ: It’s always good to be on there [laughs]. It’s nice to get a swing-and-miss every now and then.

RD: So these are totally unrelated questions.

Ryan Spilborghs on his radio show asked a question: “Why don’t pitchers get the equivalent of a home run celebration?” Do you think if you have a complete game or you meet a certain threshold with strikeouts, should you get a celebration?

CQ: Mmm, that’s interesting. I don’t know. I don’t even know what that would look like.

I, personally, am okay with where the game is going. I think that we should be excited, and baseball is extremely hard. When you have success, it’s okay to show it. I think that we should do our very best to direct it at our own dugouts. It’s not about showing up the other player. It’s about celebrating your team having a big accomplishment.

So maybe if you get eight innings and 10 punchies, if you want to let one rip on the mound, I’m good with that.

RD: Do you want to go in the dugout after a good outing and wear the ski helmet or anything like that?

CQ: I’ll pass on the ski helmet. I’ll leave that to the hitters.

RD: How does your process change both for your splitter and your approach in general going in and out of elevation?

CQ: Yeah, it’s tough. I still feel like I’m kind of learning how to do it.

I’ve leaned in on Kyle Freeland and Austin Gomber and some of the guys who’ve done it more than me.

It’s certainly hardest if you pitch the first day back or the first day on the road.

But I think as a staff, we have some things that we’ve been doing this year to try and prepare ourselves. Some of them are simple. Some of them are just things that are just so obvious: sleep and hydration. And some of them are about tweaking the repertoire a little bit at home and understanding that you can’t just rely on stuff, that the chances that it’s going to be good enough here in Denver are pretty tough. There’s not a lot of guys who can throw a 20-inch fastball or a devastating curveball here at altitude.

So I think that you’ll see all of us, a little bit of a pitch tweaking at home and on the road and trying to get better at that.

RD: If you can steal any other pitchers’ pitch, whose would you take and why?

CQ: I mean, I’d take Chris Sale’s slider.

RD: What do you like about it?

CQ: I like any pitch that doesn’t look like anyone else’s pitch.

I can’t think of another guy who throws that one—the way he backs it up. He’s got a plus-plus fastball that you have to be aware of, and then he’s throwing a 40-inch sweeping slider from a slot that people don’t see.

I think Tanner Houck is doing the same thing from the right side.

I think those big sweepers are really fun pitches. I think your arm kind of has to work that way to throw that pitch. It’s not really a pitch that you can super effectively teach. I’ve seen some guys get pretty good at it, but those two have pretty natural arm slots for that pitch.

It’s a good pitch.

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It’s worth returning to Quantrill’s comments about celebrations: “When you have success, it’s okay to show it. I think that we should do our very best to direct it at our own dugouts. It’s not about showing up the other player. It’s about celebrating your team having a big accomplishment.”

That came into play in the Rockies 20-7 blowup of the Boston Red Sox on July 24, Quantrill took center stage first as the starting pitcher and then as part of a benches-clearing event that was the result of a celebration intended for his teammates but instead was misunderstood by Reese McGuire.

Here’s what he told media after the game:

Whether Quantrill is still a Rockie next week remains to be seen, but it’s safe to say he’s probably not shipping up to Boston. 

Additional Reading

 

Renee Dechert

Renee Dechert writes about baseball and fandom, often with a focus on the Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks. (She's also an English professor, but the baseball is more interesting.) Follow her on Twitter (@ReneeDechert) or Bluesky (@ReneeDechert.com).

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