I’ve written previously about different archetypes of pitchers. There are only so many different ways to throw a baseball, and a pitcher’s ability to harness these different ways effectively is largely dependent on predetermined factors. You can’t make a pronator good at supinating. That just isn’t going to happen. As a result, there’s a limited number of boxes pitchers can be sorted into. So while it’s not surprising that some guys have skill sets that look the same, I thought it would be interesting to look at two different pitchers who have strikingly similar arsenals but accomplish them in slightly different ways, and have different abilities within this grouping. They’re probably comparable in terms of what they’re capable of in general, so as we break them down together, maybe they could learn things from each other.
Introducing Ginn & Quinn
J.T. Ginn and Quinn Priester don’t have the most in common outside of their pitch arsenals, and they both started to establish themselves in the majors this year as post-hype prospects. Luckily for us, that’s all we need them to have to talk about them.
The similarities stand out immediately; they almost look like the same chart outside of Priester’s curveball. Let’s look at each pitch individually so we can get a better idea of just how alike the offerings are.
Ginn and Quinn are both defined by their heavy sinkers, with usage at 55.9% and 43.2% respectively. Ginn, more so than Priester, has an immediately clear strategy with it, as he loves to pepper the glove side of the zone, hunting called strikes and setting up his other pitches out of the zone there. Comparing the two pitches based on their stuff, I slightly prefer Ginn’s due to the exceptional seam-shifted wake he creates. The observed movement is so far off compared to its initial spin direction. Priester’s sinker is hardly a slouch, though, creating nearly identical steepness by staying more upright in his delivery and releasing the ball from a higher point than Ginn does. I do want to give Ginn a slight “funk” bonus for how low his release is despite his arm slot being what it is. He creates a really strange look with his mechanics.
As you might expect, these pitches have carried similar batted ball profiles this year. Priester’s had more success inducing ground balls, while Ginn has done a better job of avoiding dangerous contact in general. Neither of them has perfect command of these pitches, but Ginn’s plan is more clearly defined. I think in general, Priester could take a note from Ginn’s book about the usage of this pitch and try to aim for the low glove side corner a bit more often. This might lead to more success than just consistently throwing it away from whoever’s in the box, regardless of handedness. This can get you burned in platoon matchups, but throwing sinkers to opposite-handed hitters is already a dangerous game. He might as well go higher risk, higher reward, to get more called strikes and set up his other pitches better. I’d rather that than try to pitch to contact with a fastball that lefties are more likely to hit well, as it runs toward their barrels.
While these pitches share nearly indistinguishable movement and velocity, Priester’s has two distinct advantages. He doesn’t alter his release from his fastball to throw it, which aids deception. Also, his higher release gives it a steeper plane to come in on, creating more whiffs and ground balls. Furthermore, Priester’s slider is generally thrown in better spots than Ginn’s. He drills the low glove-side quadrant of the zone and areas outside of it with good consistency, exactly where you want a slider to be. Ginn’s plot shows an attempt to recreate this, albeit with varying results.
As you’d expect, Priester’s slider has better results just about across the board. Slightly higher whiff and chase rates, inducing more bad contact and avoiding more good contact. This isn’t to say Ginn’s slider is bad; he just needs to cut down on the misses that gravitate toward the middle of the plate.
Side note: I find it interesting that they throw this slider slightly differently. They create about the same amount of active spin, movement, and velocity. However, they start at different spin directions before settling into their final movement direction, and the initial directions are on opposite sides of the initial direction.
The last pitches they have fully in common are their cutters, which are unsurprisingly very similar. The main difference here is in their starting spin direction and raw spin rates, which wind up dictating why they move the way they do. They see about the same amount of difference between initial direction and observed movement direction, but Priester’s ability to start at a higher direction is what allows him to get over the horizontal neutral line for a cutter that actually “cuts”. This isn’t necessarily a knock on J.T.’s, though. His cutter starting at a direction so close to his sinker’s makes it very difficult for hitters to identify which of his fastballs is coming until it’s too late to do anything about it.
Their plans of attack with their cutters are so different that I can’t compare their effectiveness against each other because they’re not trying to accomplish the same things. Ginn has zoned his cutter less often than anyone else in the league so far this year, at just 29%. He is exclusively looking for chases, whiffs, and bad contact out of the zone, and to set up the sinker in the zone. When it is out of the zone, this works very well. When he misses in the zone, it gets obliterated like most cutters do when they’re in bad spots.
Priester’s pitch plot for his cutter is a bit all over the place, but it seems like he tries to do a few different things with it. Specifically against lefties, he’ll try to hit the patented Corbin Burnes high backdoor spot for called strikes sometimes. Otherwise, he works it in on their hands to try to tie them up. He works this same spot against righties, aiming for chases on pitches they think are backdoor sinkers. I can’t tell if the cutters above the zone are intentional or not. There’s a decent number of them, so he might be looking for chases up there. It’s hard to be entirely sure, as they could just as well be misses.
This is where the differences start to arise, although we’ve reached pitches they don’t throw very often, so it’s not like these stand out as massive variances in their pitching profiles. Ginn throws the exact kind of changeup you’d expect from someone with his sinker: low active spin percentage and astonishing SSW. In theory, this pitch should be one of his best offerings. The issue is that he spikes it into the dirt about as often as he puts it in useful locations. He’s at a waste zone rate that is slightly more than double the league average for changeups. That’s not acceptable, and he knows that, which is why he throws this pitch so rarely. I hope he can get a better handle on it, though. It would be a great pitch if he could locate it more consistently.
Priester throws a changeup with a movement relationship to his sinker that is almost a clone of Ginn’s. Their velo separation is exactly the same, and their iVB separation is 0.4” apart from each other. Ironically, he throws his changeup differently. His change has a very high active spin percentage and has less SSW as well. Unfortunately, what his changeup does have in common with Ginn’s is a high rate of wasted pitches and poor locations.
The last pitch either of them throws is Priester’s curveball. Ginn does not offer one. What this pitch lacks in elite velocity or movement, Priester makes up for with his ability to spot it. He drops this just below the zone with excellent consistency, allowing a pitch with mediocre stuff to run above-average chase and whiff rates. Hitters have a hard time squaring it up when they do get the bat on it as well. Lots of hard-hit grounders and 300-foot flyouts. Nothing that would actually cause substantial concerns.
What Do We Take From This?
You might be wondering if there was a point to this beyond just comparing two similar pitchers. I’d say the reason I compared them isn’t just to look at how much they have in common. Rather, to look at the differences and try to find strengths and weaknesses they don’t share. Using those to build off of each other, borrowing what works and leaving behind what doesn’t. I’m not suggesting Ginn can magically obtain Priester’s ability to locate the curve; Ginn would have to learn a curve to begin with and then harness the command of it. But as we went through the pitches, I noted what they did differently and why some things worked, and some didn’t.
One thing I didn’t cover much outside of their relation to deception was arm angles. Priester keeps his very consistent across his entire arsenal, while Ginn’s vary some from pitch to pitch. Getting his arm on the same plane for each pitch type might cause some shifts to his stuff, but could improve his general command and disguise his pitches from tells.
It’s funny, despite having arsenals that look so much alike, their strengths are the opposite of each other. Ginn locates his sinker very well, racking up called strikes at will despite a below-average zone rate. Meanwhile, Priester throws his sinker in the general vicinity of the zone, but is far better at locating his secondary pitches. Also, Priester has a wider arsenal of pitches, but Ginn likely has him beat slightly in terms of pure stuff. I’m getting off track, the point of this wasn’t to say “this one is better than the other one”. I wanted to highlight how even pitchers with so much in common as it relates to how they pitch can still be very different. No two pitchers are exactly alike, though some are much closer than others.
