To be able to use the strategy of bringing hitters to a middle speed and beat them faster and slower, you have to have middle speed pitches that are work horses. In Civale’s case, that is his cutter.
Cutters work off FB’s for the most part. And that is because hitters are trained to hunt FB and whack them. From an early age they are told NOT TO SWING at junk, and it is ingrained in them because most breaking pitches are designed to be chase pitches. Not so with a cutter, it is a strike pitch in most cases because its movement profile isn’t real large. But it can be used as a chase if disguised correctly
Once again, more of a 30 thousand foot view, rather than too much detail.
In the Kzone diagram above you will see some offsets. It is the basis for understanding the way leading edge pitchers use tunneling effectively today. And isn’t necessarily the way it has been popularized by the TV graphics where they show a single tunnel with all a pitcher’s offerings emanating from.
In the diagram there is this grey dotted line to be used as a reference. From there we have a black circle (a typical Civale 4s FB) offset to the upper right corner of the Kzone. Then a red circle offset to the left (a typical Civale cutter) and down from the top of the Zone.
Using average Movement profiles for those two pitches, the differential horizontal movement between a Civale FB/Cutter is 17”. And the differential in vertical movement is 8”. The actual VERTICAL window they come out of (pitchers hand) is way above the strike zone and isn’t really important, given pitchers release points are very consistent and hitters can’t identify the small changes most pitchers have on two similar FB’s like a 4s/cutter. But the horizontal window is important and there is a yellow circle with a black x, that I have put on top of the reference line, to use as the “window” (ie tunnel) that the pitches I am going to look at will come out of.
So we have a FB that moves in to a righty 11” off the tunnel and ends up at the very top of the strike zone. The cutter moves the opposite direction 6” from the horizontal tunnel reference line, and 8” additional inches vertically down from where the FB ends up.