Every Cleveland Indians starter’s most improved pitch
By Zack Meisel 28m ago
CINCINNATI — Starting pitchers no longer hibernate during the winter months.
They lock themselves in a laboratory, where they study spreadsheets and review video clips as they craft the perfect pitch to implement into their repertoire. When pitchers report to spring training, coaches aren’t aiming to pinpoint who developed a beer belly. They’re looking to identify who wields a fancy new slider that whips from one edge of the strike zone to the other like a frisbee.
Trevor Bauer dedicated an entire offseason to developing a new slider, and a subsequent winter refining his changeup. Shane Bieber followed Bauer’s lead and spent the offseason before last cultivating an effective changeup.
The way the Indians’ rotation has delivered quality starts in 2020, it would be easy to point to a litany of pitches that appear to be enhanced. So, we asked each Cleveland starter to identify which pitch in their arsenal is most improved this season.
Shane Bieber
Cutter, curveball
Bieber and Roberto Pérez praised his new cutter, a pitch he added over the winter and polished while the league was on hiatus, when he said he finally “nailed down some consistency with it.” It equips him with a weapon with horizontal break, but at a higher velocity than his slider.
“It’s a little bit harder and it’s late,” Pérez said. “It’s going to be huge against lefties. Lefties have to be aware of that, especially going fastball up and in and throwing a cutter off that.”
Bieber’s take: “My thought process was to get guys off my fastball. (In my first start), I couldn’t feel my slider, and I was able to turn (the cutter) into a slider. I use that cutter/slider-type pitch to keep guys off the depth-y curveball and the fastball.”
We’d be remiss not to mention his curveball, which has proved lethal through his first two starts. It’s responsible for 15 of his 27 strikeouts. Of those 15 third strikes, nine of the baseballs plunged into the dirt and Bieber’s catcher smothered another two as they spiraled toward the earth.
“In terms of what he does with it with two strikes, it’s much the same,” pitching coach Carl Willis said. “But his ability to throw it for a strike with such conviction and not letting it get that hump in it and get tracked by the hitter, I do see that as improved.”
“He has five above-average pitches,” Pérez said. “As a hitter, you can’t just sit there and look for just one pitch. He has five weapons to go to now. It’s his second year. He’s getting to know the league a little more and our division. He’s paying attention to what guys are trying to do against him. Maturity, man. This is how I describe Shane Bieber. His work ethic, the way he works, how he carries himself in the clubhouse.
“That’s why he’s our ace.”
Mike Clevinger
Changeup
Clevinger has long fixated on boosting his velocity until his fastballs whiz past hitters at a rate too rapid for radar guns to register. Over the winter, though, he prioritized his curveball and changeup.
He said since he arrived in Cleveland for summer camp, his changeup “has really picked up.”
He altered his grip and relied on an Edgertronic high-speed camera to help him determine the proper mechanics for throwing it.
“(That) made me get more behind it instead of trying to sideswipe it,” Clevinger said. “I think my changeup is going to be a new weapon for me.”
The changeup forces left-handed hitters to consider another off-speed pitch. Clevinger usually throws his slider to righties and his curveball to lefties. Through two starts, he has thrown 30 changeups, all but two to lefties. No batter has recorded a hit against the pitch. Last season, it was the pitch hitters fared best against.
Carlos Carrasco
Changeup
Even after Carrasco completed his triumphant journey back to the mound last September, he still yearned to reclaim his spot in the Indians’ rotation. Nearly 14 months after his leukemia diagnosis, Carrasco spilled out of the home dugout at Progressive Field as Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69” blared from the ballpark speakers a few minutes before first pitch. For the rotation’s elder statesman, it’s more about his return to his familiar role than any slight improvement in his arsenal.
That said, Carrasco lauded the early results from his changeup. Last season, hitters teed off on the pitch, to the tune of a .313 average and .612 slugging percentage. Carrasco said his curveball and changeup guided him through that first start of the year — and first since May 30, 2019 — in which he piled up 10 strikeouts in six innings.
Zach Plesac
Curveball
Plesac devoted his offseason (and quarantine) to refining his mechanics.
Clevinger helped him create more mobility with his hips. He perfected the timing of his motion and his follow-through, too.
“With that comes consistency with my pitches,” he said. “I think it just tightened everything up.”
Plesac already possessed an effective slider, and he threw it nearly as often as his fastball in his first start of the year, to ravishing results. His curveball, however, has made the greatest leap.
“The consistency with the break is more advanced than it was a year ago,” he said. “It’s just finding that feel with it. There are times when it feels comfortable, but I’m not throwing it in the right spots and it gets hit. Sometimes I learn where the right spot is by throwing a bad one in the wrong spot. It’s really learning to read the hitters and read how it’s playing that day and just focus on what I’m trying to do with it after the previous pitch, just working the sequences to get guys off-balance and keep the ball out of the heart of the plate.”
On Monday, Plesac relied on a heavy dose of fastballs and changeups low in the zone, which he said eventually opened the door for him to throw more curveballs later in the game.
Aaron Civale
Slider
You wouldn’t know it based on Civale’s pitch usage, but Willis contends Civale’s slider has made significant strides. He has only thrown it about 13 percent of the time in his two starts. Willis said Civale didn’t have a feel for it in Minnesota on Sunday, so he relied more on his cutter. Civale altered his grip of the slider after spring training was halted.
Of course, with only 12 major-league starts to his name, the soft-spoken hurler has plenty of improvements in mind.
“Comfort with all of my pitches has definitely gone up and continues to go up the more I throw them,” Civale said. “(It’s) just an experience thing.”
Adam Plutko
Curveball
Over the winter, Plutko committed to crafting the proper curveball to fit his revamped approach: fastballs high in the zone and off-speed pitches at the bottom of the zone. It sounds simple, but Plutko essentially smacked a hornet’s nest like a piñata whenever he tossed anything near the middle of the plate, even when resting on one of the corners. He served up 16 of his 22 home runs on midlevel pitches and, unsurprisingly, hitters’ exit velocities soared in that same region.
Plutko has exhibited elite spin rate on his curveball, but he relied on it only 10.6 percent of the time last year because the spin wasn’t causing the pitch to plummet toward the ground.
It was just spinning sideways, refusing to offer him the sharp break that would complement a high fastball.
He said the plan “is rock solid” and that he feels “really confident in what I’m doing.”
“The proof’s in the pudding,” he said. “The fact that the curveball is working the way I want it to, the fact that the high heater last year got proven to be effective for me, I’m going in there with more confidence than I’ve ever had.”
(Photo of Shane Bieber: Hannah Foslien / Getty Images)
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