STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- Kyle Crick has quietly put together an impactful season, even if the peripherals don't show it.
Crick, a 26-year-old righty, has suffered a rocky road since the calendar flipped to June, with a 4.26 ERA for the month to go along with two blown saves. Crick's two home runs allowed in June conspired with seven walks to leave him with that bloated ERA, even if his batting average against was still solid at .136. Those seven walks tied three other months over his career for the highest single-month total, and his two home runs also tied career highs for a per-month figure.
So, yes, it was a bad month for the late-inning reliever, but Richard Rodriguez he is not.
Perhaps his slider serves as the main factor in Clint Hurdle's clear and stated preference for Crick to come in to high-leverage situations. The pitch's bona fides are seriously impressive.
Hitters are chasing it 41.1 percent of the time when it lands outside the zone, and whiffing when it falls inside at a 30.3 percent. The overall whiff-per-swing on the pitch is an astounding 48.6 percent. He ranks 14th in all of baseball among relievers who have thrown at least 25 sliders in terms of wOBA against the pitch, coming in at .193. Francisco Liriano comes in second with .093 ... that might be a column for another day.
The catalyst for Crick's slider finding another level is the movement he can put on the pitch.
This handful of pitches shows that Crick isn't afraid to come into the zone with the pitch, and he can bury it against lefty hitters or pinpoint it on the back door. A pitch for all hitters, if you will.
All sliders are not created equal. Some have a bit more vertical movement while others still rely on moving sideways to fool a hitter. The baseball gods must have paid Crick's version of the pitch a little bit of extra attention, as his horizontal movement is well off the charts.
This is a look at Crick's slider movement, horizontally, versus the average slider across all of MLB. This means that Crick's horizontal movement -- some of which you saw in the video above -- is 10.6 inches more than the norm. This is actually a drop from his 10.8 rate in 2018, but we won't quibble.
With this movement, then, it's not wonder that Crick's slider lands in the zone just 42 percent of the time. Hung sliders equal trouble, sure. But with a pitch that can move like Crick's slider, wouldn't you like to make hitters chase? Of course you would, but Crick's slider has good enough movement to fool hitters into taking an otherwise juicy pitch, just as Harold Ramirez found out on Sunday:
The first pitch, by all reason, could have at least been offered at, to say nothing of any potential result. Yet, Crick's MLB-best average spin rate of 3,211 rpm on his slider allows for enough late break to fool Ramirez into thinking the pitch will fall out of the zone. After the initial offering, Crick comes right back with another slider that does just that.
And this feels like a natural segue to talk about pitch pairing and pitch tunneling.
Simply put, pitch pairing refers to two pitches offered back to back. A building block of pitch sequencing, pitch pairing can be used to maximize the difference in velocity, location and spin among two consecutive offerings. It just makes good sense. A common example that is quite en vogue in today's game is to offer a high four-seam fastball, followed by a breaking ball down. Such a combination offers not only a quick change in velocity but in location, as well. A hitter's eye level is suddenly changed, and can throw him off for the rest of the at-bat.
Pitch tunneling, on the other hand, builds off of pitch pairing by designing two consecutive pitches to look as similar as they can, for as long as they can. Doing so adds a considerable amount of deception, as this recent tweet from Rob Friedman displays:
2018 PitchingNinja "I can't believe these are 2 pitches" Tunneling Award. ?
Kyle Hendricks: 87mph Sinker and 78mph Changeup. ? pic.twitter.com/WE5XpyAHfD
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) December 20, 2018
Crick's got the pairing down pat. I pulled all of his pitches for 2019 -- 409 in total as of this writing -- and found 36 pairings of FFSL -- that is four-seam followed by slider -- and 34 slider-slider pairings. The Ramirez example up above was a SLSL combo, and it resulted in two consecutive strikes.
Among the 34 slider-slider pairings Crick has let loose this season, 14 of the second pitches in those pairings resulted in swinging strikes. Overall, 49 of the 68 total pitches in this pair landed for a strike, be it swinging, called or foul.
Among the 36 FFSL pairings -- totaling 72 pitches -- Crick found a strike 52 times.
Both pairings combined saw just seven total pitches put into play.
All seven of those resulted in outs.
Crick does this without being able to classically tunnel the pitches as well as some of his peers. Here's an example, culled from two pitches to complete a strikeout against Marcell Ozuna:
Take note of the final, zoomed in overlay as that is where you will see the lack of tunneling. Crick's pitches -- the first a four-seamer, the second a slider -- diverge quickly.
This particular example still produced in a positive result. Ozuna flailed miserably as Crick's filth cascaded away from the strike zone. However, sliders are fickle. A slight change in grip here, a small bump in arm slot there can certainly alter Crick's other-worldly movement. Tunneling helps to stave off those in-season changes that a pitch can go through. While not absolutely necessary, it falls in the "nice to have" bucket.
Still, the results have been there for his slider, and the pitch has certainly proved capable of getting him through some tough times.
MORE MOUND VISIT
June 17: Saving Polanco's summer
June 14: Brault steps up
June 13: Archer's fastball lets him down
June 12: Tucker's first taste examined
