ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- No Pirate has caught Roansy Contreras more in his three years with the team than Jason Delay. From Class AA Altoona, AAA Indianapolis and the majors, Delay and Contreras have been together more time than apart since 2021.
It's fair to say Delay knows Contreras' tendencies, especially when the 23-year-old right-hander needs to throw a get-right pitch.
"The slider has always been his pitch that gets him back in the zone, even going back to the minor leagues," Delay said. "I think, if anything, it speaks to his stuff."
That's worth keeping in mind when looking at a start like Tuesday against the Rays. Contreras would end up taking the loss in the 4-1 decision, though that was not all his fault.
And interestingly, he got there by throwing more sliders than any other Pirate starter in the pitch tracking era (since 2008). Contreras threw 99 pitches, 58 of which were sliders. That beat the previous team record for most sliders in a game, which was held by, again, Contreras when he threw 50 on April 20.
The Pirates have leaned heavily on the slider this year. Vince Velasquez and Johan Oviedo are throwing it about as often as their four-seam fastball, even. Contreras has taken it a step further so far. He's thrown his slider for 48.2% of his pitches. Going by FanGraphs' data, no starting pitcher has ever thrown the slider that often in a season (min. 120 innings).
Contreras' slider is definitely a plus pitch, and with his velocity down early in the year as he was still stretching out his arm, it made sense to lean on offspeed and breaking stuff more. The early returns were really good, too. Hitters have just a .143 batting average against it this year, and Harold Ramírez's home run in the sixth on a slider up was the first extra-base hit Contreras has allowed all year with his primary breaking ball.
Normally, that would make it his best secondary pitch. But as the Pirates get a bit deeper into the season, the slider is becoming his primary pitch, at least in practice.
It's at least a viable option because Contreras can throw it for a strike in different areas, especially in the strike zone:
The Rays are a good slider-hitting team, entering the night with a MLB-best .266 batting average against sliders. They did get four runs off of Contreras, but two of them were the product of a pop up that was lost in the ceiling at Tropicana Field that dropped between Jack Suwinski and Rodolfo Castro. Had that been converted for an easy out, Contreras might have been able to get a quality start against the best lineup over the first month of the season.
So if the goal was to keep hitters off balance, it more or less worked, even if the results weren't completely there.
"I feel like it was thrown in the right spots against that kind of lineup," Contreras said, via interpreter Stephen Morales. "I feel pretty good with it."
The question is more so how sustainable is this? The Pirates have been built on the pitching ideology of throwing your best stuff often. It's never reached this level before, though. Is the fact that he can throw it for strikes and alter the movement enough that this can be a viable way to go through a lineup a couple times?
To focus on just the home run ball, how much of that was because it was a miss-executed pitch, and how much of it was because Ramírez saw 10 sliders Tuesday?
Contreras' early results are mixed. He has a 4.09 ERA and 3.69 FIP and his strikeouts are down. He's also going into games deeper more consistently. He walked four Tuesday, partially because he could fall out of the zone.
Take some good and bad there. That comes with a sophomore season.
He's going to need that fastball command, and Delay confirmed that when Contreras' has that, it just makes the slider play up even more. But with his back against the wall against a top offense Tuesday, Contreras went to his best pitch often. We'll have to see how often he does that moving forward.
