Deep Dive: Can Gerrit Cole rely on his slider again in 2016?

Things get really interesting when we look at Cole’s usage percentages when there are runners in scoring position.

Let’s take a look at those figures both against left-handed hitters (LHH) and right-handed hitters (RHH).

Starting with righties:

And then the left-handed hitters:

I felt this interesting due to how Cole’s approach changes against batter handedness, specific to the slider. Against right-handed batters, he used the pitch more or less uniformly across the board. Although the changes are admittedly not drastic when looking at left-handed hitters, there is an eight percent difference in the usage on even counts. This effect isn’t obvious until we see that the sinker usage has a large spike when the left-handed hitter is ahead in the count. With a 20 percent usage, this could suggest that Cole, Searage, Francisco Cervelli, and Chris Stewart feel that a pitch with sinking action down in the zone fools a left-handed hitter more effectively than a pitch that is breaking in towards him.

That would seem to make sense after considering that the possibilities of “missing a spot” could be greater with a pitch known more for a horizontal break.

To thread all of this together, we should return to our original question: can the slider be as effective in 2016?

I believe that it can be, and the answer lies in just one more table of data.

Here we see Cole’s 2015 usage when seen vs the number of times through a batting order. Cole does a great job of mixing his pitches. By establishing dominance with high velocity early, he starts mixing in the slider a bit more. The resulting .122 and .149 .BAA the pitch during his second and third laps through his opponents shows that hitters are not expecting it. With swing-and-miss rates above 20 percent no matter when its thrown – the best of any of his pitches – the full picture that the slider paints is one of dominance.

After a full season of featuring it, that may change in 2016. I believe that Cole will need to do a much better job of mixing in the change and the curve at just the right spots to maintain the effectiveness of his preferred stuff.

But, let’s not kid ourselves. All of this data I’ve thrown at you today is purely to illustrate that Gerrit Cole now has found his solid secondary pitch.

Having something to compliment his world-class fastball is of utmost importance, but we should never lose sight of the fact that the heat butters the bread. Period.

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