If you remember back in spring training I went and researched what Jordan Lyles did differently in September of 2021 and it was mostly the change to his slider. Here’s what I wrote then:
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I had heard Elias said Lyles did something different in September and that’s what they are banking on. Lyles pitched to a 2.87 ERA and 3.55 FIP over his 5 games holding batters to a .215/.292/.346/.638 slash.So what did he do differently?
Looking at Baseball Savant, it appears he dropped his fastball usage way down to 29.3% (47.4% in April) and replaced that with a sinker at 17.1% (1.5% in April).
But the biggest change was in his slider where he increased his horizontal movement to 15 inches in September, 3 inches more than in August and 9 inches more than in April. He accordingly increased the usage of his slider to 26.1% (17.8% in August). Batter slashed just .138/.145/.172/.255 against his slider in September.
the effectiveness of his slider made all his pitches play up a bit as hard hit % and barrel% all went down and swing and miss went up significantly on the slider, curveball, cutter and change.
So if Lyle’s slider is for real, the Orioles may have found themselves a bargain.
– Tony Pente on March 23, 2022
So I looked over his statcast information for yesterday’s start and it appears he’s tweaked his slider even more, slowing it down almost 4 MPH (3.9) to 79.4 MPH but increased the Horizontal movement 5 inches and vertical by 8 inches. Basically he took a good hard late breaking slider (84 MPH) and turned it into more of a slurve.
He threw the pitch just 8 times, getting zero whiffs and only getting two called strikes, a foul ball and ball in play (88.1 EV). It appear he was struggling to locate the pitch very well batters seemed to pick it up pretty well and did not chase.
He’s what it looked like: https://www.mlb.com/video/00u7jzgkdtP9kH55c356/reels/lyles-slider-in-2022-opening-day
His changeup yesterday was his best pitch and it had 2 inches more vertical and 3 inches more horizontal movement than last year. Here’s what it looked like: https://www.mlb.com/video/00u7jzgkdtP9kH55c356/reels/lyles-changeup-opening-day-2022
So the biggest takeaway I have of his first start is he only used his “new” weapon only 10% of the time after using it 26.1% last September when he was very effective.
Maybe this was just a case of him not really having his command of one of his better pitches. Or maybe this is a case of him tinkering with the pitch to get more movement but he’s struggling to command that movement?
I guess we’ll see what he looks like the next time out.
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