How Cody Stashak Can Become a Reliable MLB Reliever

[Matthew Trueblood]

After a promising rookie showing, Stashak looks likely to be part of the Twins' bullpen in the near term. But he could be more than 'likely' with a successful tweak or two.Cody Stashak had an impressive 2019, rising from fringy prospect status as a Double-A reliever to an occasionally high-leverage arm in the bullpen for the Twins. Across three levels, he faced 321 batters (not counting the ALDS against the Yankees), struck out 99 of them, and walked just 10. He’s already proved he can be a good relief pitcher. However, there are mechanical and mental changes he could make to take another step forward, whenever baseball finally resumes.

 

Stashak made five appearances in the Grapefruit League, prior to it being shuttered due to the outbreak of the coronavirus. In them, he pitched seven scoreless innings. He faced 23 batters, struck out nine of them, and issued no walks. Batters managed just three hits against him. Even when the ball was put in play, it tended not to be well-struck. Between that showing and the team’s decision to trade Brusdar Graterol at the beginning of spring training, Stashak had positioned himself well to open the season in the Minnesota bullpen.

 

Obviously, it’s an open (and difficult) question whether baseball will or should be played at all in 2020, and if the season happens, the Twins will have a deep pitching staff. Stashak isn’t guaranteed to be on the roster at all times, let alone to have an important role in the club’s relief corps. Since Stashak is still a young and fresh arm, though, there’s room to dream on him as an important long-term piece of that puzzle, including and especially as a potential replacement for impending free agent Trevor May.

 

First, a quick reintroduction to Stashak’s background and skill set. He’s a former 13th-round pick, though he signed for a bonus that indicated the team believed in him more than that. For the first two and a half seasons of his professional career, he was a starter, and a fairly effective one. The Twins elected to move him to a relief role in 2018, not as a response to failure, but as a proactive effort to get the most possible out of him.

 

Neither a hard thrower nor one with an especially deep repertoire, Stashak immediately benefited from the switch. His high arm slot gives his fastball some natural rising action, and his slider can be a wipeout pitch, as evidenced by batters’ 47.3-percent whiff rate on swings against it when he reached the big leagues last season. He only gets his fastball above 92 miles per hour when really reaching back for something extra, though, and his changeup (right now) lacks sufficient movement or velocity separation.

 

Becoming a reliever also helped paper over one of Stashak’s remaining weaknesses as a pitcher: he doesn’t have great command. Because he has considerable spine tilt during the latter phase of his delivery, he doesn’t show a consistent ability to hit his catcher’s target. His misses tend strongly to be up or down, rather than lateral, which helps him avoid walks exceptionally well.

 

However, missing vertically so often makes him highly vulnerable to hard contact. In 2019, 10 of the 77 batted balls against Stashak were what Statcast classifies as Barrels—the most valuable bucket into which the system places hits. Batters had a .351 BABIP and slugged .475 against him, and the patterns were similar in the minor leagues. That’s why, despite his tremendous strikeout and walk numbers, he had an ERA of 3.22 for the entire season, and 3.24 in the big leagues, marking him as good, but not great at actually preventing runs.

 

Part of the problem might be that Stashak still has certain remnants of his effort to be a starter baked into the way he pitches. For one thing, he sets up on the first-base edge of the rubber. That’s somewhat common for a right-handed starter, because they tend to have pitches that run to their arm side, as well as ones that move to the glove side, and because that can sometimes create tough angles for opposing left-handed batters.

 

Now that he works in relief, though, Stashak should consider sliding over on the rubber. Despite his high slot and largely vertical movement profile, his slider has a natural sweep to the glove side, so moving to the middle or the third-base side of the rubber might allow him to more aggressively use the slider—especially against left-handers. He threw the slider almost exactly half the time against fellow righties in MLB last season, but against lefties, his slider usage was under 23 percent.

 

In the modern game, even a reliever needs the conviction to throw a breaking ball to opposite-handed batters, and to do it relatively often. Stashak, without an overpowering fastball or pinpoint command, needs to do so especially acutely. Moving on the rubber could help with that, and because Stashak’s fastball lacks much run to the arm side anyway, it wouldn’t much harm his ability to attack hitters with that pitch.

 

More importantly, though, Stashak needs to quiet down some of the spine tilt he shows at release, in order to harness his stuff better and avoid hard contact. Some of that tilt comes from his stride pattern, one that keeps him closed and allows him to maximize torque, but some of it is the result of insufficient functional strength. He showed signs of having improved his posture during delivery during the spring, contributing to better command, so he might already be on the way to achieving that.

 

If Stashak does improve his posture and enjoy better command, he might lose some of the rise on his fastball, as his release angle will drop slightly even if his arm slot remains the same. The arm might move more freely, though, in which case he could make up the loss of movement in one dimension with some armside run or even extra spin. He’d be far from the first hurler to see an uptick in spin or velocity after improving the same mechanical flaw. He might also get better movement (and thus, better results) with his changeup from that altered release point, especially because the pitch would be better able to work toward or past the outside corner against left-handed batters.

 

This point of caution always deserves mention: Stashak has had an improbably successful pro career. He might not be inclined to make a significant change, lest he lose whatever magic (deception, perhaps, or effective wildness born of the sheer unpredictability of his misses) has carried him so far. If he embraces data-driven adjustments, though, he could blossom into an even better reliever, and thereby transform from a competent big-leaguer forever on the shuttle to the International League into a borderline relief ace, with a chance to reach free agency and leave the game a decade from now, his family set for life.

 

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[operation mindcrime]

Unleash the Sleestak!!!!!!

[Parker Hageman]

One thing that makes Stashak effective with that two pitch mix is how well they play off each other. 

 

Here's how his fastball/slider move in tandem. You'll notice they tunnel well together as the fastball rides up in the zone and the slider breaks off. 

 

 

Here's game action:

 

 

Stashak's four-seam fastball, while only averaging 91.7 mph, holds its plane well and is effective up in the zone. His slider doesn't have crazy spin rate numbers or break but the combination of the high ride fastball and the later breaking slider keeps hitters off balance (hence the above average swing and miss rates). 

 

This spring I had a very brief conversation with him and wanted to discuss his pitch grips. I noticed last year that he holds all his pitches with his thumb to the side of the ball (as you can see in the article's picture of him) versus on the bottom like so many pitchers do. I wanted to know how he developed this and if he thought it gave him different movement. He thought for a moment and then just replied "I dunno, I just have small hands."

[ashbury]

Stashak's four-seam fastball, while only averaging 91.7 mph, ...

 

This spring I had a very brief conversation with him and wanted to discuss his pitch grips. I noticed last year that he holds all his pitches with his thumb to the side of the ball (as you can see in the article's picture of him) versus on the bottom like so many pitchers do.

I'm invariably out of my element when attempting to take part in a discussion of the nuts and bolts of playing, but that doesn't seem to stop me.

 

See, if someone had shown me the above photo, without any commentary, I would have guessed it to be a palm ball, or some variant of a circle change that isn't quite a circle. Now, 91.7 is pretty fast for a change up. But in this age of optimized mechanics, it's not very fast for a heater. Seems crazy to describe someone with a two-pitch arsenal of a change and a slider, at least for someone with any hope of a meaningful pro career, but it's almost like that.

 

Thing is, is a changeup usually thrown with four seams? I would think it's usually thrown with two, so that any movement will be downward rather than hanging. With his slider, the "other" pitch needs to stay up, hence the four seams - and I'm wondering if that grip combination is kind of rare?

 

I have the feeling that either 1) I'm not really saying anything different than you already did, or 2) I am, but it's dumb.