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Joe Ryan seems like a cerebral individual, especially regarding the art and science of pitching.
"I love talking pitching," Ryan told Fangraphs.com's David Laurilia in April. "I love messing around with the baseball, manipulating it in the dugout, just getting that feel. Then I get back on the mound with all of that. It's a good time."
"Messing around with the baseball" makes it sound like his pitches happen by a cosmic accident, but as you can glean from his back and forth with Laurilia, Ryan's approach is far from accidental. He cites vertical approach angle and horizontal break, reviewing video of his recent outings and those of his high school days when he pitched from a higher arm slot (he tried to emulate Tim Lincecum). While there is some experimentation in pitching, Ryan's practice is very much deliberate.
Ryan was a unicorn in that his fastball, while thrown at a very average velocity, piled up swinging strikes at the rate of a much harder thrower. As I detailed after he arrived in 2021, Ryan's low arm slot and riding fastball were thrown at the upper third of the strike zone, turning hitters into pretzels.
Since the dawn of baseball, hitters have minced fastballs thrown inside the zone. If you look at all the right-handed pitchers who made ten or more starts last year, Joe Ryan's fastball had a 16.8% swinging strike rate inside the strike zone. Ryan is out on the mound chucking very average velo fastballs and getting professional hitters to miss at a very high clip (10% is league average). He was 8th overall in that category – outpaced by names like Jacob DeGrom, Spencer Strider, and Hunter Greene but ahead of fastball luminaries like Gerrit Cole and Max Scherzer.
Unicorn fastball, indeed.
Ryan's biggest challenge was pairing an equally impressive secondary pitch to keep hitters from solving his fastball. Through his minor league experience, he was lauded for his fastball and curveball while his slider and changeup were considered incomplete. The Twins, however, have embraced the slider and have outfitted or improved many of those offerings in recent years.
When describing his slider's profile early in the 2022 season, Ryan told Laurilia that he thinks "more cutter with it [as opposed to] creating a slider" as he throws it.
Cutter movement is beneficial because it is thrown firm and has later movement. MLB's average horizontal cutter movement is 3.0 inches (-3.0 for right-handed pitchers). That's what Ryan's slider was for the majority of the season.
But suddenly, in September, it was not.
The shape or Ryan's slider change, and one can see that both statistically and on pitching break charts, and he had some other important changes, too. We would love for you to become a Caretaker so you can dive into that detail here. We can't pay writers enough to do that kind of deep dive just using ad revenue, so we reserve it for the Caretakers that support it.
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