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So, what is the reason for Ervin Santana’s success over the last couple of seasons? Well, it is quite simply his slider, or more specifically, the usage of his slider. Throughout his career, Ervin Santana’s slider has always been considered his best pitch. However, since his slider isn’t a big wipe-out pitch, like that of a Max Scherzer or Chris Sale, it has never been considered to be one of the best in the game. According to FanGraphs’ Pitch Value metrics, in 2017, Ervin Santana’s slider measured out at 1.83 runs above average per 100 sliders thrown. This was the sixth best number by a qualified starting pitcher last season. Max Scherzer led the way at 3.33 runs above average, more than a full run over the nearest pitcher. The Pitch Value metrics weren’t the only measuring system that liked Ervin Santana’s slider. Again, among qualified starting pitchers in 2017, Santana allowed the fifth lowest wOBA on his slider at a mere .211 (MLB average wOBA in 2017 was .321). Again, Scherzer was way ahead of the pack, posting a .138 wOBA allowed on his slider. If you prefer to look at more traditional statistics, Santana allowed a .162 batting average against on his slider last season, which ranked sixth in major league baseball, and of the 31 home runs Ervin Santana allowed last season, just eight of them were off of his slider. As you can see, the numbers clearly back up the fact that Ervin Santana had one of the best sliders in MLB in 2017, and if you go back beyond that you will see that this has been the case for nearly all of his career. So, what has made the last couple of seasons different, better, than the majority of the first 11 seasons of his career? Quite simply, it has been the vamped-up usage rate of his slider. In 2015, Santana’s first season with the Twins, he threw his slider on 33.7 percent of pitches on his way to a 4.00 ERA. In 2016 and 2017, however, he increased his slider usage rate up to 36.8 percent and 36.5 percent, respectively. This increase, factored in over the course of a full season, adds approximately 100 extra sliders that Santana is throwing instead of either his fastball or change-up, which are much worse pitches for Santana. While back-to-back seasons of increased slider outputs coinciding with improved pitching by Santana is noticeable, it is hard to say that this is an established trend. So, I decided to look back at Santana’s numbers through the course of his career to see if this pattern has always been the case, or if maybe it was just a coincidence. In the chart listed below, each of Ervin Santana’s 13 career MLB seasons are ranked by slider usage rate and matched up with his ERA in that season to see which years had the lowest ERA comparatively. Along with that is a linear model that illustrates the correlation between Ervin Santana’s slider usage rate and his ERA. When looking at the linear model, we can see that there is indeed a negative correlation between Ervin Santana’s slider usage rate and his ERA. This means that as his slider usage rate goes up, his ERA goes down. As is almost always the case with data, it would be nice to have more data points to reference in order to gain an even clearer picture of the effect Santana’s slider has on his ERA, but 13 seasons of this being the case is still pretty strong evidence. In the chart, we can break down some of the numbers even further. In each of the five seasons where Santana used his slider the most, he had one of his six lowest ERAs of his career, including each of the top four. We can also see that the three seasons where Santana had the lowest slider usage rate were also the first three seasons of his career. This is a result of Santana ditching his curveball that he threw early in his career to start focusing more on his slider. Now, to say that Ervin Santana’s slider usage rate is the end all and be all for his success would be foolish. There are many factors at play when it comes to the success that he will have in a given season, but for Santana, it appears that his slider usage rate is one of the more important individual factors when it comes to determining his success. So, what can the Twins take away from this? Obviously, Santana can’t begin to just throw his slider on every pitch, as opposing hitters will adjust, and make his slider less effective. There is also a point where if Santana throws too many sliders, it will wear on his arm. I think the best approach would be to try and increase his slider usage by a couple percentage points to start the season and see what kind of effect this has on his performance. -
It seems bold for a closer -- the guy asked to preserve the win -- to try out new methods without at least giving it some time on the side first. “I’m more of a ‘throw a pitch and see what happens’ and then react off a foul ball or a check swing or how he goes at it,” Perkins explains about his development process on the mound. “That gives me more of an idea then a pre-at bat plan of how I’m going to get this guy out. I want to throw a pitch and make a determination of what I’m going to do after that pitch.” In the third at-bat of that outing, Perkins faced the Reds’ Joey Votto, a notoriously difficult out and one of the stingiest swingers in all of baseball. Perkins said the new slider passed his litmus test when he was able to get Votto to move his hands on a ball that dove down into the dirt. Votto did not commit to a swing but getting him to flinch was the baseball equivalent of convincing Donald Trump to admit he was wrong. Later that inning, Perkins put third baseman Todd Frazier away on a slider with strong downward action. http://i.imgur.com/EHt0sim.gif It may be hard to detect with the naked eye but his slider was moving differently. After the game Perkins tracked down Jack Goin, the Twins’ Manager of Major League Administration and Baseball Research, and had him confirm with Statcast data what Votto and Frazier’s reaction had told him -- the slider had a higher spin rate than before. The combination of what he saw and what the numbers told him was enough for him to ditch his previous grip. **** Perkins stresses that all he did was make a simple adjustment. “The concept of the pitch is the same,” Perkins emphasized. “It’s not like I’m went out there and said ‘alright, now I’m going to throw a splitty’. I’ve thrown a slider for seven years and now I’m going to throw a split-finger. It’s just like how guys throw a changeup and they start to alter their changeup grip. I’ve moved the two-seamer around in my hand, I’ve tilted the four-seamer. It’s still the same pitch just holding it differently and hoping that a different grip on the ball gave it better results.” That “different grip” came from what he saw from watching Francisco Liriano and Ervin Santana throw their sliders. For most of his career, Perkins says he used a grip resembling that of a standard curveball, placing his pointer and middle finger along the horseshoe of the seams. More recently however he felt that he wasn’t getting the necessary spin rate to fool hitters as consistently as he did in the past. “It was the lack of swings-and-misses, the chases, [the slider] just didn’t look as sharp as I wanted it to be,” he said. So Perkins turned to the grip that Liriano and Santana used -- throwing his two fingers across the seams and giving the digits a little daylight. At 35.8 percent of his mix, no other starting pitcher has thrown their slider more frequently than Ervin Santana has over the last four years. And with good reason: Opponents struggled to barrel up the pitch that Perkins described as having “cutter-ish” movement with a very late, sharp break. When asked what he felt made his slider special -- one that hitters have struggled against for multiple seasons -- Santana demurred. “It’s just a normal grip,” Santana said with a shrug. “I just try to snap it at the end, that’s it. No special move.” Santana’s slider was actually a gift from his brother, who had taught him how to throw the pitch at a fairly young age. “I lost my curveball because of velocity so my brother taught me that grip for the slider and then after that…” Santana then gave a gesture that suggested everything after that was sunshine and lollipops from there on out. While his end of the season results were stifled because of his back injury, Perkins felt like when he was healthy, his new slider moved similarly to Liriano’s -- or at least eliciting similar reactions from hitters. “I would say they were pretty dang similar,” Perkins said of his new slider’s action. “Just judging on the swings that I’ve seen him get and the swings that I was getting I think they were pretty close.” To claim that your pitch gets the same response as one of the game’s most dominating pitchers could be met with some skepticism but based on results Perkins was truly on to something. What’s more is that unlike the previous iteration, opponents were swinging and missing at a higher percentage of sliders inside the strike zone. The pitch, Perkins acknowledged, was far from the perfect weapon. The new grip gave the slider more vertical drop but there were times when he was unable to get the ball to stay down. Like the one he threw to future teammate John Ryan Murphy, which stayed up in the whomp ‘em zone and was promptly launched over the right field wall at Target Field. http://i.imgur.com/IujNwyD.gif After the switch, Perkins allowed another three home runs on the new slider. Some of that was due to issues with his neck and back but at other times his inability to properly locate the pitch. **** Eddie Guardado, the current Twins bullpen coach and a former closer himself, understands exactly what Perkins is going through. “I think you always got to make adjustments, right? This game is about adjustments,” Guardado said. “I’ve done it before. I’m sure a lot of guys have done it, just to see if we get a different angle, a different feel. [Perkins] worked on that last year. I noticed that the ball was going down a little bit more, which is good. Always down, always good, right? It’s coming along pretty good this year.” As a survivor of 17 years in the big leagues, Guardado is no stranger to adjustments. In 2001, after a failed foray as a starter, Guardado was coming off several years of success as a late-innings reliever with the Twins. In 1999 Dick Such, the Twins pitching coach at the time, introduced him to the split-finger fastball grip in efforts to retire more right-handed hitters. From that point forward he threw a splitter in side sessions but lacked the necessary confidence to bring the pitch to the mound with him in a game situation. When the Twins fell out of the race that year, Guardado saw an opportunity to introduce his new pitch. He would go on to save 98 games for the Twins and strikeout 197 in 199.1 innings of relief before signing a three-year, $13 million contract with the Seattle Mariners heading into the 2004 season. “Obviously you can’t be afraid, there’s no question,” Guardado said about the mindset a pitcher needs in order to bring a new pitch out to the mound. “Different grip, not knowing what’s gonna happen when I throw this pitch...but that’s why you work on it before you go out there. But still, when you go out there, you’re still not sure.” Perkins says his experience differs from Guardado’s. First, Perkins says he wasn’t seeking out a new pitch, just to improve on an existing one.“I’m past trying to developed something for sustaining,” he said when discussing the possibility of adding a completely new pitch to his repertoire. Second, his “new” slider did not get the same incubation process as Guardado’s splitter received. Perkins points out that once the season starts, those side sessions become a luxury for a closer. When he decided to flip the pitch, he was coming off a 15 appearances in the month of May, rarely getting the opportunity to work on things in between outings. Therefore the majority of his slider development came after long toss during pre-game warm-ups with former teammate Brian Duensing. Perkins fiddled with the pitch and, ultimately, he figured if it failed miserably he could always go back to his previous slider grip. **** “I don’t like to go in there and fix a damn engine when you only need to change a spark plug,” Guardado said about his bullpen coaching philosophy. In many ways, that applies to what Perkins is going through at this stage in his career. Yes, he has added more preventative maintenance, opting to spend the winter in Fort Myers and mixing in more strength training to his conditioning program (something he admitted was never a part of his offseason workouts before). This, he believes, will keep the engine running throughout the duration of the 2016 season. In terms of on-field performance, Perkins is hoping that the on-the-fly tinkering with the slider will help him improve without a complete rebuild. He acknowledges his velocity is down from several years ago and does not expect to throw over 95 again in his career. Similar to the slider grip, he has played with a two-seam fastball all spring training to give hitters another look. He’s not fixing the damn engine, simply making a few tweaks. -
In late June of last year, Minnesota Twins closer Glen Perkins decided to make a switch. His strikeout rate had been falling since his peak in 2013 when he whiffed over 32 percent of the hitters he faced. Suddenly, he noticed hitters were not responding the same to his slider -- his go-to when he wants to miss a bat -- like they once did. From Perkins’ perspective, there was a “perceived lack of bite or spin” that prompted an evaluation of his premier pitch. At that point in the season, Perkins was on-track for one of the best of his career and was a few weeks away from representing the Twins in his third straight All Star Game. He had converted 24 saves in as many opportunities. He held hitters to a tidy .217 average against. He had struck out 28 in 31.1 innings of work. For all intents and purposes, there was nothing wrong with his performance. Nevertheless, Perkins was not satisfied with his slider’s performance and decided to make an adjustment. So on the night of June 30th, in a game at Cincinnati’s Great American Ballpark, Perkins introduced a new version of his slider.It seems bold for a closer -- the guy asked to preserve the win -- to try out new methods without at least giving it some time on the side first. “I’m more of a ‘throw a pitch and see what happens’ and then react off a foul ball or a check swing or how he goes at it,” Perkins explains about his development process on the mound. “That gives me more of an idea then a pre-at bat plan of how I’m going to get this guy out. I want to throw a pitch and make a determination of what I’m going to do after that pitch.” In the third at-bat of that outing, Perkins faced the Reds’ Joey Votto, a notoriously difficult out and one of the stingiest swingers in all of baseball. Perkins said the new slider passed his litmus test when he was able to get Votto to move his hands on a ball that dove down into the dirt. Votto did not commit to a swing but getting him to flinch was the baseball equivalent of convincing Donald Trump to admit he was wrong. Later that inning, Perkins put third baseman Todd Frazier away on a slider with strong downward action. http://i.imgur.com/EHt0sim.gif It may be hard to detect with the naked eye but his slider was moving differently. After the game Perkins tracked down Jack Goin, the Twins’ Manager of Major League Administration and Baseball Research, and had him confirm with Statcast data what Votto and Frazier’s reaction had told him -- the slider had a higher spin rate than before. The combination of what he saw and what the numbers told him was enough for him to ditch his previous grip. **** Perkins stresses that all he did was make a simple adjustment. “The concept of the pitch is the same,” Perkins emphasized. “It’s not like I’m went out there and said ‘alright, now I’m going to throw a splitty’. I’ve thrown a slider for seven years and now I’m going to throw a split-finger. It’s just like how guys throw a changeup and they start to alter their changeup grip. I’ve moved the two-seamer around in my hand, I’ve tilted the four-seamer. It’s still the same pitch just holding it differently and hoping that a different grip on the ball gave it better results.” That “different grip” came from what he saw from watching Francisco Liriano and Ervin Santana throw their sliders. For most of his career, Perkins says he used a grip resembling that of a standard curveball, placing his pointer and middle finger along the horseshoe of the seams. More recently however he felt that he wasn’t getting the necessary spin rate to fool hitters as consistently as he did in the past. “It was the lack of swings-and-misses, the chases, [the slider] just didn’t look as sharp as I wanted it to be,” he said. So Perkins turned to the grip that Liriano and Santana used -- throwing his two fingers across the seams and giving the digits a little daylight. At 35.8 percent of his mix, no other starting pitcher has thrown their slider more frequently than Ervin Santana has over the last four years. And with good reason: Opponents struggled to barrel up the pitch that Perkins described as having “cutter-ish” movement with a very late, sharp break. When asked what he felt made his slider special -- one that hitters have struggled against for multiple seasons -- Santana demurred. “It’s just a normal grip,” Santana said with a shrug. “I just try to snap it at the end, that’s it. No special move.” Santana’s slider was actually a gift from his brother, who had taught him how to throw the pitch at a fairly young age. “I lost my curveball because of velocity so my brother taught me that grip for the slider and then after that…” Santana then gave a gesture that suggested everything after that was sunshine and lollipops from there on out. While his end of the season results were stifled because of his back injury, Perkins felt like when he was healthy, his new slider moved similarly to Liriano’s -- or at least eliciting similar reactions from hitters. “I would say they were pretty dang similar,” Perkins said of his new slider’s action. “Just judging on the swings that I’ve seen him get and the swings that I was getting I think they were pretty close.” To claim that your pitch gets the same response as one of the game’s most dominating pitchers could be met with some skepticism but based on results Perkins was truly on to something. Download attachment: Perkins_Slider.png What’s more is that unlike the previous iteration, opponents were swinging and missing at a higher percentage of sliders inside the strike zone. Download attachment: Perkins.png The pitch, Perkins acknowledged, was far from the perfect weapon. The new grip gave the slider more vertical drop but there were times when he was unable to get the ball to stay down. Like the one he threw to future teammate John Ryan Murphy, which stayed up in the whomp ‘em zone and was promptly launched over the right field wall at Target Field. http://i.imgur.com/IujNwyD.gif After the switch, Perkins allowed another three home runs on the new slider. Some of that was due to issues with his neck and back but at other times his inability to properly locate the pitch. **** Eddie Guardado, the current Twins bullpen coach and a former closer himself, understands exactly what Perkins is going through. “I think you always got to make adjustments, right? This game is about adjustments,” Guardado said. “I’ve done it before. I’m sure a lot of guys have done it, just to see if we get a different angle, a different feel. [Perkins] worked on that last year. I noticed that the ball was going down a little bit more, which is good. Always down, always good, right? It’s coming along pretty good this year.” As a survivor of 17 years in the big leagues, Guardado is no stranger to adjustments. In 2001, after a failed foray as a starter, Guardado was coming off several years of success as a late-innings reliever with the Twins. In 1999 Dick Such, the Twins pitching coach at the time, introduced him to the split-finger fastball grip in efforts to retire more right-handed hitters. From that point forward he threw a splitter in side sessions but lacked the necessary confidence to bring the pitch to the mound with him in a game situation. When the Twins fell out of the race that year, Guardado saw an opportunity to introduce his new pitch. He would go on to save 98 games for the Twins and strikeout 197 in 199.1 innings of relief before signing a three-year, $13 million contract with the Seattle Mariners heading into the 2004 season. “Obviously you can’t be afraid, there’s no question,” Guardado said about the mindset a pitcher needs in order to bring a new pitch out to the mound. “Different grip, not knowing what’s gonna happen when I throw this pitch...but that’s why you work on it before you go out there. But still, when you go out there, you’re still not sure.” Perkins says his experience differs from Guardado’s. First, Perkins says he wasn’t seeking out a new pitch, just to improve on an existing one.“I’m past trying to developed something for sustaining,” he said when discussing the possibility of adding a completely new pitch to his repertoire. Second, his “new” slider did not get the same incubation process as Guardado’s splitter received. Perkins points out that once the season starts, those side sessions become a luxury for a closer. When he decided to flip the pitch, he was coming off a 15 appearances in the month of May, rarely getting the opportunity to work on things in between outings. Therefore the majority of his slider development came after long toss during pre-game warm-ups with former teammate Brian Duensing. Perkins fiddled with the pitch and, ultimately, he figured if it failed miserably he could always go back to his previous slider grip. **** “I don’t like to go in there and fix a damn engine when you only need to change a spark plug,” Guardado said about his bullpen coaching philosophy. In many ways, that applies to what Perkins is going through at this stage in his career. Yes, he has added more preventative maintenance, opting to spend the winter in Fort Myers and mixing in more strength training to his conditioning program (something he admitted was never a part of his offseason workouts before). This, he believes, will keep the engine running throughout the duration of the 2016 season. In terms of on-field performance, Perkins is hoping that the on-the-fly tinkering with the slider will help him improve without a complete rebuild. He acknowledges his velocity is down from several years ago and does not expect to throw over 95 again in his career. Similar to the slider grip, he has played with a two-seam fastball all spring training to give hitters another look. He’s not fixing the damn engine, simply making a few tweaks. Click here to view the article- 18 replies
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