Cut fastball has helped give Miley new life
He makes adjustment after dismal seasons
Milwaukee Brewers manager Craig Counsell talks frequently about the importance of players adjusting and adapting in order to consistently succeed in the major leagues.
For Wade Miley his “Aha!” moment came July 25 last year with the Baltimore Orioles at Tropicana Field, in the middle of a start against the Tampa Bay Rays.
After the Rays had scored five runs against him in the second inning to take a 5-0 lead, Miley decided enough was enough and made a major change to his repertoire.
He began throwing cut fastballs, a pitch best described as a mix between a fastball and a slider that he’d barely thrown in his previous six years.
“Just made it up in the middle of the game. Swear to God,” Miley recounted this week.
“I was getting crushed a little bit. Welington Castillo was catching and I just said, ‘Hey, look, when (Evan) Longoria comes back up to bat, I’m throwing all cutters.’ He just kind of looked at me and laughed.
“So we did, struck him out and then he grounded out his next at-bat. So I kind of ran with it.”
So much so that Miley estimated that 85 of the 105 pitches he threw in his next start against the Texas Rangers were cutters.
Why the sudden shift?
“You suck enough in this game – and I
did, for two straight years – I guess insanity is what comes to mind,” said the left-hander, who went 9-13 with a 5.37 earned run average with Seattle and Baltimore in 2016 and 8-15 with a 5.61 ERA in 2017.
“I kept doing the same thing and expecting a different result and finally I was just like, ‘I’ve got to make an adjustment.’ That’s what I came up with.”
According to FanGraphs.com, Miley threw cutters 11.5% of the time for the Orioles last season following that late July revelation.
This season, his first with the Milwaukee Brewers, he’s bumped that up considerably to 34.8% while mixing in a curveball 17% of the time and a changeup for 16.5%.
He’s now using his fastball – a pitch he threw as frequently as 72.2% of the time as an all-star in 2012 – a career-low 27.7%.
Brewers pitching coach Derek Johnson is a proponent of the cutter, a pitch that fellow starter Chase Anderson includes regularly as well.
For Miley, it’s been an effective pitch against right-handed hitters and at times a bailout pitch, as he calls it.
Miley’s splits through eight starts this season are almost identical — right-handers are hitting .216 against him and lefthanders .219. Last year, righties hit .298 against Miley compared to .230 for lefties.
“I throw it probably more than I should,” Miley said of the cutter. “I’ve always thrown fastballs at least 55-60% of the time, and sometimes even more than that earlier in my career. It’s just something that I needed — a pitch that would stay in on righties.
“A while back my four-seamer did but then it started carrying back over the plate so I was like, I can’t throw this as much anymore. It took me a while to realize that and so I started throwing a cutter and ran with it.”
Overall, Miley is 2-1 with a 2.23 ERA in 40 1/3 innings. Normally an innings eater – he entered 2018 with 30-plus starts in each of his previous six seasons – Miley appears to have finally turned the corner after suffering a pair of fluky injuries.
The first – a groin tear suffered while
fielding a bunt – came in Miley’s final start of the spring, literally just a few innings before he would have locked up a spot in the Brewers’ opening-day rotation after joining the team as a non-roster invitee.
Miley rehabbed and returned to the rotation May 2, winning his Brewers debut with a six-inning, one-run outing in Cincinnati.
Six days later, the bad luck struck again, as he suffered a strained right oblique just one-third of an inning into his start against Cleveland. It was bad enough to land Miley on the disabled list, where he remained for just over two months before returning July 12.
The 31-year-old is now in a nice groove and giving the Brewers another consistent performer in their rotation alongside Jhoulys Chacín.
“Injuries have kind of hurt his season, but he’s been able to pick up right where he left off when he’s healthy,” Counsell said. “From the time spring training started, he’s felt like a pitcher who’s been ‘on.’ There’s been one (bad) spring-training start and a bad minor-league start, but he’s been on all year and he’s pitched well every time we’ve given him the ball.
“He’s a guy pitching with some confidence. He’s comfortable. His cutter has been a big pitch for him and his strikethrowing is improving as he gets starts under his belt. There’s a lot of good signs there.”
Fluky or not, Miley has moved past the injuries with his cut fastball helping him remain effective.
His focus now is on helping the Brewers get over the hump and back into the playoffs for the first time since 2011, which just happened to be his rookie season with the Arizona Diamondbacks – Milwaukee’s opponent that year in what turned out to be a thrilling National League Division Series.
“It’s part of baseball,” he said, referring to the physical setbacks. “There’s plenty of people in this game who have fought injuries. It happened to me and I had to deal with it. It is what it is. I dealt with it, got through it and moved on. That’s really all you can do in a situation like that.
“I just try to go out every time I get the opportunity and try to make the most of it and give us a chance to win. I’ve kind of put the injury bug behind me hopefully and I’ll just keep moving on, and when it’s my turn to pitch, go out there and give us a chance.”