Old-school Houser’s windup tweak makes the grade

PORT ST. LUCIE — It’s not usually like this for Adrian Houser.

Despite all of the strikeouts that have filled MLB games the past few seasons, Houser — consistently — deviated from the trend. He’s a self-described “old-school pitcher.” Ground balls make his starts successful, and instead of veering toward the allure of strikeouts, Houser embraced his style.

That became evident across his five years as a starter with the Brewers, when he struck out 10-plus batters just three times — something Kodai Senga did five times for the Mets last season alone — and finished with five or fewer in 102 of his 120 regular-season starts. The style resurfaced during Houser’s first two spring outings with the Mets, too, but Sunday, in their 3-1 loss against the Tigers, Houser struck out five of the 10 hitters he faced in 3 ¹/₃ perfect innings.

When the Mets acquired him in December, Houser added depth to a rotation that now craves it more than ever with Senga navigating a shoulder strain. They need Houser, and the defense required behind a ground-ball pitcher, to shake career-long inconsistencies, gut through as many starts as possible and build on the strides the 31-year-old flashed in 2023: an uptick in slider usage that coincided with the lowest walk percentage of his career.

“We live in a game now where there’s a lot of strikeouts, guys are getting swing-and-miss all the time,” Houser told The Post on Friday. “Sometimes, that really isn’t there for me.”

That wasn’t the case against the Tigers. Houser started his outing with three consecutive strikes to Parker Meadows and finished with a 1-2-3 frame. He struck out former No. 1 overall pick Spencer Torkelson the next inning, too.

In a bullpen session leading up to the start, Houser worked on lifting his front leg higher, which would help sync other elements of his mechanics with his body’s upper half. It wasn’t a drastic change, but Houser had felt rushed on the mound. And it took only 37 pitches — 27 of those strikes — to implement everything to the point where Houser felt “really close to being right where we need to be.”

“He’s a guy that knows how to pitch,” manager Carlos Mendoza said postgame. “He’s gonna move the ball around. He’s gonna use that sinker, gonna get ground balls. But the fact that he was heavy today, he had life, and for him to use it on both sides of the plate, it’s gonna go a long way.”

Last year, Houser kept incorporating the slider during his second-half starts. He always had the pitch — nothing really needed to change with the way he threw it. But he wanted to mix and match, and keep mixing and keep matching his slider and sinker, a blend where he flicked the pitch backdoor to lefthanded hitters and had it tail away from the righthanders. Disguise became a factor in outings.

His slider usage jumped from 13 percent to 17 percent between 2022 and 2023, and it rose 10 percent from his rate in 2021, according to Baseball Savant. And at the same time, Houser’s walk percentage (7.1) marked his lowest since becoming a starter and his best percentile ranking (70th) among other MLB pitchers.

“Wanted to throw more

strikes and do that kind of stuff, so just really focused on hitting spots and spotting up,” Houser said Friday of the walks. “Not letting advantage counts get away from me when I get ahead, and trying to make sure I put guys away and don’t let them stick around.”

Still, it didn’t translate to strikeouts. Houser finished in the fourth percentile for whiff percentage and the 27th percentile for strikeout percentage — up from the first and sixth percentile in 2022, respectively.

That, in Houser’s eyes, is OK. Outings like Sunday don’t need to happen all the time. He’ll keep the slider in his pitching repertoire. He tweaked the grip of his changeup this spring with the Mets to rediscover his success with the pitch in 2019 and the first half of last season.

And if those two grips can both work together, it’d be the ideal scenario for their rotation. Houser would have a full collection of pitches — and an unwavering identity as a pitcher — available.

“That’d be really good to be able to get both of those working at the same time,” Houser said.