What’s behind the Red Sox dramatic pitching makeover?
andrew bailey wants to clear up a misconception.
“i don’t hate four-seamers!” the red sox pitching coach pronounced in the most recent “310 to left” podcast.
That bailey offered that disclaimer says a lot about the overhauled red sox approach to pitching. Pitch-tracking data became available in 2008. The 2024 red sox through 37 games are:
■ throwing the lowest percentage of four-seam fastballs (13 percent) in the pitch-tracking era;
■ throwing the lowest percentage of any type of fastball (four-seamers and two-seamers/ sinkers), at 32 percent;
■ throwing the highest percentage of cutters (22 percent).
a year ago, red sox pitchers threw a fastball roughly every other pitch. This year, the rate has fallen below one out of every three, with a huge bump in cutters, sweepers, changeups, and splitters.
They aren’t alone in this shift. Fastball usage in the big leagues has eroded steadily, falling below 50 percent in 2022 and continuing to drop.
but the red sox, who’d been in the upper half of the majors in fastball usage last year, are abandoning them in a fashion far removed from any other team in the tracking era.
The logic is fairly straightforward — a usage change identified as “low-hanging fruit” early in the offseason, shortly after new chief baseball officer Craig breslow joined the sox and hired bailey as pitching coach.
across baseball, hitters had the highest slugging percentage (.456) against four-seam fastballs last year. The lowest came against sweepers (.361) and splitters (.318).
There are pitchers such as Justin steele (who was with Breslow as a cub) and carlos Rodón (who pitched for Bailey in san francisco) with special four-seamers who defy those patterns. They’re exceptions.
“There’s a narrative in baseball that needs to be broken in terms of a pitcher’s best strike pitch is a fastball,” said Bailey. “I don’t think that’s necessarily true. sometimes a cutter or slider may be a guy’s best glove-strike pitch relative to the fastball.
“When you start getting into higher thresholds of fastball usage, there’s just more damage attached to fastballs throughout the history of baseball. so leveraging your best weapons — sometimes that is a fastball — is what our goal is, and to be in the zone at all times.”
Of course, pitchers have to be able to land breaking balls, cutters, and off-speed pitches in the strike zone to make them effective. for many with the sox, simple usage tweaks have unlocked far better results.
Early in the offseason, the team’s so-called “Run prevention Unit” — which includes Bailey, bullpen coach Kevin Walker, game-planning coordinator Jason varitek, director of pitching Justin Willard, coaching assistant Devin Rose, and assistant director of analytics Dave miller — met with pitchers by video conference.
They discussed pitch development goals, but the conversations focused on existing strengths — and the team’s desire for pitchers to use their best pitches in the strike zone as often as possible. In many cases, that meant clarity about how pitchers could use non-fastball offerings both to get ahead in counts and to put away hitters.
“In the past, maybe a hitter’s weakness didn’t quite match up with our pitcher’s strength, but we would try to go to that because it was a hitter’s weakness,” said catcher Reese mcguire. “We might get burned by it, and then we’re sitting there going, ‘man, we didn’t really use our best stuff.’
“There was a mind-set change to attack the strike zone differently. I think it’s a little bit less overanalyzing, overthinking how to approach a certain hitter. It’s more like, ‘OK, what does my guy do well?’ ”
The group informed Kutter crawford that his sweeper — developed during the 2023 season — was an outstanding third pitch, and should move past his curveball (.340 average, .642 slugging against in 2023) to be used alongside his fourseamer and cutter as a primary weapon.
Tanner Houck, who was already working to get more sweep on his slider and more depth to his splitter when Bailey was hired, had spent years fighting to develop a four-seamer and cutter against lefties.
“I think there could be some value in [the four-seamer], but for right now, when you want to throw a four-seam, just throw one of your other weapons that is having so much success,” Bailey conveyed to the righthander.
The pitchers didn’t flinch when asked to adapt their approaches.
said Houck, “There’s no ego in the way of ‘This is the way I’ve done it. This is the way I’m going to do it.’ It’s, ‘I’ll give it a shot.’ ”
That willingness to adapt has yielded strong results. The sox finished in the bottom 10 last year in both team ERA (4.52) and rotation ERA (4.68), but lead in both categories six weeks into this season.
They’re actually missing fewer bats than they did in 2023, with the strikeout rate and percentage of pitches resulting in a swing-and-miss down slightly. And they are throwing only slightly more strikes — 65.2 percent this year, fourth in mLB, up from 64.8 (seventh).
But the sox have meaningfully lowered their walk rate by attacking the strike zone in threeball counts rather than nibbling. perhaps most importantly, with greater unpredictability and fewer pitches that travel straight through the zone, they have limited the damage being done by hitters.
On pitches in the strike zone, the sox are allowing the lowest slugging percentage in baseball at .381. They have allowed the second-lowest hard-hit percentage at 35.8 percent of balls in play, while giving up homers at roughly half the rate (0.8 per nine innings) they did a year ago (1.3).
Will it last? There’s reason for skepticism, at least as it relates to the team’s ERA.
Because of the middle-of-the-pack strikeout rate, it’s likely the same contact resulting in harmless fly balls to this point might yield less favorable outcomes in the summer, when the ball carries farther. And, of course, hitters will become increasingly familiar with the pitchers’ attacks.
nevertheless, the Red sox pitching staff — despite injuries to Lucas giolito, garrett Whitlock, nick pivetta, and Brayan Bello — has already sustained a performance level that vastly surpasses anything they have done in recent years.
Their 2.72 ERA through 37 games was their lowest over any 37-game stretch since 1968.
“The pitching philosophy is different,” said manager Alex cora. “It starts from up top [with Breslow]. And then Andrew, there’s something about him — he embraces the challenge, and he loves it.
“They are working hard to keep it going. I think that’s the challenge now. The challenge is going to be there, but I think the way we’re doing it is really good.”