Holland, Ottavino thriving throwing sliders
Pitch is versatile and deceptive
On April 11 at Coors Field, the Rockies headed into the eighth inning nursing a 3-2 lead over San Diego.
Enter Adam Ottavino, who struck out the side, whiffing Rockies menace Wil Myers to close out the inning with a sweeping 83.4 mph slider.
Closer Greg Holland took the mound in the ninth and immediately walked Yangervis Solarte. No sweat. Holland got Ryan Schimpf to fly out to left with a 95 mph fastball, struck out Hunter Refroe with an 89.6 mph slider and closed out the victory when Austin Hedges took a helpless swing at an 85 mph slider that seemed to fall through a trap door as it reached home plate.
Ottavino and Holland: Two effective late-game relievers with two very different “out” pitches. Yet both call their coldhearted strikeout pitch a slider. What gives?
“A slider is really everything between a curveball and a cutter. It’s everything in that range,” said Ottavino, who entered Saturday with a 2.16 ERA, 12 strikeouts and four walks. “Technically, you are trying to make the ball go to the glove side, so if you are a righty, it’s goes left. But a lot of sliders drop down too.”
It’s that disappearing slider that Holland matches with his 94, 95 mph fastball to set up batters for the kill. It’s an approach that made him an all-star with Kansas City in 2014-15, and entering Saturday night, he had nine saves in his first nine chances with the Rockies.
“For me, I try to keep the slider looking as close to my fastball for as long as I can,” Holland said. “That’s my thought process: fastball, fastball, fastball, and then try to cut the ball in half.”
A nasty fastball-slider combination has landed some legendary pitchers in the Hall of Fame. Think Randy Johnson, Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton and Dennis Eckersley, among others. Like Holland and Ottavino, all had different styles and approaches. Eckersley slung a sidearm slider, and most of the others threw from a three-quarters arm slot, while Carlton’s slider came from over the top.
Holland throws more over the top, a bit like Carlton, who was left-handed, but he falls off the mound toward first base, a bit like Gibson. It has worked for him. From 2011-14, he registered 113 saves for the Royals with a 1.86 ERA and 358 strikeouts — the most among American League relievers during that span.
“A slider is a breaking ball, and every breaking ball is unique to that pitcher, because every pitch-
er imparts different spin on the ball than another guy,” said firstyear Rockies manager Bud Black, who pitched in 15 big-league seasons. “It all depends on arm speed, how they grip the ball and what seam they are using to create the spin on the baseball.”
Rockies third baseman Nolan Arenado said Washington righthander Max Scherzer, Los Angeles Dodgers left-hander Clayton Kershaw and Miami’s Jose Fernandez, who died in a boat accident last October, are the pitchers who have thrown him the most diabolical sliders.
“What makes it such a great pitch is that the arm comes through with the same speed as a fastball, but there is late movement,” Arenado said. “What makes it hard for me is that late break. I mean, Kershaw’s slider looks like a fastball, but then all of the sudden it breaks. Drives guys crazy.”
Categorizing the various types of sliders is a matter of semantics. Though Ottavino likes to call his big, sweeping breaking pitch a “slider,” Black sticks a different label on it.
“I would say Otto’s slider is more of a slurve. It’s not what I can a traditional slider,” Black said. “A traditional slider, for me, has more velocity with a shorter break. It travels a little bit horizontally and with a little bit of a tilt.
“Otto’s is a big, sweeping slurve. If you just tilted it a little bit, it would become a curveball.”
Holland’s slider, by contrast, comes in different shades and he throws it hard. The pitch in the mid-80s dives quickly, making it behave like a split-finger fastball.
“Greg has the ability to manipulate the ball to where his slider can go straight down or horizontal,” Black said. “It’s all about hand manipulation and how he releases that pitch.”
Whereas Ottavino’s slider is most effective vs. right-handed batters because it moves away from them, Holland’s slider baffles lefties as well as righties.
“When I’m going good, I can manipulate my slider. I can make it go a little more right to left, or I can make it break a little shorter,” said Holland, who chuckled and added, “But that comes and goes in waves. It’s like yesterday, I could do whatever I wanted with it and then today I wondered what the heck happened. There is a lot of feel to the pitch.”
According to Ottavino, Holland imparts less spin on his slider, allowing for more break and deception.
“His ball really grips the air,” Ottavino said. “It’s a gift and it’s a great thing, because he can throw it to both righties and lefties.
“Because for lefties who are expecting the pitch to come in toward them, it stays true or even goes away from them as it drops. That’s not normal. So when he gets to two strikes on a guy, they are in deep, deep trouble, because as he’s throwing a pitch they don’t see every day.”
Ottavino’s signature pitch is his “Frisbee” slider that appears to start behind a right-handed hitter. He can throw that pitch for a strike, and then gradually work it well off the outside corner when he gets ahead in the count. But he actually throws three sliders.
“One’s more of an up and down, one more of a slurve, and one with more of a straight lateral break,” he said. “I do that with different grips. I throw a lot of breaking balls, so I don’t want to make them all exactly the same. Even if the hitter reads slider out of my hand, he can’t be totally sure where it will end up.”
During spring training, Ottavino worked hard on diversifying his pitch portfolio.
“Everybody knows me for the sweeping slider that goes way left,” he said. “I think maybe I got a little happy throwing that pitch over the last three years. Sometimes on my sweeper … a guy can kind of track it and get a little piece of it.
“So, this year I made more of a commitment to throwing a slider with more downward action, especially with two strikes. It looks like it gets into a more hittable area, but it’s not, because it’s in the dirt. That’s a pretty tough pitch to hit.”