As of this writing, Mason Miller leads all relief pitchers in K% and K-BB%. You’ve heard of him. He’s one of this season’s breakout stars. He’s so good, he’s convinced people who should know better that years of team control for a relief pitcher ought to be worth a lot in the trade market. High praise, indeed.
No. 2 is Jeremiah Estrada, a small (6-foot-1) right-hander whom the Padres plucked off the waiver wire last November. In his previous MLB experience — 16 1/3 innings over parts of two seasons with the Cubs — Estrada struck out 21 batters and walked 15 while allowing 10 earned runs, including five home runs. This year, Estrada has 48 strikeouts against 10 walks in 26 1/3 innings. His 43.6 K% is not only second in the league this year, it would be one of the 20 best all-time if he keeps it up for the rest of the season.
It’s like he’s not the same pitcher.
Estrada pitches from a high vertical arm slot and throws a hard fastball (97.2 mph on average this year) with almost zero horizontal movement. The spin axis on Estrada’s fastball is almost completely vertical; as a result, it hardly drops at all — this is what we colloquially call “rise.” After Monday’s games, Baseball Savant’s leaderboard counted 395 pitchers who had thrown at least three pitches per team game and used their four-seamer at least 5% of the time — 24 or more fastballs so far this season, in simpler terms. Of those 395 pitchers, Estrada is fourth in vertical movement above average and 388th in horizontal movement above average. A fastball with lots of rise and almost no run is going to generate two things: fly balls and whiffs; indeed, this is not new for Estrada. His four-seamer is a little more straight up and down than it was previously, but only by a couple inches; at any rate, he was striking out more than a batter an inning and allowing roughly two fly balls for every grounder going into 2024. And that batted-ball ratio hasn’t changed much this year.
What has changed is Estrada’s secondary stuff. His slider, previously a low-80s offering, is now coming in at 89.2 mph on average, with less spin and more of a vertical movement profile. That jump in velocity left a hole in his repertoire, as having a 13 mph spread between his fastball and breaker can make hitters’ heads spin.
No matter. Estrada, in previous years, had thrown a changeup about as frequently as a college freshman washes his pillowcase. With the Padres, he’s added a low-to-mid-80s split-change, and it’s, well, changed everything.
Jeremiah Estrada’s Repertoire
| 2022-23 | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fastball | 81.1 | 3.2 ARM | 20.0 | 96.0 | 2280 | .450 | 22.3 |
| Slider | 15.0 | 9.0 GLV | 6.6 | 83.3 | 2385 | .318 | 63.6 |
| Fastball | 52.3 | 0.8 ARM | 19.4 | 97.2 | 2197 | .259 | 35.2 |
| Splitter | 25.6 | 13.6 ARM | 8.2 | 84.1 | 1335 | .289 | 54.0 |
| Slider | 22.1 | 5.8 GLV | 5.1 | 89.2 | 2273 | .249 | 39.2 |
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
In case I haven’t made it clear by now, I love a changeup, particularly a hyphenate-changeup. Split-change, circle-change, Vulcan change (I guess that last isn’t literally a hyphenate, but you get the gist). You can actually see Estrada gripping this dastardly off-speed offering in the photo on his Baseball Savant page.
A couple weeks back, Estrada dropped by MLB Network and demonstrated the grip for the “chitter,” as it’s apparently called, to Harold Reynolds and Pedro Martinez. First of all, I hate that name. We’re going down a dark path in pitch nomenclature these days. “Sweeper” is fine, though it took some getting used to, but “splinker” is only barely tolerable, and I cannot abide “chitter.” We need an Académie Française-type body to come up with better names for these new pitches that keep appearing.
More to the point, this is a wild grip that makes my knuckles hurt just to watch. Even Pedro Martinez, who not only knows more about throwing a changeup than anyone alive but also has hands the size of monster truck tires, took a minute to get it down. It’s a cool video, and if you’ve got four minutes to spare I recommend you watch it.
But if you just want the highlights, this is a pitch with ungodly arm-side movement: 3.6 inches above average, according to Baseball Savant, which is fifth in the league. Two of the four guys ahead of Estrada on the splitter horizontal movement leaderboard are Kevin Gausman and Jeff Hoffman, if you want a frame of reference. The difference in spin axis, to say nothing of the 13 mph average velocity spread — this being the reason for having a changeup in the first place — makes it impossible for hitters to cover both pitches without sitting on one.
So now, Estrada’s got three pitches with three movement profiles almost at right angles to each other: He can go in with the slider, out with the splitter, and up with the fastball, like he’s conducting a waltz for a string ensemble. He has an opponent wOBA under .300 and a whiff rate of at least 35% on all three of his pitches, headlined by a 54% whiff rate on the (sarcastic sigh) chitter. Corbin Burnes is the only other pitcher in the league who throws three different pitches with a whiff rate of 35.0% or higher and opponent wOBA and xwOBAs of .300 or lower.
Estrada’s pretty good, thanks mostly, but not exclusively, to his new splitter. So why, if he’s matching Miller’s strikeout and walk numbers, is his ERA a run and a half higher?
That’s a great question, because as much as missing bats is the foundation of success for a reliever, the actual job is to keep runs off the board. Is Estrada just getting unlucky? Maybe a little — his ERA is higher than both his FIP and xERA — but while his FIP is about two-tenths of a run higher than Miller’s, his xERA is 1.25 runs higher.
In other words, Estrada needs to miss bats to succeed, because when hitters do put the ball in play they hit it hard. Estrada’s whiff rate and K% are in the 99th and 100th percentiles, respectively, among MLB pitchers. But his HardHit% and xwOBACON are both on the fifth percentile or lower. This is what an uncharitable observer might call “The Patrick Corbin Zone.”
It’s not all that surprising that when Estrada gets hit, he gets hit hard. He’s a short right-hander with an over-the-top arm angle who throws only one fastball with no sink or horizontal run. All of his pitches are bat-missers, not soft-contact getters, and he has one of the lowest groundball rates in the league (25.0%, tied for fourth lowest among 187 qualified relievers). So if he’s giving up a lot of hard contact and most of his contact is in the air, well, that’s going to lead to a lot of damage when it happens.
How much of a problem this is going to end up being is hard to say. Right now, his HR/FB% is 12.0, which is on the high side of normal, but he’s thrown only 26 1/3 innings this year and home run rates — especially for relievers — are famously unpredictable. It’s definitely something to monitor as San Diego considers Estrada for a high-leverage relief role in the playoffs; the Padres, like nine other NL teams, Cal State Fullerton, and the company softball team at New Glarus Brewing, are in the thick of the Wild Card fight.
But the larger point is this: It’s very, very difficult to be a bad pitcher while striking out more than 40% of one’s opponents. As long as Estrada keeps his demon splitter on track and his strikeout rate up, he can live with the occasional bit of hard contact.
