Brady Singer slides his way back to the front of the rotation

His best start of 2023 was due to a complete overhaul of his slider.

In Tuesday’s Three Up, Three Down, I made note of Brady Singer’s slider. It was coming in a couple of ticks slower than usual, but it was featuring about double the horizontal movement. It turns out that the results came about from an intentional alteration in how he grips the baseball for that particular offering.

Here’s Singer talking about what he and pitching coaches Brian Sweeney and Zach Bove did to his slider since his last start.

“I think the slider was a difference-maker. We actually changed the whole thing. Bove and Sweeney came to me and said try this grip and we started tinkering with it a little bit and it was much much better tonight.”

Wait…They “changed the whole thing?” They had him use a different grip on the pitch? For real?

Yes. Yes, they did.

“(The slider) is a completely new pitch. It’s a different grip. I’m still throwing it the same way, but I think the metrics are a little bit different. Credit to Bove and Sweeney for finding that and helping me there. I just threw it kind of like I’ve usually been throwing a slider, just with a different grip. It had the right action and got some more swings and misses.”

Go ahead and re-read the above quote. It’s important. Brady Singer’s slider on Tuesday was…a completely new pitch. Holy moly, this is seismic.

If any of you were still on the fence about the new coaching and how they were impacting the roster, you should probably move off now. There is absolutely no way that this would’ve happened in any of Singer’s three previous big league seasons. Imagine…Singer is displeased with the results he’s getting on the slider. He sits down with his pitching coaches to discuss. They come to him with a different grip to use. Four starts into the season, he completely overhauls one of his core pitches…and from first glance, he makes it better.

Revolutionary.

(Really, I don’t want to keep harping on the old staff. They’re gone. But one can’t help but think that if Singer had initiated this conversation last year the advice would’ve been along the lines of, “Keep throwing it. It’s your best pitch. It will get there.”)

Singer’s slider has lived in the mid-80s since his debut in 2020. It’s a good pitch, but not a great one. Although, Statcast did consider it his best offering last year where he limited opponents to a .237 batting average against with a .371 slugging percentage.

Here’s a look at one of his better sliders from last year.

The pitch (and really all of Singer’s pitches) move less than what would be considered the league average for that particular offering, according to Statcast. In Singer’s case, the key feature of his slider is the drop, or vertical movement. In the last couple of years, he’s delivered about 36 inches of drop on the slider, which is a little bit better than average. It’s on the horizontal plane where the pitch doesn’t do much. Singer’s slider usually glides with about four inches of break. That’s well below the major league average for horizontal movement on the slider.

(Keep in mind that just because a particular pitch moves less than the major league average, that doesn’t make it a poor offering. Obviously, other issues are in play, such as pitch mix, location, arm slot…Looking at break and drop against the league average is just a measuring stick to make a comparison.)

On Tuesday, everything about the pitch changed. Everything.

For starters, not only was he throwing the pitch slower than usual, he was varying speeds when throwing it. Singer’s slider ran up as high as 85.5 MPH and as slow as 78.8 MPH. That’s an absurd mix of velocity.

Obviously, he was throwing a little harder earlier in the game. Still, according to Singer, the speed changes were intentional.

“Sometimes there I could take some off of it (the slider) and get a little bit more break on it. So that’s what I was happy about being able to move it around and kind of make it bigger and smaller and all of that.”

Here’s an 83.1 MPH slider to Ketel Marte in the third. The pitch featured 36 inches of drop and just three inches of break.

Here’s a 78.8 MPH slider to Marte in the sixth. This one had 43 inches of drop and a whopping 17 inches of break.

It’s difficult to get a read on the break from the video due to the camera angle. They do look like different pitches, but they’re definitely both sliders.

Breaking it down further, Singer’s release point on Tuesday was incredibly consistent.

That’s important because if you see from the gifs above, the pitches have such different movement that it’s possible Singer is altering his release point to achieve that. The evidence above says he wasn’t.

Now let’s look at two stills taken from similar moments after Singer released the pitch. First up, the 83.1 MPH slider.

The ball is just above Marte’s thigh in this frame. Contrast that to the location of the ball on Singer’s 78.8 MPH slider:

It’s difficult to pick up immediately, but the ball is off the right shoulder of the umpire, blending in with the numbers on his sleeve. That’s where the difference in drop and break is evident.

They’re both sliders but with different velocities and movements. The same…but oh so different. Yet both provide positive results.

Marte, bless his heart, had an extremely difficult time on Tuesday. Imagine preparing for a start by watching video of that night’s starting pitcher. You see the slider, you get familiar with the break and the drop of the pitch. You dig into the batter’s box looking for that pitch. Then you see a slider that’s not only slower than what you expect but with almost double the break. (Not to mention the insane amount of drop that the last frame captures.)

As noted, Singer’s slider was averaging two to four inches of horizontal break prior to Tuesday’s start. Against the Diamondbacks, the slider featured eight inches of break on average. The graph from Baseball Savant is something to behold.

(Also, Singer’s changeup has almost the exact same movement as his sinker. If he throws it more frequently—and for strikes—as he did on Tuesday, there’s no reason this pitch can’t turn into an effective weapon. It looks like a sinker, it acts like a sinker, except it’s running up there about 7 MPH slower. He should be getting more swings and misses on that pitch.)

Singer’s ability to reinvent his slider in between starts is an incredible development. That his new slider can vary in speed and break from pitch to pitch is amazing. The fact he trusts his coaches enough to completely revamp his key pitch just weeks into the season speaks volumes about the work the new staff has put in and the knowledge they bring. We know from Singer’s flirtation with his changeup, if he’s not fully comfortable or buying in, it’s not going to happen. Leaning on the sinker/slider combo, it’s a gambit that carries a fair amount of risk. Yet Singer, after just throwing the pitch on the side in between starts was clearly comfortable enough to use it with incredible results.

The results you say? Singer threw six innings on Tuesday, allowing five hits while striking out five and walking none. He finished with a Game Score of 63. It wasn’t the best start of his career, but given how his April was going, this is a definite step in the right direction.

Hell, it’s more than that. This is a potential game-changer. Singer was the best pitcher on this staff last year and enjoyed a breakout 2022. The question I had coming into this season was whether he was just a one-hit wonder or if he would be able to build on a season that saw him take a tremendous step forward. The early returns weren’t encouraging. What we saw on Tuesday changes everything. It’s not dissimilar to how I was taking in Kris Bubic’s starts just before he was injured.

Baseball is a game of adjustments. Brady Singer just made one that could put his season back on track.