Split decision: Red Sox beat Mariners 5-1 but with a major cause for optimism

Mariners begin the year with a series split

I spent most of the day noodling on some thoughts about baseball, legacy, and the nature of cynicism. That recap was going to be great. But some days, the game forces your hand. How can this recap not just be about Bryce Miller’s splitter?

The splitter is the It Pitch in baseball right now. Thanks in no small part to the way it took George Kirby and Logan Gilbert’s arsenals to the next level, it seems like every pitcher on earth was trying to add one this offseason. Take a guy like Bryce Miller, who’s got an electric fastball, but it plays down because he has only one secondary to play it against, a slider that doesn’t break quite hard enough to backfoot lefties, leading to one of the biggest platoon splits in the game. As you read, keep in mind that today’s Red Sox lineup featured seven lefties.

A splitter is a great solution for a pitcher like Miller since its spin mimics a fastball but moves down in contrast to the perceived rise on a good four-seamer. A good one becomes really hard to pick up, making both pitches play better than they would on their own.

But not everyone can throw a splitter successfully. Go ahead and try it. Most of the guys who tried to add a splitter this offseason will fail. In fact, I’d guess fewer than half of the attempts will even make it to MLB action. But Miller’s is ready, and it’s ready right now.

The very first splitter Bryce Miller threw had 42 inches of vertical movement and 16 inches of horizontal movement. As a comparison point, the average starter’s splitter last year broke 33.6 inches vertically and 12 inches horizontally. No wonder he got a swinging strike three. His second one didn’t move as much, but he did get another swinging strike three on it. (Looking at the day as a whole, it averaged 39 inches vertically and 8 inches horizontally.)

All told, Sheriff Miller threw 22, which elicited 10 swings, 6 of which missed, and only 2 of which resulted in balls in play. He added another called strike for a 35% CSW to go with the 60% whiff rate. If you’re new to this stuff, that’s very, very good. It’s preposterous for someone’s first time with a new pitch, particularly a splitter.

The reason I say “particularly a splitter” is that it’s a feel pitch. It takes time to get used to and is harder to command. Kirby, for instance, worked up a splitter last offseason but didn’t feel good enough about it to use it in games until a couple months into the season. (Though perhaps Kirby’s personal standards for good command are unrecognizable to a mortal.) But Miller’s command of his splitter blew me away. He only had three above the belt, only one of which was hittable.

Leaving splitters up is where you can get into trouble. Logan Gilbert took a couple months to get that skill down. This is pure speculation on my part, but I think the difference for Miller was his ability to throw them with conviction. That’s something pitchers need to do on every type of pitch, but makes the biggest difference on feel pitches. I often think back to Miller’s debut against the A’s. I’d never seen someone more calm, cool, and collected in his first time on an MLB mound. The man is fearless.

Still, Miller took the L today. But—and it’s weird that this was encouraging, but bear with me—all four runs he gave up came off of two fastballs. One was a good pitch that Tyler O’Neill ambushed and muscled into the left-field seats despite a 37-degree launch angle. The other three runs scored on a 3-1 pitch that should have been a 2-2 pitch. These things happen.

In his post-game press conference, Scott Servais said his big concern with Miller today was how often he was behind in the count: “You can go to the splitter all you want, but you gotta get ahead in the count.” And that was a problem, but it’s also not at all a problem Miller has had in his career so far. Miller only walked 4.8% of the batters he faced last year, which makes me optimistic about how this will shake out over the course of the season. It’s not like the splitter was the reason he was behind in counts, with 15 of the 20 he threw today going for strikes. That’s actually way above average for a splitter.

For his part, Miller gets it. He wasn’t happy about his fastball command today, saying, “A lot of my time this offseason was spent working on the splitter and I didn’t spend as much time as I usually do on heaters, so just focusing on locating the heater and the pitches and making sure I’m dialed in with those.” Personally, I think he prioritized his time well and that his fastball command shouldn’t take too long to recapture. If he does that, the possibilities are almost too delicious to contemplate.

So his possession of the day’s lowest WPA notwithstanding, the new sheriff in town wins this season’s first Sun Hat Award. Since this is my first recap of the year, I’ll explain that the Sun Hat Award is an honor I give out to a player who had a notable individual performance in a game that I recap. It’s named after the sun hat emoji, which honestly amuses me less than it used to, but these things have a way of sticking. Here’s the Sun Hat Award record book.

Right, so the offense. It continued to be pretty ugly, with the M’s racking up another ten strikeouts today as they were again brutalized by breaking balls. The one run they scored came on a Josh Rojas squibber, and I know Rojas is a very likable guy, but the online Rojas hype in reaction to that hit called to my mind Mac’s great line from Little Big League: “Kid, don’t you think there’s a problem when you get that excited over a seeing-eye single?”

If you’re looking for reasons for optimism, Mitch Haniger had another extra-base hit, and Ty France had two good-looking hits as well, averaging 101 mph on his three balls in play. More importantly, I’m not as concerned about the strikeouts as most people seem to be. I think it’s triggering for a lot of us because of how hard last season’s offense was to watch, but while the team is whiffing a lot, they’re not chasing. The team is swinging out of the zone less than 30% of the time, which is 20th-lowest in the league so far (in a good way). This is not without exception (cough, Dominic Canzone, cough), and you’d like to see it translate to some walks too. But overall, the swing decisions are better than last year. The contact hasn’t caught up yet, but if you’ve only got a single series to read into, I’d rather they be making better swing decisions and coming up empty than hacking away. And let’s not forget that a mere five hours ago, we were hyping up Julio’s improved approach at the plate.

So 1,300 words I have to apologize and thank you for indulging me. I definitely did not intend to start the year with a long and analysis-heavy recap, especially considering that the team lost. I just think Bryce Miller’s splitter might be the single most meaningful year-to-year improvement we see on the 2024 Mariners. We’ll have some fun recaps this year, I promise. I’ve got a couple good ideas already; there’s so much baseball ahead of us. Hey, that’s a good reason for optimism too.