Orioles reset: Baseball’s latest pitching craze is sweeping through Baltimore
Ryan Mountcastle doesn’t remember the first time he heard the term “sweeper,” but he hasn’t forgotten the first one he faced.
“It was just, like, the craziest thing I’d ever seen,” the Orioles first baseman said.
Normally, for Mountcastle to decide a breaking ball was going to make its way to a hittable area, he would see whether it started between him and the strike zone. But when then-Tampa Bay Rays right-hander Chaz Roe deployed his sweeper against Mountcastle during spring training in 2020, he had to look far more inside.
“I’d have to have it start at my butt,” he said. “It was bizarre.”
The name “sweeper” has gained prevalence of late, but in truth, the pitch that carries the name has existed for years. Baseball Savant, Major League Baseball’s hub for Statcast data, reidentified thousands of sliders over the past decade as sweepers, a slower variant of that classic breaking ball with far more horizontal break and little vertical movement beyond what gravity offers.
“This is the whole thing about the sweeper: It’s a slider,” said veteran right-hander Kyle Gibson, one of four Orioles who Statcast has tracked as throwing it. “Now that we can track visually how much it goes down, visually how much it goes left, how the spin affects that, OK, now we think we’ve got a new pitch, right? But [Boston Red Sox left-hander] Chris Sale’s probably laughing at everybody. He’s been throwing a sweeping slider ever since he came up to the big leagues.”
The pitch has become far more common, increasing in usage each year since 2015. Entering Sunday, 4.3% of all pitches this season have been sweepers, up from 2.7% last year. Before 2021, it hadn’t accounted for more than one of every 100 offerings.
“I think it’s like anything else in life, right?” Gibson said. “You see somebody doing something that’s making them successful, you want to try it.”
Other Orioles who throw sweepers are right-handed starter Dean Kremer, right-handed reliever Austin Voth and left-handed reliever Danny Coulombe. Right-hander Mike Baumann toyed with the pitch in spring training but wasn’t comfortable enough with it to carry it into the regular season.
Gibson introduced his sweeper late last season with the Philadelphia Phillies, the byproduct of pitching coach Caleb Cotham suggesting a grip change to his slider with a simple goal: “We’re just trying to make it go left.” The adjustment was minor, with Gibson moving the index and middle fingers of his right hand “up into the horseshoe 1 inch,” but the result was a pitch with more than twice as much horizontal movement as his old slider.
In Gibson’s final start of the season, the sweeper was his most used offering, and the pitch was a point of interest for teams throughout his free agency this offseason. He signed with the Orioles for one year and $10 million, the largest guarantee they have given out since 2018. His best pitch with Baltimore has been the sweeper, limiting hitters to a .125 average and responsible for nearly half of his strikeouts, while more than 43% of swings against it have missed.
The pitch “mirrors” Gibson’s sinker, which averages even more horizontal movement but in the opposite direction. He showed off the tandem Thursday against the Detroit Tigers, getting future Hall of Famer Miguel Cabrera to duck out on a sweeper that ended up right down the middle, then producing a groundout on a sinker in on his hands with the next pitch.
“People play the high-low game quite a bit, where curveball’s going down, four-seamer’s staying up. I think that still plays,” Gibson said. “The opposite of that is, ‘All right, which way is it going to go?’ I’m gonna throw it down the middle, and you’ve got to be ready for it to come in the whole width of the plate or go away the whole width of the plate. … You’ve got to decide right now which one you think it is. Makes it pretty tough for a hitter.”
Mountcastle agreed, pointing out he’s been among the Orioles in recent years who have been hit in the hands on pitches tailing in when they suspected they would be breaking away. League-wide, batters entered Sunday hitting .206 on sweepers.
“It’s still a pitch that can be high risk, high reward,” Baltimore pitching coach Chris Holt said, “because when they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, they get hit very hard. It is a lot of times location-dependent and also really pitch-quality dependent. It’s a very fine line there between a really nasty one and one that just sits in the middle of a zone.”
As Gibson did, both Voth and Coulombe added their sweepers last year. When Voth joined the Orioles as a struggling waiver claim from the Washington Nationals last season, his lone breaking ball was a curveball, having abandoned his slider after 2019. But when he threw a curve with a lot of horizontal break, Holt went about showing him a grip to make the pitch repeatable.
The grip for Voth’s sweeper, like Gibson’s, has him holding the baseball with the horseshoe’s opening downward and his fingers at its top, while on his curveball, the horseshoe is open upward with his fingers at its side. His arm action is the same, with the grips alone creating the varying horizontal and vertical movements.
That was the lesson Coulombe needed for his sweeper to become effective. Trying to throw the pitch last year with the Minnesota Twins, Coulombe found he was “trying to make it move.” But watching an interview with then-New York Yankees pitcher Lucas Luetge — who along with Coulombe is one of 22 lefties who Statcast has throwing sweepers this year — Coulombe learned a grip that does the work for him.
Acquired from Minnesota in a minor trade at the end of spring training, Coulombe has emerged as a key member of Baltimore’s bullpen. He’s also somewhat of a rarity in that he throws both a sweeper and traditional slider; Gibson said that although there have been situations he’s considered using his old slider, he’s avoiding throwing both.
“I don’t want to be in between, to where I’m kicking myself, ‘Oh, I should’ve thrown that one,’” he said. “It’s all just a little bit of a game, a little bit of a chess match.”
Coulombe said he uses both pitches because “I spin the ball well, so let’s spin the ball a lot.” But he personally doesn’t classify his two sliders as such, saying he thinks of his slider — his most-used pitch — as a cutter and calls his sweeper a slider.
“I’m not the biggest fan of the term ‘sweeper,’” Coulombe said. “Maybe I’m just old school. I’m old, man. I’m almost 34 years old. It’s been the same way forever.
“It’s kind of the craze now.”
Such is the way of pitching. Voth recalled how only a couple of years ago, “everyone started throwing a cutter.” Kremer and Holt both referenced the wave of pitchers throwing four-seam fastballs with carry up in the zone and tunneling curveballs off them.
The sweeper is the sport’s latest trend.
“I’m sure there’s going to be a slow changeup coming out soon or something,” Voth quipped. “I think guys are always looking for certain advantages.”
That was the genesis of Kremer’s sweeper. He added it this offseason, saying during spring training he wanted “to have all the shapes” so he could attack all types of hitters. Kremer has exclusively thrown the pitch to right-handed batters thus far, with Gibson, Voth and Coulombe also predominantly using sweepers with the platoon advantage. Kremer said he has other pitches he prefers to use against lefties; most of his changeups and curveballs have come facing them, and he also hasn’t thrown a sinker to a left-hander. But sweepers are at their most effective when they can move away from the hitter.
“It’s a pitch that looks like it’s going one place, and then it just keeps going,” Kremer said. “A lot of hitters run out of bat.”
Kremer said he previously had trouble integrating a typical slider into his pitch mix, but he was able to get a sweeper to work. Holt said numerous factors play a role in determining whether one of his pitchers should add a sweeper or convert their slider into one, including their body and delivery.
Gibson figures Holt has gone through that thought process with everyone.
“If I’m a pitching coach, I’m sitting here looking around the room, ‘All right, I got this guy that throws a slider,’” he said. “‘What does his pitch profile look like if he throws a sweeper?’”
What’s to come?
After the winningest April in franchise history, the Orioles open May with matchups against teams on the opposite end of the standings, beginning with a visit to the ballpark where their breakout in some ways began. A June 10 loss to the Kansas City Royals left the 2022 Orioles a season-worst 11 games below .500, but beginning with winning the final two games of that series at Kauffman Stadium, Baltimore since has the second-most victories among American League teams. More can certainly be added against the worst team in the AL Central. The National League East-leading Atlanta Braves will then offer the Orioles their first matchup with a team currently more than one game above .500 since they faced the New York Yankees in their first home series.
What was good?
Joey Ortiz’s promotion for the first three games of the Orioles’ series in Detroit gave Jorge Mateo his latest look at the talented infielders coming up behind him in the organization. He continued to showcase his ability to hold them off. Mateo hit .318 with a .773 slugging percentage last week, hitting three homers and stealing two bases. He entered Sunday tied for third among all shortstops with at least 70 plate appearances in FanGraphs’ version of wins above replacement.
What wasn’t?
Kyle Bradish’s 4 2/3-inning, three-run start Sunday was a massive improvement after he allowed seven runs in 2 1/3 innings against the Boston Red Sox on Tuesday, but it still left his final line for the week as 10 runs and 20 base runners allowed in seven innings. Bradish said Sunday that his “mechanics are a little off,” and given how sharp he was early on, the Orioles could use him recapturing that.
On the farm
Opposing hitters are now 0-for-32 against Yennier Cano, but he was not alone in having a good week among players who were part of the Orioles’ return for trading Jorge López to the Minnesota Twins at last year’s deadline. On Saturday for Double-A Bowie, left-hander Cade Povich — regarded as Baltimore’s No. 3 pitching prospect behind Grayson Rodriguez and DL Hall — struck out 10 over five scoreless innings, allowing one hit and two walks.
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