Trevor Bauer threw his first career shutout on Sunday. It’s a nice milestone, and an increasingly rare occurrence. There have been 15 this year, just 19 all of last year, far and away the lowest number ever in a single season. Prior to 1991 there had never been fewer than 107 in a season. So good for Trevor.
He also pitched a bit outside the box, at least for him. While he doesn’t throw any pitch the majority of the time, it’s usually a fastball/slider/curve mix with something else tossed in. On Sunday though, he got a bit weird with the cutter.
At 38 cutters, it’s comfortably his most ever thrown in a single start. The second highest number came earlier this year against the White Sox when he tossed 28. Plainly it’s something he’s working on. But is it, really?
We’ve heard so much about his slider the last few years, how he’s developing this vicious new pitch in the lab that’s basically stolen from Corey Kluber. And when it’s on, it’s certainly incredible. Here's one he threw to the Blue Jays’ Brandon Drury early in the season
Pretty nice, huh? Just kind of leans away from the hitter. It’s a great pitch when thrown well. But check this out — it’s a cutter he threw to the same exact person, in the same game.
So that’s something. It’s almost certainly not the same pitch of course, because people with more knowledge than me have confirmed that he does in fact throw two discrete pitches. And the second one doesn’t have the same frisbeeing bite as the first. Corey Kluber has the same kind of pairing that work off of each other. Heck, Kluber’s cutter is considered a very valuable pitch by FanGraphs’ linear pitch weights, even if it seems like all he does is give up home runs with it. That’s probably a sequencing thing as much as anything.
For Bauer though, there’s some strange stuff with that cutter. He throws it anywhere between 79 and 89 mph this year, and trails only his slider in swinging strike rate at 12.6% (the slider is 19.3%). It’s definitely it’s own thing, a specific pitch he throws apart from the rest of his arsenal.
But then there’s this:
The one on the left is a cutter, the one on the right ostensibly a slider. Or maybe it’s the other way around (it’s not). It’s odd, isn’t it? Is this really just a classification issue? Again, it’s agreed (by Bauer and many others) that these are discrete pitches. And yet, here we stand, getting swinging strikes with markedly similar pitches that we call completely different things.
Bauer has allowed a combined two earned runs this year when he’s really leaned on the cutter like he did yesterday. Of course those two opponents were the Tigers and White Sox, so strength of competition needs to be taken into account. But it does demonstrate that, even in these days of ever more velocity, style and panache have some place to make outs. Zack Grienke’s changeup is actually harder than his fastball sometimes. So Bauer might not need the fastball in the future as much.
While some simplification of repertoire might be good for him, maybe this strange, two pitches in one freak of nature he’s throwing can create an entire different beast, which would be the third or fourth beast version of Bauer. Or maybe the radar just doesn’t know what it’s doing. Either is possible.