PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. — The hard throwers occasionally get away with mistakes. Miss your spot at 97 mph, and it’s a little different than, say, 87 mph.
The hard throwers also get the benefit of the doubt. If your ERA jumps from 3.56 one year to 5.11 the next year, people are more inclined to believe it’s a fluke.
But when your hardest pitch sits in that 87-mph range, you’ve got no margin for error. Not on your location, not on your off-speed pitches, not on your reputation.
This is where Ryan Yarbrough finds himself in 2022. One of the most underrated pitchers in the American League from 2018-2020, Yarbrough had a hiccup in 2021 that is, at the same time, both logical and inexplicable.
On the one hand, you can see how AL East hitters might feast on a guy whose fastball is among the slowest in the majors. On the other hand, Yarbrough had been getting those same hitters out with regularity for several seasons.
There are a few theories as to why Yarbrough’s ERA jumped more than 1.50 runs per game in a single season, but there is no undisputed answer.
His velocity has been trending downward the past few years, so there is some concern that he was not getting enough separation in speed between the fastball and his breaking pitches.
But advanced metrics also suggest that his cutter, which he throws more than any other pitch, had lost its bite.
So before the lockout began in December, pitching coach Kyle Snyder suggested Yarbrough focus his offseason workouts on long tosses to strengthen his arm and potentially add a few miles per hour to his harder stuff. The results were evident in the first days of camp when Yarbrough was flirting with 89 mph on his fastball/sinker and his cutter was up from 81-82 to 83-86.
“Not that he has to pitch on velocity. That’s not his game,” manager Kevin Cash said. “But late movement. He hasn’t had that cutter that was so dominating at the velo numbers probably for two seasons, and they were there (this week.)”
It was important, however, that Yarbrough not try to overhaul his game. The hallmark of his repertoire is the amount of soft contact he induces, and that has not changed.
Yarbrough led major league pitchers in exit velocity allowed in both 2019 and 2020. He slipped an inch in 2021, but was still second in the league, sandwiched between Corbin Burnes and Zack Wheeler, who finished 1-2 in National League Cy Young voting.
“You look at the numbers and you’re like, ‘OK, it wasn’t the best year.’ But you still feel like you’ve had a lot of positives out of it,” Yarbrough said. “So I wanted to focus on that, but at the same time you don’t want to just put it under the rug like, ‘OK, that happened, let’s move on.’
“I still wanted to look at some things and try find ways of going about fixing those things and just focus on that all offseason.”
There was also the matter of poor timing, or perhaps poor execution in critical situations. Among pitchers with at least 150 innings in 2021, he was dead last when it came to the percentage of runners he stranded on base. He also gave up a career-high 25 home runs and a much greater percentage of fly balls than he had in previous years.
Those kind of numbers go back to the original point for a pitcher like Yarbrough, or Rich Hill or Dallas Keuchel, for that matter. When you rely more on finesse and deception than overpowering hitters, you cannot afford even the slightest misstep.
Snyder has been encouraged early in camp that the cutter has regained some if its velocity and effectiveness not just with increased arm strength but also a little more attention to detail.
“He isn’t the guy that gets the most out of the output of his body and his delivery, but he has deception,” Snyder said. “Over time, his arm was probably picking up the heaving lifting for a few years, he had more innings than anybody we had, and it just hit that point of saying, ‘Let’s get some output out of the body and take some stress off the arm.
“Let’s not snowball in the wrong direction and let’s focus on making sure we’re getting behind the ball and getting the cutter at 83.”
