A literal work in progress: Are new pitches for the Orioles' rookie starters promising, or part of the problem?

New pitch, who dis? Well, it's sliders for Zac Lowther and Alexander Wells that were effective. Otherwise...

Owing to their roles on a struggling pitching staff that many believed would be better for their presence, searching for bright spots hasn’t been easy for the Orioles’ band of rookie starters after an overall letdown in 2021.

Connecting those potential aspects to build on proves even more challenging, which is hard to imagine for a group that came through with such promise. But one exists.

Back in 2019, all of Dean Kremer, Zac Lowther, Bruce Zimmermann, Alexander Wells, Keegan Akin, and Mike Baumann were at the vanguard of an organization-wide pitching renaissance brought on by the new front office and now-pitching coach Chris Holt.

They weren’t top-tier prospects like former first-round picks Grayson Rodriguez and DL Hall, but as a group they provided reasonably good odds to produce a usable back-end major league starter or two. The Orioles have been desperate to develop those for generations.

For a variety of reasons, not the smallest of which was the game time they would have used to finish their development lost in 2020 to COVID-19, the group’s major league careers haven’t gone as planned.

But back to that through-line. Save for Baumann, whose 2021 coming back from elbow injury made him a unique case, each of those pitchers changed something significant about his arsenal from that 2019 season to now. Whether it was a new pitch or added emphasis to a certain offering in their repertoire, each was a different pitcher than the one who climbed the minor league ranks and enjoyed plenty of success along the way.

(Baumann went the opposite direction for large parts of 2021, as he was more a fastball-slider pitcher as he worked back from injury and didn’t feature his changeup or curveball often enough for anyone’s liking. The Orioles want him to get back to that four-pitch mix that can keep him in the rotation, but his unique circumstances disqualify him from this exercise.)

That they haven’t kicked on in the majors doesn’t mean that’s a bad thing. The pitching development plans the Orioles have now is much different than the one before, and directing their prospects get comfortable with all pitches in all counts or add new pitches before they get to the big leagues is only meant to help them compete at the highest level in a treacherous division.

What’s clear is such changes don’t take hold overnight, with rare exception, so evaluations of these pitchers shouldn’t be done in pen. A year of experience in the majors using a new pitch might be a gateway to using it more, or reason enough to shelve it all together. Just depends on the pitcher, and the pitch.

Here’s a breakdown of what each pitcher has changed or added under the new regime, and what the data behind those pitches at the major league level tells us about its usefulness now and going forward.

Keegan Akin

Akin was the most advanced of these pitchers at the start of 2019, spending the whole year at Triple-A Norfolk and enduring some growing pains going away from a fastball-dominant approach while there. His deceptive fastball was effective enough to earn him 2018 organizational pitcher of the year honors, but he was made to throw his slider and changeup more often and in unconventional counts to prepare him for the big leagues. 

His curveball was a clear fourth pitch in 2021, with Akin using his slider and changeup an identical 19.5 percent of the time. Opponents hit each hard, with a weighted on-base average (wOBA) of .425 on the slider and .405 on the changeup. According to MLB’s Statcast data, the run value per 100 pitches (RV/100) on Akin’s slider was the worst of any pitcher who threw it at least 300 times. With a RV/100 of 2.8 on his changeup, the same designation is true.

The good news is Akin’s fastball was still an effective pitch at the major league level, and when everything was working for him, there were clear examples of how to pitch well in the big leagues to build on for 2022. Still, he’ll need to bring one of those pitches along to work well with his fastball for the rotation to be part of his future.

Dean Kremer

Kremer led the minors in strikeouts in 2018 when he was part of the Manny Machado trade on the back of a fastball/curveball mix, the latter of the slower variety but which missed bats nonetheless. He and pitched well in 2019, but an early-season injury meant he went to the Arizona Fall League where his slider and changeup became a point of emphasis.

Kremer took to remote work particularly well in the 2020 shutdown when it came to honing the pitch that’s now considered a cutter, and he used the pitch well in his September call-up that year as the changeup became a clear fourth pitch. 

In 2021, a year where he struggled during the first half of the year and made one major league start in the second half, the cutter was a pitch he went to frequently with mixed results. Opponents had a .336 wOBA off it and a .500 slugging percentage, which while not great were the best of any of his pitches. It was, statistically, his best put-away pitch as well. 

Kremer and the Orioles seemed to be hoping for a more aggressive and focused attack plan as he spent the second half of 2021 in the minors, and while it may have been opponent-based, it’s notable that in his one September start, he threw as many cutters as four-seam fastballs (27), indicating it’s still very much in the plans. It should be, too, as if he locates it, it could be a the both-sides weapon Kremer needs to start in the majors.

Alexander Wells

Wells, too, spent time in the Arizona Fall League in 2019 bringing along his slider and made gains on it in a 2020 that was fully remote due to pandemic-related restrictions that kept him in Australia for the entire summer.

Coming up, he thrived with pinpoint command despite below-average fastball velocity and kept hitters off balance with a bigger curveball and an advanced changeup. But evaluators often thought a tighter breaking ball could be an effective addition to Wells’ mix, and 2021 showed it was.

He threw the pitch 16 percent of the time in the big leagues and by Statcast’s actual and expected statistics, it was his most effective pitch with a .239 wOBA off the slider from opposing hitters and the highest whiff rate (23.9 percent) of any of his pitches. 

As Wells grows more comfortable with the pitch, it stands to reason it can be a real weapon for him, especially pitching inside to right-handed hitters with it and moving the barrel against lefties when he faces them. In terms of adding pitches, this one was a success.

Zac Lowther

Lowther had a similar pitch mix to Wells coming up through the minors, and their finesse-lefty profiles often have them lumped together. That they’ve both focused on adding sliders that are distinguishable from their curveballs in the last couple seasons is another commonality between them.

Lowther’s work on his came primarily back home in Ohio in 2020, and as a late arrival at the Bowie camp, he impressed with the progress he made on it. It was an uneven year for him overall, but at least in the majors, his slider was a weapon.

Opponents had a .243 wOBA off the pitch, second-best behind his curveball, and his slider boasted the best whiff rate (38.9 percent) of all his pitches. Having a slider to use to run inside to right-handed hitters plus the curveball for lefties is important for Lowther, especially considering his changeup was hit hard this year. But there was definitely a benefit to the work he put in during the shutdown when it came to that particular pitch.

Bruce Zimmermann

When it comes to the local product for the Orioles, his change actually took hold before the 2019 season when he ramped up his offseason training and added three ticks to his fastball, bringing it up to the 91 mph average it’s at now.

It worked well for Zimmermann that year as he got up to Triple-A after an impressive showing at Bowie, and he wasn’t his best self even as he debuted with the Orioles in 2020, but there could be some questions as to the effectiveness of his fastball at that velocity band given what happened in 2021.

Opponents had a .496 wOBA against the pitch in 2021, with eight home runs ballooning the slugging percentage off his fastball to .711. It’s not as if he can’t be effective throwing that hard, as he was in 2019, albeit at a lower level.

It brings to mind how a stronger John Means carried more fastball in 2020 than in 2019 and lost some overall effectiveness because of it, as throwing his fastball harder could get him out of whack with his delivery and reduce the effectiveness of his other pitches.

Both of Zimmermann’s breaking balls were particularly effective, so perhaps featuring them more could help the fastball play up more and find less barrels.