Chris Sale in Crisis: Rookie Andrew Abbott's Emergence Sparks Pitching Revolution
The biggest change I see is with his cutter. It now has 1.5 inches more vertical movement, which means it’s dropping less than it did last year as it approached the plate. He’s throwing it up 10% more and inside to righties 6% more to take advantage of that added “rise”. It also seems like keeping it up in the zone is helping his swing-and-miss because he’s elevating it out of the strike zone with two strikes, and his two-strike chase rate has jumped from 9% to 20% this year. Additionally, the PutAway Rate on the cutter is 40% to righties, which means it has been really effective as a strikeout pitch for him. Overall, the cutter has posted a SwStr% of 14% and an ICR of 37.5% after posting just a 6% and 56.3% mark respectively last year. Those are intriguing changes, but may just be small sample size noise.
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