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As you can see from his pitch plot from his last start against the Pirates (chart courtesy of Kyle Bland at Pitcher List), Rea has plenty of pitches that can attack all areas of the strike zone once he gets ahead in the count.
To righties, he will primarily rely on a sweeper, cutter, and slider trio, and also mix in the sinker. As you can imagine, the sinker has a similar velocity to the four-seamer but more arm-side run, which should create minor deception. Only, it’s not really a good pitch and gets hit hard. The slider, cutter, and sweeper range between 82-87 mph with varying amounts of horizontal movement, but all are designed to attack righties away. If Rea can get ahead with the four-seam fastball, it will be hard for hitters to identify which of the three pitches they’re seeing out of his hand as he begins to attack them away. That’s likely a big part of why he has a 13.4% SwStr% and 35% ICR against righties this season.
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