Have you seen Adam Wainwright throw a slider? A FOX Sports investigation

So we've got two innings of Adam Wainwright pitching against the Giants. Have you noticed a slider yet?

This is a significant question, because the weirdest thing about Adam Wainwright's NLDS start was what it said in his pitch chart: 13 sliders. Which wouldn't be weird for a pitcher who throws sliders, which Wainwright ... isn't. Or doesn't seem to be. He threw 12 recorded "sliders" all year, according to Brooks Baseball, and those 12 were the first of his career. So what's going on here?

First, we need to define some terms. A slider and a cutter are often on the same spectrum; a slider and a curveball are often on the same spectrum; Wainwright throws a cutter, and he throws a curveball, so if he throws a "slider," it might be a bastardized version of one of the others. It's also possible that he has thrown "sliders" in the past that Pitch Info (which provided pitch tags to Brooks Baseball) figured were so similar to another pitch in his repertoire that they were lumped into one of the other categories.

The latter -- the lumping -- seems plausible. Before this year, none of Wainwright's pitches were labeled sliders, but we have Wainwright himself describing his slider in to ESPN's Anna McDonald: "My slider and my curveball were real sharp-snapping good," he said about the first starts after his 2012 comeback from Tommy John surgery, but then "my slider completely lost its break and was flat as a board." So he threw what he called a slider. But, remember: spectrum. It's not that Pitch Info was wrong, but just that there's no point of delineation where a slider necessarily becomes a curve or becomes a cutter. Those sliders Wainwright described were either a figment of his imagination or (much more likely) were lumped in.

So he probably has a slider, which he rarely (almost never) throws. Did he throw it in Game One? Check out his average-velocity chart for September and October starts:

The slider shows up as the same velocity that his cutter normally is, and two or three mph faster than his "slider" "should" be. Which would strongly suggest these are cutters. But look at the curveballs: Two or three mph faster than his curveballs should be. If he was certainly overthrowing one breaking ball, why not assume he was also throwing another one harder than usual?

Further, the sliders he threw had distinctive movement, movement unlike a cutter. It moved four inches side-to-side (which is close to typical for his cutter) but got about three or four inches more "drop" than his cutter gets. That means that he clearly threw a pitch that acted as a slider. Says Harry Pavlidis, who charts every pitch that gets listed at Brooks Baseball, and who made the decision to tag these as sliders, "I'm hesitant to give guys like Waino a new pitch, but this looked really different. Those pitches had a lot of depth, more than normal. Until intent is documented, I decided to go with outcome on these."

There's one last clue, a very important one: He threw it much more to right-handers than to left-handers, an indication of intent. If we lump the sliders and cutters into the same category, then against lefties only 20 percent of the slider/cutters were classified as sliders. But 59 percent of the slider/cutters thrown to righties were classified as sliders. It strongly suggests that we've spotted Wainwright doing something, rather than that something funny in the labeling.

Why is this so important? Because we know that there's a pitch that acted like a slider, but intent makes all the difference in our conclusions. If Wainwright was intentionally throwing a "slider," it means he has added a weapon for the postseason. If he wasn't intentionally throwing this pitch, then it strongly implies that Wainwright's elbow "condition" might have affected his pitches enough to mess with our pitch-identification heuristics. In other words, when Wainwright says reports of an infirm elbow are overblown, his pitches themselves would be screaming otherwise.

So, knowing all that, think back on these first two innings -- and watch the ones ahead -- and ask yourself again: Have you seen a slider yet?