You are born with a few abilities, and it's how you hone and direct those abilities that might determine your success. Consider Tyler Clippard. He started with a good sense of his mechanics and a 90+ mph fastball. He figured out how to best take advantage of those assets and now he's Tyler Clippard, Athletics closer.
Maybe it's a chicken and egg thing, but let's consider his fastball. We know that nobody throws more high fastballs than Clippard, and that nobody in baseball since 2011 has gotten as many popups as Clippard. You might think that the pitcher chose to do these things on purpose.
But it might not be that way, not entirely. Clippard thought the high fastball was a necessity given his mechanics. "It's how I see the strike zone, and how I throw, and where my release point is," Clippard said about his four-seamer.
If you take release point and normalize it for pitcher height, you'll find that that his kind of over-the-top fastball release point is indeed correlated to rise. Not in an incredibly strong way -- release point predicts about 21 percent of the variability in fastball rise -- but in a significant way. The "p value" on a study of over 1000 pitchers was less than .0001.
Clippard's height-adjusted release point is in the top 15 percent of the league, and so he was maybe destined to throw a rising fastball. He realized that it could be a strength and took advantage. "I very rarely will ever bury a fastball -- if I miss with the fastball, it's up above the letters, top of the zone," he said. "That's just where I throw, I've stuck to that, and it's worked my whole career."
Would it have been different if he'd played more in a place like Colorado or Texas, where high mistakes might end up home runs more often? The pitcher doesn't think so. "The way that I pitch, my game plan, has never really wavered, has never really changed," Clippard said. "I know one way to do it and that's what I've done my whole career."
He's figured out how to get the most out of that fastball. "I'm trying to throw the ball as straight as I can," he said. In order to get more rise on the pitch, Clippard does focus on getting good extension on the pitch, though. "I don't throw 100, if I can get good extension and come out true, my 91 plays like it's 96." That benefit to the rising fastball has been documented here and elsewhere, and Clippard knows it's true. "It's tougher for hitters to get to that pitch up," he said. Last year, Clippard got 10.5% whiffs on his four-seamer, or almost double the average four-seam whiff rate.
The change followed the lead provided by the fastball. Clippard uses a four-seam grip on the changeup so that it comes out looking the same as his fastball. He even throws it high in the zone sometimes -- despite your average pitcher's aversion to "hanging" changeups -- with the idea that it's supposed to look just like his fastball. At least until the very end, when it shows up to the plate about a tenth of second later than the fastball. It works. Clippard's change had the 11th-best whiff rate on a changeup thrown at least 300 times last year.
Along the way, Clippard has added some wrinkles. A new splitter gave hitters something to think about in 2014. "Those hitters in the NL East knew me very well and I just wanted to put something else in their mind, especially late in the count," Clippard said. He'd been working on the pitch on the side for three years, and at the prodding of his catchers and coaches, finally brought it into the game.
With a 17% whiff rate last year, the splitter is merely average -- not otherworldly like his fastball and change -- but not only has it given batters another pitch to think about, it's uncovered a new part of the zone for the high-and-tight pitcher. "My split is more a grip and rip, and if it's a strike, great, if it falls out of the zone, even better," Clippard said.
Look at the Brooks Baseball heat maps below showing where the fastball (first), change (second), and splitter (third) end up crossing the plate against right-handers. Now batters can't isolate one part of the zone, or even two.
This new splitter has 10 inches more drop than his regular changeup, and between the two, Clippard is probably all set from an arsenal standpoint. The "straight" changeup has a reverse platoon split, meaning he can use it against lefties effectively.
The splitter is a little bit more complicated, but could be used to complete an arsenal led by a straight changeup, just because it's different. Harry Pavlidis of Brooks Baseball ran the numbers for the pitch, which you can see in the table below. It looks like the splitter has a reverse platoon split when it comes to whiffs, but a traditional platoon split when it comes to grounders and suppressing power.
| Splitter Batter-Pitcher Combo | Whiff% | SLG% | GB% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Same-handed | 32% | 0.450 | 55% |
| Opposite-handed | 35% | 0.522 | 53% |
Take a look at how different the pitches are, with the change on the top and the splitter on the bottom. The change GIF shows what Clippard was talking about when he said that he's gotten plenty of strikes on high changeups.
ClippardChange
ClippardSplit
"I command my change way better than my splitter," says Clippard, so he's not going to change his three-to-one mix between the change and the splitter. He can throw the change in any count, while he needs to be ahead to throw the splitter. "It's a pitch that I can throw in the zone and attack guys in the zone with," he said of the change, and according to the numbers at FanGraphs, he throws the change in the zone more than his fastball, which is remarkable for an offspeed pitch.
Clippard has meddled with a cutter, which he dropped in 2013. Now his curve is his only breaking pitch, and it's decent. But it's not what makes him Tyler Clippard.
No, that's the changeup(s) and the rising fastball. His mechanics gave him that high fastball, and then he added a couple of great tweaks to make it all work. "Just throw it straight, so it's not getting any side spin on it that the hitter will recognize," he said of his remarkable straight changeup. "Then, just pull the string."
