You all know how playoff relief pitchers work these days. A starter comes out, perhaps earlier than he would in the regular season, and then the parade starts. A 23-year-old who throws 99 with a mind-bending slider. A former starter who pops 100 with ease. A crafty lefty is next, an embarrassment to his peers thanks to a mere 97-mph radar gun reading. Then it’s time for the big cheese, the bullpen anchor; he throws 100 as well, only with a secondary pitch that would get him convicted of witchcraft in an earlier era.
That’s just the way baseball has gone in recent years. Pitcher training is better than ever and velocity misses bats, so the trend is inexorable. In 2014, the average fastball thrown by a reliever in the playoffs checked in at 94.1 mph. In 2022, it hit 95.9 mph. In the not-so-distant future, it will surely top 96. If you can build the entire bullpen out of fireballers, why not do it?
It feels strange to call Ryan Pressly a junkballer. He sits 94-95 mph with a backspinning four-seamer. He threw a pitch 98 mph this season. He’s lived up near 100 at various points in his 11-year major league career. But in modern baseball, he’s downright quaint, a four-pitch reliever who doesn’t rely on gamebreaking velocity.
Combine his unconventional methods with the fact that he’s a relief pitcher, and Pressly drew the ire of some Astros fans this year. He posted his worst ERA since 2017 (a still-solid 3.58) and looked worse down the stretch, particularly if you’re only looking at that ERA; three blowup games led to a 4.76 mark after the trade deadline. Everyone thinks their own team’s bullpen is bad, it’s just a fact of life, but might Pressly be Houston’s undoing come playoff time?
Right, yeah, no. Pressly faced six Minnesota batters in the team’s four-game ALDS victory. He retired all six, five by strikeout. You just can’t do much better than that. In the Astros’ last three playoff runs, he’s thrown 22.2 innings across 21 games and allowed a solitary earned run. That was in 2021, and he got the save anyway. Seems like the old guy still has it.
Judging relievers by their success is always going to be futile. Pressly is the closer for a team that has gone to two straight World Series, and even then, he’s barely cracked 20 innings across three years of work. The samples are necessarily tiny. A single bad game – or simply not having a bad game – can be the difference between a great line and a poor one. But I thought Pressly’s game plan against the Twins did a good job illustrating why he’s so lastingly great despite an atypical pitch mix.
Before we get to a pile of GIFs, let me point out one important thing: Pressly might not throw particularly hard in the context of today’s game, but all of his pitches are great. His fastball gets more ride than you’d expect and has virtually no east/west movement. His bullet slider comes in at 90 mph and has a little wiggle in it. His curveball? It drops off the face of the earth with nasty two-plane break. Even his changeup is great; it mirrors his slider velo-wise but fades more than a foot in the opposite direction.
Our pitch models agree with my subjective assessment. Stuff+ gives the fastball, slider, curve, and changeup grades of 127, 179, 156, and 134 respectively. 100 is average, just so we’re clear. Per that model, he has the third-best fastball on the team behind Bryan Abreu and Ryne Stanek, the best slider, the best curveball, and the best changeup. The PitchingBot model is on a different scale, but it agrees with the general magnitude. It thinks Pressly has the third-best fastball, fifth-best slider, second-best curveball, and third-best changeup on a team full of impressive pitches.
As Matt Trueblood pointed out earlier this month, the Twins have a unique two-strike approach: don’t change anything. They have the lowest in-zone swing rate with two strikes, hit for power when they connect, and generally treat it like just another chance to put something in play rather than a wholly different count. They led the majors in called strikeouts this year by a big margin. The gap between them and the second-place Reds is as large as the gap between the Reds and the 12th-place Cardinals. They had the highest in-zone whiff rate when they swung; they take big hacks where many teams shorten up.
That team-wide tendency means that a standard pitching approach might not fare well against the Twins. If you’re bouncing breaking balls hoping for a chase or ripping four-seamers above the zone, you’re liable to get a series of takes. And if your counter is to throw some fastballs in the zone and hope they take, that’s risky too; they’re swinging aggressively when they offer. But Pressly has the perfect tools to counter that. He can command all four of his pitches for strikes. He did just that:
That cluster of secondaries at the bottom of the zone is ludicrous. It’s perfectly designed to counter Minnesota’s tendencies. It’s generally accepted wisdom that leaving a slow pitch in the zone with two strikes is risky. The hitter will be defending the zone, so he’ll almost certainly be swinging. He’ll probably be trying to put something into play. A slow pitch in the zone is liable to get blooped somewhere. Even worse, maybe the hitter is looking breaking ball and hoping to foul off a fastball that he gets fooled on; that might lead to some loud contact against your in-zone 80 mph offering.
Pressly knows that, and he doesn’t usually pitch this way. Only a quarter of his two-strike pitches were in-zone breaking balls this year. The same is true for his career as a whole. He throws less than half of his two-strike pitches in the strike zone. Against the Twins, he abandoned all of that and adapted to what they were giving him.
That location chart actually undersells Pressly’s calculated aggression. Here’s his 0-2 pitch to Royce Lewis from last night:
That post-pitch crawl isn’t the newest dance craze sweeping the nation; he lost his footing and couldn’t complete the pitch. That location clearly wasn’t part of his plan; sometimes, you just slip. He took a while trying to re-find the zone after that mishap. Here are the next two pitches of the sequence:
Just look at that body language after the 2-2 fastball he yanked wide. “Dangit, hand,” he seems to be telling himself. “Throw strikes.” So naturally, he regrouped and had just the right weight on his 3-2 curveball:
Go back up and take a look at the location chart from earlier in this article. Those three balls – all because he slipped off the mound – are the only two-strike pitches he threw outside of the strike zone. Maybe he was planning on bouncing that first pitch anyway. And plenty of these two strike counts were of the 3-2 variety, which argues for in-zone pitches regardless of opposition. But the game plan seemed clear, and it worked to perfection.
Check out this sequence from Pressly’s first save of the series. Jorge Polanco managed to foul off a tough two-strike curve, so Pressly came back with a nastier and lower one, but still kept it in the zone:
The Twins were wholly unprepared for this plan of attack. How could it be any other way? They did things one way all year and rolled to the playoffs, then waited out the Blue Jays (28.9% two-strike zone rate) in the Wild Card round. Pressly simply had all the answers for the questions the Twins were attempting to pose.
I don’t think that we’ll see this approach against the Rangers next week. They look much more like an average team when they reach two strikes; they shorten up, swing fairly often in the strike zone, and have been particularly lethal against in-zone bendy stuff with two strikes. They were 30 runs above average against such pitches, behind only the mighty Braves. The Twins, on the other hand, were 36 runs below average. Hitters aren’t a monolithic group; bring the same plan of attack against a different group of opponents, and you might run into trouble quickly.
That’s part of what makes Pressly so great. He has the tools to adapt to his opposition. It’s not a matter of using his third-best pitch to attack their weakness, either; all of his pitches are great, and he can throw his breaking balls for strikes if necessary. The Twins were a tailor-made matchup for his unique skill set. The Rangers will be a completely different challenge, but I wouldn’t bet against him being up for it. After all, he has a long history of figuring out the right tools for the job and applying them effectively. He might just start a new trend while he’s at it, too:
