Which of the Indians' Pitches Performed Best?

What makes a pitch great? It's a combination of factors. These offerings were among the best thrown by Indians pitchers in 2019.

Wendell Cruz-USA TODAY Sports

What makes a pitch great?

Is it how it moves? How much it moves? It’s speed? It’s unpredictability? The amount of deception with which it’s thrown? How the other pitches in the arsenal are paired with it?

Yup. All of that.

It's sort of like asking what makes a pizza great. It's not just the toppings. The sauce. Your favorite crust style. It's the entire pie.

Not any one element can make a pitch great. It’s often a combination of factors that lead to the outcomes, making true evaluation a single offering in a vacuum nearly impossible. No matter how deep you dig into a pitch’s characteristics, you can always dig a little deeper. And concepts like pitch tunneling or spin mirroring aren’t new — it’s all baked into this delicious, whiff-inducing cake.

Given there are more than a handful of ways to evaluate a pitch, let’s focus on the actual production of individual pitches thrown by Indians pitchers in 2019. To do that, we’ll use Statcast’s xwOBA (expected weighted on-base average), which calculates the results you would expect, taking into account the quality (using exit velocity and launch angle) and frequency of contact. That gives us a little better idea of the offering’s true performance — removing luck, defense, ballpark or anything else that would cloud the results. From there, we can dig a little deeper into that pitch’s characteristics, knowing that, at the very least, the pitch is dominant because of its features or how that pitcher sets it up with the rest of his arsenal and command — or both.

MLB.com's Sarah Langs recently performed a similar exercise with all pitchers around baseball, but since we’re focused on Tribe hurlers, we put their pitches under the microscope, focusing on the best performance of each pitch type in 2019 to give us an imperfect but fun dissection of the best pitch results.

(Note: The results have been filtered to remove pitchers no longer with the Indians organization -- apologies to Tyler Clippard's logic-defying production -- and Clevela off-season acquisitions have been added.)

Four-seam fastball, min. 300 pitches: Mike Clevinger (.283 xwOBA)

League average: .354

Clevinger’s goal last season was to focus on his average fastball velocity. His training and delivery adjustments paid off with a 95.4 mph average, the highest of his career despite an early-season injury that sidelined him for over two months. On top of that, the righty finished with the fifth-highest whiff rate among starters on their four-seam fastballs (30 percent), and his heater featured 16 percent more vertical movement (also thought of as rise) than the average four-seamer. He utilized that velocity and movement to his advantage, throwing the highest percentage of those pitches in the upper-third of the zone or above of his career (47.1 percent), a near 11 percent increase from 2018.

Two-seamer or sinker, min. 150 pitches: Aaron Civale (.268)

League average: .358

While the league's use of the sinker has been declining over the past several years, Civale proved it can still be effective. He posted the second-lowest xwOBA on a two-seamer or sinker in baseball among starters (min. of 250 pitches). The pitch featured the lowest whiff rate of all of Civale's pitches (9.6 percent), but he managed to keep it off hitter's barrels, allowing just six extra-base hits on the sinker -- all doubles -- while limiting batters to a .213 average and .288 slugging against it. The pitch also didn't allow a single barrel, Statcast's ideal combination of exit velocity and launch angle, finished with the second-lowest xwOBA on contact among sinkers or two-seamers in the majors (min. 50 results) and generated a near 50 percent ground ball rate. Whether that elite contact management can roll into 2020 is far from certain, but it played a major role in his success last season.

Cutter, min. 150 pitches: Emmanuel Clase (.290)

League average: .319

An ability to reach triple digits provides a pretty good floor for Clase, who joins Cleveland after being acquired in the Corey Kluber trade with Texas. He relies heavily on the cutter, which he threw 73.3 percent of the time. When paired with slightly above average horizontal movement, it resulted in a strikeout over 27 percent of the time he threw it in a two-strike count. Now, the fact that his heater sits around 99 mph would suggest his talent lies in strikeouts, but his cutter was barely in the top 50 among cutter swing-and-miss rate. His overall strikeout rate is about average, but what his cutter is capable of, however, is keeping the ball on the ground. Clase's fastball combination (cutter and four-seam) led to a near 60-percent grounder rate, per FanGraphs.

Slider, min. 150 pitches: Mike Clevinger (.210)

League average: .269

Clevinger again? Gasp! The highest putaway pitch rate of Clevinger's offerings was his slider, meaning that 26.4 percent of the time he threw it with two strikes, the at-bat ended with a strikeout. The slider also generated a swinging-strike on nearly half of the cuts opposing hitters took against it (48.3 percent). That rate was the sixth-best this year among the sliders thrown by all starting pitchers. Batters went just 13-for-121 against that pitch (.174), and the expected batting average against it (.159) suggests the lack of hits weren't any sort of fluke. The 21.7 percent hard-hit rate against it was also the lowest of Clevinger's four offerings. Additionally, his slider also displayed more horizontal movement than ever, moving 8.1 inches more to his glove side than the average slider, generating 93 percent more break than average, per Statcast.

Curveball:, min. 150 pitches Adam Plutko (.191)

League average: .271

Aha! A surprise. While nothing in the movement profile of Plutko’s curve screams overly special, his breaking ball did feature 93rd percentile spin last year. Given the pitch’s performance, it doesn’t make sense that the righty’s curve was his least-utilized pitch in 2019 (10.6 percent usage). Things are never as simple as “Hey, just throw more curves,” but it does seem like the breaking ball could be a bit more of a weapon if paired with a fastball up in the zone (the curve did lead to his second-highest whiff rate of his four pitches). Given his changeup actually yielded a .370 wOBA — oof — it seems reasonable that he could flip-flop its usage with the breaking ball, using more of his curve and slider, the two pitches that finished with positive values over at FanGraphs.

Changeup or split-finger, min. 150 pitches: Mike Clevinger (.315)

League average: .286

Clevinger’s changeup performed “best,” but the pitch was still below league average, and the Indians staff actually threw changeups at a lower rate than the MLB average last year. Keep in mind, a reason for that was the health of Carlos Carrasco. Carrasco’s changeup had yielded a .229 xwOBA from 2016-2018, among the top 25 in baseball over that time (min. 300 results), but due to his battle with Leukemia, he missed a big chunk of 2019. If Carrasco is able to return to form in 2020, a key factor will be his changeup, a pitch that induced a 44.2 percent whiff rate in 2018 and led to a strikeout in a two-strike count nearly 30 percent of the time he threw it, almost on par with his lethal slider.