And Holmes is very good at earning strikes with both pitches: he has a 118 strike+ with the two-seamer/sinker and a 116 mark with his slider.Īll things considered, the Yankees saw a pitcher with wicked pitch movement last year, acquired him on the cheap, and worked with him to turn him into an elite reliever. His whiff+ on his two-seamer is an excellent 156, and it’s even better with his slider at 170.Ĭommand+ tells us both pitches are a bit below-average (92 on the two-seamer and 90 on the slider), but those are acceptable marks for pitches with so much velocity and movement. Now, it’s clear Holmes is getting by on pure stuff rather than command, which is usually a good omen for the future as long as the command (and control) don’t become a problem. In these three metrics, 100 is considered average. The first one is the rate at which a pitcher generates swinging strikes the second one allows us to quantify how good he is at placing the ball where he wants (or executing his plan with every pitch, if you will), and the third one lets us evaluate how good a pitcher is at earning strikes, both called or swinging. To further analyze Holmes’ stuff, command and ability to throw strikes, we can use whiff+, command+ and strike+. Here, you can see how he can use it for called strikes, as the pitch starts out of the zone but has so much arm-side movement that it ends up pounding the zone: Holmes two-seamer/sinker is an absolute problem for hitters. In any case, the pitch is death to both righties and lefties, and he throws it a whopping 81.3% of the time (heading into Wednesday’s action). In our database, they’re pretty much one and the same (certain pitchers just make the pitch move/sink more than others). In this exercise, you may find that Holmes throws a two-seamer, but other publications call it a sinker. They changed his pitch mix (he doesn’t throw a curveball anymore, focusing on a deadly two-seamer/slider combination), and they improved both offerings to the point that both are absolutely elite. That’s not the only thing the Yankees did for him, of course. With so much movement on his pitches, the organization encouraged him to throw his two-seamer in the zone and let its natural drop and run do the rest – and it has worked wonders. The Yankees, who have turned several flawed pitchers into aces and reliable contributors in the last couple of years (Néstor Cortés Jr., Michael King, Jameson Taillon, Jonathan Loáisiga, Jordan Montgomery, Lucas Luetge and more), basically told him last year to stop nibbling and trying to hit the corners.
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