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2018 Houston Astros Season Thread

Planet Houston

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Outstanding article on McHugh’s slider:

 

Collin McHugh has an innate ability to spin a baseball. It’s why the Astros plucked him from obscurity off the waiver wire in December 2013. As he blossomed into a middle-of-the-rotation starter in the years that followed, the curveball he threw off his high-spin, elevated four-seam fastball was his best weapon.

But in his season-long cameo as a reliever this year, McHugh has carved up hitters by harnessing that spin on a different axis. A late-breaking slider with sweeping, side-to-side movement has supplanted his still-effective 12-6 curve as his most-used offspeed pitch and helped propel him from long reliever to high-leverage troubleshooter.

The pitch, which averages 80 mph, is still a relatively new one for McHugh, a 31-year-old right-hander with more than 700 innings of major league experience. He first broke it out in only July of last year. It’s now one of the most effective sliders among relievers, a development that will only increase McHugh’s value when he presumably returns to a starting role next year.

It could also prove pivotal in key matchups against right-handed hitters in the postseason, when McHugh should be one of Astros manager A.J. Hinch’s go-to arms out of the bullpen.

“It’s a sweeping pitch, so I’m not necessarily looking for like a hard downer slider like some guys,” said McHugh, whose 1.00 ERA in 54 innings coming into Friday ranked second in the majors in reliever ERA behind only the A’s Blake Treinen (0.93). “Mine’s like more of a hybrid curveball-slider where it’s just straight side-to-side sweep as much as I can get.”

This particular slider, unleashed in a 2-and-2 count against the Rangers’ Delino DeShields on July 29, earned McHugh a shoutout from the @PitchingNinja, Rob Friedman. That morning, McHugh had seen via Friedman’s feed a video of Pirates reliever Kyle Crick’s slider. It featured exactly the type of movement he seeks. So, he tried to emulate it.

“I knew that was the one I was looking for,” McHugh said. “Like right out of the hand, it was the ‘in the zone the whole time and then sweeping late off the plate.’ That’s kind of the exact one you want for a swing and miss.”

McHugh will enter the weekend having thrown 195 sliders this season, which equates to 22.5 percent of his pitches, according to MLB’s Statcast data. Merely four have resulted in a hit for the opposition, and all four have been just singles. The pitch has also accounted for 24 of his 70 strikeouts. Overall, McHugh has a strikeout percentage of 35.0, almost 10 percent better than his best mark as a starter (25.4 percent in 2014).

Against right-handed hitters, McHugh has relied on his slider roughly one of every three pitches. His .367 opponents’ OPS against righties came into Friday night’s slate of games ranked third among relievers (minimum 30 appearances), trailing only the Padres’ Kirby Yates (.255) and Seranthony Dominguez of the Phillies (.339).

Reliever Team Opponents’ OPS vs. RHB
Kirby Yates Padres .255
Seranthony Dominguez Phillies .339
Collin McHugh Astros .367
Blake Treinen Athletics .384
Jesse Biddle Braves .406
Lou Trivino Athletics .407
Keone Kela Pirates .407

“It shows Collin’s continual intellectual curiosity on how he can get better, how he can evolve,” said Hinch, his manager since 2015. “When I got here he was predominantly high fastball, cutter, big curveball. Now he’s dominating with this right-on-right slider.”

McHugh still spins his curveball 20 percent of the time — it has yielded only three hits, also all singles, this season — but more so against lefties than righties. His motivation to learn the slider corresponded to the decline of his cutter, a pitch he used to throw nearly as much if not more than his four-seamer. But in 2016, a year he regressed to a 4.34 ERA, his cutter lacked effectiveness.

So in the offseason ahead of the 2017 season, McHugh began to mess around with a new pitch. He sought the advice of two teammates known for their sliders, Luke Gregerson and Brad Peacock. Then in the spring McHugh got hurt, stalling the pitch’s development.

McHugh’s injury — a posterior impingement of his pitching elbow — cost him the first three-plus months of the 2017 season. As he rehabbed, he worked on the slider. He spoke extensively with Peacock, who showed him his grip and the type of sideways spin he looks for when he throws the pitch. McHugh continued to tinker as he worked his way back to the Astros.

When he made his 2017 regular-season debut on July 22 in Baltimore, McHugh didn’t waste any time in testing out his new pitch. In the first inning of the game, he used it to strike out Jonathan Schoop.

“You don’t want to get beat on it, but at the same time I kind of felt like I had nothing to lose,” he said. “I knew that the way my cutter was playing the year before was not going to be sustainable, was not going to cut it in the big leagues for the way I was using it. So, I figured if we could make that slider into even a marginally useful pitch, it would probably be better.”

A little more than 12 months later, it’s way better than marginally useful. Peacock, who revived his career after he learned his slider from Class AAA teammate Jordan Jankowski in July 2016, believes McHugh’s version of the pitch has surpassed his own. When they play catch, Peacock said McHugh’s slider tricks him all the time.

“With some sliders, you can see like a circle on the ball coming at you. This one, it’s like a fastball. You can’t see any circle on it,” said Peacock, who pitches with a lower arm angle than McHugh. “And it’s his late movement. Hitters have to guess whether it’s a heater or a slider.”

“Some guys can naturally spin the ball, and [McHugh’s] one of those guys,” Charlie Morton added. “My guess is if he’s spinning it well and it’s a little bit tighter, it’s easier to control. And then he can throw it more often instead of throwing the curveball, which is harder to control because he spins and moves that a ton. He can probably the throw slider more, and then he’s probably become more confident in it.

“[Hitters] still have to protect against his curveball, which is one of the better ones in the game. So, he’s got two really good breaking balls, and he’s got a four-seam fastball that he can locate well up in the zone. He spins it really well. He’s got starter stuff, legit starter stuff, in a role where he doesn’t really have to go through an order a bunch [of times]. It’s got to be really tough for hitters to do anything, and obviously it has been.”

McHugh continues to develop his slider and his usage of it. He’s learning to throw it to both sides of the plate and tinkering with using it against left-handed hitters. Even when not getting a swing and miss, the pitch can be a valuable tool for inducing weak contact when he catches hitters out in front of it.

“Hopefully,” he said, “it can continue to evolve and just become a better pitch for me.”

 

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