This year’s ballpark has new fixtures in addition to a pitch clock and larger base. It does not have its own marketing campaign and has not been tested in focus groups or minor leaguers. Even those responsible for it are surprised to find it’s presence on stadium scoreboards.
“When it said ‘sweeper,’ we were like, ‘What the hell?’ Because it has sliders.”
Major League Baseball’s Statcast system, which feeds scoreboards and television screens, has quietly introduced sweepers and slabs as new pitches this season. However, slabs are better known as a combination of sliders and curves. What is a sweeper… what exactly is it?
“It’s kind of a glitchy pitch,” Yankees pitching coach Matt Blake said. When it came out, suddenly a lot of people saw it and said, ‘Okay, I can take it to this person or that person,’ and now suddenly everyone understood it.
Specifically, a pretty Yankee throw. Blake said the trend started with staffers in Houston and Cleveland around 2017, but the Yankees have been fervently preaching sweeper virtues throughout the system.
Throws by King, Nestor Cortez, Clay Holmes, Ron Marinaccio and Clark Schmidt. So are several pitchers traded last summer who grew up in the Yankees system, including JP Sears and Ken Waldichuk of the Oakland Athletics and Hayden Wesneski of the Chicago Cubs.
“It’s an opportunity to say, ‘OK, what’s their main curveball? Will it be swing and miss?'” says Blake. “There may be an opportunity to add something here. Give this a try.”
Blake said the sweeper is a horizontal slider with less downward movement than the slab. Classic sliders like Jerrit Cole, which the Yankees often call “gyro” sliders, are designed to look like fastballs to hitters. The sweeper never looks like a fastball, but it attracts hitters by making it look like a curve ball that can be hit before it leaves the bat.
“You need a sidespin,” said King, who learned the sweeper from former Yankees starter Corey Kluber, now with the Boston Red Sox. “We always talk about the nose of the ball. Gyro If he’s throwing a slider, the nose points straight at the hitter like a spinning red dot. With a sweeper, you want the nose to go up.” I guess.”
Pitching is brotherhood. Teammates and even opponents regularly compare grips and share tips on finger pressure, seam orientation, and more. Now that high-speed cameras have become a common teaching tool, pitch design is becoming more precise and efficient, and teams are devoting more resources (technology and manpower) to it than ever before. A right curveball can turn a fringe prospect into a big leaguer.
Of course, more often than not, data only disseminates what older generations already knew. Throughout the 1990s and into his early 2000s, the sweeper was instrumental in building a Yankees dynasty through top his starter David his Cohn and outstanding set-up man Jeff Nelson.
“Right-handers can start at hitters and break through inside corners for front-door sweepers. I start it on their hips. Last week’s game.” was frowned upon by his pitching coaches because a miss is a home run, and off-speed and inside the plate, if the hitter recognizes it, he can launch it and draw a fly ball. “
He added: The Sweeper has a larger, flatter break and is designed for swing-and-a-miss and flinching. If it’s at the front door, it’s to make a man flinch. When throwing, it is to swing and escape. “
Nelson, who now calls games with the Yankees and Miami Marlins, said he always thought his signature pitch was a slab. The 6-foot-8-inch right-handed Nelson throws from an angle of his three-quarters low and riding inside. I made it
“Sometimes it was so choppy that when we tried to slow it down, it would drop for a mile,” says Nelson. “There were days when I was like, ‘I don’t know how to control it.'”
Nelson may be wild, sure, but before relief pitchers became commonplace, he regularly struck out more than he pitched innings. Closer Mariano his Rivera famous cutter scored many swing his strikes but was more famous for breaking bats. The cutter looks like a fastball before a lateral slice in the second half. Cohn calls the pitch “Baby Sweeper”.
The Yankees’ current closer, right-handed Holmes, has an exceptional sinker that hits right-handed hitters. He complements it with both sliders and sweepers, making it logical to distinguish between pitches.
“I threw both last year, and when I went to Statcast, it was all one pitch,” Holmes said. “I was throwing a sweeper and a gyro, but they were rolled into one, so the averages weren’t really indicative of either pitch — velocity, movement, etc. It was a blend of both. So the average didn’t really show this pitch shape and that pitch shape.”
now, this shape and or Shapes have their own official names.
