Chris Bassitt throws eight pitches. How that wide arsenal gives his team an edge

Last year, no starting pitcher threw 100 innings and threw more different pitch types at least 10 percent of the time than Chris Bassitt. He’s working to keep that up by throwing as many different pitches as he can.

“Technically I have eight,” he laughed before a spring start last week. “I have two different changeups. To lefties, it’s more of a split-change, and to righties, I have a true change.”

Maybe you could quibble with that one. The difference is small. The changeup is about an inch more horizontal and less than a mile per hour faster against righties, and that might strain the definition of “new pitch.”

But definitions are why he’ll probably at least throw six next season — his slow slider was reclassified as a sweeper by Statcast in the offseason.

“I call it a slow slider, they call it a sweeper,” Bassitt pointed out. “They renamed it. I don’t know what the sweeper is.”

A sweeper is technically a slider that has less drop than you might expect based on spin alone. A pitch made popular by the Dodgers and Yankees and Astros, it seems like Bassitt has been throwing one forever, without really intending to take advantage of “seam-shifted wake.” It’s just the slider he throws.

Do hitters swing under it because they expect it to be higher like other sweepers?

“On a normal slider, if your velo is 93 (mph), normal slider is like 83, 84, and my slow slider is like 76,” said the Blue Jays righty. “They are so out in front that they are underneath it — but I could be wrong on that.”

This spring, he’s working on expanding his number of pitches even further by sliding around on the rubber to make the most of his pitch angles.

“We’re learning right now that if I slide more to the third base side it improves my slider, because I have more plate to work with,” he said. “From the third base side, I can throw it straight and let it break, like how (Max) Scherzer does it — he’s hard third base side and crossfires sliders down and away.”

Below, you can see the very beginning of bringing that adjustment from the bullpen to the game mound. The day we talked, Bassitt thought he’d take it to the field, and did, to an extent. The Orioles threw a very lefty-heavy lineup at him, and he mostly held to the first base side against them, as you can see on the left (he threw a sweeper). But against righties, he switched up his position a little, as you can see on the right (he threw a sinker).

But why is he working so hard to multiply the looks and add pitches? According to Savant, the sweeper was his second-best pitch last season. Shouldn’t he just throw it more often than the eight percent of the time he threw it last year?

“It’s always been a really good pitch for me, but when does too much of a good thing become not a good thing?” Bassitt wondered. “You’re toeing a fine line.”

Recently, we had Spencer Strider telling us that he didn’t see value in throwing lesser pitches, that he thought there wasn’t really such a thing as too much of a good thing. But Bassitt’s conviction runs deep, and it’s about not only what he can do for himself, but what he can do for his team.

“I’ve talked to hitters in camp here, and I’ve heard ‘the number one goal I have when I face a guy like you is that I want to see every pitch you have in the first at-bat,’” said Bassitt. “For me, one of the biggest things, I almost pitch (only) two or three pitches first time through the order because I don’t want to show you everything. I know that’s what you want. I can definitely throw all my pitches all the way, but do you want me to throw in the sixth and seventh? I’m good in those innings because of how I pitch.”

There’s plenty of evidence that he’s right. Just throwing a third pitch even just 10 percent of the time softens a pitcher’s third-time-through-the-order penalty. And that effect is probably because players get accustomed to the shapes pitchers are throwing, not because pitchers get fatigued, as you can see from Cameron Grove’s tweet below. The pitcher’s stuff (blue) remains steady, but the hitters (red) do much better the third time through the order.

The third time through the order penalty, where pitchers get worse results as batters see more of their pitches, shows up as a residual in my models.

It is decorrelated from my xRV which shows that it is due to familiarity and not pitchers throwing lower quality pitches. pic.twitter.com/HN0JxWOnyG

— Cameron Grove (@Pitching_Bot) November 21, 2021

Theoretically, this should mean that a pitcher with more pitches should be able to go deeper into games. Turns out, that theory is correct. If you look at pitchers from 2010 to 2019, starters with more pitches faced more batters per game. And if that number seems to inch upward with every pitch, look at the last column to see how a small impact start-to-start can add up over the course of a season.

There’s no entry for eight pitch types — the sample for comparison is zero — but Bassitt is helping his cause for going deeper into games, and deeper into the season, by adding these wrinkles. He also thinks about it from a team standpoint.

“I see the true value of depth from a starter,” he said. “Go talk to any bullpen arm and ask them, who do you want, the five-inning guy or the seven-inning guy. ‘Well, the five-inning guy is nasty, but I don’t care, we have to eat four innings.’ I know how good our bullpen can be, but we can also give them the chance to go off-day, off-day, off-day. To me, the teams that are really, really good have the healthiest bullpens. I want our bullpen to pitch because they have to pitch, not because we need them to pitch, if that makes sense.”

Just looking at the number of plate appearances thrown by starting pitchers on a certain team and then at how that team’s bullpen fared in the postseason versus the regular season doesn’t produce a relationship. If the starters throw more innings, it doesn’t mean the bullpen will necessarily do better in the postseason. That’s probably because both elements have so many moving parts. Think of the Rays, whose starters throw fewer innings than anyone. Their bullpen slips to seventh-worst in the postseason over the last four playoffs, so it’s tempting to draw a straight line between these two things. The Jays got the sixth-fewest innings from their starters in this four-year sample, and have the sixth-worst bullpen in those postseasons. Sure seems like 1+1 = 2.

But the math isn’t quite that easy. The Padres had the 22nd-most innings pitched by their starters and the fourth-best bullpen in the postseason. The Yankees were middle of the pack by innings pitched by their starters and still managed the third-best bullpen in those postseasons. Teams are adding, subtracting, trading, and calling up pitchers all the time, so it’s hard to know exactly what the impact a few more innings from a starter can have on a bullpen’s ability to be fresh in the postseason.

One thing we have seen proven in the numbers, though, is that every pitch thrown by a pitcher makes them a little worse over the course of the season. So more innings from better pitchers should help keep average pitchers from dipping into below-average territory. In other words, more innings from your best starters is good, and that looks like it is true when we look at the numbers. Thanks to STATS Perform, we can see below that the number of innings top five starters (by innings) throw is positively correlated to team success.

So Bassitt’s efforts to throw more pitches, to mix it up — and maybe even to change the looks by moving on the rubber — should have real benefits for the Blue Jays this year. It’s likely to help him see more batters, go deeper into games, and deeper into the season, and that sort of thing is correlated with team success.

It looks like quality is as good as quantity in some respects. Or, as the new Jays righty says:

“Here, with (Kevin) Gausman and (Alek) Manoah, I’m excited as hell.”

(Photo of Bassitt: Nathan Denette / The Canadian Press via Associated Press)