Checking in on the new sweeper and cutter Emerson Hancock debuted on Sunday.
One of the main things I pay attention to during spring training is changes in pitch velocity and pitchers who are working on new pitches. When Emerson Hancock mentioned a few weeks ago that he was working on a couple of new pitches, it piqued my interest. Despite being a first-round draft pick and a top prospect in the Mariners system for years, Hancock has largely been overshadowed by the successes of the quartet of homegrown starters who have found success before him. Across 15 unremarkable starts in the majors, he’s posted a 4.71 ERA and a 5.42 FIP, and is, at best, the sixth starter on Seattle’s depth chart. It’s safe to say that the start of his big league career hasn’t gone according to plan, but his efforts to expand and hone his pitch repertoire could be a sign of better days ahead.
The main issue Hancock has faced is a pitch arsenal that’s far too hittable. During his first three minor league seasons in High-A and Double-A, he ran a strikeout rate of 24.1% — good, but not outstanding. Last year, his strikeout rate cratered upon reaching Triple-A, down to 16.7%, and it’s been even worse in those 15 major league starts at just 14.3%. It’s not hard to see why; none of his four pitches has a whiff rate above league average and just one of his pitches produces a xwOBA better than league average, his changeup. Last year, opposing batters produced a xwOBA over .400 off both of his fastballs. His pitches don’t miss bats and when he allows contact, it’s generally been pretty loud.
The root of his issues are two fastballs that just haven’t been big league quality pitches. His four-seam fastball earned comparisons to Justin Verlander’s heater as a college prospect due to its high spin rate and good velocity. At the time, it was assumed that high spin correlated well with swing-and-miss stuff and that Hancock’s fastball would transition easily to the big leagues. Our understanding of pitch characteristics has grown by leaps and bounds since 2020. Hancock’s four-seamer does have a high spin rate, nearly 2400 RPMs on average, but his arm angle produces a really weird movement profile. Instead of pure backspin like Verlander creates with his over-the-top delivery, Hancock’s fastball has a ton of horizontal arm-side run without the characteristic ride of a backspinning four-seamer. This movement profile produces a dreaded “dead zone” fastball.
The dead zone describes a movement profile that doesn’t differ from the average fastball thrown from a given arm angle. For Hancock, because he’s throwing from a three-quarters arm slot, batters can expect to see a fastball with more horizontal movement than vertical, and can easily track and square it up.
His sinker has a similar, if opposite problem; it also has a ton of arm-side run but it doesn’t have the telltale sink you’d expect from the pitch. As you can see in the image above, this pitch mostly avoids the dead zone because of that combination of horizontal movement and lack of vertical movement, though he’ll never generate the gaudy groundball rates you’d expect from a sinker.
If you look at Hancock’s entire arsenal, all of his pitches have outstanding horizontal movement except for his slider. That breaking ball is a pretty standard hard slider with gyroscopic spin — it doesn’t really have much break horizontally or vertically. It doesn’t really fit with the rest of his repertoire. That’s why I was excited to see that Hancock was tinkering with both a sweeper and a cutter this spring. A sweeper has a lot more horizontal movement than a standard gyro slider and can play well off his horizontally oriented sinker.
In his first start of the spring, Hancock threw six pitches that Statcast classified as sliders; five of them had a velocity around 79-80 mph, decidedly slower than his hard slider he had been throwing. The horizontal movement on those five sweepers ranged from 4” to 14” with an average of 9” — the pitch is still obviously a work in progress. The low end of that range is untenable; the high end is fairly average for a big league sweeper, but I think still an improvement on his hard slider he was throwing. Here’s the sweeper in action on Sunday:
You don’t get a great sense for the quality of the pitch because he’s used it as a backdoor breaking ball to a left-handed batter in this clip, but you definitely can see how much horizontal movement the pitch has.
It’s possible that the one other pitch that was classified as a slider on Sunday but wasn’t obviously a sweeper was his cutter; it was thrown at 87.5 mph with 1” of glove-side horizontal movement and 9” of induced vertical movement, decidedly different from the movement profile of his previous slider. While the cutter isn’t as obvious a fit for his repertoire, it would give him something to use against left-handed batters to keep them honest against his four-seam fastball.
Simply adding a couple of new pitches to his arsenal isn’t going to magically fix all the issues with Hancock’s fastballs, but a more horizontally oriented pitch mix is definitely a step in the right direction. Optimizing his breaking ball to play off his running fastballs gives batters a difficult choice between pitches breaking in opposite directions. That’s the kind of holistic approach to pitch design that lifts a mediocre arsenal into one that could possibly be the foundation of a big league pitcher.