Mound Visit: How Hartlieb, Howard rose up

CHICAGO -- Quick. Off the top of your head, can you guess how many members of the Pirates' opening day bullpen are still in the bullpen?

Think you have it? Give up? There were nine guys in the bullpen to start.

Time's up. It's three: Richard Rodriguez, Nik Turley and Dovydas Neverauskas.

Kyle Crick, Nick Burdi, Michael Feliz and Clay Holmes are on the injured list, though Crick is joining the club on their road trip this week, signaling he should be returning. Robbie Erlin was designated for assignment, and JT Brubaker was moved into the rotation. And that's to say nothing of closer Keone Kela missing the opening few weeks because of coronavirus issues.

Every team goes through bullpen overturn, but losing two-thirds in the opening weeks of the season is drastic. As a result, the Pirates have had to go to their alternate training site in Altoona, Pa. for fresh arms more times than they wanted to.

The results of those call-ups have been mixed, but the two best have been righty Geoff Hartlieb and southpaw Sam Howard. Going based off of their 2019 results, neither seemed like particularity exciting depth options entering the year. Hartlieb got his first taste of the majors last season, but posted a 9.00 ERA. Howard had earned a couple calls to the majors with the Rockies the last two years, but they exposed him to waivers last October, which is how the Pirates acquired him.

Despite that, and not making the team out of summer camp, both have been pretty reliable hands out of the bullpen this year.

Even though he was dinged for a 337-foot homer Sunday, Hartlieb is still the owner of a 3.00 ERA, a 55.9% ground ball rate through 12 innings pitched, and has stranded nine of the 11 base runners he's inherited.

Howard has a 3.72 ERA through his first 9.2 innings, and has struck out one-third of his batters faced. Going by Baseball Savant's data, he's in the top 15% of pitchers in strikeout and whiff rate this year.

Neither screams "late inning reliever" at the moment, but those are two good guys to have in the bullpen. The bullpen needs good pitchers, and these two have bounced back from shaky starts this season very nicely.

They've also done it in pretty similar fashion. Here's how.

THROW YOUR BEST STUFF MORE

Pitching coach Oscar Marin is highly regarded for his analytics work, but sometimes that work is as simple as telling a pitcher that they should throw their best pitch more. Both Hartlieb and Howard are doing that.



Last year, Hartlieb had a four-seam, sinker and slider mix. He ditched the four-seamer this season, which was actually his most used pitch in 2019, at Marin's request. He didn't like where it was being released and thought it was tipping off his slider.

Hartlieb said Saturday he now has a "live by it, die by it relationship" with the sinker. At the moment, he's living. Going based off of its movement and velocity (94 mph this season), it looks like the type of pitch he can continue to live on.

"It has been fun to just go out there and know what I’m doing before I get on the mound. I’m gonna rip sinkers," Hartlieb said Saturday. "I’m gonna rip sliders. Get ground balls. Get strikeouts."

Howard is finding success moving away from his fastball and relying on his slider more and more. He has thrown it 66.3% of the time this year, the fourth highest percentage in baseball among those who have thrown at least 50 pitches. In his two years with the Rockies, he had a roughly 50-50 split between his breaking pitch and his heater. Now it's two sliders for every fastball.

Going into spring training, Howard had a legitimate shot to make the major-league team, but was ultimately optioned to class AAA towards the end because of a walk problem. Derek Shelton challenged him to be more aggressive in the zone after that, and Howard responded by throwing more sliders.

“Aggressive doesn’t necessarily mean just with the fastball," Shelton said earlier this month. "It’s just in the zone with his stuff, and I think we’ve seen the way the slider has played and how well it’s played, that it’s a really good pitch. Because of that, if you’re aggressive in the zone – regardless of what pitch it is – it’s extremely effective.”

A NEW RELEASE

When Hartlieb made the transition to a sinker-slider pitcher, Marin wanted him to work on lowering his arm slot so the two pitches can come out of the hand more consistently. It's a new development, starting during summer camp.

"It was basically trying to sink up that slot with the slider and sinker out of the same point," Hartlieb said.

Looking at Hartlieb's release points by pitch this year, though, the ball is leaving the band at a slightly higher point than it was a year ago:

 



But even if his vertical release is a little higher, the gap between where the two pitches leave the hand has shrunk, which is important.

"[The] closer those two are, the harder it is for a hitter to pick it up," Hartlieb said. "That’s what we’re going for."

Howard, on the other hand, has had his release point drop this year.  Additionally, the range of his game-by-game release points has flattened, suggesting the ball is leaving his hand more consistently:



It's very likely that a lower arm slot is helping Howard locate his slider low and to his glove side more this season. If batters want to swing at where he's throwing it, they won't hit it hard. He's getting more consistent break on it, leaving fewer over the heart of the plate:



Speaking of pitch movement...

LESS MOVEMENT IS BETTER?

I should preface this with saying that I'm not convinced this is actually a good thing, but it certainly is worth noting.

Last year, Hartlieb averaged the fourth most vertical movement on his sinker, getting 6.5 inches more movement on it than the average pitcher. This season, it's 3.9 inches more than average. That's still good for a spot in the top 20, but that is a noticeable drop.

Hartlieb knows his movement is fluctuating, but is not worried about it.

"It’s not going to always move the exact same in terms of inches of movement, inches of vertical break, horizontal break that day," Hartlieb said. "It’s finding that focal point that, if I start it here, I can get it to end up here. And it changes. It’s not always going to be 22 inches, 14 inches, whatever it is."

Same goes with Howard and the slider. It never had a ton of vertical or horizontal movement with the Rockies, but it has gone from getting about -2.5 inches of vertical movement compared to the average slider in 2019 to -3.9 inches in 2020. Horizontally, it's now -2.7 inches less compared to -2 a year ago.

The sample size is too small to know how much stock to put into this, but Hartlieb's sinker still gets outstanding movement and Howard is locating his sliders at a place where batters can't hit them hard. Both are good for different reasons. Perhaps it's as simple as they aren't overthrowing their pitches anymore.

GOTTA BE CONFIDENT

Hey, who says Mound Visit can't have a little old school thinking in it, too?

Success breeds confidence. Hartlieb is attacking with his stuff, and he says his confidence is "definitely growing." He's a sinkerballer now and knows that will lead to contact. He welcomes it.

“It’s putting it in the zone and giving them a chance to attack it,” Hartlieb said. “It’s trusting that, even if they put the bat on the ball, the angle I’m creating with the pitch will, whether it’s hard contact or not, put it in the ground and let my defense make plays behind me.

“I’ve got the stuff to do that consistently. It’s just attacking with those pitches and trusting that it will happen.”

For Howard, when he was in Altoona, he rewatched videos of himself pitching for the Rockies' class AAA affiliate from 2019. That's where he felt he was doing the best pitching of his career.

After pressing during spring training, he went to Altoona camp's pitching coach, Joel Hanrahan, about trying to recapture that mentality and success.

"I saw the difference, and I immediately told him, ‘look, man, I want to go back to this. I believe in this. It felt really good,’ ” Howard said earlier this month. “So we agreed, and from that day on, we started making sure I went back to that and I was doing exactly what I was doing last year everyday.”

Something is clicking for these two, both mechanically and mentally. The bullpen is looking for help anywhere they can find it, and both are starting to get more looks in higher leverage situations. There's playing time to be won going forward and into 2021, if they keep this up.