MINNEAPOLIS -- It was a situation that could have turned out very differently a year or two ago.
Kyle Crick entered Saturday’s game with two runners in scoring position and the heart of the Twins’ order up to bat. He got Josh Donaldson to pop up to center for a sacrifice fly – a no-brainer decision to trade a run for an out. Now it was on to Nelson Cruz, who was absolutely the type of player who could make it a ball game with one swing.
He started with a slider, which Cruz watched. Strike one. He followed with another slider. Cruz swung, but could only get a piece of it. Foul tip, strike two.
Then one more slider:
Strike three.
“Those are big outs,” Derek Shelton said after the game. “To come in and do that was outstanding. Slider was really good.”
Crick’s slider has been really good this year. Actually, let’s expand on that. Crick has been really good this year. Eight innings in, he has not allowed a run and just one hit. You do that with more than just one good pitch.
But the pitch has been that good. Crick’s slider has its frisbee action again, in case you couldn’t tell from the gif above. In the last two pitches of the Cruz at-bat, those sliders came in at 3,405 and 3,355 RPM. Once you get above 3,300 rotations per minute, you’re in rare, rare air as far as spin goes.
Yes, it’s an arbitrary number, but so far this year, there have been 35 sliders thrown with a spin rate of at least 3300 RPM. Crick threw 25 of them.
Spin wasn’t Crick’s problem the past few years, though. Neither was movement. This spring, he said he had “diminished stuff” last year, but that seemed to be more of a fastball problem.
While he doesn’t quite have his 2018-2019 heat yet, he’s roughly at where he started those last two years. Perhaps he can find another tick or two as the year progresses. If not, it doesn’t look like a dealbreaker.
What really matters is how he is using the zone.
The first part of that is just being in the zone. Crick has always had outstanding batted ball peripherals. Hitters can’t square him up. It’s a small sample, but his 2021 batted ball data…
…Looks very similar to his 2019 data…
…Which itself was nearly identical to 2018:
Crick doesn’t give up a lot of barrels, but he is prone to giving out free passes. In 2019, he had a 15.5% walk rate, the fourth highest in baseball. Some of that could be tied to him tipping his pitches, an issue that wasn’t brought to his attention until later that year. By the time he figured it out, his season was close to over.
Presumably no longer tipping, Crick still has issued four walks and hit a batter in his first eight innings. Every April Mound Visit comes with an obligatory “small sample size warning,” and it seems ridiculous to calculate BB/9 until he throws, you know, at least nine innings, but that’s not a great start.
Why is that still happening? Here’s a theory, and a suggestion.
Crick’s doing a much better job of getting his slider to hit the outside part of the plate. In 2019, the horizontal movement was inconsistent, and there were plenty of times where it hung over the heart of the plate:
Hitting the edges is going to mean a lot for him, not because it’ll generate slightly softer contact, but because he will get called strikes with it. Once that starts happening frequently, he’ll get chases out of the zone and more strikes.
That’s good news. Here’s the bad news: His fastballs are going where his sliders are:
This is anti-pitch tunneling, where two pitches have different flight paths but are landing in the same spot. He’s throwing a little more high heat, but with the horizontal movement his slider gets, Crick would probably be better off throwing more heaters to his hand side. Have the two pitches play off each other more and use the whole zone more effectively.
Crick’s sinker played well inside to righties in 2018, but he’s phasing that pitch out. His slider is really more of a slurve, and it would probably tunnel better with a four-seamer because of that, but hand-side sink can work with glove-side run. Sinkers have been going out of fashion across the league, but Crick doesn’t give up hard contact. It might be something worth exploring.
Before we wrap things up – and since I don’t really have any other place to put this note – it looks like Crick’s release is different. We saw this last year also, so this is a 2020-2021 vs. 2018-2019 comparison. In his first two years with the Pirates, he had an extension point of 5.5-5.6 feet. The past two years, it’s been 6.1-6.2 feet, so he’s releasing the ball about seven or so inches closer to home plate. This is more in line with where he releases his fastball, so perhaps this will help him have consistent deliveries. Maybe the stuff plays up a little more since hitters have a little less time to react. Maybe it means nothing. Again, this is a note that really couldn’t go anywhere but a Crick Mound Visit. May as well put it there.
It looks like Crick is on the cusp of a big bounce back year. He has already earned a late-inning opportunity again, and his stuff isn’t diminished anymore. Shelton credits a lot of that to him being healthy, but he has also continued to mature as a pitcher. He could still fall back into the walk pitfall, but he will continue to refine his approach as the year progresses. If he finds the right tweak to put those walk troubles behind him, he’ll stick in the set-up or closer job.
