Bryan Shaw's cutter is currently performing like one of baseball's better pitches
While it was Zach Plesac forcing fans to keep their eyes open in anticipation of history and Emmanuel Clase forcing the sleep-deprived to later cover them in horror, it was Bryan Shaw that managed to keep Cleveland’s Thursday night in Seattle from a capsize. Terry Francona’s version of the Flex Tape meme emerged, fixing the leaky boat with a bases-loaded strikeout of Luis Torrens with a 95 mph cutter, preserving the two-run victory in the opener and lifting the Indians to 21-14.
You can certainly make the case that Shaw has been Cleveland’s most meaningful offseason pickup, though, even the most hopeful of the right-hander’s defenders over the years would probably tell you that he’s been better than their most pleasant projection. Regardless, Shaw has managed to reinvent himself by rediscovering some velocity and expanding his pitch mix at the age of 33 to post a 1.93 ERA in 14 innings this season following a three-year stretch of a 6.17 ERA between Colorado and Seattle.
A great deal of thanks is due to that cutter.
That pitch has always been Shaw’s favorite toy, and when he was at his best during his past Cleveland career, he used that cutter-slider mix to serve as one of baseball’s better and more durable setup men. But then the righty left for a three-year, free-agent deal and that cutter started getting blasted. Now, back with the Indians, it’s limiting opposing slugging percentage better than it ever has.
Of course, you can never judge a single pitch on its own — it’s often an entire pitch mix and how the pitcher gets there that sets up the result — but given that Shaw is throwing it nearly 80 percent of the time, maybe that’s less true for him.
Baseball Savant gives us a different way to judge how effective a pitch has been: Its run value. Run value is defined as “the run impact of an event based on the runners on base, outs, ball and strike count.” More simple, think of every pitch having a value based on the situation. A strike, ball or pitch put in play can impact it positively or negatively.
From that, we can see which pitches have been performing best — and using that metric, Shaw’s cutter has been one of baseball’s better offerings.
As of Friday, his cutter ranked 34th among all pitches in baseball in run value, landing just ahead of Josh Hader’s four-seamer. That’s not pitchers, but individual pitches, meaning that just 33 offerings have fared better in total run value, including Plesac’s slider (8th) and James Karinchak’s four-seamer (28th).
Among just cutters, Shaw’s ranks third — even ahead of fireballing teammate, Clase.
Shaw’s cutter hasn’t been a big swing-and-miss pitch — though, it certainly did the job early Friday morning — but it has limited meaningful contact.
So far, hitters are just 1-for-29 against it with a .169 wOBA. Just 16.7 percent of the contact has been hit 95 mph or harder.
When it’s not generating contact on the ground, it’s setting up the slider against righties and the curveball against lefties to get those whiffs, getting a swinging-strike between 43-44 percent of the time on the breaking balls.
Some of the cutter’s success is due to added velocity. Shaw is throwing that pitch at 93.3 mph, his highest average since 2018 (93.5 mph) and the sixth-highest of all cutters in baseball among pitchers with at least 100 pitches. On top of the speed is movement, with Shaw’s cutter now demonstrating 2.6 inches more horizontal movement than those pitches at a similar velocity, 132 percent more break than average.
In other words, it not just moving more side-to-side than it has over the past couple of seasons compared to the average, it’s also coming in harder, giving hitters less time to act upon that movement. That separates it from your average cutter, and as Trevor Bauer used to stress in nearly every conversation, a big key to success is to stay away from average as a pitcher — the sort of thing hitters see and prepare for most often.
When you couple that with a slider that is also up in velocity (84.3 mph) and is moving 8.9 inches more horizontally than similar sliders and an occasional curveball that is demonstrating 7.9 more inches of drop than curves at a similar velocity, you can see why he’s re-established himself as one of Cleveland’s best fix-it-all solutions.