Well, we all know who had the best cutter in the Blue Jays organization for a long, long time. Then, the next best cutter was traded away for some Canadian kid that everyone's talking about these days.
Now,
an organization that basically taught everyone the cutter is sorely
lacking. Litsch and Cecil seem to be able to cut the ball a little
bit, but neither player really relies on the pitch. Romero can work
his fastball every which way, and Brandon
Morrow did what?
Watch out, American League!
As a tangent, I'll take a
quick look at Morrow's cutter: 1.95 inches horizontal movement
compared to 4.51 on his slider. The slider comes in around 88mph with
30 inches of drop (inc. gravity) with his cutter adding a couple more
mph and subtracting about 10 inches of drop. With a sample size of
about 100, it looks like Morrow was comfortable enough throwing it
for strikes, and got batters to swing 51% of the time and
swing-and-miss 12% of the time. Batters fouled off about 20% of the
pitches and put another 20% into play. Thankfully, for the fly-ball
machine, more than half of those balls in play were ground
balls.
Morrow's only thrown 100
of the pitches in game action so I feel good about his ability to
improve his command and control of the pitch. Considering that
Morrow's largely a fastball-slider pitcher, the cutter will go a long
way to help him get opposite handers out and induce ground-balls.
Casey
Janssen provides an interesting case for the best cutter in the
organization. He consistently throws it for strikes and often gets
plenty of foul balls and called strikes despite his lacklustre 6.7%
whiff rate. Ten-and-change percentage of his cutters are hit into the
ground for relatively easy outs and he throws the pitch about 40% of
the time. With great horizontal movement and good vertical movement,
the 91mph is a dandy, despite
average pitch values.
So who has the best
cutter? Well, probably Janssen (or maybe even Morrow!) but I'm going
to give the nod to the player received in the Halladay-deal, Kyle
Drabek. In 2011, Drabek had huge issues with commanding his cutter,
and tossed it for a ball 47% of the time, but the pitch is a 91.4mph
beast that jumps out of his hand and barrels in on lefties.
Drabek's issues were
across the board, not really cutter-specific, and he'll hopefully be
able to fix 'em up this year. Considering his arsenal, especially
with that cutter, he could still be a terrific player (if he can just
throw fuckin' strikes).
Sorry for swearing, but
I'm sure you feel me. For now, at least until I see Morrow's pitchf/x in 2012, I'm going to give it to Drabek. Brandon's got one hell of a shot to be a devastating pitcher this year, though.
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