Article: Did We Just Witness the Birth of Four-Pitch Freddy Peralta?

[Matthew Trueblood]

There have been games in which Freddy Peralta leaned as heavily on his curveball as he did Sunday, There have been some in which he leaned as heavily on his changeup. There have been plenty in which he used his slider at least as often. But we might never have seen the Brewers' young right-hander use all four of his pitches as much as he just did. What could this mean?

Image courtesy of © Jeff Hanisch-USA TODAY Sports

First of all, it's important to note that the Pirates didn't want Freddy Peralta facing any more right-handed batters than was absolutely necessary. Manager Derek Shelton wrote out a lineup that included left-hitting Ji-Hwan Bae, Jack Suwinski, Tucupita Marcano, and Josh Palacios, plus switch-hitters Bryan Reynolds, Carlos Santana, and Rodolfo Castro. As a result, Peralta threw most of his pitches against lefties. That's the same challenge Corbin Burnes had to navigate in his start against the Orioles a little over a week ago, about which I wrote last week. 

For Burnes, the solution was to throw his cutter unusually often, and it seemed to help him find a feel for the pitch that was absent when he was using it less often earlier in the season. Peralta, however, took just the opposite tack. Partially because of his established pitch mix, but also partially in an effort to show a large number of batters something different, he varied his arsenal more than he usually does. 

Peralta developed his current changeup at the start of 2021. From that point through his previous outing this month, he had never thrown the pitch more than 15 times in any outing. He only used it 20 total times across his last three starts. On Sunday, he threw the Pirates 18 changeups. It wasn't a devastating offering. He only induced three swings with it, and none of the three resulted in a whiff. He got just four called strikes. By and large, Pirates hitters spotted it, and they let it go for a ball. However, by using it so much, he forced those hitters to keep the change in mind.

That's not terribly newsworthy, of course. A pitcher whose changeup tends to be a marginal weapon threw it a lot because he faced a bunch of opposite-handed batters, and the results were mixed, even if there was some fringe benefit to merely making it part of the mix. However, that's just one part of the story.

Peralta also threw 20 curveballs Sunday. That's more than he's thrown in a start since last August, and the two times he depended that much on the hook in that month, it was because he had no feel for his slider. Sunday, he used both breaking balls. We've seen him make such equipollent use of the two breaking balls before, but it was mostly in 2021. Even then, it was always at the expense of (or, more likely, to make up for) the changeup, which he would throw less often. 

The man they once called Fastball Freddy now seems to have four full-fledged pitches, and an idea of how to use them to get deep into a game. Even if only three of those pitches are likely to be at full strength on a given night, and even if it requires somewhat unusual circumstances for us to see them all on display within a start, Sunday was a milestone in the evolution of Peralta into the top-of-the-rotation guy Brewers fans have envisioned for so long. If he can do this consistently, he'll be a credible co-ace for the next few years, and saying goodbye to either Corbin Burnes or Brandon Woodruff could be less painful.

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[Harold Hutchison]

If so, then it may be worth picking up the options for 2025 and 2026 at the very least.

[sveumrules]

He’s been working with the four pitch mix since 2021, so not sure if it was really the birth so much as maybe a tweaked version thereof.

Here are his pitch percentages each of the last three years…

FB: 53.1, 54.9, 53.3
SL: 26.4, 18.3, 20.8
CB: 10.9, 16.3, 14.0
CH: 9.7, 10.4, 11.9

Pretty consistent. Slider usage dropped off in 2022 in favor of more curves, while the change has been gradually thrown more.

Here are the pitch values per 100 pitches over the last three years…

FB: +1.40, +0.67, -0.21
SL: +1.14, +0.19, -0.86
CB: +2.43, +1.99, -0.35
CH: -0.90, +1.24, -0.61

Ouch. In 2021/22 he was positive on seven out of eight. This year all four pitches are getting negative results. Fastball, slider and curve all waaay down from 2021.

I think the main thing is Freddy’s fastball losing effectiveness requires him to be more precise with his location, which has never been a strong suit.

Here’s the resulting batted ball results over the last three years…

BABIP: .230, .246, .286
HR/9: 0.87, 0.69, 1.65
Barrel%: 6.0, 3.5, 9,9
HardHit%: 27.7, 26.9, 31.6

Diminished stuff + poor command in the zone = nightmare batted ball profile.

[Matthew Trueblood]

1 hour ago, sveumrules said:

He’s been working with the four pitch mix since 2021, so not sure if it was really the birth so much as maybe a tweaked version thereof.

Here are his pitch percentages each of the last three years…

FB: 53.1, 54.9, 53.3
SL: 26.4, 18.3, 20.8
CB: 10.9, 16.3, 14.0
CH: 9.7, 10.4, 11.9

Pretty consistent. Slider usage dropped off in 2022 in favor of more curves, while the change has been gradually thrown more.

Here are the pitch values per 100 pitches over the last three years…

FB: +1.40, +0.67, -0.21
SL: +1.14, +0.19, -0.86
CB: +2.43, +1.99, -0.35
CH: -0.90, +1.24, -0.61

Ouch. In 2021/22 he was positive on seven out of eight. This year all four pitches are getting negative results. Fastball, slider and curve all waaay down from 2021.

I think the main thing is Freddy’s fastball losing effectiveness requires him to be more precise with his location, which has never been a strong suit.

Here’s the resulting batted ball results over the last three years…

BABIP: .230, .246, .286
HR/9: 0.87, 0.69, 1.65
Barrel%: 6.0, 3.5, 9,9
HardHit%: 27.7, 26.9, 31.6

Diminished stuff + poor command in the zone = nightmare batted ball profile.

Right, but what I’m highlighting here isn’t the presence of all four pitches. It’s that he’s never utilized them all so much within one start before. They were, for the first time, complements to one another in relatively equal mixture, instead of replacements for one another when something wasn’t working. That’s an important distinction.

[Jason Wang]

guys just wait until he learns the slutter

[sveumrules]

Looks like Freddy reverted back to a more traditional pitch mix for his start yesterday - 59 FB | 20 SL | 13 CU | 6 CH