Tobias Myers's Signature Four-Seamer is Not His Most Important Fastball

[Jack Stern]

Tobias Myers has turned heads with the elite vertical ride on his four-seam fastball, but the best and most crucial fastball in his arsenal may be the cutter he has refined since joining the Brewers organization.

Image courtesy of © Bob DeChiara-USA TODAY Sports

When Tobias Myers began surfacing on the radars of prospect enthusiasts, and when he eventually made his major-league debut last month, his fastball captured the most attention. Myers has a well-rounded five-pitch mix, but the 19.7 inches of induced vertical break he has averaged with his four-seam fastball captivates pitching nerds.

Due to gravity, every pitch drops during its trajectory from a pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s mitt. Induced vertical break measures the added or subtracted drop imparted on the ball due to how the pitcher spins it. A negative number signifies added drop, and a positive number indicates that the ball is fighting against the force of gravity and dropping less as it approaches the plate.

In Myers’s case, the backspin he imparts on his four-seamer causes it to drop substantially less than most fastballs, giving it truer carry through the zone. This creates the effect that hitters often refer to as “late life” or a “ride” on a pitch.

The effect is somewhat mitigated by Myers’s extreme over-the-top delivery, which creates a steep downward release angle. Still, one would assume at first glance that his four-seamer is the centerpiece of his arsenal and will be the driving force behind most of the success he has.

In reality, it might not even be his most important fastball.

In his first six appearances, Myers has only thrown his four-seamer 36.7% of the time. That’s still the highest usage rate of any pitch in his arsenal, but not far behind that is his cutter. Myers has used it 27.6% of the time, and he has thrown more cutters than four-seamers in two appearances. It’s been his most-used pitch against left-handed batters.

Myers began experimenting with a cutter in 2019. He was pitching for the Tampa Bay Rays’ High-A affiliate, and wanted to expand his arsenal, which consisted then of only the four-seamer, a curveball, and a changeup.

Myers would tweak the cutter’s shape based on matchups, but it typically resembled a breaking ball more than a hard pitch with late cut.

“It was around 83 miles per hour,” he said. “Kind of like a bullet slider.”

Myers continued throwing more cutters when minor-league play resumed in 2021 after the COVID-19 pandemic, but didn’t arrive at its current shape until he began working with the Brewers.

After he joined the organization on a minor-league deal in December 2022, members of Milwaukee's pitching development crew helped him develop a slider to utilize against right-handed batters. That eliminated the need for a hybrid cutter/slider, so he started thinking of the cutter as a true cutting fastball. Its velocity jumped to its current 87-92 mph range.

“I’m trying to backspin it as hard as I can and just let it do what it does,” he said.

One of the things it does is keep hitters off his four-seamer. The cutter spins on a very similar axis to the four-seamer, making it difficult for hitters to distinguish the two out of Myers’s hand as he releases the ball.

The two pitches take distinctly different paths as they approach the plate. The cutter has nearly seven fewer inches of vertical break. Whereas the fastball averages 4.3 inches of arm-side movement, the cutter moves 4.1 inches to the glove side.

As the cutter leaves Myers’s hand, hitters see a pitch that looks like it could be a riding four-seamer. Instead, they get a pitch with more drop and lateral movement in the opposite direction.

“If I’m throwing it well, it looks a lot like a fastball and then kind of has that late cut,” Myers said. “Just trying to get them off the heater any way I can.”

Myers’s cutter is arguably just as vital to success as his four-seamer, so it’s not a surprise that poor results with it early have led to an inconsistent start to his big-league career. Hitters are slugging .778 against the cutter, which has leaked over the heart of the plate far too often.

“Those are the ones that are getting hit right now,” Myers acknowledged.

When he places it in his target location, there is evidence of a productive pitch. Half of the batted balls against the cutter have been ground balls.

That’s an essential equalizer for Myers. The shape of his four-seamer carries the upside of inducing whiffs and pop-ups by getting hitters to swing underneath it at the top of the zone. When he misses low with the fastball or hitters start hunting it, those swings turn into loud contact in the air, resulting in the home run troubles Myers has battled throughout his career. The cutter is his key to mitigating that weakness enough to establish himself as a big-league pitcher.

“If we’re going to face a team that’s hunting heater and trying to get on top of the fastball and trying to attack it, especially first time through, second time through, we’re gonna roll some cutters out there.”

Some pitch modeling metrics, including Baseball Prospectus’ PitchPro and StuffPro, hold Myers's cutter in higher regard than his four-seamer. It could be his ticket to success as he looks to provide valuable innings for an injury-ravaged Brewers pitching staff.

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[biedergb]

Awesome review. I keep getting amazed at what goes into the pitch selection and how these details make or break a pitcher’s success. Also cutter seems to be a Brewers organization focus, or are other teams using it a lot more as well.  I appears that a philosophy of the organization is a competent off speed (slider, CB or change up), good FB with movement and add a cutter (or something else that I’m not smart enough to understand).  Then analytics to maximize the usage.  For a fan of the Brewers starting in the late 80s, seeing the late 90s and earl 00s teams struggle to get competitive pitching (Sheets and Gallardo as the main exceptions), the past 5-10 years has been encouraging.