Mechanical Tweaks Have Transformed His Pitch Mix, and Now, Frankie Montas Can Dominate Again

[Matthew Trueblood]

Acquired amid very little fanfare just before the deadline, the right-handed starter has reemerged as the kind of pitcher you can imagine taking the ball in the postseason and turning in a season-defining gem.

Image courtesy of © Jeff Hanisch-Imagn Images

He ran into a spot of trouble in the sixth and took the loss, but Frankie Montas also struck out 10 Phillies Tuesday night. That gives him 28 punchouts over his last three starts, and he looks increasingly like a lock to start for the Brewers even in a short playoff series. When that postseason start comes, Pat Murphy will even be able and willing to truncate his appearances a bit more, and his effectiveness will be magnified. Over his last six starts, Montas has allowed only one run in the first three innings and four in the fourth. The rest of the damage against him (two runs in fifth frames and seven in sixths) has come at the phase of the contest when Murphy would probably go to his bullpen, in a playoff game.

It's a marvelous stretch from the hurler the team acquired just before the trade deadline, to mixed and unenthusiastic reviews. Montas's ERA this season for the Reds was 5.01, and that wasn't all bad luck. The form that made him a hot commodity on the trade market a few years ago and a popular gamble on the free-agent market this past winter seemed more and more unreachable, and many fans expected only that he would deliver some stabilizing innings at the tail end of the rotation.

Instead, he's clearly surpassed Colin Rea and Aaron Civale on the pecking order for potential postseason starts, and could very well be in line to start Game 2 of a Wild Card or Division Series, after Freddy Peralta takes his turn. When the team first landed him, I envisioned some of this success. However, I was partially wrong about how it would come about, and the real answers he and the Brewers have unlocked his talent again are worth some exploration.

As I predicted, the team has invited Montas to lean more on his sinker and cutter and be less focused on his four-seam fastball. That forecast was a no-brainer; it's what the Brewers like to do and exactly what Montas needed to do. However, I also anticipated that the team would slide Montas over toward third base, to create a new set of angles for opposing hitters. Instead, they've kept him right where he is, and the changes they've implemented are to the way his body moves. Those changes have been very subtle, but their implications are huge.

You might have noticed that Montas's velocity has trended upward since he joined the Brewers. With the Reds, he averaged 95.2 and 94.3 miles per hour with his four-seam fastball and sinker, respectively. With the Crew, those numbers are up to 96.3 and 95.3, which is a significant bump. Crucially, though, this isn't a matter of finding more adrenaline because he landed in a playoff race, or of humping up occasionally. On the contrary: Montas's maximum and 90th-percentile velocities on each heater are almost identical between his two stops this year. The rise in his averages have come from a higher floor. His 10th-percentile velocity on the four-seamer is up 1.4 miles per hour, from 93.5 to 94.9. On the sinker, it's up from 92.6 to 94.2. That kind of improvement comes from a methodical increase in mechanical consistency, and indeed, there's a difference here.

Here's a Montas fastball from his time with the Reds.

Pay special attention to the position of his hips and shoulders when his front foot lands--the literally pivotal movement of a delivery, which baseball people call "foot-strike". Now, compare that to this heater, thrown for the Crew.

To give ourselves the best chance of making direct comparisons, I'm using pairs of videos from the same venues. Hopefully, that will make the difficult work of seeing small mechanical changes a bit easier. Here, what you can notice is that his shoulders are slightly more closed when the front foot lands. He's creating more consistent torque, because his hip-shoulder separation is slightly greater. It would be much easier to see this from an open side angle, but his weight is also a bit more back with the Brewers--meaning that he's not drifting down the mound as much before foot strike, and thus reserves a bit more force with which to cut things loose.

Now, let's take another pair of clips, to talk a bit about posture. You've probably heard commentators talk, at some point, about a pitcher's posture through release point. Some hurlers stay very upright, with good spinal stability. Others, sometimes intentionally and sometimes for reasons of misplaced priorities or wanting functional strength, tilt way over toward their glove side. Here's Montas with the Reds.

Now, here he is for the Brewers.

Surprise! The way posture is typically framed, you might have expected that Montas would be more upright through his delivery with the Brewers. Not so. He's going with the rotational energy of his body more since joining the Crew, and that includes more spine tilt. Despite landing more solidly and transferring his energy more cleanly through his front leg since coming to Milwaukee, he's falling off to the first-base side as much as ever, because he's tilting to the side more. That's facilitating a slightly altered arm path; he's getting the arm higher earlier in his delivery and coming a bit more over the top. That's an important development, but before we discuss it further, we need to identify the other element of the same change.

Here's Montas with the Reds again. Here, I want you to attend to the way he flexes his back, then extends it through release, as he comes over his landing leg.

And here he is for the Brewers, back where he'd pitched his home games earlier in the year.

Now, we're not quite comparing apples to apples anymore. The first clip here came with a runner on base, and Montas was working out of the stretch. That matters, more for Montas than for others. Importantly, though, whereas he lost almost a full tick (0.8 MPH) from bases empty to runners on during his time with the Reds, his velocity is almost identical (96.3 MPH when empty; 96.2 when runners are on) in those splits since joining the Brewers.

Anyway, notice the greater lean and pinch of his back in the Brewers clip--and the way the altered arm angle and spine tilt work with this sharper transition from extension to flexion of the spine to create more firing power. Montas's release point is about two inches higher since he joined the Brewers, yet, his release extension--the distance between the front of the rubber and his release point--is higher with them, too. Usually, a pitcher gains extension when they lower their arm slot. The Brewers roster is full of examples of that. Montas is a counterexample, because of the way he and the team have worked together to optimize his natural mechanical signature.

This has also had an effect on the shape of his pitches, which has as much to do with his rising strikeout rate as a little extra velocity--if not more. 

His command of the cutter and splitter are better since he came to the Crew, and his fastball has a bit more cut-ride action, which is valuable, especially given his velocity bump. By far, though, the biggest story here is his slider. See those sliders that rode as high as his cutter, but with more sweep, when he was with the Reds? Those are now completely gone, and good riddance. They were in a slider dead zone, lacking either the deception of a gyro slider or the magnitude of movement of a true sweeper.

The successful version of that pitch, for him, is the one he's thrown exclusively since making these changes with the Brewers. A more vertical arm path has helped him steer that pitch toward the glove-side corner consistently, without needing to make the pitch swerve widely. It's a pitch with sharp, biting action. Hitters whiffed on just 28% of their swings against his slider with the Reds. As a Brewer, he misses bats on 42.5% of opponents' swings at that pitch.

Montas is not a perfect pitcher. He's not fully restored to the best version of himself, as evidenced by the trouble he's gotten into late in starts. Still, the improvements he's made since the trade are real and vital. Now that he's comfortable with them, he's even reintroduced his signature pitch, the splitter, more often over these last three starts. In an NL playoff landscape full of teams limping toward the postseason with diminished rotations, a top pairing of Peralta and Montas suddenly looks plenty formidable to let Brewers fans dream on a run to the team's first pennant since 1982. Come October, Montas is going to have a central role in whatever happens to the team, and that's greatly to the credit of both Montas himself and Milwaukee's sensational pitching instruction infrastructure.

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[sveumrules]

Awesome breakdown on how the Brewers completely flipped the script on Frankie’s season.

Frankie Reds
85 K%+ | 120 HR9+ | 104 AVG+ | 115 ERA- | 114 FIP- 

Frankie Brewers
128 K%+ | 95 HR9+ | 84 AVG+ | 86 ERA- | 86 FIP-

I believe I typed something along the lines of “Dear Chris Hook, Good Luck” in the initial trade thread, but it turns out minimal luck was required on account of good design.

[Samurai Bucky]

I agree -- great breakdown.  I get geeked out on film... 👍