Freddy Peralta Is Tipping His Pitches, But Reforming His Mechanics and Breaking Ball Shape Could Fix Him

[Jake McKibbin]

Freddy Peralta is the likely ace of the Brewers staff again in 2025, but it’s fair to say his 2024 results didn’t live up to expectations. By cleaning up some pitch-tipping and a wayward pitch mix, can he find his best self in 2025?

Image courtesy of © Jovanny Hernandez / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Some of you who follow me may know that I have an obsession with Freddy Peralta. His raw stuff is some of the best in the league, showing (in short bursts) how capable he is of blowing away the best hitters in the world. The problem is he can’t do it consistently, and after a roaring finish to the 2023 season, he tailed off slowly and inexorably throughout 2024. Game after game, it seemed like hitters could lay off his breaking pitches with more ease than you would expect, and I may now know why.

A good indicator of how well a hitter can recognize a pitch is how often they swing at it, inside and outside the strike zone. A combination of pitches moving in different ways will keep them off-balance, as will having a similar release point on multiple offerings. The goal is to have hitters swinging more often at pitches outside the strike zone, especially fastballs, and taking more of them inside the zone to work ahead in the count. Doing so requires a variety of pitches moving in disparate ways. Here are Peralta's swing decision metrics from 2021 and 2024 on his fastball:

As you can see, hitters swung significantly more often inside the strike zone, despite Peralta finding the zone less often in 2024. Combining that with a lower-than-ever swing-and-miss rate on his four-seamer suggests Peralta may have been struggling with a lack of deception. Before turning to the tipped pitches, let's first review his pitch mix alterations;

The Pitch Mix Progression
A slight side note, but an important one: In 2024, Peralta used his changeup more than ever before, to the detriment of his curveball. In 2021, the curve was distinct from his slider and gave him two distinct breaking pitches. As the changeup has developed and his slider changed shape (more to come on this later), the curveball has been pushed to the side, which will be relevant when we look at release points in a little bit.

He became more comfortable with the pitch part way through his 2023 season and continued to increase its usage. Despite average stuff+ grades, the pitch performed fantastically. On its own, the cambio is not the cause of his struggles. You’ll see below in the map from Thomas Nestico (TJstats on Twitter) that all of Peralta’s pitches had above-average swing-and-miss but poor xWOBACON, which showcases that when he got hit, he got hit hard.

This has always been the case for Peralta, partly due to a lack of command that can result in too many walks and too many meatballs. As a fly-ball pitcher, that’s a dangerous combination, which does tend to bite him. That being said, it was never as extreme as this, particularly against the fastball. Hitters had an expected slugging mark of .419 against it in 2024 (only 2019 was worse) and an xwOBA of .330 (worse than any prior season). In short, the fastball was being recognized, targeted, and pummeled. So why was his electric four-seamer, with a TJstuff+ grade of 106, on the receiving end of so much damage? 

Freddy Peralta Was Tipping His Hand, And His Pitches
The answer to this is twofold. Peralta’s deceptive “rise” has historically come from his low arm slot. It creates a perception that the pitch is rising as it reaches the hitter, but that changed in 2024. As you can see, in 2023 Peralta's fastball (the red line) was released on a similar arm angle to his slider and changeup, but in 2024, it was released from a higher arm angle more closely resembling the release point of his curveball.

This release point might have been okay, had he thrown the curve at a significant rate in 2024. Instead, he relegated it to more of a show-me role, and with the lowered usage, Peralta’s release point for the four-seam fastball had nothing to blend with. It looked just different enough than his main secondaries for hitters to pick up on the disparity. When I say that it's noticeable, here's how Peralta's release point used to look, compared to how it looks now:

In the above version from 2021, you can only see the barest hint of a red speck directly behind the yellow and green release points. It's an almost identical release with his slider and changeup. In the 2024 points below, it's almost entirely separated, half-hiding behind the curveball release point in blue. This may not seem to be a large difference, but to a big-league hitter, it's all they need, especially if the curveball isn't a large factor in their swing decisions.

It might not get picked up as readily the first time Peralta faces a lineup, but it became easier to pick up as hitters faced him a second and third time. Coincidentally or not, he saw a lot more damage against him the second time through an order this season.

Arm angles can fluctuate naturally, but the fact that he lost some of his alignment with the changeup and curveball that had previously fluctuated together with the four-seam fastball suggests there may have been deliberate intent behind it. Matt Trueblood wrote about Peralta's changes in mound position and mechanics (including stride direction and posture, as well as arm angle) in August, and that seems to be a salient consideration, too.

To delve deeper, I asked our pitching expert Spencer Michaelis, who suggested that if it was a deliberate change, it could be done in search of better command; a higher arm slot often gives the pitcher a better feeling of control of the pitch. That command improvement didn't materialize in 2024, and I could even argue that the loss of deception put increased scrutiny on dotting his fastball. 

To back this up, Pitch Profiler has a model that estimates a pitcher's ability to tunnel his offerings; the metric that evaluates that skill is called Match+. The measurement assesses how similar a pitcher's arsenal appears at a hitter's decision point (150 milliseconds before the ball reaches the plate). In 2021, Peralta was in the 92nd percentile for Match+. He dropped all the way down to the 20th percentile in 2024, and has been declining since increasing the changeup usage and throttling back the curveball. Peralta's pitch-tunneling is on the decline, and without taking steps to remedy it, 2024's results may augur a continued downward trend in overall performance.

The good news is, if it was a deliberate change, it should be far easier to rectify. If it was injury-related, that's a different proposition altogether, but given the arm angles of his slider and changeup, I'm inclined to believe it's the former.

The Return Of The Sweeper
One other point of difference is the variation in Peralta’s slider from the 2021 version compared to its 2022-2024 iteration. In 2021, Peralta had a definitive sweeper (even after the sticky stuff ban came in, in case you’re wondering), and he had the best xwOBA against sliders of his career in that season, at just .306. The reason it was so effective lies in how the shape differentiated from his curveball to create a distinct movement profile:

On the right, you can see the separation between the yellow (slider) and blue (curveball) splatters in 2021, the slider in particular being a relatively tight cluster.

Now contrast that with 2024:

The cluster of sliders is a lot more expansive, coming closer to the movement profiles of the fastball and overlapping more often with the curveball. Part of the reason for this is that Peralta tries to vary his slider shape for different situations, with our own Matt Trueblood estimating him to have as many as four different variations. When a hurler manipulates a pitch that much, however, it becomes more difficult to execute it consistently. The reduced contrast in the movement profile places added pressure on Peralta to hit his spots with precision. The results are tough to argue with: he had vastly more success with both his sweeper and his curveball than he’s seen since modifying the sweeper to a variety of slider shapes in 2022-24. 

In adding separation between the two breaking pitches, Peralta's results on his fastball surged. The added horizontal and vertical movement kept hitters off-balance, to the point that they were swinging underneath far more of his fastballs, with a higher whiff rate. Good stuff will do that to hitters; it's why having multiple strong pitches in your arsenal is so valuable at the major-league level. The sweeper-fastball tandem begot the most pitcher-friendly contact profile of Peralta's career, when he had it working.

It also creates an entirely different look for a hitter. When they see a ball out of the hand that appears to be on the inner third of the plate and high, a sweeper can swing that pitch away off the outside edge of the strike zone. With more regular slider(s) and a changeup with minimal horizontal movement, Peralta has reduced the horizontal plane his pitches work on, and made it easier to swing at the fastball and changeup inside the strike zone.

So Can It Be Fixed?
Barring injury concerns, it’s entirely feasible that Peralta can readjust the arm angle on his four-seam fastball, and tunnel that pitch more effectively with his breaking pitches—especially now that he’s using the changeup with more regularity. The added deception for a starting pitcher who predominantly used just three pitches would be momentous, and could help the signature fastball become a real difference-maker once again. 

The sweeper is another matter, and maybe an even easier correction for him. The balance it provided the rest of his arsenal may allow him to reduce his four-seam fastball usage in favor of a more varied arsenal that incorporates the curveball more often (because of the more diverse breaking planes of the pitches), thus boosting the outcomes of his entire repertoire. Having four legitimate offerings with 12%-20% usage will keep hitters off-balance, creating the kind of results we saw in 2021 from Peralta regarding the quality of contact against him, and maybe even allow him to live in the strike zone with more regularity. 

Regardless of how good your pitches are, if an MLB hitter can identify it, then it won't succeed for long. Peralta's fastball has become easier for opposing hitters to target, and it's a trend that he has to address, one way or another. The sweeper shape return would be an added bonus, but the fastball is his bread and butter. Without that deceptive release point, he may never truly find the performance he's capable of once more.

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I would like to give a special mention to Pitch Profiler and TJstats for allowing me to use their models for analysis. If you haven’t already, both are worth a follow on your social media of choice, with an incredible level of detail and evaluation available there and on their Patreon sites.

What do you think of Peralta’s fastball and secondaries before the 2025 season? Do you think he can rekindle his 2021 form, or is it expected to be a slow downward trajectory from here on out? Does this article change your opinion of him at all? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

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[Sugarrayray]

Even though it’s not as important as tunneling and pitch movement, it’s also frustrating that the velocity bands on his slider and curveball have grown closer together.