Baseball Has Tried Everything to Get Rid of Grant Anderson. He's Outlasted It So Far.

[Matthew Trueblood]

The sidearm pitcher the Brewers picked up this winter never meant to be one—not a sidearmer, and not even a pitcher, actually.

Image courtesy of © Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

McNeese State University is not exactly a powerhouse collegiate baseball program, but they play Div. I ball, and they wanted Grant Anderson. He wasn't drafted at the end of his high-school playing days, so off he went to McNeese State. When he arrived on campus, he was a catcher. That had been his position in high school, and when you compare Anderson to the (literally) huge majority of the pitchers who now populate the Brewers' clubhouse at their spring training complex in Maryvale, he looks a lot more like a catcher than he does like most of them. 

By the time baseball season actually came, though, that dream was dead. Anderson wasn't going to cut it in NCAA as a hitter, so the Cowboys and coach Justin Hill moved him to the mound. Initially, though, that wasn't working out much better.

"I was a little inconsistent over the top, as far as being able to throw breaking pitches and offspeed pitches," Anderson recalled. "So they were like, ‘Well, you’ve got an athletic build; you’ve got a good arm. So why don’t you try dropping down sidearm?’ So we tried that, and it ended up working."

In that freshman season, Anderson barely survived. In 15 innings across 12 mop-up appearances, he allowed 23 runs, good for an ERA of 13.80. Some of those outings and beatings-up came before the change in slot, though. When he came back the following season, after a full offseason to prepare as a sidewinder, he was much better—although still more 'good' than truly dominant. In fact, for the balance of his college career, he was endlessly intriguing, and often valuable, but never overwhelmingly valuable. He made many multi-inning relief appearances and a fistful of starts. He helped McNeese State, but he wasn't their ace, or even their relief ace.

At the end of his junior year, he was selected in the 21st round of the MLB Draft—a round that wouldn't even exist a few years later. Nonetheless, he seized his chance to become a pro ballplayer, signing with the Seattle Mariners for $50,000. Ten months later, the Mariners dealt him to the Texas Rangers, where Anderson settled in nicely.

He didn't explode onto the scene, though. He just steadily climbed the ladder. He survived the contraction of the minors, and a season lost to the pandemic in 2020. His command steadily improved, and he racked up more strikeouts against minor-league hitters than he had in college. He was very good—good enough, a half-decade after being selected, to crack the big leagues. He only managed 62 innings of work across two seasons in Texas, though, before the team designated him for assignment this winter, making room for the addition of Joc Pederson. The Brewers pounced on their chance, trading for him on Jan. 2.

Milwaukee never does that kind of thing without a plan, and as soon as they had officially acquired Anderson, they approached him with theirs. It wasn't anything big or elaborate. It was just the next way for a dedicated baseball survivor to keep surviving.

"Just some pitch usage stuff, maybe a couple pitch design things, making some pitches a little different movement-wise," Anderson said. "That was basically it."

Specifically, Anderson recalled, the team sought to help him create more depth with his changeup, and to increase the sweeping action on his slider. Because of his funky arm angle, his slider actually rises, relative to the sinker he lives on. Giving the hitters the extra wrinkle of a changeup with vertical drop would diversify the looks with which they have to contend and (especially) make him tougher on left-handed batters, who have an OPS north of 1.000 against him since the start of 2023, at all levels.

"I just have kind of a standard changeup grip," Anderson said, when asked in what ways he's trying to reengineer that pitch. "No circle change, I just put these two fingers on the middle laces, on a two-seam grip, basically, and throw it pretty similarly to my sinker. It’s actually the same grip I’ve had in previous years, but I just didn’t throw it at all the last two years."

This seems to be one of the subtle specialties of the Brewers, when it comes to diamond hunts in the rough of the pitching landscape. It's unsexy, because there's nothing especially high-tech or high-concept to it, but they seem to pick up pitchers and give them the confidence to reimagine or resurrect pitches they've thrown in the past, with some frequency. In Anderson's case, the changeup is such a pivotal pitch that it's shocking either he or the Rangers would have let it slide through the cracks. On the other hand, good changeups from slots like his lie thin on the ground. Most of the time, since pitchers who throw like Anderson already have such heavy action on their sinkers, they don't go in much for changeups. The separation between that pitch and the sinker isn't great enough, and hitters spot what there is too easily.

Atypically, though, Anderson doesn't only have that sinker. He can also throw a four-seamer, which would be heavy even by the standards of most pitchers' sinkers but rides quite a bit higher than his sinker does. Hitters strongly tend to expect the sinker, based on Anderson's slot, so that four-seamer comes with some degree of deception on its own. In this graphic, the topography map behind the circles representing the actual movement spread of Anderson's fastballs represents what a hitter intuitively expects, with brighter areas representing the greatest likelihood.

Even given Anderson's low slot, his sinker is so heavy that it dips more than the hitter expects. Even more than that, though, the four-seamer confounds the hitter just by existing. Then, once he gets a hitter looking for that pitch a bit, room is created for the changeup underneath it. The change doesn't vary much from the sinker in the way it moves, but it's not meant to play off that pitch, anyway. In a perfect world, Anderson would get a lefty's eyes rising with a four-seamer, then throw the changeup to induce a bad swing and/or weak contact.

Anderson threw his sinker exclusively to righties in 2024, and he went to the four-seamer almost exclusively against lefties. That approach didn't work, as he got lit up by lefties, but a big chunk of the reason for that lies in his not having used the changeup much at all. If he can throw that pitch more often and more consistently, he's part of the way to being an effective big-league reliever.

The other key ingredient in reaching that goal for Anderson will be improving upon his slider, and that's the weapon he's even more excited about as he begins his stint with the Brewers.

"With the slider, honestly, it’s a new pitch, so my first couple outings were rough, because I had no idea where the ball was going at the time," he said. "But the more I play catch with it, the more comfortable I get. So it becomes, where you’re starting the ball at, that determines if you’ll be able to get it glove-side or not. If I can get both of those pitches working together, sinker and slider, then I think I have a pretty good chance of being successful. The past couple of years, my slider’s been really short—almost cuttery. So I think getting more horizontal movement is going to help a lot."

Sure enough, Anderson is already getting more sweep on that pitch, in his earliest introduction to the team. This scatter plot shows the average horizontal and vertical movement of his pitches by month, for all the months of his professional career in which he's pitched in stadia equipped with tracking systems. The red dot with the green box around it represents his slider movement this month.

Only in August 2022, long before he made his big-league debut, did Anderson achieve this much horizontal movement on his slider. He's created the depth he needed, almost overnight, with a few tweaks made in concert with his new team. 

Whether that will be enough to turn him from a forgettable fringe big-league arm into a more thoroughly useful one remains to be seen. Once he learns to trust and deploy the changeup more often, Anderson will have four total pitches, and while he only needs two of them (the sinker and the not-so-cuttery-now slider) to righties, he has to find feel for both the four-seamer and the change, in order to take advantage of the new depth on his breaking ball against lefties. If he can manage that final synthesis, though, he could be a right-handed Hoby Milner for the Brewers for a few years.

He's not built like a pitcher. He barely survived college ball to reach the pros, and barely survived the minors to reach the bigs. Anderson has dealt with a lot of adversity to get this far, but now he's closer than ever to establishing himself in the majors—thanks to open-mindedness and the Brewers' ideas about pitch usage and design, from the brilliant to the stunningly simple.

View full article

[Profbratsch]

Does the movie “Rudy” come to mind for anyone else? 😉