Following Familiar Blueprint, Brewers Have Turned Grant Anderson into a Valuable Reliever

[Jack Stern]

Image courtesy of © Jeff Curry-Imagn Images

As a slew of early injuries hit the Brewers' pitching staff in spring training, Pat Murphy compiled a list of the next 13 arms he expected to lean on in the regular season. Grant Anderson didn't make the cut.

"I didn't have him on any piece of paper I was writing on out of spring training," Murphy admitted on the club's last homestand.

Despite his omission from the manager's list and the Opening Day roster, Anderson quickly emerged as Murphy's most prominent middle reliever. In a team-leading 17 relief innings, the sidewinding right-hander has pitched to a 3.18 ERA and 3.26 FIP.

"I was wrong," Murphy said. "And I love being wrong in these situations."

Most of Anderson's success is thanks to a sweeping slider he developed under the instruction of his new pitching coaches. Opponents are hitting .115 with a 35.1% whiff rate against the sweeper, which has already been worth four runs on its own.

It's not an entirely new pitch. Anderson said he once had a bigger slider, but lost the feel for it in the upper minors before his MLB debut.

"In (2022), before I got up (to the big leagues), I had a pretty decent-sized sweeper," he recalled. "I just kind of lost it after that. I couldn't really figure out how to get it back to breaking where I wanted to, and then I was kind of searching for it the last couple years, but just couldn't really figure it out."

Anderson wanted a breaking ball with more lateral movement. So did the Brewers, who acquired him from the Texas Rangers in January. They felt his existing slider, which often behaved more like a cutter, did not properly complement his heavy sinker.

"It was just too lifty," said pitching coach Chris Hook. "It didn't make any sense with where the arsenal was."

The chart below is Anderson's 2024 pitch movement plot. Note how the slider cluster is well above the zero line, while the sinker cluster is slightly below it. That means the slider lacked the same depth as the sinker, and was not approaching the hitter on the same plane—making it easier for opponents to identify it out of his hand.

The new sweeper's movement comes much closer to mirroring that of the sinker, both vertically and horizontally. That makes for a tougher identification and gives hitters more break to cover in opposing directions.

"Off the bat, they just wanted something to kind of go equal with the sinker," Anderson said. "Kind of make it more of a 50-50 decision from a hitter standpoint, making it harder to check one or the other off."

Sidearm pitchers like Anderson are often best served by maximizing horizontal movement across their repertoire. Compared to a traditional over-the-top or three-quarters arm slot, their hands are better positioned to throw the ball with the sidespin that makes a sweeping slider break. Anderson was struggling to tap into that ability.

"It was kind of weird that he wasn't getting there," Hook said.

Seeing an opportunity to add more movement, assistant pitching and strategy coach Jim Henderson spearheaded the sweeper's development early in spring training.

"It's kind of like when I saw [Joel Payamps] a couple years ago in the first live BPs out of spring," Henderson said. "It was just one of those things where I saw Grant coming in, and I just thought there was a lot more potential there for how it was moving."

Henderson and Anderson spent over a week working daily on a new grip to unlock the movement both parties desired.

"His hand's already in the right position," Henderson said. "His slot's in the right position. He can work underneath the baseball if he needs to and lift the sweeper. He was already there, so it made it an easy transition for him."

"The right wordage was kind of what helped me figure it out, so that was obviously very beneficial and much-needed," Anderson said.

It helped that the Brewers could draw from a past success story. When discussing Anderson's development, both coaches quickly evoked Hoby Milner, who preceded him as the team's most versatile and durable middle reliever.

Due to his arm slot and pitch shapes, Anderson profiled as a mirror of Milner, albeit with more velocity. Those similarities were, indeed, part of the thinking when he became the club's latest pitching development project.

"It was like, we already have the blueprint in Hoby Milner and how he used all his stuff, and now we can use this with Grant," Henderson said. "That's kind of how our minds are shaped with this, is that Hoby kind of led the way with it."

Fast-forward a few months, and Anderson is now recording outs with a game plan similar to Milner's: working both sides of the plate with sweepers, sinkers, and changeups, and elevating an upshoot four-seamer for whiffs at the top of the zone.

Achieving the desired break on the sweeper also required cleaning up Anderson's noisy mechanics. With the Rangers, he came set with his hands in his lap and his back to the hitter, before beginning his motion with a dramatic twist and arm swing.

All of that movement made it challenging for Anderson to repeat his delivery. The Brewers saw it as unnecessary.

"He's already deceptive," said Henderson. "He doesn't really need to do anything else that's deceptive."

"Every pitcher has to deal with timing," Hook elaborated. "And when that timing's so inconsistent that you're dealing with just your hand getting on time well enough, that's very difficult, and you can't get the consistent movement that we need. For him, he's coming in and facing right-handed batters a lot. (With the sweeper), you've got to be on time to get in front of it and spin it the right way."

With guidance from Hook and Henderson, Anderson cut the superfluous movement from his delivery. His front foot remains turned away from the hitter, but his hips now start in a straighter line toward home plate. He also comes set with his hands near his head.

"It was just a little much," Anderson said of his previous mechanics. "Being more direct to the plate with the lower half, and then the hands just going straight down to the plate, makes it a lot easier to be on time and be more consistent with the release point for all four of my pitches."

"He's rooted in the ground now with his back leg, and he's working around his back leg, as opposed to just trying to find whatever on the way up and hoping that he gets on time on the way down," Hook said.

Learning to control a bigger breaking ball with retooled mechanics was a bumpy ordeal. Anderson walked 20% of the hitters he faced in spring training, leading to his omission from Murphy's list.

"He got beat up a little bit with it in spring, but that's a great opportunity to use it and work at stuff in spring training, even though he was fighting for a job," Henderson said. "So credit to him for sticking with it."

Anderson is still walking too many, issuing free passes at a 10.7% clip in the regular season. Still, he's off to a productive start as another potential success story for Milwaukee's pitching development team, which has helped another hurler maximize his natural abilities.

"This is what the organization does," Murphy said. "It goes out and gets these people, and you might not see it right away, but here you've got a guy that I trust and will put in there at any time."

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