How Quinn Priester's Lousy Cutter Has Transformed His Game for the Better

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Sam Navarro-Imagn Images

In a first half that has seen them survive some worrisome bouts of injury and underperformance to position themselves wonderfully for the pennant race, the Brewers have had several great individual storylines emerge. Perhaps the most compelling, though, is the success of Quinn Priester. Acquired under duress in mid-April at a cost that made many Brewers fans balk, Priester looked at first like so much cannon fodder—a hurler to be thrown out there to soak up mediocre innings in the name of survival. Now, he looks like something closer to a mid-rotation starter under long-term team control. Far from an overpay, the price the team paid now looks like a good deal.

The transformation in Priester has been profound. Early on, the team had to work with him between starts and make some needed adjustments, so the results didn't keep up well with what was changing under the hood. Some of the work player and team have done this year is the sort that would normally happen over an offseason, or during spring training. Being thrown together with the campaign already underway, though, the parties had to make the best of things. Recently, things have really clicked.

Last year, Priester was a sinker-slider guy, with a four-seamer, a changeup and a curveball he threw about equally often to round out an unremarkable mix. As we talked about at the time, it was perfectly possible to see what the Brewers would try to do with Priester, following the blueprints of other high-arm-slot sinkerballers throughout the league—but that didn't mean it was going to work.

Priester had already made one significant change, switching from a four-seamer to a cutter as the fast complement to his sinker. The Brewers locked that in and stuck with it, and indeed, his arsenal is now best described as a four-pitch mix—sinker, slider, cutter, curveball—with an occasional show-me changeup.

That cutter was in the mix right away, over his first three starts with the team, but it got pounded, and the player and the team put it on the shelf for a while. Again, this is one of the hurdles of onboarding a new, promising pitcher within the season: he had to largely hide what is now his well-established third pitch for two months, while workshopping some things. For much of that time, his performance was uneven as a result.

Over the course of two starts in mid-May, though, Priester worked his way from the first-base side of the rubber to the middle of it. That trend has continued; he's very much in the center of the rubber now.

To visualize the difference there, take a look at these two pitches he threw—one in early May, before the move, and one in mid-June. Here's the old location on the rubber.

(Don't focus on the pitch itself; both of the ones I chose are high, arm-side misses with the sinker. Just watch his delivery, including and especially his starting point.) Here's the new setup point.

So, Priester has moved over, and he's changed to the cutter. The thing is, the first adjustment is value-neutral, in a vacuum: the optimal position on the rubber is different for every pitcher, and pretty idiosyncratic. And the cutter is, by any model's estimation or even by outcomes (whiff rate, quality of contact, and so on), his worst pitch.

Be that as it may, though, the cutter has been key to Priester's newfound success. It's a central part of his arsenal, not because of its own quality, but because of how it interacts with his other offerings.

Priester has also raised his arm slot this year, which has helped him consistently execute the curveball at the bottom edge of the zone and helped him get around the ball more, changing his spin profile. Here's a chart showing the distribution of spin direction (left) out of his hand and movement direction (right) by pitch type, for 2024. These are helpful for seeing where a pitcher is getting their movement, and how good a chance a hitter has to recognize a given offering based on its spin.

Prister's four-seamer and curve stayed true to their spin profiles (as, by and large, those pitch types do), but note how much movement his changeup and sinker (to the arm side) and slider (to the glove side) get, beyond what his spin would imply. Priester has always been good at achieving seam-shifted wake effects, which use the position of the seams during the flight of the ball to produce movement we couldn't predict based on spin. For most hitters, at least until they've seen a pitcher several times, that type of movement is harder to suss out than spin-based movement. Being a high-slot sinker guy has much to do with this; it's just in the nature of the arm's operation from that position.

Here's the same chart for this year, with the cutter taking the place of the four-seamer. As you'll see, though, that's not all that has changed.

From his slightly raised slot, Priester is, again, getting around the ball a bit more. That means that the spin direction on his slider tilts more toward sweep, and the seam effects then steer it more downward. That leaves room in his movement profile for that cutter, which you can see starting with something close to true backspin but moving to the glove side more than a hitter would expect based on that spin direction. His sinker has become more of a two-seamer, with less heavy action, which might sound like an unfortunate shift—but it's not. It fits perfexctly with the other things happening in Priester's arsenal. 

So, the change in slot has created space for the cutter to fit into his spin and movement landscape. That, however, doesn't explain (really) how the cutter helps him out. Here's a glimpse at that explanation.

This is an animated representation of Priester's release point and the trajectory of his pitches, from a right-handed batter's vantage point. The bars are colored by pitch type: orange for sinker, yellow for slider, rusty brown for cutter. At release, of course, there's no huge separation between the average flight paths of the three pitches. By the time of the first checkin this illustration provides, though, there is some. The white balls in the distance show what Baseball Savant calls the 'recognition point,' where the hitter gets their chance to spot a pitch based on spin and trajectory, rather than any variations in arm slot or release point by the pitcher. Even at that early marker, the sinker and slider are separating a bit. To keep either on the plate, Priester has to throw them with such different horizontal release angles that the hitter can see them diverge earlier than you'd like. (Normally, sinkers and sliders pair well together in this regard, but then, most pitchers who rely on sinker-slider combinations have a very different slot than Priester's.)

The cutter keeps righties from spotting that slider early, at least with the confidence they would otherwise have. It's on the same early flight path as the slider, and has spin more similar to the slider's than the sinker can offer, too. By the second set of markers, in pink, the approximate point by which a hitter has to have committed to swing, the cutter is also helping keep hitters slow on the sinker, because the two pitches are headed to similar locations but will be breaking in opposite directions when they get there. Greg Maddux and Roy Halladay can tell you how valuable it is to just have a sinker and a cutter that head for the same edge but wiggle away from one another, time after time.

Against lefties, though, this might be even more important. Here's an animation similar to the above, but for left-handed batters, and from 2024.

It's ok that the curveball stands out that way; that's part of the plan. The curve should often freeze hitters, by looking so different that they lock up—or induce bad, jumpy swings. The other offerings shown, though, have some problems. The sinker shows itself to a lefty right out of the hand, which is always the danger with sinkers to opposite-handed batters and why many pitchers don't throw many of them. The four-seamer also does nothing, in contrast with the cutter's work against righties this year discussed a moment ago, to camouflage the slider. Hitters can see these differences, and they could identify pitches against Priester very well, very early last season.

Here's the same image for this year.

Again, the sinker stands out. That's ok, though. It's hard to see without placing the two side-by-side, but consider each image, and notice that shift across the rubber and that slightly higher release this year. That's allowing Priester to work better to the arm side with the sinker, so his command can make up for whatever exposure the pitch has. The sinker actually operates a bit more like a four-seamer, to lefties, in the wake of his changes in mechanics and starting position.

The real story, though, is the cutter's interaction with the slider. Look how it hugs the slider's early trajectory, only for the two to diverge really widely (from the batter's perspective) after the commitment point. This, in a nutshell, is why Priester's slider went from getting whiffs 25.4% of the time and yielding a .404 expected slugging average to a 35.1% whiff rate and a .345 expected slugging in 2025. The cutter itself might not be a good pitch—indeed, it gets hit hard—but it's making his other pitches (especially the slider) much better.

There are no guarantees in baseball. This approach has worked very well for Priester over about two full months, but hitters will make further adjustments to him, and he'll have to make some new ones in reply. He's still a righty who sits just below 94 miles per hour with his fastball; he doesn't profile as a pitcher with a frontline ceiling. However, if he can stay healthy, the signs point to a solid contributor for what could be the next half-decade. The Brewers helped maximize the value of some tweaks he'd already made, and he's turned a corner for them.

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[MattK]

Great digging Matthew, thanks!