Improbably, Grant Anderson Has Had Baseball's Most Untouchable Four-Seam Fastball This Year

[Jack Stern]

Image courtesy of © Joe Nicholson-Imagn Images

Peruse the list of regularly-thrown four-seam fastballs that induce the most whiffs and the least productive contact, and you'll see a litany of hard-throwing pitchers with some of the most electric raw stuff in baseball. You'll also find Grant Anderson's name—ahead of them all. Among four-seamers thrown at least 200 times this year, the Brewers right-hander ranks first in whiff rate and xwOBA, despite below-average velocity for a reliever. It's not especially close, either.

Pitcher	xwOBA	Whiff%	Velocity (MPH)
Grant Anderson	.208	45.2%	93.3
Jacob Misiorowski	.229	32.1%	99.4
Hunter Brown	.230	32.2%	97.4
Randy Rodriguez	.234	28.0%	96.9
Brock Stewart	.242	35.5%	96.0

Anderson's four-seamer has always excelled at generating swings and misses, due to his sidearm release slot. That makes it appear as though he's throwing the ball upward when he locates it at the top of the strike zone, giving it more perceived rise than its 11 inches of induced vertical break would suggest. Its -3.5° vertical approach angle ranks second among four-seamers thrown at least 200 times, meaning it enters the zone at an exceptionally flat angle.

"Metrically, my four-seam is not anything special," Anderson said, "but the arm angle which it's coming from is pretty much completely opposite from where they're seeing most four-seams at. So it just adds another level of deception, I guess, to the pitch."

The drawback with rising four-seamers is that when opponents make contact with them, they are often hit and in the air, due to their shape. Anderson experienced that to an extreme in his first two big-league seasons. He threw his four-seamer almost exclusively to left-handed hitters, who crushed it to the tune of a .543 wOBA and .497 xwOBA despite whiffing on 35.5% of swings against it. Ten of their 16 hits against it in that span were home runs.

"He's got the upshoot, and if you catch it right, I feel like that's where the homers came from," assistant pitching coach Jim Henderson said in late April, when Anderson was using his four-seamer conservatively and leaning primarily on his sweeper and sinker to right-handers. "If the lefties kind of catch it right, they backspin it well."

It was easier for lefties to catch the four-seamer because they could sell out for it at the top of the zone. With the new sweeper in tow, Henderson believed the four-seamer would play better because hitters now had to protect against increased horizontal movement at the bottom.

"Now it's just that it's disguised a bit better, and it still produces whiffs," he said. "I think it was just damage prone, which doesn't mean it was a bad pitch, because it's still got the whiffs."

That's precisely how things have played out. Because opponents are thinking about a sinker and sweeper combination with 31 inches of horizontal separation on average, the loud contact on elevated four-seamers has evaporated, and a plus whiff rate has jumped to video-game-like proportions.

"It kind of makes you have to choose whether you're gonna look sinker or sweeper," Anderson said of his new breaking ball's impact, "and then it opens up the door for the four-seam, because the eyes are kind of looking more down, east to west. So then, when they see hard, and you can throw it up, I think it changes the eye level pretty well. It's just a good amount of separation between the two pitches."

The four-seamer is no longer just his leading weapon against lefties, either. Anderson has thrown it progressively more against righties, who have yet to record a hit against it while whiffing on a whopping 57.5% of swings.

There's no grand strategy behind that change, Anderson said, just an awareness that the four-seamer is his best option when he needs to miss bats.

"I've come in a couple times in extra innings. Guy on second base, you want to try to do your best to strand them there, so you're gonna use your two best swing-and-miss pitches. And for me, that's four-seam and sweeper. And then you're obviously big on not letting your teammates' runners score when you come in, so if I can get swing-and-miss, that obviously lowers the chance of that guy scoring."

It's not a conventionally dominant fastball; instead of blowing it past hitters at a high velocity, Anderson uses deceptive angles that leave them swinging underneath it. It's been increasingly instrumental in his breakout season as a swiss army knife in the Milwaukee bullpen.

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[Joseph Zarr]

You want to look in the nooks and crannies of why and how the Brewers seem to do it again and again? Look at a trade like 2024 Brewers  7th Rounder LHP Mason Molina sent to the Rangers of the Republic of Texas on a day after New Year's in the dead of winter for a recently DFA'd fallen out of favor struggling RHP Grant Anderson. While every Wisconsinite was likely worrying about the weather, the Brewers were working the baseball outer limits. I am on record loving the trade at the time. Hard to see it working out any better.