Chad Patrick's Sinker and the Art of the Anti-Tunnel

The sinker is there to work to the arm side of the pitcher who throws it. It's there to force a same-handed batter not to dive over the plate, so they can't reach your four-seamer on the far corner or your breaking ball. It's there to control that arm-side half of the plate; that's what it does.

For Chad Patrick, though, it does something else. Patrick uses the sinker strangely. Of the 58 sinkers he's thrown so far this season, 30 of them were on the glove-side (that is, the first-base-side) third of the plate or farther that direction—in on lefties, and away from fellow righties. Most pitchers struggle mightily to command that pitch, so they don't bother throwing it. The sinker runs to the arm side. If you try to aim it toward the glove side but miss, you're likely to leave a meatball in the heart of the zone. Much of the time, the reward for getting it right there just isn't rich enough to justify the risks of that. 

Patrick, however, has pretty good command of the pitch, and has gotten good mileage from it. Here's how those 30 pitches have broken down:

• 12 called strikes
• 11 balls
• 1 swinging strike
• 2 foul balls
• 2 outs on balls in play
• 2 singles

That doesn't add up to a lot of value in a vacuum, but let's discuss some nuances here. Firstly, using FanGraphs's new Pitch Pairing tool, we can take a look at the way Patrick attacks hitters and the interactions between his pitches. Here, for instance, is his profile against right-handed batters, with his signature pitch—the cutter—as the anchor pitch off which the others are considered to be working.

When Patrick is executing well, his cutter forces hitters to sit on it, and his new slurve can be a bat-missing strike-to-ball offering. His four-seamer is nothing special, on its own, but if a hitter is sitting cutter, the four-seamer can induce pop-ups and weak contact, as long as he gets it high enough.

Ah, but graphics like these assume the same "start line"—that's what the Brewers, at least, call the point they want a pitcher to target as they release a given pitch, letting it move from there to its real destination—for all pitches. By now, you know that Patrick isn't using the same start line for his sinker that he is for his cutter and the others. He starts that pitch off the outside edge by so much that if he threw the cutter the same way, it would end up in the left-handed batter's box. Instead, he's using the middle of the plate as his start line for the cutter and the slurve. For the sinker, he's starting outside.

Tunneling pitches is only one way to generate deception. Sometimes, you want to get hitters looking for the tunneled set (in this case, the cutter-slurve-four-seam tunnel) of pitches, so you can freeze them with a pitch that would be non-competitive if it were part of that tunneled set. That doesn't always work, but when it does, it works gorgeously. Check out this sequence against Maikel García of the Royals, on April 4.

This encounter came in the fifth inning. It was the third time García was seeing Patrick, so the hurler started him by landing a sluve in the zone for a called strike. That's conventional: catch a batter by surprise by showing them something unexpected at the front end of a third or fourth look within a game. He next went up to the top of the zone (above it, really) for a swinging strike on the cutter; he was way ahead of García. 

On his third pitch, though, he just got lucky. He tried to throw one of those strike-to-ball slurves, but got stuck in his own tunnel. The pitch broke off the line of the previous cutter, instead of one more typical of what Patrick throws to righties, and it ended up in the middle of the zone again. With two strikes, García wasn't going to be frozen and beaten so easily. It was still 0-2, but Patrick needed something new to show to a dangerous hitter who was right on him, now. Thus, the backdoor sinker.

Yes, technically, this pitch missed the zone. It didn't matter, though. Patrick had shaped it well and hit his spot. William Contreras framed the pitch well. Most importantly, García was fooled, badly. He was so unready to see that pitch, coming from that angle and landing where it did, that he was in no position to risk Kansas City's second challenge of the game on it. That's the ideal way for the backdoor sinker to work.

It's a different thing if you first fall behind in the count. Here's a third-inning showdown with Chase Meidroth back on March 28.

You can see what Patrick was thinking, here. He'd missed low with two of his first three offerings, but a front-door cutter had frozen Meidroth, so he was hoping that a hitter in an advantageous count would be sitting on another pitch on the inner half, on which he could turn and burn. Having thrown him the slurve on the previous pitch, he hoped he had Meidroth looking in that same tunnel, and that starting the sinker off the outside edge would freeze him and get Patrick back into the count at 2-2. Instead, Meidroth stayed on the ball and flicked it neatly into right field.

With any pitch on which you're hoping for lots of called strikes, sequencing is paramount. Patrick wants righties to sit on the four-seamer and the cutter and the slurve, but he needs count leverage and/or perfect execution to win with the sinker just by violating those expectations.

Because he throws the pitch so well to that side of the plate, though, Patrick's sinker is much better against lefties than most right-handed pitchers' sinkers are. Let's take a look at a couple more of those FanGraphs images. First, here's what his arsenal looks like when anchored to the four-seamer. You can see, pretty easily, how a lefty will experience the four-seamer, the cutter and the slurve as a tunnel and struggle to differentiate them. 

The key to the front-door sinker, then, is that it moves so differently than the rest of the arsenal that given the start line Patrick uses, it'll look to a batter like it's going to hit him, if the batter thinks it's either the cutter or the slurve. To a lefty, the pitch can tunnel a bit with the four-seamer, but it has to be set up in a different way. Here's a glance at the arsenal if we use the sinker as the anchor.

So, let's look at one more way the pitch actually worked in a real matchup. In a showdown with the Nationals' Jorbit Vivas on Friday, Patrick started him with a more traditionally located two-seamer, hitting the outside edge of the zone for strike one. (It was initially called a ball, but Contreras got it back with a challenge via ABS.) Next, he dropped a fantastic slurve into the bottom, inner quadrant of the zone, getting ahead 0-2. The question was how to put Vivas away from there.

Patrick guessed that Vivas would be looking for the cutter or the four-seamer, upstairs. He was right. Instead of giving Vivas that, though, he threw him a high, front-door sinker. As you can see above, it wasn't pinpoint location, but it worked, because Vivas hit the inside of the ball. He was trying to get his barrel around and through a four-seamer or cutter; the sinker ran off the side of the stick and produced an easy fly ball.

Throwing the glove-side sinker takes some fearlessness and guile, as well as tactile command. Patrick has shown all of that this spring. This pitch is one more way in which he frustrates batters, despite his apparent lack of a swing-and-miss out pitch. He works in a three-pitch tunnel with the rest of his arsenal, but when it comes to the sinker, the tunnel isn't the point. Rather, Patrick is inviting batters to hone in on that tunnel—then working beyond it, forcing them to reconceptualize their approach and (if nothing else) be less locked in when he goes back to his tunneled set.