Did We Just Witness the Birth of Four-Pitch Freddy Peralta?

First of all, it's important to note that the Pirates didn't want Freddy Peralta facing any more right-handed batters than was absolutely necessary. Manager Derek Shelton wrote out a lineup that included left-hitting Ji-Hwan Bae, Jack Suwinski, Tucupita Marcano, and Josh Palacios, plus switch-hitters Bryan Reynolds, Carlos Santana, and Rodolfo Castro. As a result, Peralta threw most of his pitches against lefties. That's the same challenge Corbin Burnes had to navigate in his start against the Orioles a little over a week ago, about which I wrote last week. 

For Burnes, the solution was to throw his cutter unusually often, and it seemed to help him find a feel for the pitch that was absent when he was using it less often earlier in the season. Peralta, however, took just the opposite tack. Partially because of his established pitch mix, but also partially in an effort to show a large number of batters something different, he varied his arsenal more than he usually does. 

Peralta developed his current changeup at the start of 2021. From that point through his previous outing this month, he had never thrown the pitch more than 15 times in any outing. He only used it 20 total times across his last three starts. On Sunday, he threw the Pirates 18 changeups. It wasn't a devastating offering. He only induced three swings with it, and none of the three resulted in a whiff. He got just four called strikes. By and large, Pirates hitters spotted it, and they let it go for a ball. However, by using it so much, he forced those hitters to keep the change in mind.

That's not terribly newsworthy, of course. A pitcher whose changeup tends to be a marginal weapon threw it a lot because he faced a bunch of opposite-handed batters, and the results were mixed, even if there was some fringe benefit to merely making it part of the mix. However, that's just one part of the story.

Peralta also threw 20 curveballs Sunday. That's more than he's thrown in a start since last August, and the two times he depended that much on the hook in that month, it was because he had no feel for his slider. Sunday, he used both breaking balls. We've seen him make such equipollent use of the two breaking balls before, but it was mostly in 2021. Even then, it was always at the expense of (or, more likely, to make up for) the changeup, which he would throw less often. 

The man they once called Fastball Freddy now seems to have four full-fledged pitches, and an idea of how to use them to get deep into a game. Even if only three of those pitches are likely to be at full strength on a given night, and even if it requires somewhat unusual circumstances for us to see them all on display within a start, Sunday was a milestone in the evolution of Peralta into the top-of-the-rotation guy Brewers fans have envisioned for so long. If he can do this consistently, he'll be a credible co-ace for the next few years, and saying goodbye to either Corbin Burnes or Brandon Woodruff could be less painful.