For Bryan Hudson, Coming in High From Low Slot is Key

This is a story about a difficult question: How do you consistently throw the high fastball, from a low arm slot? It's a bit of a juggling act; it's a bit of a wrestling match with oneself. All the best high-carry fastballs come from pitchers who throw overhand, because such pitchers have an easy, natural time staying behind the ball and creating backspin. That's all well and good, if that's how you pitch and your arsenal naturally flows therefrom, but Bryan Hudson realized a couple years ago that his best self is the high-extension, low-arm slot version, with his heater getting on top of hitters because of how far down the mound he gets before releasing the ball. His body works best when he fires from just above sidearm, and for a pitcher with a long injury history and natural obstacles to locating with precision, it's important to use the delivery that lets his body work best.

Here's the problem: Hudson's fastball has a nice, flat vertical approach angle when it's at the top of the strike zone, and the pitch induces lots of weak contact in that area. When it's lower, though, the pitch's lack of elite raw movement or above-average velocity gets him into trouble. Thus, Hudson is always fighting to answer that question: How does he consistently execute the high heater from a release point as low as he can manage? 

The easiest way to see this might be to take the pitch grades and the outcomes on the pitch across each month of the past season. 

On the outcomes portion, I've merged the segments of the season where he had locations approved by pitch-modeling algorithms, to give us decent-sized samples with which to work and to simplify the presentation of the data. Now, here's his location heat map on the heater from the start of the season through the end of June:

He's neatly filling up the zone, here, bullying hitters and getting ahead of them. In July, though, he started losing that fight with himself.

Hudson got it back together, though, and finished the season with the fastball doing basically as well as ever. Here's where he located the pitch during those last two months, when he was with the team.

It's not hard to see what worked for Hudson in the good times, or what happened in July. With the high fastball working, he can stay in or around the zone confidently, and the pitch will be effective. It doesn't miss tons of bats, but it induces weak contact. Pop-ups are frequent. When he loses the ability to elevate it, though, he starts having to try to nibble at the edges—and his delivery, with that wide, low angle, is not conducive to that. His misses tend to be east-west, which means he throws a fair number of non-competitive fastballs if he has to aim for the corner, rather than the heart of the plate.

Throwing high fastballs is indispensable for Hudson. He has a good sweeper, but that pitch has to play off of something, and his cutter is already the weak cousin of his mix. The sad fact is that throwing the high heater means working against his body a bit, even as he otherwise embraces the long, low throwing motion. He has to find ways to consistently locate the heater up, without letting his arm angle rise too much and losing the deception and extension that are such vital elements of his success.

The Brewers had to veer away from Hudson in the second half of 2024, as he faltered and wore down. After the Devin Williams trade, the team is in position to rely heavily on the big lefty again in 2025, if he can handle that assignment. To do so, he has to resolve the tension between how he throws and where he throws best. He'd hardly be the first person to overcome that tension, but that doesn't mean it can be done easily.