How Jose Quintana Keeps Fooling Opponents and Putting Up Numbers

Baseball Prospectus has StuffPro grades on every pitch in each pitcher's arsenal, all the way back to 2020. The number is meant to reflect the number of runs that offering causes to score (or not) per 100 times thrown, relative to an exactly average pitch, so the average is 0.0 and negative numbers are better; they mean fewer runs are likely to score because of the influence of that pitch. Jose Quintana last had a pitch with a StuffPro below 0.0 in 2020, when he threw his curveball 57 times and it graded out at a cool -0.4.

Every other data point—each weapon in his four-pitch arsenal for each of the last five-plus seasons, except that one long-ago iteration of the hook—points toward the conclusion that Quintana's stuff is below-average. This year hasn't changed that at all. 

This is why Quintana was available so cheaply on a free-agent market that values starting pitchers so highly. It's why his DRA- (a rate measurement of a pitcher's overall contribution to preventing runs, where 100 is average and lower is better) figures were 118 and 116 the last two seasons when he pitched for the Mets, despite an ERA under 3.70 in almost 250 innings. Quintana doesn't have the stuff to miss bats, or even to live in the middle of the zone and minimize walks without getting hit hard, so hardly anyone in the league believes he can keep up what he's done of late.

Don't tell that to Quintana, or his 2.83 ERA this year, or the 94 DRA- that says that this time, it's not a fluke. He joined the Brewers, slightly lowered his arm slot, leaned more heavily into his sinker at the expense of his four-seamer, and has become even better in 2025—all despite his fastballs barely hanging onto an average velocity starting with 9.

The change in mix is certainly one important aspect of the improvement. When most pitchers move from four-seamers to sinkers, they lose a lot of whiff potential, but since Quintana's four-seamer wasn't missing bats, anyway, it made a little more sense for him to become a sinker maven.

What's most interesting is the way he's also leaned into his changeup, eschewing significant use of his curve. Note here, too, that Statcast draws a distinction Prospectus's model doesn't (but should) between the true curve and the slurve for Quintana. If you go back up to the plot of movement from Prospectus, alongside his StuffPro, you can see the small but real separation between two clusters that are both tagged as curves.

The rest of the southpaw's unlikely late-career renaissance, though, comes down to deception—layers and layers of it. Firstly, nothing he throws moves quite the way the hitter anticipates. Statcast says he has five pitches, not four, thanks to breaking out the curve and the slurve. None of them has an average movement direction within 15° (or 30-minute, on the clock face presentation to which you might be accustomed) of what their spin direction out of the hand would have suggested.

In this graphic, the image on the left shows the frequency with which he threw each pitch type with a given spin direction. Spin direction predicts the way the ball will move, at least fairly well, and it's one of the key things hitters try to identify. On the right is the actual distribution of movement directions for each pitch type. As you can see, the four-seamer rides (or carries) a bit more than the spin would predict, while both his changeup and his sinker dip substantially more. His curve plunges more than the spin implies. His slurve sweeps more and dives less.

All of those modest but tricky variations give the hitter one kind of trouble. Another comes from the fact that, out of the hand, none of his pitches gives itself away. If Quintana threw a cutter or a true slider, we would expect to see a spin direction somewhere in the upper right quadrant of the clock face above. That pitch would be easy for the hitter to spot, because its spin would be along a totally different axis. They'd probably see a dot develop on the ball, due to the non-movement of the seams at one particular place as the ball spins along an imaginary line through that dot to a spot on the other side of it. These five pitches, however, all spin on something close to the same axis—the breaking stuff just spins the opposite direction on it from the fastballs and the changeup. There is a little bit of an offset, but not a very helpful one—especially because the hitter has to keep in mind that Quintana's two most oft-used pitches move the most off their spin axis, anyway. This is called spin-mirroring, and it makes it harder to pick out a pitch early.

So does Quintana's tightly controlled release point, and the way he locates and angles his stuff to batters from each side. Here's his arsenal, rendered in 3-D color form, against right-handed batters this year.

This is from the umpire's vantage point, more or less, and we can see a lot of what he's doing from it. That fastball should get off course from the rest of his offerings early. The changeup and the sinker move the same way, so that's a problem, but putting ourselves in hitters' shoes, we can imagine staying through the ball on the outer edge, trusting our hands, and at least making solid contact, without perfectly distinguishing between these two offerings. They move too similarly and end up too close to the same place to get swings and misses. The curve looks positively fat; we'll spot that out of the hand and crush it.

Here's the same array, though, from the true vantage point of a righty batter.

First of all, that ability to pick out the four-seamer was an illusion—or rather, now that we're standing in the place of a real hitter, we're susceptible to an illusion, just like they are. The angle of release and the initial trajectory of the changeup, the sinker and the four-seamer are all so similar that a hitter has a hard time telling them apart, after all. And from our new angle, the changeup seems to dive more than we though, relative to the sinker. That pitch is trouble, after all: weak contact ahead. The curve really does pop, right out of the hand. We can see that pitch coming, when he throws it! Alas: he throws it infrequently enough (and we have to be on our guard enough against the trio of other nastily similar-looking, harder offerings) that all we can often manage is to see it, go, 'Don't swing,' because it's a curveball and we're hunting heat, and then watch it drop in for a called strike.

Against lefties, he's kept it simpler. The only two pitches with large enough samples against them are his sinker and his slurve. Here's what the umpire sees when Quintana works against a lefty batter.

Aha! No problem of identical initial trajectory here! No real similarity of movement or final location, either. This should be easier.

Welp. There's a problem here, after all. As unlikely as it might look from straight-on, the sinker and the slurve come out of Quintana's hand looking very similar for lefties. Then, the sheer degree of arm-side run for the sinker makes the batter feel defensive, because that ball is running in toward them—and the slurve bends away, to a side of the plate they're not covering at all by the time the ball arrives. And don't forget, he's still using his other pitches against lefties, too. This is a simplified version of the dilemma those hitters actually face, and it's still not very simple.

Quintana is the poster boy, at this point, for the value of command, savvy, and repeating one's delivery. He's healthier than most pitchers his age, and far, far more successful than most pitchers his age—even though he has worse stuff than most pitchers his age. It's not fair to count on a sub-3.00 ERA the rest of the way, but don't expect Quintana to turn into a pumpkin, either. He's not under a magical spell. He's the one doing the casting.