The Brewers Like Dustin May's Cutter a Lot, and With Good Reason

It's only been two starts, but the early returns suggest that the Brewers have a specific plan for Dustin May: throw your cutter more. No, more. No, even more than that. 

May, whom the team acquired just hours before the trade deadline on August 3, has allowed just 12 baserunners and three runs in 13 innings over his first two appearances for Milwaukee. The Crew prized him for the depth of his arsenal and his feel for moving the ball in all four directions, but while his best pitch (according to Baseball Prospectus's StuffPro) is his sweeper, it's the cutter the team has ratcheted up his usage of so far.

As I often say, every pitcher is really two different creatures: one against same-handed batters and one against opposite-handed ones. For different reasons, the Brewers and May have elected to have him throw more cutters regardless of which type of batter he's facing, and the results speak for themselves. Let's drill down on their reasons for each change of gameplan.

Against righties, May's exceptionally heavy sinker runs the show. During his stint with the Cardinals, however, he used that pitch to set up high four-seamers and sweepers that would run the opposite of the direction of his sinker. Since joining Milwaukee, the sinker has set the stage for the cutter, instead. It's a pitch May can keep on the plate and in the zone better, but as long as he executes each offering, the resulting contact is bound to be weak and harmless.

Against lefties, the cutter was more prominent even while May pitched for St. Louis. His four-seamer and the cutter pair well to those batters. Since coming to Milwaukee, though, he's switched the roles of the two pitches. He's using the cutter as the primary offering, and then the four-seamer as the change of eye level. The Brewers do this more than almost any other team in the league: letting one of the more horizontal fastball shapes force hitters into a visual box, then throwing the four-seamer off that to make it harder to catch up to.

The secret to both changes, though, is that May's cutter makes a better anchor pitch than most pitchers' do. Because of his size and extension, his relatively vanilla raw arm angle is more deceptive than the data initially suggests. That also changes what a hitter sees and expects out of his hand. According to Prospectus, batters are only likely to accurately identify the cutter 52.6% of the time. Meanwhile, the pitch his four-seamer and changeup are most frequently mistaken for is the cutter. 

May's ability to move the ball east and west, achieve depth on the breaking ball and find more carry on the four-seamer than most similar pitchers makes him an extremely high-upside addition to the starting rotation. His cutter is so firm (and his command of it to the glove-side edge of the plate is so good) that it sits neatly in the default position, allowing him to force both lefties and righties to cover a big strike zone and a wide variety of speeds and shapes by working off the cutter.

Again, it's only been two starts. The matchups in his next two might dictate that May and whichever catcher is paired with him operate differently. So far, though, the returns on the Brewers' change to his pitch mix have been excellent. The team who most loves to attack with fastballs has a new hurler who thrives with three different flavors of fastball. It's a match made in heaven.

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