The Soul-Snatchers: Bryan Hudson Latest Brewer to Bust Out Backdoor Sweeper at Crucial Time

Only three other teams in baseball throw sweepers to opposite-handed batters with the same frequency as the Brewers. By both conventional wisdom and every available macro-level adjustment, the sweeper (which relies primarily on horizontal movement, taking it toward an opposite-handed batter and away from a same-handed one) is a pitch vulnerable to bad platoon matchups, so most teams and pitchers who use that pitch try to come up with an alternative on which to lean when the hitter has the platoon advantage. In fact, only 10 teams have thrown at least 200 sweepers to opposite-handed batters this year. The Brewers are coming up on 400.

That's not the only regard in which they're unusual when it comes to the sweeper, though. The Brewers don't just use that pitch more than most clubs against opposite-handed hitters; they also use it differently. For many pitchers, if the sweeper is going to work while breaking toward a hitter, it needs to have two-plane movement and dive at their back foot, like an old-fashioned Randy Johnson offering. The Brewers take a different tack altogether.

Even for the other nine teams who use the sweeper (for instance) with lefties facing a righty batter, the pitch is either a chase pitch low and in, or one meant to go from ball to strike and freeze them over the heart of the plate, like a traditional curveball. Since a lot of pitchers' sweepers are newish, modified versions of previous breaking balls, it's something the hurlers can intuit and feel out well.

The Brewers are either more intentional about their approach, or just plain better at it. In either case, what they do is what's hinted at by the chart above: they try to dot backdoor sweepers, low and away. It works, too. They have 16 called strikes on sweepers in the lower and outer third of the zone to opposite-handed batters this year, the most in MLB. They don't often come in unimportant situations, either. On Monday, Bryan Hudson threw one to Dansby Swanson, locking up the Cubs' highly-paid shortstop and killing a menacing rally with perfect execution of a fiendish gameplan. 

That was the first time Hudson jumped aboard, but this train has been in motion all year. Hoby Milner and Colin Rea talk openly about their love of pinpointing the backdoor sweeper, and Robert Gasser has come up and shown an immediate facility with that tricky version of the pitch. (More on Gasser another time, soon, in this and a related but distinct vein.) None of the above have exceptional velocity, so they have to be able to hit specific and sometimes difficult spots like these. Many pitchers never find the confidence to try such pitches in big situations, let alone the feel to do successfully. As ever, though, the pitchers under the charge of Chris Hook are the exception to the rule.

Milner is the foremost artisan of the craft on the staff. The pitch seems to taunt the hitter on its way to them, clearly too far away to be reachable or hittable--and then it nestles right in at the corner for the strike.

Again, it's not normal to deftly command this pitch. As a general rule, pitchers control pitches better when throwing them to the side of the plate toward which they naturally move, anyway. That's why, for instance, few pitchers try to emulate the extraordinary success enjoyed by Corey Kluber, whose best years included a great many "front-hip" sinkers--a sinker thrown to the glove side of the plate with pinpoint accuracy, sneaking back onto the corner by moving to his arm side. Many just can't do it. This Crew can.

Milner also froze Christopher Morel on a backdoor sweeper for a strikeout in the ninth inning Monday. There's a bonus value to that pitch against any struggling hitter, which is that it breaks them a little bit. Any successful backdoor breaking ball becomes a highly frustrating pitch for a batter, and if that batter was already frustrated to some extent, the effect is magnified. 

Creating very steep horizontal release angles has been a common point of emphasis for many recent Brewers pitching reclamation projects, like Hudson, Milner, and Bryse Wilson. That might not be a coincidence. Doing so means starting so far wide of the center of the rubber that you're well wide, even, of the arm-side edge of home plate. Perhaps that makes it much easier for the hurler to attack the arm side with stuff that moves toward their glove side--without making it any easier or more comfortable for the hitter trying to pick up that pattern.

You won't find the Brewers atop the league leaderboards in whiffs, even on their sweepers and other breaking balls, partially because many of them don't throw very hard. They have to get called strikes in bunches to get outs in bunches, and that means some creative gameplanning and sterling execution. So far, that's exactly what we've seen from them, and their expertise with the backdoor sweeper is one perfect example.