Trevor Megill's Comfort Zone, in Fastball Usage and Elsewhere

Because their appearances are so short (and, thus, their samples are so small), most relief pitchers experience some wide variations in the breakdown of their arsenals from month to month. Sometimes, it's not really what we would call a change in "pitch usage", for a starter; it's just the natural, wide vibrations that come with throwing 15 pitches at a time. Over 90 pitches, throwing 46 fastballs or 44 doesn't look much different. Over 15, throwing nine or seven is a relatively huge gap. The pocket of an opposing lineup you face on a given day might change your approach for the day, and that might show up even in a breakdown of pitch usage over a week or two.

Not so with Trevor Megill, though. He's extremely stable in the way he attacks hitters—and that takes conscious effort.

"I like to keep my fastball usage around 69 percent. That’s usually the goal," Megill said Saturday, in the Brewers clubhouse in Maryvale, Ariz. "I think that’s a good split—69/31. It just works out like that. It’s always been like that. It’s been like that for three years."

As the chart above shows, that's not quite right, but you can certainly see the towering righthander working in that direction—and he got very close to his goal in 2024. While many modern pitchers try to mix in the breaking stuff increasingly often, toward 40 or 50 percent of the time—especially those who only work an inning or so per game and don't have to worry about opponents getting too many looks at that pitch. Megill, however, is sticking with a very fastball-forward approach. Partially, that's because he's so much more likely to find the zone with the heater than with the hook. He could only throw the curve much more if he could be sure that hitters would chase it at an extraordinarily high rate, and although we know why his curve does consistently induce chases, that's a risky game.

Throwing enough strikes isn't the main reason why Megill thinks this pitch mix makes the most sense, though. Since he has an exceptionally hard, high-spin fastball he can locate in the top of the zone, he mostly fills that mixing his pitches that way makes it hardest for hitters to anticipate, identify and attack his stuff. He loses a few strikeouts this way, but arguably, he gets even more outs.

"Last year was the first year where stressing over strikeouts wasn’t really a thing for me," Megill said. "It was more like, ‘How quick can we get the game over with? Let’s get the hell out of here in 12 pitches.’ I felt like being in the zone more, that put a lot more pressure on hitters to either make swings or make poor swing decisions."

Attacking hitters more fearlessly was easy, Megill noted, because of the superb defense behind him. He felt confident that if a ball stayed in the park, his defense would snag it and convert an out. He also got better, though, at avoiding the center of the strike zone with his heater—especially the area middle-up where hitters can make hard contact without getting under the ball. In the graphic above, you can see how his locations were somewhat bifurcated: lots in the lower half of the zone, and lots along the top rail. In 2022 and 2023, his fastball locations were more amorphous, and less precise.

Megill confirmed that the change was intentional, and focused on his long-term viability as the relief ace he became in the second half of 2023.

"I knew I had to do that at some point in my career," he said. "There’s a long process to where I envision myself and how I envision myself throwing, and you gotta work on, for me it was stuff, and then get to location with the stuff that you have. So it took two years to get there, but now I feel comfortable moving it around and placing the ball in different places, in different counts."

It all worked gorgeously, in ways not even fully captured by simple stats. Megill's new approach did reduce his strikeout rate, but it also drastically reduced his walk rate. If you strip out the four of his 14 walks on the year that were intentional (and also take them out of the denominator for walk rate, batters faced), Megill only gave out free passes to 5.6% of the batters he faced. It's clear that the self-confident Megill views himself as an elite reliever, capable of holding this level for years to come, as long as he can sustain that 69% fastball usage and continue making valuable adjustments. Injury risk notwithstanding, it's hard to argue with him.

Perhaps because he's now entering the season as the presumptive closer for the second time (although it was just as a placeholder last time), Megill also seems exceptionally comfortable in camp. Though he reminisced about the way playing in warm, humid, sea-level climes can affect his pitch movement ("Florida spring training, your curveball is disgusting. Everything you throw out there is nasty. The air is so heavy."), he strongly prefers spring training in Arizona, for a simple reason: it's home. Megill moved to the area a decade ago, so coming to Maryvale and playing in the Cactus League requires no hassle. In fact, it means an extra month at home with his young family.

For all the same reasons why relievers with stable pitch usage ratios are rare, relievers who stick around and thrive for more than a few years are similarly scarce. Megill is hoping to be among the exceptions to the latter, partially by dedicating himself so ardently to being an exception to the former.