The Minnesota Twins acquired starting pitcher Anthony DeSclafani from the Seattle Mariners on Monday evening. While his superficial numbers aren’t particularly eye-popping, DeSclafani provides solid rotation depth. He may also have some potential waiting to be unlocked.
Anthony DeSclafani was once considered among MLB’s up-and-coming starting pitchers before injuries began to hamper his career. He has spent significant time on the injured list, due to a right UCL sprain (all of 2017), right flexor-pronator strain (2023), right ankle inflammation (2021) and surgery (2022; peroneal tendon repair), right shoulder fatigue (2021), right teres major strain (2020), and two left oblique strains (2016 and 2018).
However, when healthy, DeSclafani has proved he’s a viable MLB starter. He has posted ERAs of 3.17, 3.89, and 4.05 in the three seasons in which he’s made at least 30 starts, and 3.28 and 4.93 in the two seasons in which he started between 20 and 30. He's a traditional five-pitch mix, but has largely relied on his sinker and slider over his past two seasons with the San Francisco Giants. (The Mariners traded for DeSclafani earlier this offseason, before flipping him to the Twins.)
DeSclafani’s best and most-thrown—44.8% usage rate last summer—pitch is that slider. It sits at 87-89 mph, with poor spin efficiency (43% active) and a 60-minute deviation in observed versus spin-based movement. In English: DeSclafani’s slider features more gyroscopic spin than active (i.e. movement-causing) spin. Thus, it relies more on gravity and seam-shifted wake to create drop, rather than on the Magnus effect to create run.
As a result, his bullet slider is a ground-ball machine, with the average launch angle against it in 2023 registering at 10 degrees; he’s only surrendered 34 home runs across 4,578 career offerings. It’s a legit weapon, though it works in defiance of the Twins’ sweeper-crazed ethos last year.
DeSclafani’s second most-utilized pitch is a sinker. (Notice I said second-most utilized, not second-best. More on that in a second.) To be blunt: It’s nothing special. It does exactly what you’d expect of a sinker. It has decent arm-side run (16 inches; basically league average) and a modest 2,128 RPM spin rate (same). It’s used for inducing ground balls, and that’s about it.
Those two pitches became his bread-and-butter during his tenure by the Bay, but there might be much more to him than what the Giants have tapped into recently.
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Lucas Seehafer is a professor and physical therapist living in southern Minnesota. He holds a PhD in Kinesiology and serves as a sports science consultant for college athletes.
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