How Sonny Gray Turned the Corner

Last December, I wrote about Sonny Gray and the Twins’ persistent problem with seizing the platoon advantage on the mound. We discussed the two distinct pitchers living within Gray, because every pitcher needs to have a bifurcated approach with which they can succeed against two very different opponents: left- and right-handed batters. At the time, as I wrote, he was largely a two-pitch pitcher against lefties, and only a little more than that against righties. He worked, mostly, north and south, and he got plenty of strikeouts but was somewhat vulnerable to power.

By now, everyone has heard about Gray’s embrace of the sweeper, which is the same pitch that has transmogrified Pablo Lopez into an ace. Last week, our Parker Hageman delivered a deep dive on Lopez, with heavy emphasis on that sweeper and its unique utility. As Parker shared, Lopez’s breakthrough came when the Twins helped him understand that throwing a good sweeper doesn’t require the same hand or wrist action–the same manipulation of the baseball–as a typical slider.

Much of the magic of the sweeper lies in the confluence of grip and arm angle. That allows a pitcher to add it to their suite of breaking balls without cannibalizing the rest of the set, as often happened in the past when a hurler who specialized in either the curve or the slider tried to mix in the other.

After a year of tinkering and blending it in with his former, truer slider, Gray has made the full conversion to the sweeper in 2023. It’s been a smashing success. Gray has achieved:

• A swing rate of 54.3 percent on sweepers (7th-best of 98 pitchers who have thrown at least 200 sweepers)
• A Whiff rate (as a percentage of swings) of 41.8 percent (19th)
• A Called Strike Probability (an estimate of a pitcher’s tendency to be around the zone with a pitch, expressed as the chances that an average pitch in the sample would be called a strike if the batter doesn’t swing) of 30 percent (97th on the aforementioned list of 98)

He’s getting a lot of chases on the offering, and many of those swings are coming up empty. The sweeper has been a lethal weapon for Gray. Note that hitters are waving at it often, despite the fact that it’s rarely even especially close to the strike zone by the time it arrives at home plate.

That doesn’t make sense. Usually, especially with a breaking ball, a pitcher has to establish both an ability and a willingness to land the ball in the strike zone, to induce hitters to take the bat off their shoulders. Gray isn’t around the zone with the sweeper very much at all, but he’s getting an above-average swing rate against it, anyway. How?

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