Here's How Pablo López Can Get Even Better

Few pitchers in baseball are more intelligent and eloquent than Pablo Lopez, so maybe the right way to talk about these changes is in terms of Bloom’s Taxonomy. You probably learned about this way back in elementary school. Bloom’s Taxonomy is a framework for learning in which learning progresses through stages, with each stage building upon mastery of the previous one. You can see it above.

It’s meant as a broad concept, but in certain cases, it can be neatly applied to specific endeavors. In the highly intentional, craftsmanlike career of a pitcher like López, the art and science of pitching maps right onto this pyramid. López doesn’t have overwhelming raw stuff, and while he’s always been regarded as a promising player, he didn’t arrive in the majors as anything close to a fully formed ace. He’s had to make stepwise progressions. 

By the time the Twins acquired him, López had already moved through a few of those stages. That’s why he’s now approaching ace status. He’s not only adding pitches, but integrating them in a logically consistent way into his overall arsenal. Simultaneously, he’s improving his mechanics, so that each pitch he throws is more effective in an absolute sense, as well as in relation to one another. He’s identified his basic flaws and weaknesses, and taken all the plausible steps to remediate them. He’s past merely recognizing patterns and options, and has reached the point of comparing and evaluating them, the better to bring the best ones together as a coherent, whole approach.

Famously, López is a part of Sweeper Mania. Every pitcher who has ever thrown a breaking ball has tried to develop a sweeping slider this spring. Somewhere in the wilds of the American South, far from your televisions but always just beyond the range of your mind’s eye, Bert Blyleven has abandoned his hopelessly old-fashipned curveball and is pondering a comeback using a sweeper.

It’s an unfortunate side effect of the particular, technology- and management-driven evolution of the game that every innovation anyone has tried recently seems to have immediately been tried by about 40 others. It takes some of the romance and the mystery out of pitch development, which should be an iterative, pedagogical, individualized process–not an assembly line thing. 

Still and all, López is one of those guys who would be a good candidate for a sweeping slider, even if pitching coaches didn’t suddenly see everyone as a good candidate for a sweeping slider. He throws from a fairly low arm slot, but he’d never had a pitch that moved much to the glove side before adding the sweeper–except his curveball, which was always more of a vertically-shaped offering.

There's a lot more - charts, videos, analysis - below for Caretakers. We need to reserve this deep-dive content for Caretakers because these types of stories cost more to produce, and they support them.

If you're not, maybe consider becoming a Caretaker? There are lots of other benefits, like a free Winter Meltdown ticket and early access for guests, special callouts on the site, and lots more inside or in-depth content like this. So please consider joining our little club. The money is going to a site you love, to support coverage you love, and writers you value. Thank you so much.