What If Joe Ryan is Actually This Good?

The Twins entered the season low on the national media’s must watch list. Lip service was paid to their rotation improvements and the return of Carlos Correa, but most analysts had the Twins as an 81-83 win team. They’re a nice team but why did they improve enough on a 79-win team to matter? They added pitching but did they add enough pitching?

Smarter analysts and less biased projection models had the Twins closer to 88 wins, citing the return to something resembling the mean as far as WAR lost to injuries, as well as the tangible and obvious improvements to the roster that was in first place on Labor Day before Arm/Knee-ageddon happened.

But one thing that both the meatheads at MLB Network and the computer simulations at Baseball Prospectus agreed on is that the Twins lacked an ace coming into 2023; a true top-of-the-rotation-game-one-of-the-playoffs type of ubermensch.

The Twins’ brass had a different opinion, and believed that Pablo López was a couple of tweaks from ascending to that level. Of course that’s just spring training talk, akin to everyone being in “the best shape of their life.” But López started out so well with a new, tantalizing third pitch to pair with his crisp fastball and elite changeup, that the Twins locked him up for his first three free agent years.

But López has also been spotty with his command at times, and on several occasions has scrapped his much ballyhooed “sweeper” mid-outing in favor of his tried-and-true fastball-changeup combination. I still think López was worth giving up Luis Arraez, and even more so with his extension in place, but he doesn’t strike me as someone who starts game one of a playoff series his team expects to win. 

He’s more the best pitcher on a fun team that won the division going away and then gets crushed in the Division Series. He’s mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and generally just too nice to be a starting pitcher, a position usually reserved for obsessive jerkoffs who enjoy nothing more than making fools out of their competitors and spitting. His stuff is good, but it so often comes and goes, particularly in cold weather, that you wonder about him starting an important game in October.

Which brings me to Sonny Gray , a man so devoted to his craft he can’t speak without gesticulating as if a baseball was in his hand. He talks about pitching like an eight-year-old talks about his Legos, and compulsively tinkers and prepares so as to stay ahead of the adjustments and trends hitters employ and follow. 

In a recent interview accepting the “Pitch Hand” award from the MLB Central morning show, he mentioned that early in his career he just threw hard and let his stuff dominate hitters, and that he doesn’t have that luxury today. He throws 91-92 MPH with his fastball now, and relies more on his variety of pitches rather than sheer stuff. Consequently, his Stuff+ rating, a new metric that gauges a pitcher’s overall quality in terms of break and velocity, has been fairly middling (four percent above average in 2022).

But as David Ortiz put it, facing Gray is frustrating for an elite hitter because of how many pitches he can throw you in any situation. It's hard to eliminate pitches against him, and he is good at thinking along with you to know what pitch will be the least expected. 

That’s valuable, but at the end of the day Gray doesn’t throw that hard and his stuff isn’t overly exceptional. There is a ceiling to that type of pitcher, and he’s reaching it in the early-going this year. Gray also has been susceptible to nagging injuries in the back half of his career, and put a lot of mileage on his arm in his early years in Oakland. 

Which brings me to Joe Ryan . I was not particularly high on Ryan coming into the season because of his dramatic splits from 2022. Basically, he was Cy Young caliber against the Royals and Tigers, but Kevin Correia against everyone else. He tinkered with a new slider down the stretch and had some success, leading to some optimism about a step forward this year. Although even then, the level of competition affected his results. The last six starts of 2022 went as follows:

• Boston: 5 IP 5 ER
• NY Yankees: 4 IP 4 ER
• Kansas City: 7 IP 0 ER
• Cleveland 7 ⅔ IP 0 ER
• LA Angels 4 IP 3 ER
• Detroit 6 IP 0 ER

You may be asking yourself if the Angels were really much of a test last year. Well, Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, possibly the best two players in the game, drove in all three runs in that outing.

You get the picture. Ryan had enough stuff to obliterate rebuilding lineups, but against elite hitters he couldn’t skip his fastball past their bats up in the zone; they would just foul it off.

Part of that is because hitters didn’t have to worry about any of Ryan’s other pitches. He threw his fastball 60% of the time and it rated as one of the most effective pitches in all of baseball in terms of run value, ranking just ahead of Corbin Burnes’ cutter at ninth overall.

Ryan’s other pitches, as we all know, left a lot to be desired. His slider was awful and his changeup wasn’t much better. He went to Driveline over the offseason and settled on a sweeper and split-changeup as replacements. The early returns aren’t just good, they could change the entire outlook for the Twins’ competitive window.

Ryan’s fastball is dominant, and he has thrown it even harder this year, averaging 92.7 MPH. His sweeper has been okay, giving right-handed hitters something to think about besides the fastball, generating some swings and misses but also allowing the hardest contact of Ryan’s pitches with a .508 expected slugging percentage (xSLG).

The split-change, however, has been a revelation, and the eye-test confirms that. The pitch falls away from left handed hitters, but also can get whiffs from righties. It also seems like he can command it around the zone.

The numbers back it up too, as the pitch is rated as the 44th most effective pitch in baseball, while his fastball has remained in the top 30. (Someone who is better at Baseball Savant than me, please let me know if anyone else has two pitches in the top 50, because I can’t find them.)

As a one-pitch pitcher, Joe Ryan was pretty good. As a two-and-a-half pitch pitcher, he looks dominant. He’s durable, doesn’t give up walks, and is fairly platoon neutral (.491 OPS against righties, .487 against lefties). He’s been able to pitch deep into games, and thus far, hasn’t pitched appreciably worse against good lineups. He shut down the Yankees twice (but is their lineup really a test?), pitched well outside of one mistake against the Astros, and threw a quality start against the Red Sox. He’s been tested, and his ERA is 2.37 with a Verlanderish .76 WHIP.

Gray is a former ace, and López is the presumptive ace, but Joe Ryan has a chance to outperform each of them. He is no longer a novelty throwing 80% fastballs for the Rays’ Triple A affiliate. He has better stuff than Gray, and is more consistent (this year and historically) than López. 

It’s still early, but it sure does appear that he has found an off-speed pitch that complements his unique arm slot with the split-changeup. He is the Twins’ most emotive and marketable pitcher already, which is nice and not unimportant, but if he pushes Gray and López to the second and third slots in the rotation, the Twins’ playoff prospects look almost.. promising?

The next test will be in facing the adjustments that teams make facing Ryan. Last year, opposing hitters liked to disrupt his rhythm by stepping out of the box, fouling pitches off, and generally getting under his skin. With the pitch clock he has been able to stay in his tempo, and perhaps that is part of his success thus far in 2023. 

But Tim Anderson showed last week that you can still beat the Twins with Ryan on the mound by wearing him down. If he dictates the game, he’ll go seven scoreless in the blink of an eye. But if a lineup is composed of a bunch of grinders with contact ability, they could get Ryan out of the game after the fifth, or force him into some fatigue-related mistakes. Is that the new key to attacking Ryan? The next step in ascending to Ace level is to see how the league adjusts to the new Joe Ryan.