How a Sinker Could Save Joe Ryan From His Stinker of a Slider

Pablo López figures to be in the thick of voting for the American League Cy Young Award by season’s end. He is Rocco Baldelli’s ace and one of the game's five or 10 best pitchers. If the Twins are going to make noise in the postseason, though, he’ll need help. There’s a possibility that Bailey Ober takes a step forward and becomes another top-tier arm. If Joe Ryan is going to do so, then there are a few tweaks he’ll need to make along the way.

Last season, Ryan pitched a career-high 161 2/3 innings, but that resulted in a career-worst 4.51 ERA. His FIP suggested a bit better numbers could be expected, and while the strikeouts were impressive, the hits and long balls damaged him. For Ryan to deviate from that result in 2024, a few things need to happen.

One avenue via which Ryan can keep opposing hitters off-balance is tweaking his repertoire. With the righty throwing a fastball, sweeper, and slider last year, righties were able to sit on his four-seam offering easily. That pitch came nearly 60% of the time, and the stuff was too easy to read with secondary offerings that didn’t play well off of his primary pitch.

To differentiate offerings, Ryan is looking to incorporate a sinker. Joe Trezza recently noted that Ryan’s sinker isn’t entirely new to him. Having previously thrown a two-seamer as an amateur, the sinker is a variation of that grip, and the pitch itself is seeing a resurgence across Major League Baseball. Ryan already threw a splitter nearly 23% of the time last year, but the sinker is less designed to miss bats than to generate weak contact.

As a fastball-forward pitcher, Ryan can benefit a great deal from a mix of pitches that appear the same but have divergent late movement. The sinker and splitter play up for a guy with a solid fastball, but the former is something he can turn to earlier in counts and rely on against same-handed hitters. While working through different grips and ideas this offseason, Ryan began to dig in with the sinker at Driveline.

“I don't know how much we're going to use it," he said. "I don't know what that usage looks like throughout the course of the season, but it's a fun pitch to have in my back pocket to keep hitters off-balance, and it feels really good to throw.”

Beyond just adding a pitch, it’s how Ryan can utilize pitches that may help take him to the next level. In a piece focusing on command by FanGraphs author Alex Chamberlain, Ryan was highlighted as the pitcher who threw a higher percentage of competitive pitches compared to the competition, especially in the last pitch of an at-bat. That would suggest that Ryan’s ability to pitch is there, but the tools he was using may have been somewhat lacking. Perhaps he was too much around the zone deep in counts, because his stuff didn't allow him to do anything else.

Specifically, his slider was problematic. The pitch wasn’t good last season, largely because of its location. For a pitcher who works the ladder to allow his fastball additional room to play, the placement of his slider and sweeper to right-handed batters left him in position to get beat. Throwing sliders up in the zone and then seeing them tumble into the heart is not a sustainable path toward success, even as a means of stealing called strikes when hitters are programmed to try to lay off the high fastball.

With a sinker incorporated into his arsenal, the plan should be for Ryan to attack at the top of the zone with his fastball and then allow both the sinker and splitter to play off one another down in the zone. Slider usage could dissipate almost entirely, with the splitter being an out pitch against lefties.

For a guy who came into the league throwing a fastball nearly 70% of the time, lessening that percentage much more than to the current 57% doesn’t make much sense. Dialing back the 15% slider usage is an area of opportunity, though, and doing so with a pitch mix that plays better together could provide a great deal of benefit.

Ryan's spring training fastball velocities in 2022 and 2023 were 92.6 and 92.3 miles per hour, respectively. This spring, he's already sitting 93.1. His 37.5% chase rate and 13.8% whiff rate were both career highs last year. The Twins have an arm capable of getting pitches by big-league hitters, but he was leaving himself open to being burnt on mistake choices before making mistakes in location. Getting away from the slider, specifically up, while tightening the fastball location would do wonders. Then, having two different types of down-darting secondaries is a near-perfect overhaul to get him over the hump and into top-of-the-rotation territory.

Finding a way for Ryan to bring the best of what he was in 2022 and 2023 together would give the Twins the second playoff starter they currently lack. Whether the sinker will do that for him or not remains to be seen, but it's one highly plausible option for turning that corner.