Dylan Cease has ‘fiddled’ with his slider, and the results might be arriving

The White Sox looked miserable against the Blue Jays this week, and instead of taking a step forward after reaching the ALDS last year, they have the fifth-worst run differential in MLB and need a major turnaround to win a mediocre division. But hey, Dylan Cease mentioned something interesting postgame Sunday.

It probably got buried amid Tim Anderson being injured and the White Sox completing the rare feat of a walk-off win to clinch a season series victory over the Cubs, which still managed to frustrate the fan base. It was not about whether Cease was making the trip to Toronto, either.

“I fiddled with my slider grip a little bit to get a little bit more depth,” Cease said after allowing one unearned run on two hits to the Cubs over seven innings. “And I threw more inside fastballs to make sure I establish that.”

After his worst outing of the year on May 24, where the Red Sox were seemingly on everything he threw and lit Cease up for seven runs in three innings, the 26-year-old right-hander deferred questions on whether he was tipping pitches until after he could take a “deep dive” into the shortcomings of that start. In the follow-up, he walked four batters (one intentionally) on Sunday. Only striking out five is atypical for him, even if quick outs obviously allowed him to efficiently work deep into the game. The above quote was his answer five days later on what his deep dive had produced.

Cease’s note about inside fastballs is important. He has a changeup, a “Bugs Bunny pitch” (pitching coach Ethan Katz’s description), that succeeds on the strength of its more than 20 mph of separation, and the sheer WTF factor it offers coming amid an otherwise steady diet of high-90s fastballs and hard sliders, with some curves mixed in. Once the WTF factor fades with higher usage, Katz concedes “if you just look at it analytically, it’s not a very good changeup,” and there are limits to how often he can throw it. Cease did not throw it all Sunday, and with his other off-speed pitches being breaking balls that move glove-side, commanding inside heaters is crucial to keep hitters from keying on the outer half of the plate.

But enough about that. Cease said he changed something with his slider, a pitch he throws 35 percent of the time and will often use close to 50 percent of the time when other pitches aren’t working and he becomes a “one-trick pony,” by his own description. Looking at various numbers and talking to scouts, he certainly changed something.

This breakdown starts with what Cease would identify as the best game of his career, blanking and striking out all the Angels for seven dominant innings, in what was also his only walk-free outing of 2022. The month of May sees him move toward a harder slider, with bigger spin numbers and reclaiming some of the movement toward the end. A league scout suggested that Cease has seemingly altered his wrist position slightly to get more over the top of the ball, resulting in something they would compare to Kerry Wood’s cutter in velocity, axis and shape — and Cease touched over 90 mph with one Sunday — but with enough raw spin (he threw one at 3,140 RPM) to get slider movement, which they summed up as “hell for a hitter.”

For a different perspective, I always like to flip it over to our analytics-focused national baseball writer (and my fellow German-Jamaican) Eno Sarris, to see what he observes, other than easily noticed things on Statcast, like that Cease is throwing a harder slider with more spin. Sarris frequently employs the metric Stuff+, which seeks to give a grade to a pitch based on physical properties like velocity, spin rate, movement, velocity difference from fastball, and a bunch of other things listed here. There are a lot of reasons and pitch concepts like command, deception, arm angle tunneling with other offerings and more that explain why pure stuff measures are not going to tell you exactly how well a pitch will play every time.

Which is why I would try to limit employing it to dramatic instances, like Sarris saying that Cease’s “fiddling” changed his slider from grading out as 123+ (23 percent better than league average) to 149 (49 percent better), and that “it’s by far the best two games on the slider since we’ve tracked it.” Cease was showing his work after Sunday, but the progression in velocity toward a harder slider started before that, and Sarris noted a progression in its movement beforehand. Generally, it would seem that Stuff+ loves when you can maintain a breaking ball’s movement (Sarris pointed out the vertical drop is slightly less than Julio Urias’ slurve) while throwing it even harder.

How important is breaking ball velocity?

Short answer: very

At 80 you have to have a very good profile in order to rate above ML average.

At 85? Almost anything plays.

Almost no way to throw a bad breaking ball harder than 85.

Charts Via @DrivelineBB Edge pic.twitter.com/mnLeECJq5F

— John Creel (@JohnEcreel) May 23, 2022

This doesn’t fully answer the question of whether Cease can command this pitch as well, since his stuff has been largely excellent for the duration of his major league career and certainly since the start of 2021, and his best outings are separated by his strike-throwing. But his immediate observation Sunday was an increased margin for error.

“It was moving really great,” Cease said. “Unfortunately I didn’t really throw it for strikes very well. But with it moving like that it makes it difficult — even if you’re not throwing it for strikes — to hit, and obviously it makes the fastball play up. I didn’t exactly do a good job of getting count leverage or throwing it for strikes, I was able to use what I had today.”

What Cease has now in his slider movement profile, is a pitch that Sarris believes most resembles that of Gerrit Cole. Cole doesn’t lean on his slider as heavily as Cease does, but has followed a similar route to Cease this year of seeing his fastball play up as he throws it less than half the time, developing more weapons to get hitters off sitting on riding four-seamers at the top of the strike zone. Katz affirmed that he’s a believer in making the fastball more of a weapon by making it less of a crutch, and building out Cease’s slider into a more reliable monster seems like a route toward that. Frankly, it doesn’t seem like the full returns have even arrived yet.

“He’s definitely taking some big steps,” Katz said of Cease. “And what’s exciting is there’s still more steps to be had.”

(Photo: Quinn Harris / Getty Images)