The year is 1997. Liván Hernández takes the mound for the Marlins in Game 5 of the NLCS against the Braves. Little did the Braves, the fans in attendance, and those tuning in know that they were about to witness one of the most outrageous displays of home plate umpiring in MLB history.
Granted, Greg Maddux also benefitted from this… liberal interpretation of the strike zone, but it really felt like Eric Gregg was on a one-man mission to get home ahead of the traffic.
It’s the era of the sinker. For an entire generation of baseball players and fans, this is pretty close to the norm. Before there were umpire audit accounts and later the ABS system, pitchers learned to weaponize the East-West strike zones of umpires around the league. They knew they could steal strikes often as much as a half-foot off the plate on either side, so horizontally running pitches reigned supreme.
Fast forward almost 30 years and we’ve entered a new age. It actually started on the hitting side with the launch angle revolution, hitters increasing the angles of their swings to lift all those pesky sinkers low in the zone. This precipitated a reaction from pitchers, starting with former Astros pitching coach Brent Strom, the paradigm shifted to high-spinning four-seamers whose late riding life at the top of the zone effectively neutralized the proliferation of steep swings. Aided by advances in pitch tracking and biomechanic technology and the strike zone going from East-West to North-South (as well as some sticky foreign substances), we saw this transition from sinker to four-seamer take place almost overnight.
As with many things in life, patterns and trends emerge and then ebb away in cycles. Now it appears that we’re reaching — if not an end — then at least an inflection point in this cycle of fastball usage, and the Yankees are at the forefront of the reemergence of the sinker.
There are several factors which I feel are influencing the current movement back toward the sinker. The league-wide crackdown on Spider Tack and other foreign substances in 2021 was the catalyst, many pitchers finding themselves robbed of the RPMs and induced vertical movement that were making their four-seamers so unhittable. Over the following couple years, research into the effects of seam-shifted wake and its ability to increase the downward movement of pitches, particularly the sinker, provided further impetus for pitchers to dust off their old sinkers and tinker with seam orientation until they found the perfect combination to achieve maximal downward break.
Then in 2024 and 2025, much of the research in the pitching realm zeroed in on the benefits of starting pitchers throwing multiple different types of fastball. On the surface, it makes intuitive sense that having a more expansive arsenal gives you more weapons to make it deeper into games. Digging a litter farther, we now understand how the divergent movement profiles of four-seamers, sinkers, and cutters are interacting to fool hitters. All three types of fastball look the same coming out of the pitcher’s hand, meaning three pitches that look exactly the same can end up in three different locations once they get to home. The best hitters are able to use certain cues to identify pitch type out of the hand — think the dot made by the rotating seams of a slider, or the upward pop of a curveball out of the pitcher’s hand — but with fastballs it is almost impossible to discern four-seamer from sinker from cutter.
Starting in the second-half of 2024, I’ve been mulling over how I want to explore this topic with our readers. Now, I am very excited to use this as the introduction for a series that I’m really looking forward to jumping in to. Over the course of the season, I would like to pick out individual Yankees pitchers who have not only increased their sinker usage, but also improved the raw characteristics (velo, movement, etc.), especially those pitchers who’ve recently joined the Yankees and saw immediate changes to their sinker deployment. Matt Blake, Sam Briend, and the rest of the Yankees pitching department are constantly looking for ways to innovate, and I am intrigued to learn about their process in disseminating the sinker across pretty much the entire Yankees pitching room. From Max Fried to Carlos Rodón to Cam Schlittler and many others, I can’t wait to share what I’ve observed with all of you, so stay tuned!
