MINNEAPOLIS — For a Minnesota Twins starting rotation that needs serious development from several young arms this season, no pitcher is perhaps more important than Joe Ryan.
As they attempt to fill the void created by the free agent departures of Sonny Gray and Kenta Maeda, the Twins are asking the trio of Ryan, Bailey Ober and Louie Varland to make crucial moves and produce like never before.
With Varland’s improved pieces, Ober’s unique physical traits and pitching, and Ryan’s accurate fastball, the three right-handers make an intriguing group.
But Ryan may have the most upside of all.
From sometimes looking like a potential All-Star last June to giving up home runs at a ridiculous rate later in the summer to retiring after just two innings of his only start of playoffsRyan has experienced it all in 2023.
One of the reasons Ryan fluctuated between ups and downs last season was because of inconsistent secondary pitching, a problem that has kept him from breaking through to become a standout pitcher thus far in his career. To combat this inconsistency, Ryan returned to Driveline Baseball this offseason and again worked with pitching director Chris Langin to refine his slider and sweeper while rediscovering his split finger changeup.
Ryan’s offseason work stood out to the Twins during spring training. Those around the club see it as further proof that Ryan, 27, recognizes how important this season is for him and the team.
“He realized the shoes he had to fill,” receiver Ryan Jeffers said. “He’s going to play a vital role in what we can do as a team. … He kind of realized as a pitcher where he needed to develop his game, where he could take the next step.
Ryan is already receiving rave reviews from his teammates and coaches this season. Even though Ryan suffered the loss Saturday against the Cleveland Guardians, Twins manager Rocco Baldelli was impressed with his No. 2 starter.
Joe Ryan is off to a good start this season, thanks in part to the improvement in the secondary.
Here’s a look at the five pitch handles (left to right): 4-seam, 2-seam, sweeper, spike slider, and split changeup. #MNTwins pic.twitter.com/HA6YYL7l2j
– DanHayesMLB (@DanHayesMLB) April 9, 2024
Pitching coach Pete Maki is also pleased with Ryan’s progress, citing the improved command of his offspeed pitches. Ryan throws his slider, sweeper and split finger much faster than last season, which he attributes to a new “spiked” grip with the slider and better cues for locating the handles of his other pitches. All the changes allow Ryan to throw those pitches for strikes more and entice hitters to chase.
“It’s definitely better,” Maki said. “He throws strikes with his spin pitches, both of them. With a firm rotation, with a rapid rotation. The biggest difference if I had to pick one thing is that when it’s 2-1 (on count), 2-0 now, or 0-0, when he throws it, we can feel really good seeing him throw strikes with his rotation. »
Although he faced plenty of frustration in 2023, Ryan, who went 11-10 with 197 strikeouts and a 4.51 ERA in 161 2/3 innings, sees the positives. He believes the uneven campaign helped him learn how to respond to a series of teachable moments, inconsistent throws in the game despite a groin injury and poor communication with the team after his injury.
Those experiences have made Ryan feel better prepared to take on a key role this season following the departures of Gray and Maeda, who together threw 288 1/3 innings last season. Rather than focusing on replacing them or achieving a bunch of individual goals, Ryan just wants to go deep into games.
“The most important thing is to stay consistent and throw as many innings as possible,” Ryan said. “If I throw a lot of innings, I’m probably doing pretty well.”
Ryan has always had a fastball. His search for quality land also struck gold. Last year, he arrived at spring training with yet another broken finger that scared him, but turned heads early in the season.
Over his first 10 starts, Ryan was 7-1 with 70 strikeouts and a 2.21 ERA in 61 innings pitched.
“He just had some really high highs,” Baldelli said.
Then something happened at the end of May.
“He lost the splitter in Houston last year,” said Langin, who coaches Ryan at Driveline Baseball. “That’s when this absurd home run train started.”
The before and after of this one was crazy.
Before the May 30 game against the Astros, Ryan had allowed about a half-homer every nine innings. After this match he gave up two and a half home runs every nine innings. His splitter lost an inch and a half of drop, and that was enough for hitters to go from .233 to .480 against the field. That’s over 200 strike points coming from an inch and a half of difference (plus some speed changes, too).
This spring, Ryan is getting even more drops on the splitter than early last year, and he’s throwing it 4 mph harder. At its flattest, slowest form, late last summer, its splitter looked like this:
Now it looks like this:
Seeing it in these extremes, it makes sense that changing the average movement of a pitch like this (and its speed) could lead to better results.
It turns out that his old hold set off a chain of events that led to Ryan losing the plot.
“He used to throw it with his finger on the smooth part of the ball and he had to kind of clip it right, that’s how he got more velocity on it,” Langin said.
This approach led to inconsistent command and some discomfort, so he changed the grip and was successful in bullpen sessions…but not when he went to throw it as hard as he could in gaming environments.
“He needed to spend more time trying to get rid of it since the profile wasn’t working in games,” Langin said.
Being placed on the injured list in early August and rehabbing gave Ryan the chance to throw his new split-finger grip as hard as he could during games, something the developmental specialist Twins pitcher Matt Daniels oversaw, and much of the work toward, the split finger. Ryan threw his first start this season and then began to get into position. Figuring out how to bring the training environment to the same level of intensity as the playing environment is an underappreciated element of court design.
Technically, Ryan has launched the two types of sliders he currently uses for a while. He throws a harder “gyroscopic” slider with less movement, then a larger, slower horizontal slider, known in baseball as a sweeper. But last year he had trouble deciding which one to use. From Baseball Savant, here’s his pitch usage per game last year – pay close attention to those two yellow stripes at the bottom.
He couldn’t decide which cursor to use. During the offseason, Ryan went to work on the gyro slider. He pointed his index finger at the pitch, allowing him to get some good movement while throwing it as hard as he could. Now his slider is 4 mph harder, so even though he moves a little less, the hitter has less time to react. He’s thrown it 20 times this season and allowed just two hits.
Making it a harder slider was probably a good idea. On this chart, you can see how sliders perform across the league by Stuff+ – blue is bad for the pitcher and red is good – when grouped by speed and drop. The horizontal black line represents where Ryan was. Follow that black line to 87 mph and you get red.
But even if the harder slider was going to work for Ryan, it was about giving him options. Sweepers are large pitches that sit on an offset wake – it’s harder to command pitches like that. Some days they don’t work for a pitcher. This is when it’s good to have a gyroscope or “ball” slider, which generally has smaller platoon sections, moves less, and is easier to command.
“It just gives him the confidence that he can replace a sweeper with a hard slider on days when his sweeper command isn’t there,” Langin said. “And then he has another secondary (pitch) that can play against lefties, which should keep him from having to throw his splitter in the strike zone as often as he did in 2023.”
Ryan thinks he lost the separator due to a mix-up between several grips for the new throws. In addition to the splitter, there’s that sweeper he developed with Langin in October 2022 and the harder slider he developed with the Twins so he can command a breaking ball for strikes.
He had successfully thrown the harder slider in late 2022. But when he tried to bring it back during the 2023 season, chaos ensued.
“Three new courts seemed like so much,” Ryan said. “It probably wasn’t a good decision. …It was just weird. The fracture was flattening a lot.
So by strengthening the harder slider (and working on refining all of his secondaries), Ryan ended up ensuring that he would have three secondary locations he could go to on a good night, and backup plans if one location didn’t necessarily feel right.
“Putting a gyro ball really frees up a pronator so they can just pursue speed and not have to worry about generating movement by supinating,” Langin said of the new grip, referring to the natural ability to Ryan to pull down on the thumb side of the ball (overhand). relative to the pink side (supinated). “We’re just making it easier to be a caveman when he throws it.”
Part of this story is simple: Ryan throws his best pitches harder and has always had the strikeouts to prove it. But, with one more year to refine his secondary pitches – and become a more comfortable caveman on the mound – he is assembling a well-rounded arsenal worthy of an ace.
(Top photo by Joe Ryan: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)