Breaking Down Brady

Brady Singer had an up and down 2021 that ended with a trip off the mound with the trainer. What caused the issues and what can be done to get him back to at least his 2020 self?

Coming into the season, I wrote some bold predictions of what I thought would happen. One of them was that Brady Singer would get some early-season Cy Young talk that would ultimately die down. So I was expecting big things, at least to start the season, for the first of the 2018 Royals draft class to get to the big leagues. Why did I think that? Well, he not only held his own in 2020, but at times looked dominant and finished the season extremely strong.

The knock on Singer, though, is that he didn’t have a third pitch. It’s why Keith Law and many others thought he was likely a reliever. He simply didn’t have something that could work on lefties. Except for in 2020, lefties hit .217/.313/.357 against him. Righties had a higher average and similar SLG but a much lower OBP, which tells me that Singer was pitching selectively to lefties, but maybe he actually could get them out and he was going to be the anomaly. Or maybe this was simply him being new to the league and there not being much to go on. Either way, he went from looking like he might be able to buck the trend in 2020 to looking like he might be heading to the bullpen after 2021. So what happened?

His Slider

The first thing that caught my attention from Singer is that his slider didn’t move the same way in 2021 that it did in 2020. The spin rate was basically the same (2393 rpm in 2021 vs. 2387 in 2020), but it didn’t have nearly as much vertical movement.

You can see the massive decrease from 41.1 inches in 2020 to 36.6 inches in 2021. I wouldn’t classify his 2020 slider as a slurve, but it was definitely closer, which gave lefties a much more difficult look as the ball moved horizontally very similarly, but just didn’t drop quite as much. That allowed hitters to not have to adjust their swing plane much in order to get to the ball.

Could this have to do with release point? Maybe! Let’s compare!

Lefties hit .218 with a .400 SLG on his slider in 2020 compared with .240 with a .464 SLG in 2021. They did swing and miss more at the slider, but I think some of that is that it was more hittable and it’s still a good pitch with a lot of break. So this isn’t to say that it suddenly became a bad pitch or anything. It just was less good, which led to some issues, particularly against lefties.

The shift in the shape of the pitch may have actually helped him against righties as they hit .242 with a .298 SLG against it compared with .205 but a .455 SLG against it in 2020. Some of that is probably due to it getting a little big, but it makes me wonder if maybe he wants to refine a bit and go to more of a cutter against righties, but keep the bigger slider against lefties moving forward. That’s a change that isn’t quite as big as developing a changeup since I see a cutter is more of a refined slider than a fastball (though it’s technically a cut fastball for whatever that’s worth).

To view it in a different way, it’s easy to see what hitters saw from the slider in 2020 compared with 2021. Again, not a bad pitch in 2021, but definitely a different one.

The slider is in yellow and the yellow lines dipping more down and more to the left of the image are from 2020 while the more horizontal are from 2021. So again, I’d love to see him be able to get back to a bit more of a drop on that pitch because I think it set up the fastball extremely well and gave him more of a chance as a two-pitch pitcher.

His Sinker

Now here’s where it all starts to work together, at least in my opinion. I see two issues with his sinker from 2020 compared with 2021. The first is release point, which is pretty important. The second is location, which might be a result of the first. Before we get into that, let’s look at some number comparisons between 2020 and 2021 on his sinker.

2020

vs. LHB: .217 average, .333 SLG, 21.1% Whiff

vs. RHB: .242 average, .290 SLG, 15.0% Whiff

2021

vs. LHB: .302 average, .465 SLG, 28.6% Whiff

vs. RHB: .350 average, .458 SLG, 15.0% Whiff

If you’re going to struggle against opposite hand hitters, you have to dominant the hitters on your same side. The numbers against righties in 2021 on his sinker are a big reason why I have my doubts that the 2021 version of Singer can even make it in the bullpen. I do think a lot of this is location-based, but it’s probably worth mentioning that there is another decrease in drop on the sinker, just like on the slider.

That’s a pretty similar-looking graph to the one above. A lot of times, a small change in release point can change everything, and I’m wondering if that’s what happened here like maybe it did with the slider.

The general cluster was the same, but you can see that the release point drifted up and maybe a bit closer to his body. The phrase that baseball is a game of inches is probably not really accurate. It’s a game of centimeters and moving even the slightest little bit can drastically alter things. If he’s more over the top, I could see his sinker riding a bit more rather than, well, sinking. It’s hard to see a huge difference here, but it’s sort of the point. The first image is going to be from his no-hit bid in September 2020 in Cleveland and the second is from a start this past September.

The first pitch ended up low and away while the second pitch not as low and in. I don’t know. I’m not trying to be a screenshot warrior here and maybe I’m seeing what I want to see, but it looks like his arm just isn’t quite as extended in the second picture. Of course, the angle is slightly different as well, so maybe it means nothing, but if you just look at Singer and you look very closely, it sure looks different. Again, cherry-picked images are here to fit the narrative, but the data shows that the release point is different, so even if I am seeing what I want to see, the data backs it up.

And as I said above, the location might be a result of the release point, which, by the way, might be a result of his shoulder not feeling great as he had some issues with that throughout the season. Or maybe it’s just an inconsistent young starter. But whatever it is, the locations on his sinkers in 2021 left a lot to be desired. If you’ve read anything by me over the last handful of years, you know I’m a sucker for the fastball up, and that includes sinkers. Singer did a nice job with the sinker up in 2020 and when he got it there.

Opponents hit just .033 with all singles against sinkers at the top part of the zone and slightly above. In 2020, they hit .111 with all singles. He got tons of strikeouts up there. It was just a great spot for him, and one that worked in tandem with a slider that dove out of the zone as well. But in 2021, he didn’t work up in the zone enough.

You can see by the heatmap that he was in the middle of the plate quite a bit in 2020, but he moved pitches around enough that hitters didn’t need to sit in a spot.

But in 2021, yeesh, that’s a lot of the plate and not a lot of variance.

Some of that is likely that he didn’t have the drop he did in 2020 so pitches that would start in the same spot and would end up in the bottom of the zone on the left-handed batter’s box just hung in the middle. Some of it is likely just missing. He gets a ton of called strikes on his sinker, so he gets away with it quite a bit, but it’s hard to argue with the numbers against that pitch that I highlighted above. And again, I think there’s a lot of yin and yang with his sinker and his slider that when the sinker wasn’t changing eye level and causing problems like it did in 2020, the slider just wasn’t at its best either.

His Changeup

And that brings us to the pitch that probably gets talked about more than anything and he barely ever throws it. If he’s going to be unable to control lefties with his two-pitch mix, he has to figure out a third pitch. I mentioned above that adding a cutter might not be a bad idea, but I also have some concerns about a cutter with a primarily slider pitcher. As I’ve said so many times, the shape is just too similar for me that if one flattens out, it ruins both pitches.

Singer has thrown 139 changeups in his career out of 3,358 pitches. The results, when an at bat ends on the changeup, have been stellar actually, but the pitch just isn’t good enough for game use. I’ve been very hard on Singer throughout 2021 about it, but the reality is that he’s probably right not to throw it. They alarmingly stay arm-side and up in 2021, but in 2020 that wasn’t the case. These are his 2020 changeups in heat map form:

And here’s 2021:

If you’re using that as primarily a pitch to get lefties, you probably want to get that changeup a bit more in than he did in 2020, but it finished the way you want it, at least vertically. But again, look at the difference in that vertical movement from season to season.

Hey, I’ve seen that before, but in a different color. That’s now all three of his pitches. There’s no way that’s simply just a coincidence. So should we check the release point again? Of course we should.

Yep. There it is again. It’s obviously more subtle with the changeup because there are so few of them, but you can see the shift from 2020 to 2021 with the release point getting closer to Singer’s body. This isn’t to say that this is just an easy fix for him with the changeup, but with the release point a bit farther away from him, he was able to get more downward action which left his changeup in a much less hittable location. The 2020 changeup was one to build on. The 2021 changeup was one to scrap entirely.

If only it was so simple to look at Singer’s 2021 and say it was just the result of some out-of-whack mechanics. That would be great because it is such a relatively easy fix. But I mentioned the shoulder issues that plagued him throughout the season. My question that I don’t have an answer to at this time is if he altered his release point because he was hurting or if altering his release point caused the pain. Or maybe it’s neither and they’re not related at all, but just humor me for a second.

Take your arm and put it straight in the air. You can wait until nobody can see you, but when you think about it do that. Then move your arm a bit away from your body. Does that strain your shoulder? For me, it does a bit. So while I don’t have an actual answer here, I can say that it does make sense logically that it would hurt a little less to come over the top.

But again, we need to know which came first, the chicken (the injury) or the egg (the slightly altered release point) because if the injury made him adjust, well, that’s a problem. If he adjusted because of the injury, well, that’s a quick fix as long as he’s feeling good now. But whatever it takes for him to get that downward movement is something he needs to fix to get back to where he was in 2020. If he can do that and can make progress on a changeup that I thought showed actual promise then, he can find his way to a mid-rotation or even better role. If not, well, I’m not sure what the future holds.