JUPITER, Fla. — After being presented with the premise of this story, the Cardinals’ new leader of the rotation started rotating the baseball in his right hand to settle on a grip.
Sonny Gray is one of nine pitchers the Cardinals have in major league spring training who were acquired this past winter. The group ranges from Gray atop the rotation to former All-Stars Kyle Gibson and Lance Lynn, to a few young, potential breakout relievers, to a Class AAA starter acquired from the Red Sox. Each has his favorite or most-effective pitch. So the Post-Dispatch asked all nine to discuss the one that has a grip on them.
Gray throws one of the most effective sweeping sliders in the majors, and he was asked if that was the one he’d like to talk about.
He twisted the ball past that grip.
“I don’t want to give away all of my secrets,†he said.
People are also reading…
But he and others did spin stories.
Here are nine origin stories about nine grips, how they shifted in a pitcher’s hand or changed a pitcher’s career, from a returning fastball to a Hall of Famer-suggested changeup, a new-wave slider to the pitch Gray ultimately landed on to share.
Lance Lynn’s four-seam fastball
As soon as his hand was big enough to grip a baseball with two fingers and not three like so many of his peers, Lynn nestled into the four-seam grip he still uses today.
“I was probably 8,†he said.
Back with the team that drafted him and the team that once urged him to embrace the sinker, Lynn is now 36 years old, 14 wins shy of 150 and still chucking fastballs, unapologetically. This past season, which he split between the Dodgers and White Sox, he threw more than 2,500 fastballs, 1,376 of them four-seamers. He did not get the results he wanted, but he feels he has to fix his usage and delivery because his pitch isn’t going to change. He mused that he’s had games where he’s thrown more than 100 fastballs and because “I throw a four-seam, two-seam and cutter and they’re all fastballs, there is a game I threw 100% variations of a fastball.â€
Described as a “heavy†fastball, there’s deception in Lynn’s delivery and movement on the fastball that has given it such longevity. While showing his four-seam grip, he was asked if he throws it so much because it’s the pitch that fits his personality as much as his hand.
“Just attack,†Lynn said. “You’re kind of who you are as a person, and that translates into what you are as a pitcher. You have to figure out how to make it work. It’s you vs. me. Let’s see who wins. And then on to the next guy. Here it comes. Go get your glove.â€
Victor Santos’ change-up
A minor league pitcher in Boston’s organization, Santos worked through a bullpen session firing sinker after sinker after sinker when a Hall of Famer walked up beside him.
Pedro Martinez had an idea.
“Pedro was watching me with the bullpen, and he saw my sinker,†Santos explained through a team interpreter this past week. “Pedro told me that my grip is likely really loose, really loose, loose like his. So Pedro asked me, ‘Do you throw a change-up?’ When he saw the change-up, he saw that it was moving a lot, and he says, ‘Don’t throw the sinker. That change-up is super-nasty.’â€
Santos, 23, had a 4.97 ERA in 28 games (25 starts) this past season and 126 strikeouts in 145 innings. The Cardinals acquired him from Boston in the Tyler O’Neill trade, and around the same time, the right-hander was going 4-1 with a 3.97 ERA in nine games of winter ball, where he worked to gain innings on his way back from injury. The change-up became his favorite pitch.
Martinez, an all-time great who beguiled hitters with his change-up on the way to 219 wins and a 2.93 career ERA, showed Santos how subtle shifts in his finger could change the whimsy of the pitch in the same way a guitarist changes chords. Spreading the index and middle finger would create more movement, while holding them tight would mean less. They talked about what counts were best for which grip.
“Feels like it’s good to go,†Santos said.
Kyle Gibson’s sinker
As the hard-riding, elevated fastball combined with the curveball swept through pitching staffs around the majors a few years ago, teammates comforted the seasoned sinker-baller from the Midwest.
“Everybody would always joke, ‘Well, Gibby, you’ve just got to play a few more years and sinker will be back again,’†he said. “They’re almost cool again.â€
Drafted 22nd overall out of Mizzou back in 2009, Gibson took the same sinker he had as a Tiger and brought it to the majors. In his first two seasons with the Twins, two-thirds of the pitches Gibson threw were sinkers. He has scaled that back, throwing it a career-low 39.5% this past season as he won 15 games in Baltimore.
Now 36, his career has spanned long enough for the sinker to be vogue, mothballed and now vogue again. He recently used modern tech to adjust the grip for the first time in years. High-speed cameras showed how every pitch he threw was last touched by his index finger.
His sinker was misbehaving, so he adjusted for it too to come off the pointer.
“Everything else bases off that pitch and bases off if I’m locating it and bases off if I’m throwing it well that day,†Gibson said. “I didn’t get to throw breaking balls as a kid until I was 13 or so. My dad just always had me throwing two fastballs — two-seam and four-seam. Two-seam ended up being my best. So I threw it a lot. ... I’m a little sentimental about my sinker.â€
Riley O’Brien’s slider
A tall, lean right-hander, O’Brien has his back to the batter at one point during his delivery, and that adds an element of peek-a-boo deception to the upper 90s fastball about to come off his fingertips. But it’s his slider that had the Cardinals seeking a trade because it misses bats.
It began as a blend.
O’Brien’s go-to breaking ball early in his career was a curveball. He wanted to get a pitch that moved more horizontally and workshopped a slider. He had two breaking balls until they merged to become essentially no effective breaking balls. O’Brien, 29, shifted his grip a bit so that he could “rip the outside half of the ball.†That gave him the biting slider he wanted, and a shift to the bullpen produced the results — 86 strikeouts in 55 innings this past year at Triple-A Tacoma.
“You call my slider three different things,†he said. “You could call it a slider, a sweeper or a slurve. I’ve always just called it a slider because it’s easier. I do get a good amount of sweep with it. I’ll feel like I’ll always have that swing-and-miss slider, the two-strike slider ready.â€
Keynan Middleton’s change-up
Late in his rookie season with the Angels, Middleton was in a bind and stuck in a feisty at-bat against at the Rangers. His catcher, Martin Maldonado, kept calling for a pitch that Middleton only threw in the bullpen. But Maldonado insisted.
The at-bat ended with a change-up.
A few games later, a batter ripped off his batting gloves after a strikeout.
Again, the change-up.
“I think we might have something here,†Middleton said.
Several years and one reconstructive elbow surgery later, Middleton finally got a chance to see more of that something. The breakthrough? PitchCom.
During his recovery from Tommy John surgery, Middleton focused on regaining his power fastball, paired classically with a slider. In Seattle, the scouting report he received said not to throw the change-ups to right-handed batters. But this past year, with the White Sox, Middleton utilized the new rule that allowed pitchers to have a PitchCom device on their gloves. He could call his own pitches.
Middleton threw 40 change-ups in 2022 and nearly 400 in 2023. Opponents hit .209 against it, slugged .396, and he kept going to it, 42.9% of the time, testing left-handed batters and right-handed batters equally with it. He started manipulating the pressure he applied with his long, lithe fingers to get more depth, and he figured out the key: “Thrown the (expletive) out of it.â€
“At first, I didn’t trust myself to throw strikes,†Middleton said. “But I have this pitch in my back pocket, and I just never used it. Now, I’m a different pitcher.â€
Andrew Kittredge’s slider
Before he could make the most of the pitch’s speed, Kittredge had to first slow it down.
In college, Kittredge began working on a cutter, something between the fastball and curveball he threw. The cutter got better but the curveball got worse, and suddenly he was left with pitches too close together in velocity and usage.
“I still loved the pitch,†Kittredge said.
He eased the speed of it, increased the bend of it and started throwing a slider that he could land more often than his fastball. By the time he got into pro baseball and traded to Tampa Bay, he was throwing the slider 71% of the time at 84.1 mph. But he wasn’t getting the same results.
Kittredge used an offseason to develop a sinker and shift his slider — not the grip but the intent. Between 2018 and 2019, his slider hopped from 84.6 mph to 88.3 mph. In his All-Star season of 2021, the slider averaged 89 mph. Back from elbow surgery this past year, Kittredge averaged 88.6 mph with the slider, and opponents hit .174 and slugged .174 against it.
“They can hit pretty much anything in the zone,†Kittredge said. “It’s when you add velocity — throw something 90 mph that is moving like a slider — that you eliminate decision time even in the zone.â€
Nick Robertson’s change-up
Whether he was sitting beside Ryan Pepiot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the Dodgers’ Class AA affiliate one year or Gavin Stone the next, Robertson quizzed them about their change-up grips. He was looking for a new way to throw his “old change-up,†and neither of his teammates’ felt right, either.
So he borrowed from both.
Robertson found a grip nestled between his fingers that was part Vulcan change-up — with its live-long-and-prosper handle — and split change-up. The pitch delighted the metrics, but there was an issue. Whatever the tech thought of it didn’t matter because it wasn’t a strike. He had to get it in the strike zone, and as he did, it still had to look like a fastball until it wasn’t.
“And then toward the plate, it dives off the table and runs into righties,†Robertson said. “The longer that I can keep it looking like a fastball, the better it will be.â€
Ryan Fernandez’s slider
Straight out of spring training as a Red Sox farmhand and into games, Fernandez received immediate feedback on the new breaking ball he’d built.
“As soon as I started throwing it, I started getting swing-and-miss, more swing-and-miss than I ever had in my career,†he said. “I was like, ‘Holy crap, this is a cool pitch.’â€
A curveball spinner most of his career, the 23rd-round pick felt his results, like his curveball, flatten out. The curve lost its shape, and he lost his feel. In spring 2022, he needed a switch, so he took his four-seam fastball grip and turned it slightly toward his hand.
“Then ripped it,†he said.
A slider was born.
Fernandez sped through three levels in the next two seasons, reaching Class AAA for Boston this past season. The Cardinals plucked him in the Rule 5 draft, so the 25-year-old right-hander will either be on the big league roster all season or passed back through waivers. His slider is one of the reasons the Cardinals selected him. In 2023, he struck out 67 of the 230 batters he faced, and his strikeout rate during the past two seasons is close to 12 per nine innings.
“That pitch turned my career around,†Fernandez said. “Not that my career was in the mud, but it definitely took it to the next level. Confidence with it just through the roof.â€
Sonny Gray’s curveball
Same as he did for his introductory news conference or as he now does to watch a teammate face hitters on Field 2, Gray carried a baseball with him as far back as he can remember. It came in handy when he and his friends would play catch and try to entertain (maybe challenge) each other with spin, any kind of movement at all.
That helped Gray develop a feel for a curveball, but what gave him his curveball was the suggestion of a teammate on a Nashville team. Gray was not yet 13 when Craig Gullickson, son of major league pitcher Bill Gullickson, suggested Gray shift his fingers over slightly, off a set of seams and snug to the horseshoe-like bend of seams.
“Take your two fingers and put it right along the horseshoe and throw your curveball like that,†Gray said. “And it became a signature pitch for me at an early age. All through high school, all through college, and it is the same grip that I still throw now.â€
About 1 of every 5 pitches Gray has thrown in the majors is the curveball, though his usage of it dropped to 16.9% in 2023, the season he finished runner-up for the American League Cy Young Award. Gray did go to the curveball 19.5% of the time he had a chance at a strikeout. His curve has a sharp break but not the waterfall of other curves, as it averaged 58.1 inches in drop this past season, 10 inches less than Adam Wainwright’s career-high 68.1-inch average in 2023.
To work on the curveball, Gray would sometimes tape his index and middle finger together so that they worked “as one finger†to create the spin. He became so confident with the curveball that he’d throw it on 3-0 counts and then follow it up on 3-1 and 3-2, stealing more strikes with it than he did his fastball. He could throw it six, seven times in a row, and in college, a coach urged him not to work on a slider so that he didn’t lose the shape of his curveball.
Not likely.
They’ve been close friends since he was 12.