This article is part of our Collette Calls series.
Corbin Burnes earned his first win of the season Saturday with a dominating outing against the lowly Pirates. Burnes scattered three hits over six innings, allowing no runs while striking out 10. It was the fourth start of the season for Burnes and his seventh outing, but his first scoreless outing of the season.
If you have not yet watched Burnes pitch this season, you may not recognize him. After all, this was a pitcher who allowed SEVENTEEN home runs in 49 innings last season, but has surrendered just one home run through 32.1 innings this season. The disappearance of his gopheritis is not the only difference between the 2019 Burnes and 2020 Burnes.
2019 was a rather improbable season for Burnes on the heels of a very strong closing to the 2018 season. Burnes struck out 70 batters in those same 49 innings around the home runs, but a sore shoulder shut him down in July as a broken pitcher. The Milwaukee front office looked at him, and thought:
Milwaukee has a double-secret probation pitching lab set up at its facility in Arizona, so it sent Burnes there last summer as his shoulder was recovering. He showed up in Phoenix with a 9.00 ERA with a .417 BABIP and a 39 percent home run to flyball ratio. Burnes's StatCast profile showed a pitcher with solid velocity, terrific spin and strikeout potential, but someone who allowed a ton of hard contact:
This is why SVP Karl Mueller said this about
Corbin Burnes earned his first win of the season Saturday with a dominating outing against the lowly Pirates. Burnes scattered three hits over six innings, allowing no runs while striking out 10. It was the fourth start of the season for Burnes and his seventh outing, but his first scoreless outing of the season.
If you have not yet watched Burnes pitch this season, you may not recognize him. After all, this was a pitcher who allowed SEVENTEEN home runs in 49 innings last season, but has surrendered just one home run through 32.1 innings this season. The disappearance of his gopheritis is not the only difference between the 2019 Burnes and 2020 Burnes.
2019 was a rather improbable season for Burnes on the heels of a very strong closing to the 2018 season. Burnes struck out 70 batters in those same 49 innings around the home runs, but a sore shoulder shut him down in July as a broken pitcher. The Milwaukee front office looked at him, and thought:
Milwaukee has a double-secret probation pitching lab set up at its facility in Arizona, so it sent Burnes there last summer as his shoulder was recovering. He showed up in Phoenix with a 9.00 ERA with a .417 BABIP and a 39 percent home run to flyball ratio. Burnes's StatCast profile showed a pitcher with solid velocity, terrific spin and strikeout potential, but someone who allowed a ton of hard contact:
This is why SVP Karl Mueller said this about sending Burnes down to the lab last summer:
"He's a guy we definitely believe in," Mueller said. "The stuff is as good as anybody we have here, even. Sometimes, it just helps to give a guy a breather, take a break, go offline and work on different things to help him get back to where he wants to be."
It is not as if Milwaukee was working with scrap parts to rebuild the pitcher. A pitcher with bad stuff does not strikeout 70 hitters in 49 innings, but a pitcher with bad execution of said stuff can and will give up home runs.
I referenced the chart below when I put in my bold prediction series that Burnes would be a top-125 pitcher in mid-January, and it is worth re-surfacing now:
| Pitcher | Z-Contact% | Contact% | Zone% | F-Strike% | SwStr% | BABIP | K% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 80% | 65% | 43% | 61% | 17% | 0.414 | 30% | |
| 72% | 65% | 43% | 63% | 18% | 0.377 | 39% | |
| 73% | 64% | 48% | 67% | 20% | 0.349 | 42% | |
| 80% | 64% | 40% | 68% | 18% | 0.343 | 33% | |
| 78% | 63% | 42% | 60% | 19% | 0.301 | 40% | |
| 74% | 65% | 43% | 62% | 18% | 0.279 | 36% | |
| 75% | 64% | 37% | 60% | 18% | 0.240 | 32% | |
| 65% | 61% | 47% | 63% | 23% | 0.232 | 48% | |
| 79% | 62% | 41% | 63% | 19% | 0.230 | 31% |
Burnes's overall metrics were right there in line with some impressive pitchers, but the results were far and away the worst of the bunch. Both he and Edwin Diaz were ripe targets for rebounds in 2020 on BABIP regression alone, but that is not what this resurgence is about because people watching Burnes pitch in 2020 would have a tough time believing it is the same pitcher in 2019. Exhibit A — the repertoire overhaul:
Burnes has drastically changed how he attacks hitters, and has done so with a purpose. Last season, his two primary pitches was his excellent slider as well as his four-seam fastball that had some natural cut to it. Burnes threw a variety of pitches in 2019, but this is what they looked like in a pitch plot:
The fastball was all over the place, while the slider was mostly a dive pitch. Notice how many of his four-seam fastballs were in the same area of his sliders in the zone; that was a big problem for him last year. The natural cut on his four seamer did not offer much separation from his slider, so batters could look slider and adjust fastball down there. This is why the league hit .425 and slugged .823 off his high-spin plus high-velocity fastball. Between inconsistent command and not enough separation from the slider, the league waited for Burnes to make his mistakes and jumped on them.
Still, the slider was a great pitch and the league hit .181 off it in 2019 and he had a 58 percent whiff rate with the pitch despite all the struggles with the fastball. Burnes, nor Milwaukee, wanted to scrap the slider, but they had to find a way to use it as the foundation for everything else he did. When you are tearing something down, you save what you can for the rebuild, so it made no sense to throw the slider away when it was one of the best pitches in baseball.
The rebuild of Burnes has resulted in his pitch plots looking like this in 2020:
Note how the four-seamer has been all but eliminated in the lower half of the zone and is now a pitch he uses to get above the swing plane of hitters to change their eye levels. The slider is still there, but not as frequent was it was in 2019, but the cutter and the sinker are a huge part of his repertoire this season and a huge part of his success. The cutter essentially gives him two versions of his slider; he throws sliders almost exclusively to righties and cutters primarily to lefties. The league has yet to record a hit off his slider this season the league has hit .194 of his cutter. However, the sinker is the most important pitch of the bunch.
We can't embed the code to jump PitchingNinja's video to the necessary time, but use the slider to advance to the 2:40 mark of the video below to watch Burnes's new repertoire in action:
The first five pitches show his cutter and slider in action (note the velocity difference and late movement) , but the second stanza of that video segment brings the sinker into play and note the trouble it gave the hitters. The hitter had to differentiate the pitches from one another, and then watched the sinker run one way while the slider or cutter ran the other. That's what pitchers and coaches call "peeling the banana."
Essentially, pitchers want their pitches to look similar as long as possible before the banana peels open and each pitch heads its own direction. This is best demonstrated by the at bat below where Sixto Sanchez absolutely overmatched Brandon Lowe on three pitches:
Sixto Sánchez, 100mph Fastball, 89mph Changeup and 88mph Slider, Overlay with Tails. pic.twitter.com/WUBCfjaDyL
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) August 29, 2020
Burnes is now peeling the banana with elevated four-seamers, cutters/sliders to the corners, and sinkers diving into righties and away from lefties. He is throwing five different pitches to each type of hitter with the changeup nearly exclusively to the lefties, and the slider to the righties, and the sinker is the only pitch the league is hitting over .200 against. Eugenio Suarez did an interview with The Athletic about the pitch earlier this month talking about how impressed he was with the pitch:
When the at-bat ended, after he had swung and missed at the ball traveling 97 mph, Eugenio Suárez stared at the spot ... "I'd never seen that pitch before," Suárez said.
The rebuilt Burnes now has a StatCast profile where the skills and outcomes are not as far apart as they were last season:
The "stuff" has elite level stuff this season, while the results have some room for improvement. It is a process for Burnes in 2020, but he continues to look better with each outing to the point that my top-125 pitcher ranking for him may end up being too conservative by year's end. Next week, I plan on taking a similar dive into Shane Bieber and just how wrong I was about his 2020 potential when I said he would not be a top-25 pitcher this season. Oops.
