In 2019, Corbin Burnes had the worst pitching year in Milwaukee Brewers history. One of the worst years for anyone in the history of any team, indeed. The kind of year that brings you a new home or a new profession.
In 2020, he finished sixth in the Cy Young election in NL.
We have all spent so much time trying to figure out what was “real” or not about the shortened 2020 pandemic season, what was flukish and what “counted” enough to sustain until 2021 and beyond. Since I knew Burnes had a lot of raw talent (remember how good he looked as a helper in 2018) and had made some real, obvious changes, we were pretty optimistic. We didn’t necessarily expect it this.
One thing is to say that he turned his nightmare into 2019, which he did. It is another thing to say that it has improved even more between 2020 and ’21, which it seems to have done. Here’s what to watch from the most unexpected ace of baseball, as he and his Milwaukee teammates face Jake Arrieta and the Cubs at home on Wednesday afternoon.
Much has been written about how bad Burnes’ 2019 was and we will not regurgitate everything here, but if you post an ERA of 8.82 (!) At the age of 24, we must at least start there.
When I started by saying that he had “the worst pitching year in the history of Milwaukee Brewer,” that was hyperbole, maybe – if you’re really that bad, you don’t even have a chance to stay around 49 innings, as he did – but he posted that ERA 8.82 and never, not even once, not even in that first year in Seattle as a Driver, had no franchise threw a pitcher 40 innings and lit up so badly. It’s in the top (bottom?) 25 seasons of all time, by any pitcher who has thrown 40 innings. It would be remarkable if it weren’t so painful.
It wasn’t even hard to see why. His first pitch was his fast with four stitches. It crushed, to the tune of a .425 batting average and a .823 slugging percentage. He got hurt so hard, going back to the beginning of the pitching era, in 2008, there were thousands of seasons in which a pitcher had at least 100 appearances on the board, with a four-stitch fastball, and Burnes’s 2019 was not the most bad, fortunately. Was second the worst.
The largest wOBA against a four-stitch ball, 2008-2020
.541 – Chris Young, 2016
.533 – Burnes, 2019 <-------
.523 – Félix Doubront, 2015
.513 – Sean O’Sullivan, 2009
.511 – Lance McCullers Jr., 2016
If everything seems enough to kill your career, it often is. Young, now Rangers general manager, threw 30 innings the following season, the last of his career. Doubront was only 27 years old in 2015 and has never played at sea before. O’Sullivan retired with a career ERA of 6.02. McCullers Jr. was successful, of course, but, like Burnes, he threw away all four stitches and moved to other fields.
There was no mystery about what was happening. The four-seam burnes was thrown hard (95.2 MPH), but despite a very impressive rotation, it was a straight and hit step. If you were to look at the ranking of the fastball movement that year, you will find that its fastball had the highest increase of 349 out of 429, and that is actually worse than it seems; at least at the bottom, you might get something washbasin. There is nothing worse than being in the middle. He was straight, without much movement, except for the hundreds of feet in the seats he traveled regularly.
So he abandoned it, largely in favor of a cutter, but also choosing to emphasize its rain and a slider that even in the disastrous year of 2019 had been very well, picking the best swing-and-miss rate of any slider of that season. (This says a lot, right here. Even in that disaster of a 2019 season, both the player and the team could see the bright signs “this guy has something!” Below the surface.)
“Hey, the slider is the best pitch in baseball. What can we do to make the slider even better, but to make the surrounding pitches even better?”
“Burnes dominates with an old-school mix: the sink, the cutter and the slider,” Kelly wrote. “The cutter and slider work at a distance of 1-2 points from right-handed strikers,” while noting that his old seamstress was a weakness especially against left-handers. “This is where the two-stitch gap fills the gap. It’s a tunneler’s dream, because Burnes’s two stitches break the opposite path, like his cutters and slides – with all three tones coming in hard and tight.”
This image created by Kelly probably shows what’s going on here better than anything I’ve seen. Where once everything acted the same, now there is a real separation in its movement, all coming from the same place.
(Light blue is curved; yellow is glider; dark red is cutter; orange is sink; red is brighter with four stitches.)
So now you’re caught, at least until the end of 2020. It’s a great story not only about an organization that was left with a pitcher after an extremely difficult year, but also with a player who is committed to completely rebuilding who he is. . But we promised to show how it improves even more.
Remembering once again that Burnes released an ERA of 8.82 in 2019, just look at where it stands at a few important values from the start of the 2020 season (min. 50 pitched innings, so 102 pitchers) and. ..
IT WAS: 1.87, the best
FIP: 1.93, the best
K%: 38.4%, the third best
HR / 9: 0.37, tied for second best
… wow, it’s so impressive. The player who couldn’t stop allowing homers two years ago simply refuses to hand them over.
There are clear differences here and they are terrifying for opposing beats.
The cutter is thrown longer and faster.
Last year, Burnes threw his fast ball 32% of the time at 93.1 MPH. This year, it is 49% at 95.8 MPH. It is the hardest cutter of 2020. It is the third hardest launch cutter ever pursued, in fact.
Last year, Burnes achieved 10.1 inches of total motion (combined vertical and horizontal) per cutter; this year, it has 14.1 inches. So it’s moving Faster and moves More, and maybe it’s no surprise that he throws it so often or that it’s so hard to hit.
Remember: Last year, Burnes’ cutter was the most valuable cutter in baseball, as assessed by Statcast’s rolling values, which give credit or demerit for every time he is thrown, not just on the results of the board’s appearance. Now he took this and threw it harder, with more movement, which is deeply unfair. So far, in 2021, he threw it 85 times and allowed just one shot (which, to be fair, was a home, but it’s not a shame to let Byron Buxton take you deep. ) Look at what is being done with a variety of cardinals and twins this year:
The slider moves much more.
Last year’s and this year’s slider are thrown at almost the same speed, but it makes it move more. Last year: 8.6 inches of total movement. This year: 11 inches. He has only thrown 18 of them so far, so maybe a little caution is recommended, but he also received misses on 7 out of 10 thrown, so maybe not?
It causes more hitters.
Last year, Burnes had, in fact, the fourth lowest strike rate in the first step, just under 53%. This year, it is up to almost 71%, which is the 12th highest. Why not? When your pitches move like this, at this speed, in tandem with each other, why make things easier for the hitters?
If he continues this, it will be one of the most remarkable changes in history, similar to “Roy Halladay who posted an ERA of 10.64 in 2000 and was All-Star in 2002”, because while a lot of great pitchers have their success and descents on the way to the top, the descents are not usually very similar this. (After all, many of the pitchers who throw like Burnes did in ’19 don’t have a chance to prove they can do better.)
But, above all, it is a very modern story. For much of baseball history, an ERA of 8.82 doesn’t give you another chance, not with the same team. But there was also so much interest under the hood – between the slider, the rotation, the speed, all the things that even in public in the winter of 2019-20 could be seen as attractive – that it was worth all the effort to understand. They did that and then some. Burnes may not be Jacob deGrom yet, but he’s not that far either.