Armed with ‘unique’ fastball, rookie Bryce Miller has solidified his place in Mainers rotation
OAKLAND, Calif. — One day into his major-league career and Bryce Miller is already doing things Mariners coaches have never seen before.
Miller, a 24-year-old rookie right-hander from Texas, didn’t expect to throw as many fastballs as he did in his Mariners debut against the Oakland A’s on Tuesday night. Of the 81 pitches he threw in the Mariners’ 2-1 come-from-behind victory, 57 of them (70.4%) were fastballs.
Here’s why:
Miller’s four-seam fastball moves unlike any other fastball in baseball.
Data analysis from Statcast shows Miller’s fastball has the most extreme vertical movement of any pitch in MLB, “rising” 4.7 inches more than the average fastball.
Trent Blank, the Mariners’ director of pitching strategies, likes to flag unique fastballs that have an “induced vertical break” (iVB) of 20 inches or more versus an average straight fastball. And those are rare.
Yankees ace Gerrit Cole, for example, averages around 19.5 inches of induced vertical break, and that’s considered elite. The average MLB four-seam fastball has about 16 inches of iVB.
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Miller threw multiple pitches that registered at 20 inches or more of iVB, topping out at a whopping 25.7 inches.
“I have never seen that,” Mariners pitching coach Pete Woodworth said Wednesday afternoon at Oakland Coliseum.
Of the 13 swings and misses Miller induced, 11 came when A’s hitters whiffed underneath the fastball.
The notion of a “rising” fastball is an optical illusion to a hitter’s eyes. We won’t get into the physics of how that works right now (or, ahem, pretend to fully understand it), but it’s that “rise” effect that makes Miller’s fastball so difficult for hitters to catch up with.
“The fastball is just unique,” Woodworth said. “It’s heavy and it can just dominate guys. And that’s what he did last night.”
After his MLB debut, Bryce Miller's 4-seamer has the most rise of any MLB fastball
+4.7 inches of rise above average pic.twitter.com/qiUVrGcMQN — David Adler (@_dadler) May 3, 2023
Miller was brilliant in his debut, retiring the first 16 Oakland batters he faced. His fastball topped out at 97.3 mph and averaged 95.3. He mixed in two different versions of his slider (and he says he’s working on a third variation of a slider), with one changeup mixed in.
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He struck out 10 and didn’t issue a walk, becoming just the third pitcher in MLB history to debut with at least 10 strikeouts and no walks in his debut, joining Johnny Cueto (2008) and Stephen Strasburg (2010).
“That was a lot of fun to watch. I’ve been expecting that for a while,” Woodworth said. “We’ve known this kid’s fastball was one of the best. That’s why we acquired him, and that’s why he’s dominated the minor leagues.”
Miller’s surface-level statistics in his four starts at Class AA Arkansas this season hardly suggested dominance. He had a 6.41 ERA with five home runs allowed and a .280 batting average against.
But those numbers didn’t tell the whole story, he said. The metrics — the Rapsodo and Statcast readings the Mariners give all their pitchers — confirmed for Miller that he was on the right track.
“If I didn’t look at the line, I’d say I was throwing the best I’ve ever felt, location-wise and action-wise with my stuff,” Miller said. “Luckily we have a lot of ways to measure how you’re pitching, not just off the main numbers that a lot of people see on the outside, which kind of reinforced how I felt.”
He proved that Tuesday night, and in the process cemented his place in the Mariners’ starting rotation going forward.
Miller is in line to make his second start Sunday in Seattle — against the reigning champion Houston Astros, the team he grew up watching closely as a kid.
Source: The Seattle Times
