Blake Treinen has spent his entire career as one of the heaviest shortstops in all of baseball. Since his debut, he has been one of the best pitchers in baseball – period. That sounds like hyperbole but it’s not. From 2014 to 2022, he ranked ninth in FIP-based WAR and fourth in RA9-WAR among all relief pitchers. He also ranked second in groundball rate among pitchers who threw 400 or more innings. That’s elite performance, and he did it with a consistent attack of sinks and slides.
As his career progressed, Treinen made a big change: He started throwing a big sweep slider. He was the first poster boy for the sweeper revolution. From 2014 to 2020, his slider averaged an inch of horizontal movement. Starting in 2021, he changed the way he threw, and that number exploded to nearly seven inches. That turbo charged his batting average, and 2021 was one of his better seasons despite occasional instruction issues.
Those two things comprise much of what people know about Treinen. He finds a bunch of stuff on the ground and throws a big old broom. In fact, he excelled in the type of pitcher that now seems to be prevalent in every major league bullpen: the sinker/sweeper righty. You can picture this guy, even if you don’t know his name on every team. He stays in the east/west plane, and produces a lot of bad swings and maybe a hit batter or two when his sinker turns into the right batter’s box seemingly out of nowhere.
Treinen missed most of 2022 and all of 2023 with a chronic injury. He faced the sound of the capsule on his shoulder. He underwent surgery to repair both his rotator cuff and his labrum. He broke two ribs and injured a lung when he was hit by a linebacker in spring training while trying to make a comeback. It was as if he would never come back, or it would be a shell of himself if he came back. We’ve seen it happen to pitchers enough times that it’s not surprising, only sad.
Good news though. Treinen is back in business as usual. His velocity is down a few homers, but his fastball has the same sinking action as usual and his slider is moving more than it was before the injury. Through 17.2 innings of work, he looks like the same old Treinen – with one small exception.
Fantasy analyst and FanGraphs alum Brad Johnson pointed out the change to me a few weeks ago, and it’s one of those things that, once seen, can’t be seen. Treinen still strikes out plenty of opposing hitters. He still struggles at times. He still throws his sinker a third of the time, his slider a third of the time, and a cutter and four-seamer to close the gaps. But he’s collected 18 fly balls and just 16 grounders so far, and it’s hard to think of anything less Treinen-y than that.
I know what you’re thinking, because I was thinking it too. Say it with me now: small sample size theater. Anyone can do anything in 20 views. Wake me up if he runs these levels for a year or two. There is one problem with that: evidence. Here’s Treinen’s ground ball rate, in 20-game rolling phases, over his entire career:
This is not just business as usual. So I thought I’d take a look at what’s changed, and if we can learn something broader from this development. After all, most pitchers throughout baseball follow Treinen’s rough plan. Can the same happen to them?
Treinen’s Sinken is still a foundational pitch, but it certainly seems smaller than before. In his career, he has a 65.3% groundball rate in the field. He dropped to 58.8% this year, which doesn’t seem like a huge gap, but it underscores the change. Another way to look at it is that his batting average dropped from 4.66 to 2.5. Or maybe this will do it for you: From 2015 to 2022, the average launch angle against Treinen sinks was -1. In other words, the batting average was thrown down. That’s not the best in the game, but only the best sinkers put up numbers below zero. Clay Holmes had the longest sinker of the season with 8, while Logan Webb and Framber Valdez each had 3. Marcus Stroman at 1, Ranger Suarez at 2. Treinen fits right into that group.
This year, the average launch angle compared to Treinen sinks can reach nine degrees. The hitters just couldn’t get his sinker up front; this year, they have hit five balls in 30 degrees or higher. That’s a full year’s worth of Treinen fly balls.
Admittedly, I’m looking at small samples at this point, but Treinen throws his sinker into the area more than ever. This year, 23% of his sinkers were top in the area; his highest single season before 2024 was 18.5%, and his career average was 13%. High sinkers are great pitches – they work differently. Those fly balls the opposition hit against Treinen were the worst this year, in fact: four no-hitters and a groundout by Teoscar Hernández.
Treinen’s sinker is still pretty successful in every pitch model I can come up with. He still kills his natural backspin at an incredible rate, and it still explodes on the side of his arm. You just see it in different places, and you still get good results, it looks different than before.
That brings us to Treinen’s slider, which is producing fly balls like it hasn’t in the past. However, this time, the culprit is not a mystery. Scavengers make gangs. That’s a feature, not a bug. The pitch drops less than you’d expect with a breaking ball and tails away from same-handed hitters, resulting in a weaker high contact.
The picture of Treinen I, the guy who closed the A’s, didn’t miss this slide. He threw a traditional gyro slider, with a slight horizontal movement and a downward break. It went down as much as the current despite a velo gain of five miles per hour. The new one it should it falls more, as it has more time for gravity to act, but its motion is not the same. The result is more swings under the ball. Slides should fall above Treinen’s.
If you want a mathematical expression for that thought, this is it. Treinen’s old slider, which he threw from 2014 to 2020, produced a 2.34 GB/FB average. It was a tough pitch, just like his sinker. His new slider, from 2021 to now, comes in at 1.0. Both pitches worked well, with a slight edge to the youngster. But his new sweeper gets those results in a very different way, with popups and whiffs instead of grounders and whiffs.
Finally, there is the matter of the Treinen cutter. He also played the field in Oakland, but began to lean more heavily on it after joining the Dodgers. It’s a smart move, because none of his primary pitches are incredible against lefties. From 2014 to 2020, he threw 63.1% of lefty sinkers. After that the Dodgers were determined to avoid platoon damage with the sinker, and its usage dropped to 18.5% since then. Something has to fill that void, and in this case, it’s a cutter.
Treinen’s cutter isn’t the most dominant pitch, but he still throws it more than half the time against lefties. It doesn’t have a significant ground/fly separation, and hitters have only put eight of them into play this year anyway. But it’s another way he’s made some meaningful changes to his game that lead to more fly balls and fewer grounders. From 2014 to 2020, Treinen threw 425.2 innings, and totaled 181 strikeouts in his sinker. In the 95 innings he’s thrown since then, he’s allowed one lefty to hit a grounder off his sinker. They just can’t see the field well enough to do much with it.
Is it a coincidence that the GB/FB ratio is the lowest in our database since 2002? Obviously not, and you can’t explain it all by changing the hitter’s behavior. Sure, batsmen are trying harder than ever to get the ball in the air, but fielders have a part to play. Sinker/slider guys are increasingly using their pitches to get weak contact instead of one cookie cutter mold. Treinen is an example of a wider trend: use your pitches to get out, not to achieve a specific goal of how things should work. He is still the same boy – yet very different at the same time.
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