Logan Gilbert’s cutter is a good idea

New pitch alert

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Logan Gilbert has a new pitch. The man who began his career in 2021 as one of the most fastball-heavy pitchers has over time dramatically revamped his slider in 2022, added a splitter in 2023, and now developed a cutter for 2024. Despite its above-average whiff rate so far, three starts is too early to read much into the cutter’s results—it’s not until teams have a chance to scout and prep for a pitch that the true test comes—but conceptually, I like the decision to mix it in.

Generally, a cutter splits the difference between a four-seamer and a slider, both in terms of movement and velocity. The best one of all time probably belonged to Mariano Rivera, who threw a cutter nearly 90% of the time, but still fooled hitters with it enough to get to the Hall of Fame. Today, Kenley Jansen and Emmanuel Clase both throw cutters more often than any other pitch (Logan has said he modeled his grip after Jansen). But in general, it’s out of vogue these days as pitching has turned to max-velocity fastballs and absurdly moving breaking balls.

But a cutter makes a lot of sense for a pitcher like Logan Gilbert. Gilbert’s arsenal has a lot of contrast on the north-south axis. He sets the whole thing up with a fastball that, thanks to his elite extension, appears to rise more than you’d expect for its mid-to-high-90s velocity, getting guys to swing underneath it. By comparison, all three of his breaking balls have a lot of drop: the splitter and curveball each drop three feet or more on the way to the plate, and while different pitchers’ sliders move very differently—some are more vertical, some more horizontal, and some both—Gilbert’s is a very vertical one, dropping about three feet with just four inches of horizontal movement:

(Gilbert also seems to have messed with his curveball this year, swapping out some depth for additional run, but we’ll talk about that another time.)

So the cutter, which doesn’t drop nearly as much as the breaking balls, can help force batters’ eyes to be thinking more three-dimensionally. Gilbert’s doesn’t have as much horizontal movement as the great cutters, but it’s above average. “I actually like keeping some vert on it,” Gilbert says, “to get above the barrel. So it’s holding that plane but taking off sideways while everything else in my arsenal drops off suddenly.” He explains that this is designed to help fool guys who are diving out in front, having identified the pitch as not being his four-seamer, and dropping the barrel right away expecting the pitch to drop too. Thus, you get guys swinging underneath it, as Brice Turang does here even though this cutter is 91 middle-middle:

In other words, the cutter is supposed to get guys off his breaking balls. But what’s more, it’s supposed to get guys off his fastball too. This was his original idea behind the cutter, saying he came up with it as a way to limit damage on his four-seamer.

It’s supposed to do this by filling in the velocity gap between his fastball and his secondaries. His heater averages 95-96 whereas the secondaries are all thrown in the 80s. The problem this creates is that if you can identify a pitch as coming in hot, you know exactly which pitch it is, which may explain why Gilbert gives up more hard contact than you’d expect for a fastball with metrics as good as his. He says he asked himself, “How do we get them off something straight, especially behind in the count if he’s sitting on the heater?”

By adding in the cutter, which he throws in the low 90s, he takes that advantage away. The typical cutter looks a lot like a fastball out of the hand, and it lacks the telltale red dot in the middle that you see on a true breaking ball. But the cutter “goes horizontal, even if they’re sitting fastball,” he says.

Last year, Gilbert’s splitter helped with the damage on his fastball, but hard contact remains the exhaust port in his Death Star. If Gilbert’s cutter can indeed get guys off the fastball a little, he might start getting more weak contact, which would take him to the next level. It’s just a sample of four, but it’s intriguing that only one of the homers he’s given up this year has come on the fastball. Instead (small sample size alert), the whiffs on it are back up and the exit velocities are down.

In and of itself Gilbert’s cutter honestly hasn’t looked great so far, and I don’t love how much he’s throwing it. Though he explains that it’s been working, so he and Cal are just going with it.

Even if the results come back to earth, as an idea, it should work. One risk is that instead of having a distinct movement profile, the cutter just causes all of his pitches to start to blend together. The bigger risk, in my opinion, is that he throws too many, eating into his better pitches. In his first three starts, he’s thrown it between 15 and 20 percent of the time. That’s too often for a pitch that isn’t that good on its own, although he talked about trying to get to throwing all of his pitches equally to make things really hard on hitters. Personally, what I’d like to see him do is throw about 8 of them per game, to make sure hitters are thinking about it. Maybe add in one or two sinkers, which is a bad pitch (he says it’s unnatural for his arm slot) but also comes in hard while moving arm side instead of the cutter’s glove side. If his fastball might move either east or west or stay straight, then suddenly the hitter is just totally guessing, even if he’s correctly identified it as a fastball. Then we might really be cooking.

But we’re not cooking yet, as Gilbert’s cutter is definitely a work in progress. His command of it has been particularly troubling.

But recall that it took him about a year and a half to find his good slider, and took a few months to get a feel for his splitter. Even if the cutter starts to get beat up a little as guys are better prepared for it, that doesn’t mean he should give up on it yet.