Is Logan Gilbert’s sinker just a prank? A Lookout Landing investigation

A very serious article on a very serious issue

Something wasn’t sitting quite right with Logan Gilbert’s sinker.

He started throwing the pitch midway through 2022, shortly after Robbie Ray brought his back into the mix and then helped work on two-seamers with both Gilbert and George Kirby. Ray’s was a trick that helped salvage his season by giving batters a third pitch to think about. (Though the final sinker he threw that season somewhat famously did not go great.) Kirby’s was a revelation, with an astonishing amount of run and some decent carry turning it into basically his best pitch. But Gilbert’s, and I say this as one of Gilbert’s biggest fans, was more of a stinker than a sinker. It was flat and lifeless, a tempting treat for opposing batters.

What with Gilbert being a tinkerer, though, I understood why he wanted to try it out. The experiment arose around the same time he was reshaping his slider, and predates his splitter and curveball. He was clearly still looking for something to make his arsenal click. But I also understood why the Mariners decided to shelve it after the 2022 season.

Since then, he’s averaged roughly one sinker per game. (A caveat: Baseball Savant thinks Gilbert threw six sinkers each in his first games back from the Injured List this season, but I strongly believe this is a data classification error. The specs do not match his other sinkers, and Statcast was clearly having trouble with Gilbert upon his return, also mistakenly labeling a couple dozen sliders as cutters. Those got corrected, but the false sinkers remain in the dataset.) Here’s one from April:

As a Gilbert connoisseur, I’ve long understood the one-or-two-sinkers-per-game approach to be an effort to catch right-handed batters flat-footed and steal a strike. At least, that’s how I understood it until Aaron Goldsmith relayed a story on a broadcast early this year. He said that Gilbert is always pushing the sinker in Spring Training and throwing it in Cactus League games. Once the team starts packing for Seattle, however, Cal annually puts his hand on Logan’s shoulder and tells him, “Buddy, the sinker’s going to stay in Arizona.”

So it turns out Cal doesn’t like the pitch. That got me curious about when Gilbert uses it. I started looking game by game. In the first half of 2023, in the immediate aftermath of the experiment’s conclusion, Gilbert never once threw the sinker to Cal. He threw it seven times over the four games in which he was pitching to back-up catcher Tom Murphy. That’s an odd fact considering that Gilbert pitches to Cal so much more often.

But starting immediately after the All-Star break in 2023, Gilbert never again threw a sinker to a back-up catcher. He’s never thrown one to Mitch Gaver, and he never threw one to Seby Zavala. He only throws them to Cal. It’s a dramatic shift from only throwing them to not-Cal to throwing them only to Cal.

So the tantalizing possible narrative this story presents is this: Cal wouldn’t let him throw the sinker, but Gilbert himself liked the pitch and thought it was successful when working with Murphy. He’s a competitor, and ultimately recognized that he shouldn’t really be using it, but he still wanted to show his critic where to stuff it. Thus, he started throwing them to Cal, with the main purpose of bothering Cal. Cal calls for a four-seamer, but Logan throws a sinker just to amuse himself.

It would make sense that Logan would be trying to get under Cal’s skin. The two have long had a fraternal connection. They came up through the minors together, and have taken the field as battery mates 90 times in MLB. They even lived together early in their careers, with Cal making Logan breakfast every day. You’ll also see them bicker with each other whenever they’re on camera together. Doesn’t it just kind of seem like the type of relationship where Gilbert would do something solely to annoy his buddy?

Further evidence for the theory comes from the fact that Logan clearly does like the pitch, as shown by his trying it out Cactus League after Cactus League. But one outing really solidifies this: his final game of 2024. That start is the post-2022 outing when he has thrown by far the most sinkers, with 11. What makes that game special? The Mariners had been eliminated from the playoffs the night before, setting the team free to play for fun. One part of the fun was that Logan got to call his own game. Cal wasn’t calling for all those two-seamers; Gilbert was.

Shut up, Zach, I hear you saying. Logan Gilbert is an MLB pitcher on an on-the-bubble team that has to scratch and claw for every win. The staff ace is not wasting bullets just to prank his friend. Knock it off. Get serious. Have some respect for your readers.

Still, I couldn’t take off my tin-foil hat. So I asked Kate to talk to the guys themselves about it. I figured they’d each say something coy, so I suggested she gesture her way toward it and we could try to decode their non-answers. But there’s a reason Kate’s the one with the credentials. She just asked Logan straight up if he throws his sinker simply to annoy Cal. To which Logan drily replied, “Basically, yes. He hates it.”

From there, Kate went to Cal to ask about it, to which Cal pleaded ignorance, as I’d suspected: “He doesn’t throw a sinker.” But when presented with the evidence above, including Logan’s confirmation, Cal had to give, saying, “Well there you go.” Then he shook his head. “That guy. Unbelievable.”