Looks like Luzardo has a new weapon in his arsenal
Jesus Luzardo had what one might call a “memorable” debut with the Phillies on Saturday, striking out 11 Nationals hitters in five innings, showcasing more velocity than most games he pitched in 2024 and generally dominating a Washington team that looked quite overmatched. There were a few hiccups in the start – a home run to Keibert Ruiz and a lot of pitches over those five innings. Those a nits that don’t really need to be picked right now as we bask in yet another top notch pitching performance.
One thing that did stick out during his performance was his debuting a new pitch, one that at the suggestion of his pitching coach.
Luzardo picked up the sweeper, a trendy variant of the slider that breaks horizontally, in the offseason after getting traded to the Phillies. Pitching coach Caleb Cotham brought it up as a way of making Luzardo’s top-of-a-rotation repertoire even more formidable.
It’s been something that Luzardo had been tinkering with this spring, something he was using as a different way of getting hitters to swing and miss.
“Just another way of getting guys out,” Luzardo said. “It just fits in the game plan a little bit in different ways than I would use my normal slider. Throughout spring, we were pushing it a certain way or trying to use it in certain counts where we might find ourselves using it in season. I think it paid off heavily today.”
It’s something that pitching coach Caleb Cotham has done quite extensively the past few seasons with other pitchers on the team’s staff. We’ve seen Zack Wheeler integrate the sweeper into his arsenal, Orion Kerkering has generated some serious swing and miss with his and others have begun throwing it as well. Whatever the pitchers were doing was working. In 2024, the Phillies had three pitchers among the top 30 in run value for the pitch. Clearly, it is something that they have identified as a pitch that can help some achieve better success so long as they have the necessary tools to be able to throw it effectively.
Luzardo looked like a solid candidate for it as well. Looking at him from afar, his stuff the past few years has been good, but it has always felt like there was something else that could added, something else that could let him take that next step.
As you can see, the basic building blocks for having a good sweeper are there. He has at least thrown a curveball once in his career (that 0.1% you see is quite literally one pitch) and has shown that a cutter was in his back pocket as well, so he has thrown something besides a slider that can move east to west (or west to east in his case). He’s relied mostly only four-seam fastball, slider and changeup to get hitters out prior to his arrival in Philadelphia, but from the run values of each pitch, they needed to be better. Saturday’s start against the Nationals showed that there is a way for pitcher’s like Luzardo to take something from what he has previously thrown, in this case a curveball and/or cutter, tweak it a bit to make it better.
Looking at the specific measurements of the pitch, one tends to drool just a smidge. Averaging 34 inches of drop and 7 inches of glove side horizontal movement after basically learning the pitch in spring training catapults that pitch upwards in terms of how good it actually is. It makes one wonder just how good it is. Granted, we’re only looking at a handful of pitches thrown thanks to there being only one game’s worth of data available, but if we were to take the measurements that Luzardo had with the pitch and apply them to 2024, we can see the rarified air it would have been in.
I ran a Statcast search on pitchers that threw the sweeper in 2024 and had the same measurements as Luzardo’s from Saturday. Again, that would be:
- > 34 inches of vertical drop
- > 6 inches of horizontal movement
But I also added that he got hitters to whiff on 70% of those sweepers, but I only sorted by whiff rate, making things a bit easier. To narrow down the number of pitchers, I set the bar at 750 total pitches thrown in a season (not just sweepers), eliminating some of those relievers and late season call-ups that would mostly populate lists like this, in order to see where Luzardo’s sweeper would rank were he to maintain these kinds of averages.
As you can see, his sweeper would have been the best in terms of whiff rate in baseball had he thrown it consistently in 2024 like he threw it on Saturday.
Will he be able to, in fact, maintain these kinds of numbers with his sweeper? Highly doubtful. We know that pitchers have good days and bad days with individual pitches. Sometimes, he “has it”; sometimes, he doesn’t. Usually, it’s discovered in the bullpen warm up session prior to his taking the mound where the pitcher and catcher and pitching coach decide if the pitch is worth using that night. So asking Luzardo to be able to keep this up is a tall task.
However, if this weekend was any indication, it does look like Cotham and company have worked whatever magic they have yet again. Luzardo looks as though he has added another weapon to his arsenal to get hitters to swing and miss. It’s a bit of an overreaction to one start, one in which he had control of the pitch, but it looks like a winner so far.