The new thing is spin rate so let's talk about spin rates
No, not spin class. I'm not nearly healthy enough for that.
You know how everyone in the world loves the store Hot Topic and has never once made fun of it? Well, you could say that spin rate is the “hot topic” in the baseball world! How do you get it higher? Is it getting too high? Why is that third baseman suddenly a goth? Are the players cheating?
My friends, things are messy. Right here in Baseball City, with a capital MESS and that rhymes with S and that stands for sticky stuff! We’ve surely got sticky stuff! Right here in Baseball City. Right here! Gotta figure out a way to keep the pitchers moral on the…uh…bluff?
All right, I don’t have a rhyme for “stuff” that means “pitching mound,” but I think I took that farther than I had any right to anyway.
Yes, spin rate has become a cause célèbre over the last few weeks, with a big Sports Illustrated report detailing just how prevalent it is in the game for pitchers to cheat their way into a better one (to simplify, the higher your spin rate, the better your pitch is). And while there are plenty of perfectly good points to be made about how baseball definitely knew and turned a blind eye what was going on, and how a lack of enforcement is a tacit acceptance of the status quo, I’m going to let other people make them, because my thoughts don’t go far beyond what I’ve already said in this paragraph.
What I want to look at is the Giants rotation. And specifically, their spin rates and how they’ve changed over their careers (at least, since 2015; spin rate data isn’t available before that). We’ll start with the unquestioned ace…
Kevin Gausman
The main thing that stands out here is that the spin rate on his four seamer and was declining every year from 2015 through 2018. It’s had a bounce back since then, and though it’s down a little in 2021 compared to 2020, it’s still on an upward trend. Gausman throws his 4-seamer half the time, and it’s been incredibly impressive this year, with batters hitting .165 and slugging .273 off of it. This isn’t purely a function of spin, since the slightly higher spin rate last year produced significantly worse results, but it seems awfully likely that the higher spin is playing a role.
The interesting thing is how consistent the trends are for every one of his pitches over the last few years. They all started at the bottom in 2018, climbed through 2020, and have taken slight dips this year. But the spin on his fastball is still solidly middle of the pack in terms of major league pitchers (Gausman’s is around 2300, while Trevor Bauer, who has definitely been cheating to massively increase his, is at 2800), so that’s probably not the whole story behind his success.
Anthony DeSclafani
Ever since DeSclafani returned from the tendinitis that cost him his 2017 season, he’s been getting more spin on his 4-seamer and his sinker. His dip in 2020 coincided with a godawful year that earned him a non-tender from the Reds and allowed him to come to the Giants on a one-year deal — thanks, dip! — but the changes in his two fastballs weren’t cataclysmic. The drop in his curveball’s spin rate was awful, but he doesn’t throw his curveball a lot anyway, so that’s probably not why his 2020 ERA jumped to 7.22.
As a general trend, you can see the spin rate on DeSclafani’s fastballs creeping up year after year. That doesn’t have to mean anything, but it also doesn’t have to not mean anything.
Johnny Cueto
You can probably throw out an awful lot of Cueto’s chart here. He pitched through 2017 injured, and had Tommy John surgery in 2018, coming back for only a few starts in 2019 and then pitching in the abbreviated 2020 season when the entire pitching staff spent half the year working themselves into game shape. So it’s hard to tell whether any changes here are coming from injury, small sample size, or an actual change in the way Cueto was pitching.
Cueto has gained a lot of spin on his curve and lost a lot on his change-up since 2016, but the other pitches look pretty consistent.
Alex Wood
The Dodgers are said to be the team that’s most clearly using sticky stuff to doctor baseballs in order to get better grips on them (how much of that is Bauer and how much is the rest of the team is unclear). And you can see that Alex Wood, a Dodger in 2017-18 and then again in 2020, has seen dramatic rises in spin rate on his fastballs during that timeframe. So ipso facto, the Dodgers are cheating cheaters who cheat cheatily, and no more analysis is needed. Break up the Dodgers! Send Cody Bellinger to the Giants for free! It’s the only way they’ll learn.
But…
Wood barely pitched in 2019 or 2020, throwing fewer pitches combined in those years than he’s already thrown this year. And according to Baseball Savant, he hasn’t thrown his 4-seamer at all this year, instead relying solely on his sinker, slider, and changeup. The slider was new as of last year, so there’s no usable information there, and the sinker’s spin rate is up significantly since 2018, but there was a long gap in there for him to learn a new way to pitch, which he clearly did.
The sinker has always been Alex Wood’s primary fastball, so sure, he might be in the doctoring baseballs club. Or when he saw the life on the pitch, he realized he just didn’t need the 4-seamer this year, and it all happened naturally. Who knows? Not me! Alex Wood knows, though.
Logan Webb:
Finally, we come to Logan Webb. His spin rates are up since 2020, but his 4-seamer and sinker are both down when compared to 2019 (he also apparently has a cutter, but since he’s only thrown it 12 times this year, I didn’t bother including it). Again, sample size comes into play, as Logan Webb has only thrown 143 innings in the big leagues. But if you want to see what he’s done, well, there it is. Very consistent in his spin rate, which does not help us figure things out. Thanks, Logan.
So, what do we make of all of this? Uh, I dunno. But the Giants starters are generally increasing their spin rates, only not a whole lot. The gains we’re seeing are mostly in the margin of error that you’d expect if no one was cheating. Wood and Gausman are down compared to last year’s spins, and the guys that are up aren’t up significantly. Could they be using sticky stuff as part of a league-wide trend? Sure, that’s on the table. But could their many new coaches and coordinators be keying into biomechanical changes that have allowed pitchers to get more spin? Also yes, absolutely possible.
So we don’t know anything for sure about how involved the Giants are in the league-wide effort to goose spin rates. All we can see is that there's no massive increase when a guy comes to San Francisco. But we do know one thing: I made a bunch of charts in an Excel knockoff program and then showed them to you. And in the end, isn’t that what baseball is all about?