Taj Bradley is evolving

The Rays build their success on the backs — err, arms — of tantalizing young pitchers, and Taj Bradley appears to be next in line. Bradley, just 23, has cemented himself as a rotation fixture. The right-hander enters the All-Star Break with a 2.90 ERA, after blanking the American League-leading Guardians across seven shutout innings on Friday night. 

Bradley closed the first half on a tear. Since allowing nine runs to the powerful Orioles at Camden Yards to open June, he allowed a grand total of five runs across his next seven starts. 

Bradley’s problem in the big leagues has been hard contact — he ranks in the 95th percentile for both average exit velocity and barrel percentage. We’ve already seen Bradley tinker with a couple of remedies, centered around the idea of generating more swings and, subsequently, more misses — likely guided by the premise that he best way to limit hard contact is to limit any contact, at all. Compared to last season, Bradley’s chase rate has jumped (27.2% to 30.1%), while his chase contact rate has dipped (59% to 52%), indicating that he is indeed missing more bats. But, until recently, the contact remained exceptionally hard, even if occurring less frequently. His hard hit percentage stood at 44.4% in June; through two starts in July, though, it’s down to 21.9%.  

A few weeks ago, we wrote about the dynamic between Bradley’s four-seam fastball and his splitter, which had seemingly swapped places in order to maximize both softer contact and swings-and-misses. In that piece, we recommended three changes for Bradley to make to further his evolution as the Rays’ next big-time pitcher, extracting the most value out of his four-pitch mix. We advised Bradley to sharpen and deploy his cutter, seeing that the pitch had strong underlying metrics, despite poor surface-level results. 

In his final pre-All-Star Break outing against Cleveland, Bradley unleashed his cutter. He threw the pitch just 18.6% of the time — squarely in the middle of the pack, in terms of usage rate compared to his other starts — but it was the way in which he deployed the cutter that allowed for such improvements. He recorded a season-high three strikeouts on the cutter, as well as five whiffs, his most since his second start of the season. According to pVAL, a metric that grades individual pitches on a scale where zero is average and positive numbers are conducive to the pitcher, Bradley’s cutter against the Guardians graded out as a +2, the pitch’s highest single-game total this season. 

Bradley threw a cutter last season, to little success, grading out as a -6 on the pVAL scale, the worst single-season mark on a pitch in his young career. He overhauled the pitch in the offseason, adding velocity (+1.9 mph) and horizontal movement (+1.2 inches of break), while reducing the amount of vertical break (-0.5 inches). In that way, it is wound tight, much like a hard slider. 

Success didn’t follow, at least not right away. But look at how Bradley’s cutter has fared over his last three starts, compared to his first nine. 

	Pitch %	wOBA	xWOBA	SLG	xSLG
First 9 GS	19%	.282	.358	.423	.506
Last 3 GS	23%	.104	.096	.118	.114

He’s throwing it more often, and it’s become a far more effective pitch — or, perhaps more accurately, it’s become a far more effective pitch, so he’s throwing it more often. And it may be the key to Bradley’s hard-hit endemic, too. 

So, how did this happen?

We’ll start with left-handed hitters (LHB). In those first nine starts, LHB hammered Bradley’s cutter, with a .556 SLG and .396 wOBA — both elite-level metrics. And yet, digging deeper, his cutter was largely successful, except for one location: low-and-in, often outside the strike zone. Unfortunately for Bradley, it’s also where he threw 54% of his cutters to left-handed hitters. 

Bradley still throws 27.3% of his cutters to lefties in this spot, but he’s adjusted. Now, more of Bradley’s cutters are further up in the zone, serving as a good compliment to his elevated four-seam fastball. 

They play well together. We saw evidence of this against the Guardians. Look at this pitch sequence to Cleveland’s young second baseman, Andres Gimenez.

At 1-1, Bradley blows a 97 mph fastball by Gimenez. The pitch is up in the zone but, importantly, it’s a strike, forcing Gimenez to go after it. 

The very next pitch, now ahead 1-2, Bradley fires the cutter — and he dots it in the same location. It’s no wonder that Gimenez misses it. 

Jose Ramirez — arguably the sport’s preeminent third baseman — didn’t stand a chance, either. Batting left-handed, Ramirez whiffed on a 2-2 cutter up in the zone — after fouling off an upper-middle fastball on the previous pitch. 

Against right-handed hitters, the story is a little different, mainly because they were not hitting Bradley’s cutter as hard as left-handed hitters. Still, the improvements (-0.77 wOBA, -.199 SLG) are strong. 

Here, Bradley is limiting his mistakes. In those first nine starts, he had an unfortunate tendency to hang a cutter with too much plate; since then, he has clustered the pitch low and away to right-handers, a change that has led to more ground balls and weaker contact — look at what Bradley does here, in a 1-1 count with two men on base, against Guardians catcher Austin Hedges. It’s a spot he, ideally, needs a ground ball. He trusts his cutter to get it. 

It can get swings-and-misses, too: Like this one to Hedges. 

Earlier this season, after Bradley first unfurled his new cutter in his season debut against the Yankees, NBC Sports surmised that the cutter could be “the soft-contact, high-zone rate pitch that he needs.” 

For a while, Bradley’s splitter — another pitch refined over the offseason — seemed to be following that arc. Of late, though, the cutter is assuming that role — a change that we see mutually beneficial to both pitches, and thus Bradley as a whole. 

IN-ZONE %	June	July
Cutter	39.8%	59.5%
Splitter	47.7%	40%

HARD-HIT %	June	July
Cutter	72.7%	22.2%
Splitter	23.1%	14.3%

In July, hitters are swinging more often (a season-high 54.1%) against Bradley’s cutter, with a swing-and-miss rate that is down 16% from its June peak. But he’s hitting his spots with precision, allowing the pitch to generate soft contact on a consistent basis; of note, no hitter has barreled Bradley’s cutter in July. Success has followed — a .411 wOBA in June to a .074 wOBA in July.  And, importantly, it remains a strikeout pitch — with the strikeout rate steady at 25% — suggesting that the cutter’s swing-and-miss capabilities remain, allowing for further development.

Moving forward, we’d like to see Bradley up his cutter usage against left-handers, playing it off the four-seam fastball. That should aid the productivity of the fastball, too, which has wavered at times to left-handed bats. Plus, as Bradley gets more comfortable with the cutter up in the zone, that should allow him to experiment with the four-seamer at the bottom of the zone — another change we think would allow Bradley to achieve more success with his four-seam fastball, the next imminent stage in his development. 

In all, Bradley’s willingness to evolve is impressive. In the offseason, he tinkered with how he throws his pitches, in terms of shape, movement, and velocity. Now, in season, he’s changing how he deploys them. The changes are vast, and the effects starkly beneficial.