Tom Verducci’s Breakdown of the Week: Brandon Pfaadt Might Be an Ace Now

The Diamondbacks starter made a simple adjustment that’s radically changed his effectiveness against opposing hitters.

Brandon Pfaadt gives the Diamondbacks the sort of steady starter they’ve long been looking for. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

This article was originally published as part of Verducci’s View, a new weekly baseball newsletter from Sports Illustrated senior writer Tom Verducci. Every Monday, Tom empties out his notebook over email and covers MLB’s hottest topics, provides in-depth analysis through both text and video breakdowns, looks forward to what’s worth watching during the week and more. If you want to be featured in his new mailbag, please email newsletters@si.com with any questions about MLB or his decades in the sport.

At a time of the year when just about everybody is looking for pitching, the Diamondbacks found a front-end starter within their midst. Demoted to the minor leagues, in part so he could get stretched out to rejoin a rotation he could not make early in the season, Brandon Pfaadt has returned as a better pitcher because of mechanical tweaks.

“The things that I notice are the finishes of the pitches at home plate,” says Arizona manager Torey Lovullo. “There’s good depth on his secondary stuff in the hitting zone, which is always what you want. You want late activity rather than trying to shape the ball out of your hand because you’re trying to place the ball. There were placement issues, trying to throw strikes because he wasn’t getting the reps as a reliever.”

The results have been dramatic:

 Pfaadt Before & After Minor League Assignment

	W-L	ERA	IP	Strike%	K:BB
Before	0–1	5.92	38	63.3%	1.82
After	3–0	1.72	15 2/3	70.2%	10.00

You can see the changes above, especially how Pfaadt moved toward the first base side of the rubber, eliminated the three-part windup in which he rocked his hands over his head and turned his glove away from the hitter in a high set position.

“He went down there and didn’t overhaul anything,” Lovullo says. “He just kind of got over the rubber a little bit, kind of got the pause and gather and comes forward at you and everything’s coming out of the same spot.”

In a world in which many teams use AI to decipher tells from pitchers, Pfaadt, by turning his glove away from the hitter and keeping it fixed, eliminated any possible flaring or movement of the glove that has the potential to tip off a hitter. Arizona does not use AI, but it does empower analysts to scout its own pitchers to see if they’re giving anything away. Lovullo says they do it “the old school way” by poring over video, even by looking through a hole in a piece of paper to decipher any variance.

 “Tipping [around baseball] is a real thing,” Lovullo says. “We have a bunch of people that are watching it and he definitely was tipping at times when he was putting [the glove] right in your face and you could see something. He took care of that as well.

“We call it Protect Our House. I would rather we take care of everything internally, so we don’t get decoded, rather than making it an offensive thing. Once we master what we want to do with Protect Our House, then we go outward and start looking at opposing starters.”

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