Revived Two-Seam Fastball Has Mariners LHP Robbie Ray Back on Track
Over his last three starts, Mariners left-handed pitcher Robbie Ray has completed 20 innings of work with as many strikeouts and just two earned runs, 10 hits and four walks allowed. He ranks seventh amongst all starters in fWAR (0.6) and tied-fourth in WPA (0.74) and, perhaps most importantly, has not surrendered a home run during this stretch.
There are plenty of factors to account for with Ray's recent turnaround, including opponent quality, with two of his last three starts coming against an Angels lineup missing Jared Walsh and Shohei Ohtani and an Athletics team that currently ranks 29th in baseball with a wRC+ of 75.
Nevertheless, there is a particular moment that correlates and stands out above everything else, which ironically transpired during what is arguably Ray's worst moment in a Mariners uniform to date. Visiting the Astros back on June 6, the veteran southpaw was tasked with protecting leads of 1-0 and 4-1 through the first two innings of the game. He immediately failed, blowing both leads in each frame with a season-high three home runs allowed.
Despite the blowup, however, the Mariners went on to win by a score of 7-4 after Ray labored through 5.0 innings with three strikeouts, three walks and eight hits to his credit. It wasn't pretty, but he was able to limit the damage from the third inning onward—thanks in large part to a pitch he's recorded as having thrown just 44 times in three of his last four seasons.
That would be his two-seam fastball, which was a featured offering in his arsenal from 2015-2017 and again in 2019, per Baseball Savant. But as noted, outside of those seasons, Ray more or less entirely phased the pitch out and had done so again in 2022 before that night in Houston.
Ray's first two-seamer of the game caught far too much plate, begging to be scorched after dropping into the middle-lower third of the strike zone. Astros second baseman José Altuve obliged and ripped the ball the other way for an RBI single that registered an exit velocity of 100.8 MPH off the bat.
This, however, would not discourage Ray, who went on to throw the pitch 25 more times in the game. It generated 14 swings, with only two resulting in hits and five producing outs.
Going off of those favorable numbers and having knocked some of the rust off, Ray has continued to emphasize the pitch in his repertoire—so much so that it's been his most used offering ever since. He's thrown it 141 times for 84 strikes, a 21.9 percent called strike plus whiff rate and a put away rate of 24.1 percent.
It's been an incredibly difficult pitch for hitters to pick up, averaging the same average velocity (93.1) as Ray's four-seam fastball but with 5.8 more inches of drop (19.4) and nine more inches of break (15.5). While contact is still being made at a decent rate, it's resulted in an average exit velocity of 88.1 MPH with an average launch angle of -1.
As such, Ray's groundball rate has jumped up from 36.1 percent over his first 12 starts to 50 percent flat over his last three. That's a game-changer for the 2021 American League Cy Young Award winner, who entered his June 12 start against the Red Sox ranked second in MLB with 13 home runs allowed.
What we're seeing right now is a version of Ray that falls more in line with his first three seasons with the Diamondbacks. From 2015-2017, in which he threw 1,431 two-seamers, he posted the 25th-highest fWAR (8.9) amongst all starting pitchers while running a groundball rate of 43.2 percent (league average is 42.9) and a home run to fly ball rate of 13 percent (league average is 11.3) with a K/9 of 10.78.
That's not a Cy Young candidate, but that's certainly a lot better than what Ray had given the Mariners through the first two months of his five-year, $115 million contract. From everything we've seen thus far, this iteration should be able to make back the team's investment and then some.
