By Eno Sarris and Corey Brock
May 11, 2023
There’s an arm farm somewhere, and the Mariners have been harvesting young starting pitchers by the bushel recently.The Mariners continue to see the fruits of their recent drafts as guys like Logan Gilbert (first round, 2018), George Kirby (first round, 2019) and Bryce Miller (fourth round, 2021) feed their rotation.
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Gilbert turned 26 last Friday. Kirby turned 25 in February and Miller, who is the baby of the group, won’t turn 25 until August. It’s fair to say that Gilbert and Kirby are rotation anchors, and Miller might be on his way.
“I have to say, we’ve gotten spoiled with Logan and George recently … but what Bryce Miller has added to our rotation has been awesome,” said Mariners manager Scott Servais.
After his stunning debut last week against the A’s, Miller followed that up on Sunday with six scoreless innings, allowing two hits and one walk against a much better fastball-hitting team in the Astros. Sixty of Miller’s 85 pitches in the game were fastballs. Fastballs at the top rail, but then also heaters that were spotted on the inside and outside corners.
That, Servais said, stood out the most Sunday.
“(I was) super impressed with the command of it … he threw a lot of really good fastballs on the inside part of the plate,” Servais said. “That’s … stuff down the road. You see that from veteran pitchers who are comfortable pitching inside. But he has no problem getting that in there.”
“What that does is it widens out the plate and makes it that much easier as you go through the lineup a second, third time. I think the sky’s the limit for this guy.”
Why is it so hard to hit Miller, and in particular his riding fastball? Ask his catcher, Cal Raleigh.
“It just never comes down,” Raleigh told The Athletic. “It stays on a line. You see it (coming) to the middle of the plate, but it ends up at your chest or at your head. It’s just really hard to hit.”
Miller will make his third big-league start Saturday on the road against the Tigers.
With his over-the-top release, Miller already stands at the top of the ride leaderboards. Only one starter with at least 10 innings this year has more vertical movement on his fastball, and it’s possible there’s more in there because it’s something that the righty works on.
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“I try to keep it 20-plus, that’s where I’ve always been,” he said of his vertical movement, before likening his body to an analog clock. “If it starts dipping, then I do something about it. If the axis is greater than 12:30 then we start to lose vert. When I throw too many sliders, then I end up a little too cross-body. This year I’ve been anywhere from 11:45 to 12:30.”
The evidence that there might be more came in a 1-2 count to A’s catcher Shea Langeliers. Miller got 25 inches of vertical movement on that fastball.
“I’ve never thrown that much vert,” Miller said with a smile. “That’ll do. Maybe the big-league ball?”
It may not look impressive — ride is often hard to see with the naked eye unless you’re behind the plate — but the fact that Langeliers was under the pitch is a clue that the ball appeared higher at the plate than he expected, which is what ride does.
That velocity and movement has pushed Miller’s fastball into the top five by Stuff+, a metric that looks only at the physical characteristics of a pitch. In fact, Miller is in rare company already with top-five Stuff+ for all starters, right there among Jacob deGrom, Shohei Ohtani, Spencer Strider and Hunter Greene.
So how did this guy slip to the fourth round in 2021? The Mariners actually wanted to select Miller during the pandemic-shortened 2020 draft, though he indicated he wanted to return to Texas A&M. That spring didn’t go as planned for Miller, who had a 4.45 ERA and also missed time with COVID-19. But it did nothing to scare the Mariners away at all. They loved the makeup, the 99-mph fastball and saw a pitcher who had a big upside.
The work he’s put in with Mariners coaches has been to develop an arsenal that fits around that fastball.
“I’m throwing three sliders,” Miller said after his first start in Oakland. “A gyro slider. I didn’t throw the third one yesterday, it’s a sweeper, I didn’t throw it. The curveball is a depthy sweeper.”
I asked Mariners pitcher Bryce Miller about his two sliders.
These are the two grips:
First is for the sweeper.
Second is the gyro slider. pic.twitter.com/gbv0Tepr4B— Corey Brock (@CoreyBrockMLB) February 20, 2023
The gyro slider is a tight, bullet spin slider that doesn’t turn all that spin into movement. It’s typically easier to command and easier to throw harder, and at 86 mph, Miller’s version is above that 85 mph threshold —it’s hard to throw a bad slider once you’re past 85.
How important is breaking ball velocity?
Short answer: very
At 80 you have to have a very good profile in order to rate above ML average.
At 85? Almost anything plays.
Almost no way to throw a bad breaking ball harder than 85.
Charts Via @DrivelineBB Edge pic.twitter.com/mnLeECJq5F
— John Creel (@JohnEcreel) May 23, 2022
So that’s another pitch that may not look super impressive to the eye but should perform well for Miller.
There’s some confusion around Miller’s other two breaking balls, as Baseball Savant has one more pitch called a sweeper, but Miller referred to it as a curve most often, because his true sweeper is one that he’ll break out more in the future.
“The sweeper is so big these days, I figured I’d try it,” said Miller in Oakland. “I just got it last week. I’ve had it for a week.”
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In fact, he was throwing this newly acquired sweeper a lot in the minors, and it helped lead to some of his weird results down in Double A this year.
“I was throwing a lot of sliders, and working on the new one,” he said. “I was commanding the sweeper fine, I only had three walks, but it would be like 0-2, 1-2, and I’d throw the sweeper and it would be an end-of-the-bat infield hit. My first three starts … it was like one of those starts that you expect to have once a year where every infield hit falls and the wind is blowing out — one of those games, but three in a row.”
But in reality, Miller’s arsenal was coming together, and the more one-plane sweeper is coming along at some point.
“Looking at my four starts in Double A, if I didn’t look at the line, I would’ve said that’s the best I’ve thrown,” he thought.
Even the changeup, which he’s only thrown twice, looks great in Stuff models and gives him more side-to-side wiggle than any other pitch.
“It looked good, they said it was 20 horizontal, I’ll take it,” Miller said. “I’m super tilted. The changeup you really have to get inside of, so it’s tough. The one I threw, it was good, it’s been good the last few weeks.”
If it sounds like Miller is talking the language of tech and data, he is. He’s learned from Mariners player development — and their implementation of the underlying research that makes up the Mariners’ own internal pitching metrics — what movements to target, he’s internalized it, and that’s the type of metric he checks to make sure he’s still doing the right things under the hood.
“Everything Bryce does is in support of his plan and his belief in dominating the strike zone,” Mariners pitching coordinator Max Weiner said. “His daily practice is a masterclass on how to become a better competitor.”
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Servais agreed.
“A tremendous job by our people; player development, scouting to identify the player first of all but the people in the minor leagues, working with our young pitchers, making sure they’re checking a lot of the boxes before they get here (the big leagues),” said Servais. “When they get here, they’re ready to contribute.”
When presented with extensive analytics-backed information, really, for the first time after turning pro, Miller was a sponge.
“As soon as I got here, we dove more into the analytics of everything. We had access to that at A&M. We just never really got too far into it,” Miller said this spring. “When I got here, it was presented to me, and I was able to implement it into my pitching. It’s helped me out a lot.”
But as much as coaches and analysts can help a young pitcher cultivate his craft, the pitcher himself has to do the hard work.
“Bryce is a great pitcher because Bryce built himself into a great pitcher,” Weiner said of the process of developing that arsenal around the elite fastball. “Bryce Miller is a dude.”
(Photo of Miller from his second start: Steven Bisig / USA Today)
