TORONTO — A different version of Kyle Bradish has taken the mound for the Orioles this season. He’s not throwing any harder than he did a year ago, nor have any of his pitches shown more movement. The biggest difference hasn’t been the pitches themselves, but the way he’s used them.
After primarily throwing a slider against right-handed hitters and a four-seam fastball against lefties last season, those two pitches have taken a backseat to Bradish’s two-seam fastball. The two-seamer, which Statcast classifies as a sinker, has come out of Bradish’s hand 38.9% of the time this year, more than any other pitch. Last season, he threw it only 20.7% of the time, behind both the slider and four-seamer.
“It’s incredible how quickly he picked it up and the command he had with it fairly early on, and now it’s just accelerated even more since then,” manager Brandon Hyde said. “You saw it right away when he introduced the two-seamer and started pitching with it, the confidence in him go up that he had another weapon to go to instead of having balls going glove-side every single time. Now, he can run a two-seamer in on righties, front hip left-handers. The command of it has been amazing so far.”
Bradish’s shift in his pitch mix comes on the heels of a breakout season. The right-hander placed fourth in American League Cy Young Award voting last year, posting a 2.83 ERA with 168 strikeouts in 30 starts. His offseason workout plan was interrupted in January when he partially tore the ulnar collateral ligament in his elbow, forcing him to undergo platelet-rich plasma injections and miss the first month of the season.
He managed to get through the rehabilitation process without sacrificing his efforts to improve, carrying a 3.18 ERA with 12.7 strikeouts per nine innings in six starts even after enduring a rough outing Saturday against the Tampa Bay Rays. In the previous start, he was at his best. Bradish held the Chicago White Sox without a hit for seven innings and tied his career high of 11 strikeouts before his pitch count ended his day.
The key to Bradish’s early-season success has been his two-seamer. He started throwing it in 2022 to add a pitch that broke to his arm side, backing up on right-handed hitters and breaking away from lefties. Bradish already had both a slider and curveball that broke to the opposite side of the plate, so the addition of the two-seamer made it difficult for opposing hitters to identify pitches out of his hand.
“The guy’s got maybe two of the best breaking balls in all of baseball,” catcher James McCann said. “Hitters that are prepping for him as a starter have to respect those breaking balls. So, when he’s throwing a breaking ball that’s breaking this way [toward the glove side] and then a two-seamer that’s starting where that slider is finishing and it’s running back for a strike, as a hitter you can’t cover both those pitches.”
While the two-seamer was already a valuable pitch in 2023, Bradish has been much more confident in it this season. He rarely threw it to left-handed hitters last year (6.7%) and is now using it almost a third of the time against them. It’s not just early in counts, either. Bradish is throwing his two-seamer 53% of the time with two strikes.
“We’ve definitely found that it plays against lefties more so than we thought last year, just to kind of give a different look and kind of run away from them,” Bradish said. “Kind of scrapped the changeup so we’re using that in some changeup situations and others for a different fastball look.”
The results have backed up the usage. Bradish has held opponents to a .148 batting average on his two-seamer, his lowest allowed on any pitch despite the heavy usage. Twenty-six of his 40 strikeouts have come on the pitch. With the two-seamer replacing a significant number of changeups (.259 batting average against last season) and four-seam fastballs (.366), Bradish has put himself in a position to take another step forward in 2024.
“It’s hard to go away from something that’s just having so much success,” McCann said. “So, I wouldn’t necessarily say that he’s like, changing anything, per se. It’s just one of those things where it’s been successful for him. He’s commanded it really well and understanding the times to use it.”
