What Justin Wilson brings to the Yankees bullpen

With reports that Justin Wilson is now a Yankee, the New York bullpen appears to be very well defined. Wilson becomes the third southpaw in the relief corps, joining Zack Britton and Aroldis Chapman, and a change in his use of the field over the past two seasons shows how we can expect him to go after streaked hitters.

Wilson is effectively a two-pitcher, throwing his seams and cutters about 93-94 percent of the time in the past two years – a significant change from previous seasons, where the former dominated all appearances on cymbals. The two pitches play well with each other, and the cut really works to hide some of the weaknesses of Wilson’s fastball. There’s nothing wrong with your four seater per se; it will average about 95 mph, with a mediocre rotation rate that leaves it relatively halfway in terms of effectiveness.

The ATV becomes especially useful when Wilson is launching his mower 40% of the time. The cutter moves a lot, as evidenced in 2019, when Wilson’s cutter broke 3.4 inches horizontally on average, or about 175% more horizontal movement than an average cutter. Shooting from the left side means that the ball invades a right-handed hitter, neutralizing part of the peloton’s natural advantage. You can see how each field plays against each other in this battle against Kurt Suzuki last year:

The so-called attack two is the four seam, up and into the Suzuki. He benefits from a generous call, to be sure, but it is the next step – a cutter about seven centimeters below – that really makes the seam work. Suzuki just saw a pure fastball into which he couldn’t pull the trigger, and now he gets a meatball-like pitch, up to the last 15 feet, when it breaks and enters. Suzuki is already swinging at that point, and he harmlessly hit the missing ball. If he doesn’t swing, Wilson’s control is good enough to keep the shot in the strike zone, and Kurt will look down.

It is this interaction between the four seams and the cut that keeps the hitters so unbalanced, as well as that sequence for Suzuki. Since the two pitches behave similarly until the cutter breaks, the hitters are largely reduced to guessing, accelerating their strokes and making weak contact. In fact, Wilson has been one of the best in baseball to suppress contact for the past two years, at the top, to miss, at the bottom 10 percent of baseball in speed of exit and strong hitting rate.

Wilson’s two disadvantages are his release and control point:

Here, with four red seams and brown cutters, it is evident that there is a certain level of demarcation between the two pitches. Part of this is a symptom of the pitches that Wilson throws – the release point plays a big role in the horizontal movement of a pitch, so if you want a cutter to cut, it cannot be thrown over. However, a more disciplined hitter may be able to capture slightly different launch points by being warned about the field.

Second, and perhaps more worrying, is control. I like to combine 2019 and 2020 statistics for appeasers just to try to get a better picture of the sample size, and of the 198 appeasers who played 50 entries in those two seasons, Wilson’s walk rate is at the 22nd percentile. As he works so hard on the inside for the right-handers, he is often at the mercy of the referee’s calls, and his things are simply not dazzling enough to induce breaths in the outside shots.

That rate of walking was what prevented Wilson from being a true elite appeaser, and any Yankees supporter who saw Aroldis Chapman lose the zone knows how difficult it can be to have a appeaser who fails to strike. Still, the pitch-to-contact approach is something that has worked well for the Yankees in the past – see Britton, Zack – and Wilson could be a good addition to that in 2021.