They’re All Good Dogs, Brant

Brant Hurter breakdown in a guest post by Mattatbatt22

By: Mattatbatt22

There’s a rookie absolutely dominating on the mound this season. He’s a huge specimen of a man, and he’s been going toe-to-toe with Cy Young candidates Chris Sale and Tarik Skubal on the leaderboards. His slider is hellacious and his four seam fastball is tying hitters in knots - both pitches have over a 38% whiff rate, truly elite marks. 

I am, of course, talking about Brant Hurter, the 6’6” lefty for the resurgent Detroit Tigers. 

Wait! All those nice things I said weren’t about Livvy Dunne’s boyfriend? I would have sworn if it weren’t the mustachioed lothario from LSU, it must have been one of the two high-priced imports from Japan - Imanaga or Yamamoto. Maybe knowing that I’m a pseudo-Italian Braves fan, you thought I was trying to sneak in a plug for Spencers Schwellenbach or Arrighetti. Or maybe I was trying to give my buddy Nate some props for some of his B-Side pitchers finally making good in Mitchell Parker and Joey Estes turning in perfectly cromulent rookie seasons.

But no! Since August 4th when Hurter debuted, he ranks 3rd in baseball by SIERA. THIRD! Behind only Logan Gilbert and Chris Sale. Ahead of lefties like Skubal, Framber, Snell, and Kikuchi (4th, 5th, 6th, 8th). Well, what does SIERA know? Isn’t it just a Mist that’s been canceled? Or is she married to a Steelers backup QB? Does she even know ball? 

I don’t see SIERA (the baseball stat) referenced by many dynasty analysts these days, but it still does an excellent job at predicting future results, even 13+ years after its debut. As explained in the FanGraphs glossary I linked earlier, it gives lots of credit for Ks, penalizes walks, and gives pitchers credit for their ability to keep the ball on the ground. Some longtime dynasty players might remember Bret Sayre writing about the “Holy Trinity” of pitching, and while lots of folks have fallen in love with the new Stuff and Statcast metrics - looking at those simple, sanctified skills still send shivers shooting skyward.

If you don’t trust a stat that sounds like that girl in your high school class who dated older guys, wore 37 pieces of flair, and drove a muscle car, FIP still thinks Brant is a good dog, too. 8th in FIP since his debut (min 30IP). 8th in BB%, 5th in WHIP, 5th in GB%, and 20th in ERA. Those seem like pretty good outcomes! Where did this guy come from and why was he outside the top 400 in prominent dynasty prospect lists?

Here’s the ‘bad’. He has little pedigree. After a decent career at Georgia Tech where he lost a year and a half to TJ and Covid but pitched well enough in his RS-Jr season (2021), he was drafted by the Tigers in the 7th round. His Baseball America writeup noted that “he’s shown enough strike-throwing ability to warrant a shot at starting, with back-of-the-rotation upside.” It also noted that he throws 89-91. Ah-HA! It seems everybody’s searching for signs of stuff.

Hurter entered pro ball to little acclaim, but the Tigers pushed the then-23-year-old stud through the system quickly, and he logged 106.2 innings while climbing the ladder up to AA. They were pretty damn good innings too, with a 31.1% K rate and an excellent 4.8% walk rate. But this still only earned him #29 on Longenhagen’s Detroit write-up after the 2022 season, and he, like many others before and since, said he has “the look of a bullpen’s second lefty.” Not even a first lefty. Sheesh.

Brant, the ol’ Georgia hoss, didn’t give a shit and just kept shoving! I was impressed enough by his mastery of the Eastern League in 2023 to make him my Detroit B-Side pick last off season. 118 innings of 2.91 FIP was music to my ears, and I said at the time that I liked him better than any Detroit arm not named Jackson. Hurter gave up a couple of homers in his 11 innings this Spring, but otherwise, he looked like the same guy, and I thought he’d continue chugging along at AAA just like he had throughout his pro career so far. 

His first seven AAA starts looked like that would be the case: 3.03 FIP and a 27.7% K-BB capped by a 5 inning, 5 hit, 9 K performance vs. St. Paul on 5/9. But as the summer wore on, the strikeout rate dipped, the walk rate climbed to the highest of his pro career, and it looked like the doubters might be right. This two-pitch lefty was destined to be a LOOGY. Over those next 11 outings, Hurter only managed to throw 35.1 innings with a 8.15 ERA, 14.5% K rate and a 7.5% BB rate. Not great, Bob.

Hurter’s mechanics had gotten out of whack in this stretch. The strikes weren’t coming, hitters were getting more hittable pitches, and Hurter was getting even more frustrated. But according to this excellent piece at The Athletic, the Mud Hens pitching coach Doug Bochtler suggested a bit more rhythm in Hurter’s motion, and from one fateful bullpen session in late July, Hurter reverted back to his excellent ways. So, how does big boy Brant beat batters?  

While I peeped him quite a bit over the last couple years, watching on grainy MILB.tv can make it tough to grasp the subtlety some suave slingers show, especially those on the southpaw spectrum. So when I sought to summarize his scouting sheet, I shared that he showed superior spotting skill of a simple sinker/slider selection, softened by some sporadic slow balls. Indeed, while I love the command, and was heartened by the ground balls, I, like Logenhagen, thought that increased use of the change up was going to be the key to his breakout in the bigs. 

But what we’ve seen in AAA and the Majors this year is a far more nuanced attack that was hiding behind proprietary Trackman data and crappy public video feeds. Let’s dive into the arsenal and see what we can uncover. 

The sinker is Hurter’s lifeblood. He throws it about 50% of the time overall: 42.5% to righties and a whopping 61.8% of the time vs. lefties. Despite what Stuff+ might tell you (88 rating), it’s a pretty good pitch! The results on it so far have it rated as top 20 sinker in all of baseball on a rate basis, just ahead of Logan Webb and Framber Valdez - two of the preeminent sinkerballers in the bigs. Considering he throws the pitch as much as he does, it’s no surprise that since his debut, he ranks 5th in run value produced by his sinker despite throwing fewer innings than any of the guys ahead of him (Jose Quintana, Logan Webb, David Peterson, and José Berríos). 

Statcast notes that his sinker runs armside 16 inches on average, and drops 28 inches, which are both significantly better than similarly situated sinkers. The extra sink is notable, and given that he hammers the zone with this pitch to the tune of a 70% zone rate, that sink seems to be helping induce ground balls. While not missing many bats (not that sinkers really are supposed to), inducing 68% ground balls with your primary pitch means your infield defense better be ready behind you. Nick Pollack gushed about how much of an outlier this pitch is on his Pod with Eno Sarris on Wednesday noting that hitters were only getting ideal contact on 15% of these sinkers. For context, the league average ICR is 38.3% and the worst pitchers can run up above 45%. This pitch is clearly befuddling hitters despite Hurter throwing it more than half the damn time. WTF is Stuff+ on about??

Before delving further into the rest of the repertoire, it’s worth a small tangent on lefties. I’m a dad to a left-handed kid, so I’ve been thinking about these sinister pitchers a bit lately. Growing up, all the left-handed pitchers I knew were kind of odd. Not that they were bad per se, but they just approached the world a little off kilter. I had a buddy that used to say, “you can always tell the lefties - they’re the ones that can’t put their hats on straight.” While not universally true, I played with a lot of goofballs who happened to be southpaws. But another thing was true about lefties - they always had worse stuff than their righty counterparts and yet seemed to have more success. This makes some sense from a population perspective since there are just fewer lefties out there and so hitters don’t see the ball come from that direction as often. Roughly 10% of the population are left handed, but closer to 30% of major league pitchers are lefties. Why is that?

This article from Guy Molyneux and Phil Birnbaum is the best research I’ve seen on the topic and it is well worth a read of the full piece. The part I wanted to pull out was this: “[Lefties] are just as successful as right handers at retiring batters, but they are not truly peers when it comes to throwing a baseball. In terms of the quality of the pitches they make - as measured by observable factors such as velocity and movement – southpaws are simply not in the same league as righties.” The difference in fastball velocity in their data set was about 1.5mph, that is, on average a righty throws 1.5 mph harder than an average lefty. Righties also induce more movement on all pitch types. But due to the dearth of lefties throughout all levels of baseball, hitters just don’t have the mental library built up to handle LHPs and the ‘unfamiliarity bonus’ neutralizes the raw stuff disparity between righties and lefties.

It’s worth reflecting on that both because now my kid will for sure be a starter in the major leagues because he’s goofy as all hell and already throwing strikes lefty as a 1.75 year old, and, more importantly for you all, because we should mentally adjust our stuff expectations when we evaluate lefties coming up through the minors. 

One reason evaluators dinged Hurter coming up was that the fastball doesn’t pop on the radar gun and scouts and analysts alike can forget to mentally adjust. Hurter’s sinker clocks in at 92.4 mph on average, which is ever so slightly above the mean for a lefty starter. By my calculations, the average sinker among lefty starters this year is 92.1 mph and Hurter’s heater hums handsomely like Heaney (92.3) hand David HEterson (91.9), both of whom have had hella hype. (Ed. We’re onto Hs now? That’s not even close to funny). Hurter’s sinker actually averages almost exactly the same speed as Logan Webb’s, and people aren’t harping on about hitters figuring out his 92.5 mph sinker – and that’s without even factoring in the lefty unfamiliarity bonus (the LUB, if you please)! 

From a shape perspective, Hurter’s sinker is a dead ringer for Ranger Suarez’s but with a tick and half of extra velocity. Seriously, the run and ride are almost bang on! If you aren’t familiar with Suarez’s bowling ball sinker, that thing has been his ticket to years of a 50% or more ground ball rate, and four straight seasons of 2.3 WAR or more. Hurter’s sinker also looks quite like Chris Sale’s! You know, the guy cruising to his first Cy Young award? Sure Sale’s is almost two ticks harder again than Hurter’s (and he doesn’t throw it quite as much), but the shape similarity is there.

Suffice it to say that I’m not buying the hater’s arguments about hitters being destined to adjust to his fastball and that it’s only a matter of time before he gets crushed and ends up in the ‘pen. Will there be an adjustment? Of course! But does Hurter need to do anything particularly different with the stuff for the sinker to play? I don’t think the data supports that.

Hurter’s second most used pitch is his sweeper. Or slider. Or whirlygig as the Yankees tried to call it a while back. Whatever it’s called, Stuff+ rates his sweeper as his best pitch with a 111 grade so far in the bigs. Against left-handed hitters, he throws the slider 36% of the time, which means lefties see either the sinker or sweeper 98% of the time. Since he’s got 32.7% K-BB and a 0.84 FIP against lefties, I, uh, think he’s doing pretty well against same-handed batters. He induces 67.6% of the balls on the ground and somehow also a wildly high 44.4% infield fly ball rate. That’s the sign of some serious domination and I’m not sure we need to unpack it too much. 

Versus righties, he has thrown sweepers 27.6% of the time. While two of his three homers allowed have come against the sweeper, it has actually performed well against the platoon advantage overall. A 31.4% whiff rate, 28.6% pop up rate, and a .268 xwOBA against all are fine outcomes. From a run value perspective, his slider is grading out slightly positively overall, though when he leaves it middle to a righty, this can happen. He needs to keep commanding it down and armside, because he can steal strikes like this. 

Thus far he’s showing that he can hold his own with a pitch that traditionally gets hammered by opposite-handed batters. One reason for that is that he throws it extremely hard given his starting velocity. There’s exactly one left-handed starter that throws their slider harder than Hurter, and his average fastball comes in almost 5 mph faster. Garrett Crochet relies mostly on his four-seamer and cutter (especially vs. righties) but that sweeper shares some traits with Hurter’s. 

Hurter trades that extra relative velocity for a bit less movement than most sweepers. Cade Povich, who is struggling a bit in his first taste of the big leagues, does something similar with his sweeper, in that they both get much less movement both vertically and horizontally than average but throw them relatively hard. Povich might be struggling overall, but his sweeper looks like perhaps his best pitch and I can’t help but wonder if it’s at least partly due to how different it is. Sure, Greg Weissert’s sweeper gets oohs and ahs with its 20.3 in of horizontal break (4.3 more than average), but it’s also been torched for a .407 wOBA this year and has a paltry 18.6% K rate. 

It seems like the sweeper plays very well off Hurter’s sinker in that their velocity separation is relatively small but the movement (mostly due to the sinker’s above average run/sink) profiles differently enough that he earns a lot of called strikes on the sweeper from hitters that think it’s a sinker off the plate away like Adley did on that 0-2 pitch above. While not quite as dominant as it is against lefties, this absolutely has potential to be a plus pitch versus righties too. 

I’m realizing as I dig into Hurter, the question I’m trying to answer ultimately is: “can he get righties out three times through the order?” His sinker is very good at earning ground balls and called strikes and seems to maintain its effectiveness through multiple looks, but it’s prone to vagaries of the BABIP gods and he is bound to have a 10 hit game on an unlucky day if he only trusts that pitch. The sweeper shows some real promise both at earning called strikes and soft contact even vs. RHBs. But two pitches are rarely enough, even if they’re really good and Detroit has been fairly protective of Hurter going through the order a 3rd time this year. Is the change up the key to beating the TTO penalty?

By velocity and movement profile, it looks a lot like Jose Quintana’s and Trevor Rogers’ change ups. They all come in similarly fast (around 85.7 mph on average), and have similar above-average drop. These might not sound like especially exciting comps, but Hurter throws his fastball a bit harder than his lefty compatriots here and the change’s effectiveness is often dependent on the fastball(s) it plays off. Quintana and Rogers both have had positive run values with their change ups in the recent past and both throw them quite a bit more often than Brant does. 

Against righties, I still believe there’s room to increase his change up usage to look a bit more like Rogers or Quintana. In our small sample so far in the Majors, Hurter has commanded the change quite well. He can spot it in the shadow off the plate and induce MVP candidates to ground out. Or sink it under the zone to get MVP candidates to strike out. Or put it on the outer edge in a hitter’s count and get a soft groundout. It’s not quite nasty enough to get a ton of whiffs in the zone – here’s one that was a skosh too middle middle to lefty-punisher Taylor Ward, but that’s not a terrible location and it wasn’t hit all that hard. I expect that it’ll still be an average to slightly above average pitch even if he increased the usage up to closer to 18-22% of the time vs. righties. Hardly groundbreaking analysis, but I think it’s a good way to set up his real secret weapon: his ‘four seam’ fastball!

OK, listen, I know we’ve only seen 41 four seamers from Hurter so far. That’s a tiny sample, even when looking at the quick-drying stats like Stuff+. And Stuff+ HATES this pitch. I believe every 10 points away from 100 is supposed to be one standard deviation in the Stuff+ world, and Hurter’s 4S comes in at 56. OVER FOUR STANDARD DEVIATIONS worse than average?! Even if Eno and team aren’t accounting for the “LUB”, that’s still hilariously bad. What gives?

Let’s look at Mr. Hurter’s objective measures of the pitch. We know he doesn’t have eye-popping velo, but huh, at 92.1 mph his average four seamer is slightly slower than his average two seamer. That’s unusual, but not crazy since we could chalk it up to the fact that he’s thrown almost 7 times more sinkers and the larger sample represents his true top end velocity. 

How about his vertical movement? Statcast calculates this a bit differently from other outlets, but since that’s what I’ve gotten used to, I’ll just copy it over from there. 

So this may be confusing to you – I know it was for me at first – but here’s the TL;DR: Hurter’s sinker drops quite a lot more than average for its velocity and release point. But so does his four seam. 

This is sort of weird when you look at it on Savant, but their data includes gravity drop and the measurements from average aren’t immediately intuitive. Let me try to explain. For a sinker that we want to, um, sink, a larger number in the inches of drop column makes a lot of sense. But since gravity is included, a slower pitch will drop more, so the raw number isn’t as useful a comparison across velocity bands. So instead, Savant calculates how much more (or less) the sinker drops when compared to similar velocity sinkers. In the above table, we see Hurter’s sinker has that good good drop. The base definitely is dropping like it’s a Mr. Music the DJ set in Jacksonville. 

For Hurter’s four seam, we see he gets less drop than his sinker, but way, way more than an average four seamer at that velocity. Picking on poor Povich’s pesky pitching problems from previously, his 92.2 mph fastball has an almost perfectly average 15.6 inches of drop out of his hand. This hasn’t led to truly catastrophic outcomes just yet, but being perfectly average, especially with the fastball, tends to lead to things like this. Or this. And this. And you definitely don’t want to do that. 

Much ink has been spilt (well pixels anyway) about the four seam fastball that drops far less than average. These riding, rising, invisiballs have been the darling of analytical departments for a few years now. Shota Imanaga and Nestor Cortes both sport lefty versions of these riding fastballs. But there’s more than one way to play the fastball game, and I think the Stuff+ and scouty types underestimate the value of being far from average in the other direction. If you sort the left-handed movement leaderboard from lowest to highest vs. average (you should see more dark blue numbers near the top), you uncover a ton of good pitchers whose fastballs do an excellent job getting outs but get panned by Stuff+. 

Nick Lodolo, Max Fried, our Cy-Young-to-be Chris Sale, and our avatars of Hurter, Ranger Suárez, and David Peterson all dot the top of this leaderboard. If he had enough pitches to qualify for this list, Hurter would rank 4th, just ahead of Fried. Now normally in the statcast world, blue is bad and red is good. But I posit to you, dear reader (if you’ve made it this far, thank you! If you haven’t, screw you, you’re missing the only possibly insightful thing I have to say in these 4,000+ words), that for pitch movements, being far from average is helpful in both directions. Each of those guys listed above have positive run values for their four seamers. Each of them gets a crap Stuff+ grade. This is a case where I’m going to trust the continued excellence of Messrs Fried, Suárez, and Sale and say this is a place where Stuff+ and the scouts are leading you astray. These guys have good four seam fastballs because they look weird to the hitter. 

Brant Hurter has this same skill. His 4S fastball also moves way less to the armside than hitters think it’s going to. While his sinker rides the laminar flow to run even more than just the spin and angle would suggest, Hurter throws his four seamer almost like a cutter, killing the active spin, disrupting the Magnus force, and causing the ball to appear like it’s moving glove-side rather than slightly arm-side. That’s kind of complicated and I just dropped a couple of new terms that I’m too tired to get into right now at 1:15AM. But hopefully you see what I see here. 

That was a four seamer at the top of the zone and Cedric Mullins pounded it into the ground. He also pulled off of the ball and yanked it to the first baseman. A running and rising fastball might have induced a popup to the left side of the infield, but Hurter got a pulled ground ball on a high fastball. Here’s another example. Fastball up and away to a righty, and boom, easy pulled ground ball for an out.  In this example, Hurter tries to go inside to Taylor Ward, and that thing almost runs into his hands for a soft line out to short. That’s a tough pitch to square up! Later in that same game, Hurter misses his spot and throws a four seamer right down the dick to Ward, and he gets his sac fly, but that’s not a well struck ball! Lest you think I’m only showing you the best examples, here’s the hardest contact Hurter has given up on this pitch so far. He misses his spot down, and O’Hoppe ropes it to center, but right to Meadows and no damage is done. 

Command is absolutely going to play a role in Hurter’s ability to increase his usage of his four seamer. As we saw, when he missed his spot, damage was lurking. Hurter has demonstrated control for the better part of the last three years and I’ve seen lots of outings with exceptional command too. If he can consistently harness that command, this pitch is going to induce soft contact and get whiffs all over the zone. I also think it will help the change up and slider versus righties by giving another movement profile the hitter has to worry about. Hurter also might want to tinker with a cutter, since his 4S is already trending in that direction, and that can help neutralize a potentially poor platoon split. 

Brant Hurter isn’t going to win Rookie of the Year. He likely will see his BABIP rise, LOB% lower, and his HR/FB% tick up. He’s not yet a true-talent sub-3 ERA pitcher in the bigs, but don’t let anyone convince you he’s a second lefty reliever. Beneath the biased blind, blathering briefs of blustering birddogs are the bones of a bonafide beast about to beat baseball. That beast’s name is Brant. And he’s a good dog - 13/10; would recommend.