There’s a new ballpark game this year, in addition to the pitch clock and bigger bases. It did not have its own marketing campaign and was not tested with focus groups and minor leaguers. Even those responsible for it have been startled by its presence on stadium scoreboards.
“When it said ‘sweeper,’ we were like, ‘What the heck?’,” said Michael King, a right-handed reliever for the Yankees. “We had no idea. But I think it’s just another way to classify a pitch because there are so many different sliders out there.”
Major League Baseball’s Statcast system, which relays information to scoreboards and television screens, has quietly introduced the sweeper and slurve as new field types this season. However, the trunk is known as a combination of a slider and a bend. A sweeper is… what exactly?
“It’s kind of a glitch pitch,” said Matt Blake, the Yankees’ pitching coach. “Some guys threw it, but maybe didn’t really understand how they did it. And then as information came out, all of a sudden more people started looking at it and saying, ‘Okay, I can take it to this or that guy,’ and now all of a sudden everyone has it.
In particular, a lot of Yankees throw it. While Blake said the trend started around 2017 with the Houston and Cleveland staffs, the Yankees have been eagerly preaching the sweeper’s virtues throughout their system.
King, Nestor Cortes, Clay Holmes, Ron Marinaccio and Clarke Schmidt all throw it. So have a few pitchers traded last summer who were brought up in the Yankees’ system, including JP Sears and Ken Waldichuk of the Oakland Athletics and Hayden Wesneski of the Chicago Cubs.
“It’s a chance to say, ‘Okay, what’s their main breaking ball, and is it going to be swing-and-miss?'” said Blake. “Maybe we have a chance to add something here – try this.”
The sweeper is a horizontal slider, Blake said, with less downward movement than a trunk. A classic slider, such as Gerrit Cole’s — often referred to as a “gyro” slider by the Yankees — should look like a fastball to the batter, who then swings over it as it breaks down. The sweeper never looks like a fastball, but lures the batter by appearing to be a hit, breaking ball before darting away from the bat.
“You want side spin,” said King, who learned his sweeper from former Yankees starter Corey Kluber, who is now with the Boston Red Sox. “We always talk about the nose of the ball, and when you throw a gyro slider, the nose is pointed straight at the batter, like a spinning red dot. With the sweeper you want the nose up.
Pitching is a brotherhood; teammates and even opponents routinely compare grips and share tips on finger pressure, seam orientation and so on. With high-speed cameras now a common learning tool, pitch design is more accurate and efficient, with teams devoting more resources – in technology and manpower – than ever before. The right breaking ball can turn a fringe prospect into a big leaguer.
Of course, data often only popularizes what older generations already knew. Before it had a name, the sweeper helped spark the Yankees dynasty in the 1990s and early 2000s through David Cone, a top starter, and Jeff Nelson, a standout setup man.
“A right-hander can start it at the batter and break it over the inside corner for a front-door sweeper — I’d start that right at their hip,” Cone, now a television analyst, said on the YES Network booth before a game last week. “That field was kind of frowned upon by old-fashioned pitching coaches, because a mistake is a home run: off-speed and on the inner part of the plate, if hitters recognize it, they can launch it and pull a flying ball. ”
He added: “But it’s about the form. A sweeper has that bigger, flatter brake and is designed for a swing-and-a-miss or a flinch. If it’s the front door, it’s to make the man flinch. If you throw it away, it’s to make them swing and miss.”
Nelson, who now calls games for the Yankees and the Miami Marlins, said he always viewed his signature throw as a sneer — “a hard, big-breaking slider,” he explained. Nelson, a 6-foot-8 right-hander, pitched from a low three-quarter angle and used a driving, inside fastball to prevent right-handed batters from reaching his sweeping breaking ball.
“Sometimes there was such a break that you tried to slow it down and it still broke a mile,” Nelson said. “Some days it was like I didn’t know how to control this thing.”
Nelson could indeed be wild, but he routinely struck out more than innings pitched before that was common for relievers. Closer Mariano Rivera’s celebrated cutter took plenty of swinging blows, but was more known for breaking bats – the ultimate result of weak contact. The cutter looks like a fastball for a late, lateral slice; Cone calls that field a “baby sweeper.”
The Yankees’ current closer, right-handed Holmes, has an exceptional float hitting right-handed batters. He supplements it with both a slider and sweeper, saying it makes sense to differentiate the pitches.
“Last year I threw both, but if you went on Statcast it was all just one throw,” said Holmes. “I threw in a sweeper and a gyro, but it had them as one, so the average wasn’t indicative of either pitch, really — speed, movement, whatever. It was a mix of both, so the average didn’t really show this shape of the field and that shape of the field.
Now, this forms That form have official proper names.