Know Your Averages 2024, Cutter Edition

What is different about the cutter? Scroll down to the bar chart below to see that it is in the zone the least of the three fastballs (four-seamer, sinker, cutter) analyzed in this series. In the zone the least, yet swung on the most. Heck, it’s even chased out of the zone by hitters the most. That’s the cutter. When executed correctly, it cuts in on a batter’s hands or it tails away from the barrel. How else does it compare to the four-seamer and sinker? In this article, we conclude the “Know Your Averages” series with a jammed hitter, a broken bat, and a sore palm.

Four-seamers | Sinkers | Cutters

My process relies on Alex Chamberlain’s Pitch Leaderboard which utilizes Statcast data that you can also find at Baseball Savant and our (New!) Pitch Type Splits on player pages. Here is a quick look at how the sinker stacks up against four-seamers and cutters in several measurements:

Let’s look at the pitchers below, at, and above average with their cutters in each measurement. A lot of what follows in the “Questions or comments?” section is less analysis and more points for further research or discussion.

NOTE: The chart and table above do not include a minimum pitch qualifier. The players in the analysis below will fall under a 40-pitch minimum qualifier with some arbitrary author finagling.

—Zone%—

• Zac Gallen – 25.7%
• Javier Assad – 51.1%
• Spencer Arrighetti – 63.5.%

Questions or comments?: On Gallen’s 77 cutters in the 2024 season, we see that he is clipping the zone just over a quarter of the time. He rarely throws the pitch to right-handed batters but when he does he tends to locate middle-away:

Against lefties, he’s jamming them and often coming a little too inside:

Gallen’s cutter is one of six pitch types he’s thrown in 2024 and he continues to break it out every once in a while to keep hitters on their toes. A pitch like Arrighetti’s, which lives in the zone, has success despite its poor Stuff+ grade due to the way its shape differs from the other offerings in his arsenal:

Spencer Arrighetti, Baseball Savant

—Swing%—

• Chad Kuhl – 30.2%
• Michael Kopech – 49.1%
• Matt Strahm – 63.6%

Questions or comments?: Of the cutter, four-seamer, and sinker, it’s our feature item the cutter that gets the most swings. Ask three different baseball people why that is and you’ll get three different answers. It’s what happens as a result of the swing that tells us anything important. For example, here’s each pitcher’s cutter pVal, or measure of run value, on each pitch:

Kuhl: -1.8   Kopech: 0.8   Strahm: 2.2

Remember, Savant tells us that “positive numbers are good and negative numbers are poor”. In this case, Strahm’s cutter is getting swung at and has shown relatively good results.

—SwStr%—

• Ethan Roberts – 2.3%
• Mitch Keller – 10.5%
• Adam Ottavino – 22.1%

Questions or comments?: Adam Ottavino’s swing-and-miss 2024 cutter is the best of his career, but it’s hard to say whether that makes it a good pitch or not. It’s given up two home runs in 2024 and has been hit for a .455 batting average. Perhaps hitters miss it once and then never miss it again. Heck, even Ethan Roberts’ cutter only gets hit for a .435 batting average. Baseball can be confusing.

—CallStr%—

• José Alvarado – 4.9%
• Michael Kopech – 15.1%
• Danny Coulombe – 26.2%

Questions or comments?: There’s something about a called strike that I just love. Maybe it happens because a pitch freezes a hitter. Maybe they don’t know what the heck it is, so they don’t swing. Perhaps they know what it is, but also know that if they swing, it may break their favorite bat. Whatever it is that creates a called strike, Danny Coulombe gets a lot of them. Oddly enough, Stuff+ doesn’t like Coulombe’s cutter at all as the pitch is nearing the “poor” classification based on its grade. But, you can’t argue with results you computer dorks!

—CSW%—

• Bryce Miller – 12.5%
• Gavin Williams – 25.5%
• David Robertson – 38.1%

Questions or comments?: Called strikes plus whiffs and you want more of them. Robertson is well above average in both individual metrics (CStr%: 25%, SwStr%: 13.2%) and hitters are only getting to it for a .189 average. Tell that to his changeup, sinker, curveball, and four-seamer, each of which has a .000 batting average this season. Yes, they’ve been thrown. Bryce Miller on the other hand? Well, he’s only thrown 48 of them this year and there may be some classification issue happening. Perhaps it’s a pitch in experimental mode.

—Chase%—

• Spencer Schwellenbach – 7.0%
• Cole Ragans– 21.6%
• Zac Gallen – 40.0%

Questions or comments?: Here he is again! Zac Gallen’s cutter rarely ends up in the zone; therefore, he gets batters to chase at an exaggerated rate. Remember, his Zone% is one of the lowest in the league so most swings will be chases. That doesn’t mean Gallen has a good or bad pitch in his cutter, its batting average against is .286 and there are a lot of hitters who would kill to hit .286. The best cutter in baseball from a batting average perspective? That belongs to Caleb Ferguson who only sees his cutter get hit 14.6% of the time he throws it. And what about Schwellenbach? The man who has one of the lowest chase percentages in the league on his cutter. Its batting average is .310. A ball chased outside of the zone is a pretty good indicator of a pitcher fooling the hitter, making them think it was a good pitch to hit as it tails away from their bat. It’s usually not a good thing when a pitch rarely fools hitters and Schwellenbach may need to thin out his six-pitch arsenal.

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There are so many different ways to evaluate a pitch, but one thing has always been true; a pitcher’s fastball is everything. Ev-ery-thing! Without it, he’s a sitting duck. With a bad one, he’s a sitting duck. With a good one, he’s more likely to have success. After all this plate-discipline evaluation, you may be wondering where the king of the cutter, Emmanuel Clase, has been. Here’s a quick comparison of Clase’s offering to the average:

Zone%: 56.4% (Avg. 51.1%)     Swing%: 55.3% (Avg. 49.1%)     SwStr%: 13.5% (Avg. 10.5%)

CallStr%: 16.7% (Avg. 15.1%)      CSW%: 30.2% (Avg. 25.5%)     Chase%: 19.9% (Avg. 12.8%)

Clase does everything better than average with his cutter, yet none of these stats are captured in the min/max extremes and perhaps that, plus throwing it 100 MPH, is what leads to success.