The Miller Family Budding Ace Spectacular

It’s not quite sh*tposting, but it’s close: I post a cryptic poll on Twitter and just let it do its thing. It is, to frame it in this week’s Internet meme jargon, my “beige flag,” my desire to sow chaos by dripping a drop of blood into shark-infested waters.

Here’s my most-recent artistic masterpiece:

miller

— Alex "Oxlade" Chamberlain (@DolphHauldhagen) June 11, 2023

It seemed like Mason, Bryce, and Bobby all tied or set some kind of record this season, each of them one-upping his predecessor from the the prior week or month or whatever it was. It’s all happening so fast, these Millers.

The poll went exactly how I expected: with exception to the 12.1% of people who enjoy a nice sh*tpost, I witnessed recency bias rule out. As part of my deviousness, I did not specify “redraft,” “dynasty,” “lifetime,” “tomorrow,” anything–it’s just a poll with names, and everyone’s imaginations took care of the rest.

It’s obvious that readers interpreted the poll, in terms of timeframe, as “right now”–which, to be clear, does not have to be exclusive of other timeframes, like “next year” or “forever.” But “right now” is clearly what matters most.

In any sense, I couldn’t let this poll close without evaluating its results. Much has been made of these Millers. I want to evaluate them in as much of an information bubble as possible, without being influenced by other analysis. Primarily, I want to do this using my Pitch Comps tool, which has proven to me to be particularly prescient at “projecting” the effectiveness of offerings from pitchers with short MLB track records.

Here, I’ll grade each Miller’s offering (among those thrown more than just a couple of times) on the 20-80 scouting scale and then offer up how I’d rank them this year and long-term (“upside” in terms of skills, not necessarily total value). In order of their MLB debuts:

Mason Miller, OAK SP

FF (53% usage): 60 grade. This is the best fastball of the bunch, something Lance Brozdowski anticipated prior to Mason’s debut:

Everybody wants the next Spencer Strider.

There probably isn't one this year. BUT if anybody has a shot, it's #Athletics Mason Miller.

4S: 100.0 mph, 16.5" ride, 6" arm-side, 144 Stuff+
CT: 95.7 mph, 7" lift, 3" cut/sweep, 116 Stuff+
SL: 86.5 mph, -3" drop, 9" sweep, 120 Stuff+

— Lance Brozdowski (@LanceBroz) April 16, 2023

Spencer Strider is a standout comp, although David Bednar, Jordan Romano, and Hunter Greene populate this list, too. It’s Mason’s carrying “tool,” so to speak, which makes sense given he throws it half the time. Given the names, including Strider’s, you might expect a 70 grade here. But these are the upside comps here; there are a lot of “a little bit too straight” types of fastballs littering this list of comps (Logan Gilbert, Chris Paddack, Kevin Gausman) to give me pause.

Through four starts, though, Mason weaponized the pitch effectively, and there’s swinging strike (SwStr%) upside lurking.

SL (21%): 50. Mason’s slider comps about 50-50 to sneaky-good sliders thrown by guys you don’t really think of as studs and to average-ish sliders thrown by average-ish guys. And, well, Strider. Repeated comps to Strider suggest the mechanical consistency that Brozdowski suggested, and having those two pitches headline Mason’s arsenal could make him something of a Strider Lite. It’s worth noting, though, that Strider’s slider has four inches less, uh, slide to it.

FC (21%): 40. It’s a Mark Melancon cutter, if that means anything to you, but it’s harder, quite a bit more so than most cutters, so I think that gives it a ratings boost. It’s his weak link, something I wish he’d sub out for his least-used offering.

CH (5%): 70. It’s only 20-or-so pitches, but you only need a few pitches to have a good sense of what the velocity, movement, release point, etc. mean in terms of potential productivity (hence the sudden popularity and ubiquity of pitch models and scores). Ignoring all the comps to sinkers (because it’s such a firm change-up), the pitch comps closely to Taijuan Walker‘s splitter, Sandy Alcantara’s change-up, Alex Cobb’s splitter, and Gausman’s splitter. Without mincing words, these are some of baseball’s best pitches. I’m not giving out any 80 grades today. But Gausman’s splitter is 80-grade, and those others are no worse than 70.

I didn’t want to let pitch models influence my assessments of these pitches, but I still wanted to cross-reference them for due diligence. PitchingBot and Pitching+ generally agree with me. They don’t overrate the four-seamer and aren’t huge on the cutter (they like it better than I do) or the slider, which I think they take the under on, and I think that’s fair. They disagree wildly on Mason’s command of it, which opens up an interesting conversation (for another day) about what constitutes good slider command.

Where the models seem to really take issue with Mason is his change-up, and I’m willing to bet it’s because their models are seeing the specs for it and misconstruing it as a sinker, much like my Pitch Comps tool does. In a way, I think that’s for the best–I think these pitch models should not be constrained or improperly guided by arbitrary taxonomy–but it does penalize Mason, although not too heavily given the pitch’s low usage.

All in all, Mason is good as-is, but his future growth could hinge on how frequently he uses his change-up (and if it’s actually any good–which I think it is). I think all of the Millers have some kind of nebulous “ace upside,” but Mason’s would come screaming into view if that change-up is, indeed, plus or even plus-plus.

Bryce Miller, SEA SP

FF (69%): 40. It’s not a good start, to have a pitch that’s thrown seven out of 10 times to grade out below-average. Bryce’s four-seamer carries marquee comps–Walker Buehler, Drew Rasmussen, Brandon Woodruff–but, like Mason’s four-seam comps, the names provide more value than the pitches themselves. And these names represent the optimistic perspective; the negative perspective includes basement-dwelling comps to Luke Weaver, Roansy Contreras, Beau Brieske, and, a little more distantly, the 20-grade Chris Archer. It was Bryce’s fastball that got absolutely torched in his two most-recent disasters, and it will obviously be interesting to see how it fares going forward, my analysis be damned.

Update: I wrote most of this post prior to Bryce’s June 12 start during which he amassed all 12 of his whiffs and nine of his 14 called strikes on his fastball. That will happen when you throw 73% four-seamers–volume in, volume out. But the Marlins had no answer for it. For now, the two-start disaster remains more a blip on the radar than the start of a trend, and I am looking increasingly in the wrong here.

SL (12%): 70. It’s intriguing–funny? weird? not sure?–to me that FanGraphs grades Bryce’s fastball as a 70 and all his other offerings as no better than 50 or 55. I’m in a nearly perfectly-inverse boat: the secondaries are killer, and it’s the fastball that scares me.

This pitch has only elite comps. It’s a Brady Singer lookalike, but it hearkens to Shane Bieber, Carlos Carrasco, Contreras (again, but good this time), Dinelson Lamet (when he was momentarily good), Germán Márquez, Dylan Cease–the list goes on and on. This is where I’d threaten to slap an 80-grade on a pitch by the sheer volume of good comps. It’s just profoundly unlikely that this pitch winds up being bad. I would expect Bryce’s slider’s 7.2% SwStr% (through only 69 pitches thrown) to or even triple moving forward. It’s cliché to call underrating someone or under-using some thing as “criminal,” but here, it’s true: every fastball Bryce throws is a change-up he doesn’t throw, and I don’t like that.

CU (8%): 60. Supported by firmly above-average comps, led by Bieber and supplemented by Aaron Nola, Erick Fedde, and Logan Webb’s slurvy sweepy slider thing. It’s on the slower end, but so is Nola’s, and that’s his bread-and-butter, so I’m a fan. But, again: 8% usage is criminal. (I’ll say that at least once more, just you wait.)

CH (6%): 65. I love change-ups that comp to splitters, and Bryce’s change-up looks quite a bit like a nice Tyler Mahle splitter. Another harder-than-usual change-up, this pitch draws lots of sinker comps, which I’ll ignore. It echoes again of Nola, of Pablo López, and, distantly, of Zach Davies–and Zach Davies is always a change-up comp that you want. The lone blemish here is a Zach Plesac comp that is more damning of the laws of numbers than of Bryce’s change-up. I’m extremely tempted to give this a 70, too. Oh, and the 6% usage: criminal, pal.

FC (5%): 70, but also n/a. The pitch models don’t recognize this as an offering, and I think based on the comps this is actually just his slider misclassified.

Like Mason, Bryce encounters classification issues with his change-up appearing like a sinker. That pitch is probably better than “below-average.” Otherwise, the models envision Bryce as plus-or-better across the board–including his four-seamer.

This, I suppose, is where my analysis will be made or broken. I think the pitch models really like Bryce’s induced vertical movement (IVB) relative to his velocity, which is above-average but not elite. Who can blame them? I think a lot of the high modeling praise for this pitch can be attributed to good outcomes. And while these models divorce themselves somewhat from observed outcomes, they don’t do so entirely.

Regardless: Bryce has multiple fantastic secondaries, comping repeatedly to Bieber, who himself has a not-so-great fastball. Bieber uses elite command on his subpar fastball to let his pair of elite secondaries sing. (Obviously, the sheen has faded this year; my effusive praise refers to the peak, Cy Young-caliber Bieber of yesteryear.) Bryce having peak-Bieber upside is describing Cy Young upside, so it’s not to be taken lightly.

But I really do not think he will get there throwing 70% fastballs. This could end up being a “old takes exposed” type of situation, but I need to stand my ground on this if I’m to have any authentic conviction about it. Similar fastballs just haven’t lived up to the hype, even though pitch models suggest they have. It’s honestly a bit confounding, really, and certainly those models are more rigorous than my pitch comps. But something’s gotta give. It’ll probably be me. We’ll see!

Bobby Miller, LAD SP

SI (29%): 60. Some more top-shelf comps here, with Woodruff, Frankie Montas, Singer, and a Jacob deGrom four-seamer sighting. This is another situation where the name value outweighs the pitch value itself, but it’s undeniably a plus offering, and I’m sure the pitch models will like it more than I do.

SL (26%): 70. This, like Mason’s change-up, could threaten to be an 80: it has elite comps to Diego Castillo, Singer, Bieber, and Lamet, and that’s just to name a few. It is probably already one of MLB’s best pitches, the grades and comps validating its immense success so far.

FF (18%): 35. This is kind of like Bryce’s four-seamer, except it doesn’t even have the cool name-comps. They’re all bad name-comps with bad performance-comps to boot. And the pitch itself has fared especially poorly to date. It probably plays a larger role in setting up other pitches in his arsenal–I’m too stupid to know what that might look like–but I could envision a scenario in which this pitch eventually falls away.

CH (17%): 65. Like Bryce, the only bad comp here is Plesac. And, like Mason and Bryce, this change-up gets lots of sinker comps, muddying the actual outlook of this pitch. I don’t think it’s quite as good as his predecessors’ change-ups, but it comes pretty close. It definitely has upside in terms of inducing whiffs and suppressing contact quality, which is crazy to imagine given how successfully Bobby’s first few innings have been. I’m open to bumping this up to a 70, but I gave this a 60 originally and chose to split the difference.

CU (9%): 70. Bieber and Joe Musgrove curves are some of the best curves. They weaponize theirs as dual-threat ground-ball/swinging-strike offerings. Not that Bobby’s arsenal needs a lot of “transforming,” but I really think this could be a transformative pitch for him if he lets it be. Then again, does he really need it? Does Scrooge McDuck need more money in which to swim?

The pitch models, despite loving Bobby, might actually be in the greatest disagreement over him. His sinker is either plus-plus or league-average? The curve is either firmly minus or league-average? At least they love the slider as much as I do.

Where they disagree with my pitch comps, specifically, are both fastballs, which I half-expected. I’m not surprised about the curve, but its bad grades are more command-related than stuff-related, and command is a fickle thing in small samples. I would expect those grades to improve considerably over time–unless his command of it is truly that bad. Then, of course, I will rescind. It would explain why it’s his least-used pitch, certainly.

Bobby might be the most MLB-ready of the lot, which makes sense. This would serve to validate the results of the poll, although I’m still not sure Bobby deserves to be that much more loved than his surname-sharing brothers.

Summary

For reference, here are all the pitch grades for PitchingBot:

And for Pitching+:

Bobby probably is the best present- and future-value arm of the lot. Part of me is sad that it’s this simple, this anti-climactic. I wanted to expose the poll respondents for their recency bias. You idiots!!! You have the short-term memory of a common goldfish!!! Alas, Bobby’s the real deal. He already has at least one fastball that’s firmly plus; whether or not the four-seamer pans out is probably immaterial at this point. A pitcher with four legitimately plus (or better) pitches is of a rare breed, and he pitches with variety, something Mason and Bryce don’t presently embrace.

When it comes to Mason and Bryce, we might be splitting hairs. But I think their paths to stardom are dissimilar in interesting ways. Bryce might have five plus-or-better pitches, but I need to dig in my heels on his four-seamer possibly being a weak link. Having an elite fastball is such a crucial distinction between league ace and rotation ace. To be clear, many league aces survive with bad fastballs. But they don’t cement themselves as perennial league aces–they often flirt with it, fall out of favor, and back again. Bryce doesn’t need to convince the pitch models, but he needs to convince me, especially after his May 29 and June 4 starts. (He may have after last night’s start, but it’s a long season.)

Mason, on the other hand, has the fastball for sure; he just might not have the secondary goods to support it. Secondaries are all lab-bred these days–fastballs can be, too, but it seems like Driveline-created breaking pitches are a dime a dozen right now–so I can see Mason improving his slider or turning it into a sweeper or some other such nonsense. And I think, truly, deep in my loins, that his change-up is actually a game-changer for his trajectory, not a bad throwaway offering. If he brings it front-and-center in his arsenal, I think it provides him the biggest glow-up opportunity of the three.

In any sense, all three Millers have bright futures–there really aren’t any smoke and mirrors here, in case that was something you suspected. There are concerns with injuries and workloads (looking at you, Mason) and even possibly surface-level minor-league performance (a 3.79 ERA in 180ish minor-league innings feels lackluster, Bobby), but we’re not worried about those right now. I’m interested in the talent, and the talent is lit.