A good trade between two left-handed pitchers.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve been this delighted by a Spring Training story. As Maria Guardado reported a couple of days ago, Robbie Ray solicited advice from AL Cy Young winner (and Hayward-born) Tarik Skubal on how to throw a better changeup. In exchange, the San Francisco Giants lefty sent Skubal tips on how to throw a better slider.
Pitchers are the ultimate control freaks, so the concept of non-teammates sharing anything at all seems — to me, anyway — as an outlier. But Major League Baseball is also a fraternity or a brotherhood; very few get to play this professional game. It’s also ruggedly individualistic. Ray’s performance will help the team, but he’s doing this to make himself better first. So, that leads to fair swaps like this where we get fun, pressure-free quotes that remind you that people are at their best when they share.
Said Ray:
“He kind of just sent me the kitchen sink,” Ray said. “He sent me pictures, video, everything. He was very open about it, and I was very thankful.”
Said Skubal:
“It was a little 1-for-1 swap. He showed me slider stuff; I showed him changeup stuff. I thought it was a good trade.”
This is fun. Just dudes being guys. Sucks to be a major league hitter sometimes, right?
Now, both pitchers already through these respective pitches — they were looking to improve them. Ray’s changeup hadn’t yet made it into Steven’s Problematic Pitches series, mainly because he didn’t throw it in his brief stint with the Giants last season. Indeed, Statcast hasn’t labeled a Robbie Ray pitch a changeup since 2022, when he threw one just 21 times. The results weren’t great, and they came off of his Cy Young 2021 season where the changeup worked against that case, too. He threw it 113 times and batters slugged .529.
By Run Value, Statcast’s measure of “run impact of an event based on the runners on base, outs, ball and strike count,” it registered a -3 in 2021. Compare that with Skubal’s changeup in 2024, which had a +7 Run Value and was the pitch he threw the most (27.2%) after his four-seam fastball (33.2%). That changeup had a 46% Whiff rate, too. Ray’s Cy Young season featured a slider with a 45.5% Whiff rate. You can see the interest by both parties.
I wonder what Skubal got from Robbie Ray that he couldn’t get from watching this interview from 2022 between Ray and the Pitching Ninja:
But pitchers aren’t just control freaks, they’re also bullies, and so hitters my reasonably perceive this as a pair of bullies swapping notes on how best to antagonize you. That Skubal has taught Robbie Ray how to throw a better changeup without having to rely on pronating (turning inward) his arm in the delivery — a quality that Ray admits he struggles with — is great news for the Giants and Giants fans and bad news for Shohei Ohtani or Freddie Freeman — but also Mookie Betts and, uh… are there other NL hitters out there?