Podcasts hosted by athletes — I don’t learn about all that. However I did get pleasure from a current clip from Mookie Betts’ podcast the place he was speaking to Cal Raleigh, who was evaluating Zack Wheeler — maybe the very best pitcher in baseball — to his batterymate Bryan Woo.
“[Wheeler] is sort of like Woo,” Raleigh mentioned. “He glides down the mound. And it’s so easy. Some guys simply have that pure glide down the mound, simple, and [the ball] simply will get on you.”
Coincidentally, in a dialog in late August, Phillies minor league pitching coach Riley McCauley made the identical comparability.
“[Woo] may be very Wheeler-ish,” McCauley informed me.
I’d messaged McCauley as a result of I wished to higher perceive how Woo’s motion associated to his outstanding efficiency. He throws so many fastballs — almost three-quarters of Woo’s pitches are both four-seamers or sinkers. And people fastballs are nearly all the time within the strike zone — he ranks first amongst all starters in each zone proportion and stroll charge. And but no one can sq. him up.
Even accounting for the three homers he allowed towards the Angels on Saturday, hitters are batting .194 and slugging .304 throughout his 94 innings pitched. The anticipated stats line up together with his outcomes — his .246 xwOBA allowed is higher than any pitcher this season. (Mikey Ajeto wrote about Woo’s injury suppression expertise in an excellent publish for Baseball Prospectus yesterday.)
How can Woo throw so many fastballs within the zone and stroll away unscathed? I feel it’s largely as a result of he’s a reasonably tall man throwing from a loopy low launch level. Standing 6-foot-2, Woo releases the ball simply 5 toes off the bottom:
Among the many 115 pitchers who’ve thrown 500 four-seam fastballs within the 2024 season, Woo’s launch peak is the sixth lowest. That tremendous low launch peak means his fastball enters the strike zone on the third-flattest vertical strategy angle (VAA) in baseball. Solely Joe Ryan and Craig Kimbrel throw flatter fastballs.
Fastballs thrown excessive within the zone with a flat VAA like Woo’s or Ryan’s are as near an unhittable pitch as exists in baseball. Add in Woo’s above-average velocity (he averages 95 mph and might ramp it as much as 97) and unbelievable strike-throwing capacity, and also you’ve bought the recipe for a pitcher who can relentlessly assault hitters together with his four-seam fastball. Though the form is in any other case bizarre — the pitch’s vertical and horizontal motion are each inside a handful of proportion factors of the league common — Woo’s launch peak negates these ostensibly mediocre form issues.
That may result in a pure query: If throwing exhausting fastballs excessive within the zone from down low is so efficient, why doesn’t each pitcher simply do it? The reply is easy: Not everyone can transfer like Woo.
When Woo was a “midlevel” draft prospect, Trent Clean, a pitching strategist for the Mariners, informed president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto that if he had the primary choose within the 2021 Draft, he’d take Bryan Woo. (Henry Davis went first general; Woo fell to the Mariners within the sixth spherical.)
Clean defined why he felt so exuberant about Woo in a July 2024 interview with the Seattle Occasions’ Adam Jude.
“What Bryan has that’s actually fascinating is, he’s a man with energy and stability and mobility, all on the identical time, with good timing (in his supply),” Clean informed Jude. “You’ve bought this unicorn of a mover who’s actually sturdy and cellular… He popped for us.”
You’ll be able to draw a direct line from this unicorn motion to Woo’s capacity to constantly throw strikes from a low launch level with above-average velocity. Every of those qualities could be defined by the specifics of his motion.
McCauley defined to me that the assorted positions Woo will get into are “fairly excessive,” even in comparison with the everyday main league pitcher. What separates Woo even farther from the inhabitants is that he maintains his stability whereas transferring his physique into these excessive positions.
I requested McCauley to stroll me by means of a couple of of the phases of Woo’s supply: the leg raise, the hand break, the entrance foot strike, and eventually ball launch. First, the raise:
Woo lifts his entrance leg means up, bringing his knee as much as the letters on his uniform. The excessive leg raise leads immediately into and influences the subsequent part of the supply — the hand break, or the second when the pitcher separates the ball from the glove.
At hand break, McCauley says, Woo extends the entrance of his physique ahead whereas sustaining stability on his again foot:
“That is very, very, very Wheeler-ish,” McCauley mentioned. “The glove and the leg are each fairly prolonged. The hand break is fairly lengthy, so he’s making a ton of rotational capability in his supply, which goes to permit the entrance foot to swing open and the higher half to remain closed.”
On the entrance foot strike part, Woo is engaged in maybe probably the most excessive place within the supply. As he propels the entrance of his physique towards the plate, he’s concurrently transferring the again half of his physique in the wrong way, creating notable hip-shoulder separation.
Woo will get “a ton” of thoracic backbone counter-rotation at the same time as he orients his entrance hip towards the batter, McCauley says. All main league pitchers most likely do that to some extent, however Woo — and Wheeler — stand out amongst even this elite inhabitants.
“It’s a reasonably rotational decrease half the place he’s swinging the entrance leg open, however he’s cellular sufficient within the higher half to — you possibly can see his chest is pointing in the direction of us proper now,” McCauley mentioned, referring to the video body under:
All of that lower-half motion brings Woo to his ultimate vacation spot means down the mound, completely balanced, channeling almost all of his potential vitality into the discharge of the pitch.
“As soon as that entrance foot hits, he’s excellent at getting linear and holding, so now he’s taking that low slot as a result of he’s creating a really steady base for that trunk to get linear and ahead with,” McCauley mentioned:
What’s outstanding about Woo (and Wheeler, McCauley factors out) is that he can transfer like that with out falling out of sequence. There are benefits to excessive positions: They assist pitchers attain peak velocity and get to the devastating low-slot launch level. However a typical faculty or minor league pitcher with a supply like this, McCauley defined, may run into command issues by trying to repeat this formidable supply pitch after pitch.
“For some guys that get on this excessive of a place, it may most likely trigger quite a lot of inconsistency,” McCauley mentioned.
That being mentioned, “good” pitching mechanics should not nearly reaching excessive positions, however optimally timing the sequence of those positions.
Grant Messner, then a pitcher at Caltech, wrote about going to Driveline in 2018 to kind out some velocity points; I’d suggest studying the complete publish. Driveline discovered that one factor holding Messner again was the timing of when his hip and shoulder, respectively, hit their most velocity. Messner was at nearly zero seconds — to optimize his velocity, he wanted it to be extra like 0.05 seconds. 5-hundredths of a second, in different phrases, separated inefficient mechanics from good mechanics. And that’s only one part of a supply that Messner poetically describes as an “infinite-dimensional mechanical downside.”
“Guys that create positions like this — these are the fellows you’re sometimes seeing have greater stroll charges, spray the ball, get very inconsistent ball flight,” McCauley mentioned.
As I identified in my article on launch angles final month, the subsequent Bryan Woo may be identifiable from a handful of pitches in entrance of KinaTrax cameras. The exact variables captured by an organization like KinaTrax — hip-shoulder separation, core stability, leg extension at hand break, and so forth. — could be measured and in comparison with different professionals to search for outlier performers.
You can most likely take a look at Woo’s biomechanical information, for instance, and discover proof for Cal Raleigh and Riley McCauley’s observations that Woo strikes like Zack Wheeler.
Wheeler and Woo each succeed as a result of they throw high-velocity fastballs from distinct slots with distinctive command. A fastball like Wheeler’s or Woo’s “simply will get on you,” as Raleigh described it. And the flexibility to throw that fastball could be linked on to the best way these pitchers “glide down the mound,” harnessing athleticism that stands out even among the many tremendous proficient individuals who throw baseballs for a residing.
“That is subjective, however from what I’ve seen, the larger positions you get into, it’s going to be more durable to create stress and throw strikes in these positions,” McCauley mentioned. “However that’s the place you get guys — like Joe Ryan or Wheeler or Woo — who’ve in some way discovered stability in these loopy positions. You’ve now created a monster of a man that has elite command and really distinctive supply. And now you’re speaking a few beast.”
