Although the Minnesota Twins have been relatively quiet this offseason, they added a high-upside reliever for just under $1 million. Upside is only worth as much as the results it brings, but Josh Staumont isn’t short on potential. He shares unique qualities with Kenley Jansen and David Robertson, two dominant relievers.
Jansen and Robertson have parlayed their unique approach into remarkable careers. Jansen has 420 saves and a career 2.51 FIP, while Robertson has saved 157 games and owns a career 2.97 FIP.
The combination of cut and ride on their fastballs makes them unique. Cut-ride, or cut-carry as many call it, is loosely defined as a four-seamer with no more than 3.0 inches of horizontal movement with non-dead zone amounts of vertical movement.
Put differently, it’s when a four-seamer achieves good ride but with horizontal movement that perplexes hitters.
Four-seamers are supposed to have arm-side movement. Many of the best four-seamers have lots of it. It’s part of what allows four-seamers to generate whiffs. Movement away from hitters increases the chances they fail to make contact, though it’s still important to have ride.
Hitters get caught off-guard when four-seamers fail to move arm-side as much as hitters expect. Cut-ride four-seamers don’t necessarily have actual glove-side movement, though they can. But they have minimal arm-side movement, giving the illusion of cut.
Staumont has a four-seamer right on the borderline of the cut-ride variety, and it’s part of why he’s such a tantalizing bullpen arm for the Twins.
However, Staumont’s health is a legitimate concern for the Twins. He underwent thoracic outlet syndrome surgery in July, an injury that has cut several players’ careers short. He could bounce back much more easily if he received the vascular surgery (not the neurogenic).
Should Staumont have a successful recovery, the Twins could unlock his fullest potential. He put up incredible numbers with the Royals from 2019 to 2021, including a 159 ERA+, but he may be able to pitch better than that in Minnesota.
Part of unlocking that potential could include leaning even more into his natural cut-ride tendency. Staumont already throws his four-seamer with the same induced vertical break as Jansen, 18.1 inches. But his 3.1 inches of induced horizontal break trails Jansen’s 1.6.
Given that Staumont has an over-the-top delivery, a slight change in grip and axis tilt could help him achieve even more cut and therefore an even freakier four-seamer.
You can see the difference in the grips in the image below courtesy of former Iowa Hawkeyes pitcher and current assistant coach Casey Day:
The term “gyro degree” helps to explain what axis a pitcher throws on.
The image on the left depicts a four-seamer thrown with a gyro degree of zero, while the right image is something closer to 45 degrees. Staumont releases his four-seamer with 21 degrees of gyro, while Jansen throws his with 38 degrees.
Every pitcher has natural anatomical biases. But if Staumont can throw his four-seamer with a gyro degree tilted slightly more towards 90 degrees, he could create a perfect cut-ride four-seamer.
The amount of cut matters. Research done by Day found that four-seamers with an “effective” cut noticeably outperform those with “ineffective cut.” Four-seamers that averaged only 1.8 inches of arm-side movement had a whiff rate of 16.7% and a 0.430 xwOBACON. In contrast, four-seamers that averaged 6.5 inches of arm-side movement had a whiff rate of just 10.1% and a 0.459 xwOBACON.
Staumont’s four-seamer, though not far off from the aforementioned 1.8 inches of arm-side movement, could improve. Its 10.8% swinging strike rate was 55th percentile among relievers, and its 0.487 xwOBACON was 15th percentile. Getting even more cut could help boost those numbers.
He may lose some of his vertical break simply because tilting that axis will kill some of the backspin that creates it, but he already has a lot of vertical break. If he could create a four-seamer with parameters of 16 to 17 inches of induced vertical break and somewhere between -1 and 1 inches of induced horizontal break, he could become an entirely new pitcher for the Twins. He was already looking like one for the Royals before his injury.
Staumont introduced a slider into his arsenal last season. For years, he used to throw four-seamers, curveballs, and sinkers in his pitch mix. But he found great success with this new slider.
The pitch tunnels perfectly with his four-seamer, traveling along the same path until falling off the table before hitters could correctly identify it.
He only threw 77 of them in his injury-shortened season, but the pitch returned extraordinary results. Hitters swung and missed at it on 20.8 percent of the pitches he threw, and they did very little with the pitches they made contact with (99th percentile xwOBACON).
Though pitch-tracking technology likely incorrectly identified his slider as a splitter, he also threw a splitter for the first time in an appearance on April 18. Based on the video of the pitch, it was probably a slider he missed up and away on:
However, it should be noted that a splitter would pair well with Staumont’s over-the-top release and upstairs-heavy four-seamer approach. It would offer him another solid pitch to tunnel off his four-seamer, and its arm-side movement would give him an offspeed weapon to attack lefties with.
Staumont’s control issues and high walk rate will impede him from making any starts for the Twins, but he represents a low-risk, high-reward bullpen option. Assuming he’s healthy on opening day, he could pitch 60 innings for the Twins. If everything breaks right, he could be an option in setup situations with a FIP in the mid-3.00s.
