HOUSTON — Predictability is part of Ryan Pressly’s prowess. He is the type of power pitcher who doesn’t need deception and won’t disguise what makes him great. Pressly can bump 97 mph with his four-seam fastball and features two of the sport’s best breaking balls. His curveball averages more than 3,200 revolutions per minute, one of the highest spin rates in the sport.
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Still, Pressly’s slider is his most trusted pitch. Opponents hit .152, slugged .182 and whiffed at a 51.7 percent clip against it last season. Pressly spun his slider 51.1 percent of the time during his 10 postseason outings. The Mariners, Yankees and Phillies produced a .105 batting average against it.
Pressly did not allow an earned run in the 11 playoff innings he pitched. He yielded five in his first 11 1/3 frames of this season but allowed just two singles against a slider he couldn’t stop throwing.
“I had, like, a .180-something batting average on it,” Pressly said before Thursday’s game against the Nationals. “Keep using it until they prove to me they can hit it.”
Proof arrived when Pressly took the mound Thursday. In the ninth inning of a scoreless game, he spun a 2-2 slider to Keibert Ruiz. The Nationals catcher redirected it into the right-field bleachers, continuing Pressly’s June swoon and prompting some concern about the two-time All-Star closer. He has allowed seven runs and eight hits across six appearances this month, one in which he might be too predictable with his pitch sequences.
Pressly is throwing fewer four-seam fastballs than at any point in his career, and opponents are starting to sit on his slider as a result. Dominic Smith whacked one for a tying triple Wednesday night. The one Ruiz smoked Thursday was, according to Pressly, “a pitcher’s pitch.”
“It’s not even in the strike zone,” Pressly said. “It’s barely nicking the bottom rail, down and in. I don’t know if you can make a better pitch. You can bounce it if you want. I don’t really know what else to say.”
CRUSH A BASEBALL, BREAK THE TIE#NATITUDE pic.twitter.com/i9WUseOvMb
— Washington Nationals (@Nationals) June 16, 2023
The outing inflated Pressly’s ERA to 3.49. The 2.89 FIP accompanying it suggests some poor luck and is perhaps a better indicator of Pressly’s — or any reliever’s — overall effectiveness. Pressly is paid for his on-field results, not his underlying metrics. Opponents have 10 hits in the past seven innings he’s pitched. Three of them are against his slider.
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“I feel like it’s a good enough pitch that you could tell them it’s coming and, if he executes it well, he’s going to probably have really good results. Some of the times he’s been burned recently, it hasn’t been an executed slider that’s burned him,” pitching coach Josh Miller said before the game.
According to Pressly and Miller, nothing about the slider’s shape, spin or overall effectiveness has changed. Pressly entered Thursday’s outing using his slider 48.8 percent of the time. He’s never thrown it more than 38 percent of the time in any other 162-game season.
“I’ve had so much success with it, so it’s like why change anything? But now the league is starting to make an adjustment — it’s all about making adjustments,” Pressly said before Thursday’s game. “They’ve started cheating to it, and now it’s like, ‘OK, we can make an adjustment now.’ Until a couple weeks ago, no one was making an adjustment to it, so why change anything?”
Pressly has blown three saves in his past seven appearances, including an inglorious ninth-inning implosion Wednesday. He squandered a three-run lead, overthrew home plate after fielding a routine groundball and yielded two extra-base hits into the right-centerfield gap.
The Astros rallied to walk off Washington in the home half, handing Pressly a win he did not deserve. All three of the runs he surrendered were unearned, perhaps the only solace Pressly can take from a forgettable outing. He entered the dugout and spiked his glove against the bench upon its completion. He took a tamer approach after Thursday’s game, slowly shuffling toward the dugout.
“I’ll be the first one to sit here and tell you that three blown saves in the span of two weeks is probably not the best thing in the world,” Pressly said before Thursday’s game. “It’s not my favorite thing to do, obviously. It’s a rough stretch. Everyone goes through it. It’s just a matter of how you get out of it and how you make an adjustment. That’s all it is.”
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Smith’s tying triple Wednesday arrived on a thigh-high slider. A pitch earlier, Smith spoiled one foul in an almost identical location. Pressly threw 17 pitches. Ten were sliders, seven were curveballs and none were four-seam fastballs. Pressly entered Thursday’s outing using his four-seamer just 19.4 percent of the time. He threw it at least 32 percent of the time in each of the past three 162-game seasons.
“I think we have gotten slider-happy. It doesn’t mean I’m just going to stop using it all of a sudden,” Pressly said before the game. “Maybe we just need to set it up a little bit better. There is no exact pitch sequence that you can really nail on the head. It’s more of how we use it and how we get to it.”
The simplest solution is to throw more four-seam fastballs to keep hitters honest. Pressly threw nine of them Thursday after tossing none a day earlier. Washington took five swings against the pitch and whiffed just once, illustrating perhaps another issue with that strategy.
Hitters are 8-for-21 against Pressly’s four-seamer this season, and the pitch is generating just a 7 percent whiff rate. Pressly’s fastball has never been as elite as his curveball or slider, but because those two pitches play so well, it hasn’t been a problem. The whiff rate has dropped precipitously — it was 17.2 percent last season and 18.6 percent in 2021 — but if both breaking balls are performing as they should, Pressly has few problems.
“Fastball shape and fastball (velocity) has all been good,” Miller said. “There’s been maybe some opponent-dependent stuff and also throwing the slider maybe a little bit too much. Being unpredictable is good for the pitcher, and we aim to be that.”
(Photo: Bob Levey / Getty Images)
