Framber Valdez Made a Change

If you had to associate a single current major leaguer with throwing sinkers, Framber Valdez would be toward the top of the list. His standout career is all about throwing sinkers and keeping the ball on the ground. So imagine my surprise when I was perusing a leaderboard of starters who used their secondaries most frequently with two strikes in 2024. The top of that list is dotted with pitchers who confounded my classification system: We’ve got Corbin Burnes, Graham Ashcraft, and Clarke Schmidt there representing the cutter brigade. Most of the other pitchers in the top 10 mix in cutters liberally with two strikes. Then we’ve got Valdez, in 10th and looking sorely out of place.

Train your eyes on Valdez, and you’ll start to ask yourself: What’s going on here? In some ways, his statistics are consistent to the point of monotony. Take a look at his strikeout and walk rates over the years, plus some league-adjusted run prevention numbers:

After some early-career wildness, Valdez has produced a string of near-identical seasons. But while doing that, he’s cut back on using his sinker to finish off hitters. I know what you’re thinking: Sure, to throw his wipeout curveball. But nope! It’s a changeup story:

Early in his career, Valdez didn’t throw many changeups. He used the pitch between 5% and 10% of the time, almost exclusively to righties; it was an emergency option that he mostly avoided. That was with good reason: With a nasty sinker and wipeout curve, he simply didn’t want to give hitters a break from his two top options.

Valdez’s curveball seems like the perfect two-strike pitch. It’s huge and frequently misses the zone low; hitters defending the plate are liable to end up fishing at something that bounces if he starts it on the same plane as his sinker. But the fish haven’t been biting in recent years. Putaway percentage is a simple statistic – strikeouts per two-strike pitches thrown. It shows a clear trend:

If you ask our pitch-based models, his curveball is broadly unchanged. It’s one of the nastiest in baseball, and he locates it acceptably well; it’s never going to be pinpoint given the huge movement. Nothing much has changed on that front, though, which is what we care about. It’s still mostly the same pitch, but batters just aren’t being fooled as frequently. That feels logical to me; when a guy throws one signature pitch for seven years, well-compensated elite athletes who are paid to beat that guy will get better at facing it.

Valdez hasn’t been taking this erosion in curveball effectiveness sitting down, though. First, he dabbled with incorporating a slider, as you can see in the two-strike usage chart. But in 2024, he hit on a new approach, and the changeup is now ascendant. If you take a quick look at one, it’s easy to see why Valdez might lean on it. Much has been made of his harder sinker and attendant decline in groundball rate. But that harder sinker (94.1 mph in 2024, up from 92-93 earlier) has meant harder changeups too, and the new Valdez changeup benefits greatly. A 90-mph changeup is just nasty:

That’s particularly tough on righties, and Valdez mostly throws the pitch when he has a platoon disadvantage. But in two-strike counts, he’s seen the benefits of diversification even to lefties. Check out the difference between all counts and two-strike counts:

How has that changeup done? By putaway percentage, it’s no better than his curveball. It doesn’t induce more whiffs or lead to a higher chase rate. But there’s one major difference between the two pitches: The changeup gets an absolute ton of grounders.

I mentioned Valdez’s harder sinker and declining groundball rate up above. It would feel disingenuous to write about him and not mention that major change. But how many grounders you generate isn’t exclusively about how many grounders your fastball generates. Believe it or not, Valdez’s sinker was the least grounder-friendly of his three main pitches in 2024:

That might look weird, but his changeup is heavy. Measured in terms of vertical movement relative to similar-velocity pitches of the same type, it has more unexpected drop than his sinker. Changeups are grounder-friendly pitches to begin with, and he also locates it down, as shown by our new heat maps:

Since you might not have seen a heat map of this exact style before, here’s his sinker for comparison:

Now things are starting to make a little more sense. Valdez’s changeup has a lot of similarities to his sinker, naturally enough. It’s heavy because everything he throws is heavy. But it’s a little bit more so, at the cost of missing the zone more frequently. That sounds like a two-strike pitch to me – and indeed, to Valdez.

If you’re just interested in results, you might not notice this change. Valdez just finished putting up a season worth between 3.5 and 4.5 WAR for the third straight year – or between 4.5 and 5.5 WAR if you believe in his ability to consistently outperform his FIP. (I surely do, the grounders matter.) The two previous years were interrupted by injury, but aggregate them into a single 32-start season, and they fit the pattern as well. The guy delivers the same season every year.

Under the hood, though, we’re talking about a new and different Valdez. It always felt surprising that he was able to handle major league hitters with only two real offerings. Surely they’d adjust at some point and force him to throw something else. Well, they have – and he has too. Score one for stars finding a way to succeed, even if it’s not the way they’ve done it in the past.

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