The San Francisco Giants will enter their weekend series against the Chicago Cubs with at least a 1 1/2 game lead over the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League West. (The lead could be as great as two games: the Giants are off Thursday while the Dodgers conclude their business against the St. Louis Cardinals.) With 22 games remaining on the Giants’ schedule, they have a good shot (better than 60 percent, per SportsLine) of becoming the first non-Dodgers team to win the West since 2012.
Soon, the Giants will have to shift their focus away from preserving their division lead and toward attacking the postseason. One looming question they’ll need to answer is who will take the ball for them in Game 1 of a respective series — or, should the worst come to pass, in the NL Wild Card Game. Kevin Gausman would seem like the obvious answer, but the Giants have alternatives if they have concerns about his second-half struggles. One of those candidates is a relative unknown at the national level: 24-year-old right-hander Logan Webb, who has been dominant as of late.
In Webb’s most recent start, on Tuesday against the Colorado Rockies, he allowed three runs over his seven innings of work. That’s notable because it marked the first time he’d allowed more than two runs in an outing since May 5. In between, Webb had started 14 times and compiled a 1.46 ERA and a .523 OPS against. His strikeout-to-walk ratio during that span was 5.5, and he averaged 5.7 innings per pop. Webb’s hot pitching has left him with a 2.64 ERA (157 ERA+) and a 4.23 strikeout-to-walk ratio, far from the 5.36 ERA (80 ERA+) and 2.18 strikeout-to-walk ratio that he had accumulated in his first 94 big-league innings.
How has Webb turned his career around in 2021? Let’s examine two changes he made.
1. Sinker-slider focus
Whenever a pitcher breaks out, an obvious potential explanation is how they’ve changed their pitch usage. Sometimes that entails adding a new pitch, sometimes it means better leveraging their existing pitches. In Webb’s case, he’s redefined himself in part by minimizing what had been his dominant pitch, in his four-seam fastball.
Indeed, Webb has essentially shelved the four-seamer in favor of a sinker that he’s thrown more than 36 percent of the time. He’s also prioritized his slider as his main secondary offering, upping its usage rate from 15 percent to 28 percent. In turn, he’s reduced his changeup usage from 31 percent to 24 percent.
Webb’s tinkering has had two effects. One, he’s become harder to lift. His ground ball rate has improved from 53 percent to 62 percent, and his average launch angle against has dropped from over six degrees to under zero. (As a byproduct, he’s converted 20 percent of his double-play opportunities, as opposed to 14 percent in 2020.) Two, he’s become harder to hit. Opponents have whiffed on more than 46 percent of their swings on his slider, which, in turn, has fueled a 26 percent strikeout rate.
Webb has essentially layered positive effects by reducing the quality and the frequency of contact. That’s an almost foolproof recipe for improving topline results.
2. Deeper release
Another obvious potential explanation for an improved pitcher is their mechanics. In recent years, several pitchers have improved after shortening their arm stroke to gain velocity, repeatability, and deception. Webb hasn’t made that kind of easily detected change. Nevertheless, the data reveals he is getting farther down the mound.
According to TruMedia, Webb has averaged 6.75 feet of extension on his pitches this season. (Extension is measured as the distance from the pitching rubber to the ball’s release.) Last season, Webb’s average extension was 6.52 feet, and the year before that it was 6.32 feet. In other words, he’s gained nearly half a foot since debuting.
Intuitively, that means Webb is leaving batters with less time to pick up on the ball and to make their swing-take decisions; that causes his pitches to play faster than they would otherwise. To wit, TruMedia tracks a statistic called “effective velocity” that illustrates this point. Webb’s sinker has clocked in at 92.8 mph this season, right in line with the 92.7 mark he established in 2020; yet, in terms of effective velocity, his sinker checks in at 93.6 mph, as opposed to 93 mph last season.
That may not seem like a ton of difference, but think about it this way: if Webb’s raw velocity had improved by more than half a mile per hour, it would be mentioned as a reason his performance has ticked up. Just because something is harder to see doesn’t make its impact less notable. Webb is evidence of that effect. He didn’t make the All-Star Game and he isn’t a national figure, but he’s one of the keys for the Giants’ continued success.
