Baseball is the only major American sport where being “funky” is a good thing. In everything we do in life, we train for what we can expect from our surroundings, but when life throws you a curveball (pun intended), you have to adjust rapidly. Sometimes, that can be very difficult, like when it comes to the discipline of hitting. Pitchers that defy expectations and redefine the standard for pitching are the ones that succeed. These pitchers separate themselves from the majority by, in some way, being different. Or, to use a term that lefty quarterbacks might identify with, the best pitchers are the ones that pitch weird.
Enter Hoby Milner, a reliever for the Milwaukee Brewers, who’s having one of the best seasons for a reliever in 2022, and he pitches in the same bullpen as All-Stars Devin Williams and Josh Hader. To be honest, I had no idea who Milner was before I stumbled across the reliever ERA leaderboards and saw him at 20th on the list with a 1.89 ERA. It turns out, there’s a good reason why I didn’t know who he was: 2022 is Milner’s best season as a Major League reliever, and it’s by a lot. From 2017-2021 with four different franchises, Milner’s ERA was 4.77 over 93 games, which, for anyone who might not have a great gauge for ERA, is pretty bad, especially for a reliever. So, how’d he find his groove?
Baseball Savant is a great website when it comes to pitch-tracking data, leading the charge in helping explain what baseball hasn’t been able to quantify for decades. With the Google Cloud-Statcast technology that Baseball Savant houses on its site, we, as fans, are able to get an inside look at how teams measure their pitching (and hitting, running, and fielding). Of the many fields you can sort pitchers by, one of them is pitch movement. Horizontal and/or vertical movement on a pitch and how drastic that movement is given its speed can give insight into how pitchers induces outs. Clay Holmes’s sinker is a great example of this. With an average speed almost at 97 miles an hour and a vertical drop that’s 21% greater than comparable sinkers, Clay’s sinker is ultra-effective, which has put the Yankees All-Star closer atop the leaderboard for ground ball percentage among pitchers with at least ten appearances.
What’s interesting, though, is that extra pitch movement isn’t always a great thing. Hoby Milner has 8.8 extra inches of horizontal movement on his four-seam fastball compared to fastballs of a similar speed. Milner’s fastball averages 89.1 miles per hour, which, frankly, is not good. For a while, though, it was his most frequently-used pitch, so of course he was bound to have a bad ERA. With a sluggish fastball that drops into the strike zone like a flower petal, how could you not? Milner is a lefty, so it makes perfect sense that with that kind of #1 pitch, righties for his career bat .298 against him. Milner was never going to get anywhere with that kind of pitching style, so he changed his arsenal completely.
The reason why Hoby Milner has a fastball so abnormally slow is that he throws side-arm. But when you watch him pitch, it’s not a normal side-arm motion. Milner’s arm moves like a whip when he pitches, loading up in a crouched windup before sling-shotting the ball out of his hands like a sideways trebuchet. Milner’s pitching motion is incredibly rare, but hitters saw right through his fastball and pummeled it in previous seasons. Most side-armers don’t use fastballs as frequently as most other pitchers because their arm motion makes the physics of a fastball ineffective. So, the Brewers reliever needed to hit the reset button on his mix of pitches. With funkiness as his asset, for the 2022 season, Milner dropped his fastball usage from 51.1% in 2021 to 5.5% this season, the fourth-largest decrease in fastball usage among pitchers with 10 appearances! With all new real estate for off-speed and breaking ball pitches, Milner took a page out of the Book of Clay Holmes (my favorite biblical text) and started incorporating a sinker into his game 46.8% of the time. Because of the natural sharp downward movement of sinkers along with Milner’s odd throwing motion, his ground ball rate sits at 55.1% in 2022 compared to 28.1% in 2021, which is a miraculous increase to say the least. Ok, now we’re getting somewhere, Hoby.
Along with his above-average sinker, Hoby Milner also still uses a curveball and changeup at usage percentages that haven’t changed much from last year, but they didn’t have to for Milner to attain the greatness that he’s having. As I said before, Milner doesn’t throw that hard because of his delivery, so power-pitching isn’t a part of his game. Instead, he paints the corners with pinpoint accuracy, letting his pitches deaden to ensure a limited amount of fly balls and line drives. You can see this when you look at Milner’s heat maps. Most of his pitches are meant to catch the shadow of the plate, or the area of the strike zone where the difference between balls and strikes is the smallest. He almost never gives hitters a good pitch to square up, which is evidenced by his “weakly hit” percentage of 11.2%. For reference, the MLB average in this category per Baseball Savant is 3.8%. He really just never needed a fastball in his arsenal in the first place.
Yes, you can make an argument that strikeout relievers are better than ground ball relievers. Just like a home run is objectively the best outcome for a hitter, a strikeout is the best outcome for a pitcher. Except in the rare circumstance of a dropped third strike, nothing good happens for a batting order when a batter strikes out. But where there are strikeouts, there are also high pitch counts, and when you have professional hitters up to bat who are trained to crush balls with exit velocities in the triple digits, sometimes inducing grounders is the way to go. But ideally you wouldn't want to pair the same type of relievers together. That's why the Brewers have a great bullpen order if Milner and Brad Boxberger combine for the early relief innings, while Devin Williams and Josh Hader take care of the back half. Each of those pitchers have unique strategies to get batters out, whether it be pounding the strike zone like Boxberger, using a sorcerous changeup like Williams, or being a strikeout machine like Hader.
So somehow, Hoby Milner’s name is up there with some awesome veteran relievers on an excellent pitching staff (the rest of the Brewers’ pen isn’t great, but the starters speak for themselves). How does someone who can barely touch 90 miles per hour on the mound get on the same level as the rest of the great pitchers in Milwaukee, you ask? Besides hard work and practice, it’s all in how Milner presents himself. Everything about his pitching is supposed to make a hitter uncomfortable. It’s the spin and location of his pitches, sure, but how can you gameplan to face a pitcher that has such an unorthodox release point? You can’t, that’s how. It’s because of Milner’s side-arm delivery that his pitches turn into different animals compared to their standard counterparts. Milner’s catapult of an arm gives him the Deluxe Package when it comes to surprising hitters and keeping them off-balance.
Hoby Milner is different. Hoby Milner is efficient. But most of all, Hoby Milner is weird. And that’s where all of his prosperity starts.
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