Dan Haren uses the cut fastball on nearly 40% of his pitches. / H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY Sports
Former New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera didn't invent the cut fastball - he merely turned it into an art form and a likely place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The cutter has become the fastest-growing pitch in the major leagues, a contributor to higher strikeout rates but even more so to recent increases in ground balls - weak ground balls.
"They're less likely to get the barrel of the bat on the ball," says former pitching coach and Cy Young Award winner Orel Hershiser, who broadcasts games for the Los Angeles Dodgers. "Weak contact."
That was Rivera's calling card - the broken bat - as a pitch that looks like a normal fastball breaks laterally at the last second. From a right-handed pitcher, it bores in on a lefty hitter. That's why some switch-hitters would eschew
the traditional bat-left-against-a-right-hander approach vs. Rivera.
Use of the pitch has jumped almost six-fold since 2004, according to Fangraphs.com, mostly at the expense of the traditional fastball. All other pitches have remained generally steady.
But those numbers might be misleading.
In 2004, 1% of pitches in the major leagues were cutters. The rate climbed steadily to 4.7% in 2010, jumped to 5.7% in 2011 and has remained there since.
Since the start of the 2012 season, 18 pitchers with at least 200 innings have used the cutter on as many as 20% of their pitches.
Recently retired Roy Halladay was the cutter king at 38.1%, but Dan Haren of the Dodgers wasn't far behind at 37.7%.
If the pitch is so effective, why isn't everybody throwing it?
"The cutter is not a pitch for a lazy pitcher," says former major league outfielder Rick Monday, who works with Hershiser on Dodgers games. "If you don't throw it correctly, it's flat across the zone. That's a home run."
In other words, the execution of the pitch must be nearly perfect every time, unlike the room for error built into high-velocity fastballs or pitches that break down rather than across the strike zone. If you can't cut it correctly, you won't cut it.
Speed still dominates like nothing else, as increased velocity across the major leagues is coinciding with record strikeout rates - perhaps a result of larger pitching staffs and an emphasis on innings and pitch limits.
"There's probably less pitching (for each guy), which means there's more velocity," Hershiser says. "So there's more big-time stuff at the end of the game, and if he can't control it, they bring in more big-time stuff."
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Read the original story: When done correctly, cutter is effective