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It is Tuesday, April 15th, Derek Van Riper, Inoceris, and a special guest, Lance Brasdowski, joins the show today.

You've seen Lance on Marquis Sports. He's the player development analyst there. You've probably read his substack, Lancebrose.substack.com, or you've seen him on YouTube, if not all three of those places. Lance, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, guys. I listen to this podcast pretty religiously, so it's really cool to be on it in a more featured sense. I think you guys have me on as winter meetings, kind of how did you get into baseball person? But this is an honor to be on the mantle here with you guys. Yeah, thanks for coming back around. Thanks for joining us the first time. It was kind of an experimental thing we did at the winter meetings, just talking to people about their paths into the game. You can check that out on our YouTube channel. Lots of interesting interviews from folks in a variety of different roles.

Lance, you're at the forefront of new pitches. You write about them extensively. You break a lot of interesting things down on YouTube. And one thing we want to talk about with you today are new pitches that are going to have a long-term impact. Sometimes pitches show up and they disappear, and we never hear from them again. Or they show up and they don't make that much of an impact. We're going to try to cut through a lot of the noise. We're going to look at the AAA level, talk about a few pitchers that are standing out in a good way there and answer some bigger questions. Like, how long does an edge last at the MLB level in 2025? You figure something out as an organization. Is it a good thing tactically for a year? Is it a good thing for a month? How long does it take for the rest of the league to catch up? So all those topics coming up over the course of this show. Let's dig into some of the new pitches this year, though. We're just going to leave this as kind of an open book sort of question for you, Lance. Among the new pitches you've seen, there's tons of them that you've written about. What has stood out to you is something that's going to be a good long-term addition to an arsenal? Yeah, I'll start with Max Fried. I think the Yankees are one of the teams that's on the forefront of some of the seam effects stuff and being able to optimize orientation to pick up shapes that guys hadn't normally been able to capture.

And Max Fried is doing some fun stuff with his sinker.

I mean, you know, Stuff Plus has a jumping from a 104 to a 114 year over year, which is a pretty substantial jump on a pitch that he doesn't throw a ton to right-handed hitters.

But I mean, this is like an optimal approach here from like a, how do you make a pitch better standpoint? He's throwing at the same VLO and he cut five inches of induced furt off it. So it's dropping more. That's like the lower induced vertical break number means more drop. And that's pretty considerable, you know? Like his command of it still looks good. He's zoning the pitch aton.

The overall stuff plus, you know, in your model looks like the same for him. But the Yankees have done some interesting things in terms of just redistributing parts of his mix. I don't know if you noticed, but he's throwing like a true four seamer with armside now. It's actually in there. and then the cutter is the force team that he was throwing last year.

So they played around some weird stuff here.

I wouldn't. side now. It's actually in there. And then the cutter is the force team that he was throwing last year. So they played around some weird stuff here. I would say maybe some of the guys I get into here

are almost more like wholesale. I'm doing this differently versus a specific handedness as opposed

to like one new pitch. Those guys I just think are more interesting from like, wow, you change

a lot standpoint. But I mean, early going swinging strike rates up, you know, strike us and walks are in alignment looking really good. I wonder if they can access like a higher level of Max Fried where he's still that random number generator. Throwing five pitches 10% plus. It's a one-handedness. But these like subtle adjustments where we now have a true force scene, the sinkers there.

It seems like they cut out the in-between slider and only throw in the sweeper,

kind of make him a really deadly weapon for them from the left side needed, given

Coles out for the rest of the season.

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