If anybody was squinting to understand why the White Sox traded for Lance Lynn in a contract year, his performance in the home opener on Thursday should clear things up.
The White Sox wanted a workhorse, and it only took Lynn two starts to deliver an 11-strikeout shutout of the Kansas City Royals. White Sox relievers went from covering 25⅓ innings over the first seven games to zero innings over the next two days. Lynn wrapped it all up in 111 pitches, and an easy 111 pitches at that. He only threw more than 14 in one inning (the 20-pitch eighth), and 103 of those pitches counted as some variation of a fastball.
That sentence is Statcast-certified correct because I’m not a liar, but it also undersells the diversity in Lynn’s repertoire. His first pitch of the game was an 89.3 mph fastball to Whit Merrifield, who only saw one other four-seam fastball over the other 11 pitches Lynn threw him.
He started out the third inning with a four-seam fastball to Kyle Isbel that clocked in at 89.1 mph. A few pitches later, he went to the same location with 93.3 mph and got a swinging strike three.
How about the sinker? Here’s Lynn tying up Salvador Perez with an 89.5 mph sinker to open the seventh inning. He closed out his masterpiece with the same pitch in theory, but this one was 94 mph, and Jorge Soler swung like it was 104.
And then there’s the cutter, a pitch that supposedly covered a 5 mph spread in the same battle with Andrew Benintendi. If you can trust Statcast’s pitch classification, the 89 mph backdoor offering that got a foul ball for strike one is the same pitch as the 84.7 mph diver that put Benintendi away.
Now, should we trust labels? I’m skeptical, because MLB.com’s video system classifies the second pitch as a curveball, and the release point and spin axis are a lot closer to his breaking ball than most of the cutters. But it’d also be the hardest of the few breakers he threw, so he messes with that scale as well.
This is how Lynn goes about his business — changing speeds, changing tilts, and having the command to make effective velocity work in his favor. An 89 mph sinker to Perez sounds like a bad idea when 93 is available, but when it’s 89 mph two inches in off the plate, what’s Perez going to do with it? Peak Miguel Cabrera is just about the only hitter who can barrel that up and keep it fair. Lynn might only throw fastballs, but his three pitches are setup pitches and putaway pitches.
- Four-seam: 41 pitches, six whiffs
- Sinker: 34 pitches, five whiffs
- Cutter: 33 pitches, six whiffs*
(*One was probably a curveball.)
Occasionally this approach backfires because it’s easier said than done. He gave up 13 homers over 85 innings last year, and a number of them came early in the count. Yet he still posted an excellent season because more than half of them were solo shots, and nearly half of them were to the Houston Astros.
When Lynn finds a groove like this, it looks like he can pitch forever, because the velocity showed no detectable pattern over the course of innings …
… and should his in-season stamina resemble Thursday’s in-game stamina, the in-season extension talks should intensify.
April 10, 2021 at 12:25AM
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With shutout, Lance Lynn shows White Sox fans the big idea - Sox Machine
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