Do the Mets have something in Trevor Hildenberger?
Side-arm reliever Trevor Hildenberger is fun to watch. Let’s just start with that.
Beyond the aesthetics of his delivery, he can also be very effective. While pitching for the Twins in 2017 and early 2018, the righty was lights out. During that first season, he pitched to a 3.21 ERA while striking out 25.9% of the hitters he faced, walking only 3.5%, and turning nearly 60% of balls in play into grounders.
He appeared to be Minnesota’s closer of the future and then like the sobering reality that comes from turning the lights on during a school dance, the party ended. He struggled with his mechanics, losing the release point on his sinker (and his command of the strike zone with it), and was non-tendered after pitching to an ERA over ten during the 2019 season.
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Well, if you are rooting for a comeback story, it’s hard not to get excited about Hildenberger’s first two spring outings with the Mets. In two innings of work, he has six strikeouts, buoyed by a perfect frame on Sunday in which he struck out all three batters he faced.
Strikeouts are good. I mean, they are the best. If you are a pitcher who misses bats, you will have a very successful major league career. This is common sense. But for a hurler like Trevor Hildenberger, strikeouts are sort of the offspring of his contact pitches. He doesn’t stand on the mound with an evil scowl before throwing 99 MPH up in the zone. No, he throws three pitches at well-below league average speed, and gets hitters to whiff at a 77 MPH change-up. And, as we said, he does so while throwing side-armed. He’s a magician who relies on deception to succeed.
And the key to this deception is the way he offsets a pitch made for contact with another that looks like the same pitch until it drops. When things were going well in Minnesota, it was Hildenberger’s sinker/change-up combination that led the way. He was effective in reducing the amount of time hitters had to differentiate between the two pitches by throwing them at similar release points and fooling batters with late movement. This is why his change-up, which boasts impressive drop, has been able to rack up whiff rates in the 40 percent range even though it is thrown extremely slow (even for an offspeed pitch).
This is also what makes his initial spring results interesting. Hildenberger only threw one change-up on Sunday. For the second straight outing, he relied on a sinker/slider combination. He has been able to get called strikes with his slider and swings-and-misses with his sinker. Whatever works, right?
Sort of. Even when Hildenberger was pitching at his best, his sinker was used the way a sinker is supposed to be used and that was to reduce hard contact by getting hitters to swing on top of the ball. You can’t expect major league hitters to miss 80% of their swings against a pitch you actually expect them to hit, which is astonishingly what Hildenberger has achieved this spring.
Getting people out is a good thing. It’s great to see the former Twin find new ways to do it after missing the 2020 season because he couldn’t make a major league roster. But before we get too excited, it’s hard to know how much his initial results are the product of Hildenberger figuring something out, or if the Marlins (whom he faced in both outings) were just a little overeager at the plate. While it appeared he was doing well masking his slider from his sinker based on his release points, four of the whiffs he earned with his sinker were on the first two pitches of different at-bats (so not sequenced after a slider).
We will find out over the next three weeks what happens when Hildenberger doesn’t generate whiffs with his sinker. And luckily, two people who know him well from Minnesota — pitching coach Jeremy Hefner and reliever Trevor May — are around to give the Mets added insight.