If you want to throw in some heat, get it out of the kitchen.

Reed Detmers, right?

On Wednesday night, the Angels' 24-year-old left-hander got off to perhaps his worst start of the season thus far: He pitched 5 1/3 innings against the Rays, allowing seven hits, two runs (one earned), and four strikeouts. It was just that. It was the worst start to the season ever. 1 earned run.

After Wednesday night's game, Detmers led all major league-eligible starting pitchers with a 1.61 FIP and shared the lead in pitching WAR. His ERA of 1.19 was seventh in the majors. And his success was exposed to reasonable competition. He started four games, all of which the Angels won, against the Rays, Red Sox (twice), and Orioles. His first start for Baltimore was in the Angels' third game of the season. In Games 1 and 2, Baltimore plastered Patrick Sandoval and Griffin Canning all over the park like mosquito guts on a trucker's windshield. Detmers held the Orioles hatchlings to just one run through five innings.

This didn't come out of nowhere. Despite his young age, Detmers is in his fourth major league season. He was a top-10 pick in 2020, another college ball drafted by the Angels in a desperate bid to squeeze out a one-win season from the Ohtani-Trout era. (It didn't work out.) Detmers has been at least an average starter the past two seasons. He started 53 games in 2022-2023, pitching a total of 277 2/3 innings, posting a 99 ERA and 4.7 WAR. He had a no-hitter!

So you know this isn't the scrubs where you spent the best three weeks of your life. But is Detmers actually the front-line starter he's ever resembled in 2024?

When a pitcher's numbers skyrocket like this, the first thing to look at is what's underlying it. Is he throwing new pitches? Did he tweak his breaking ball? Is he changing his pitch rate?

According to this article by Sam Bloom: The Athletic, which features interviews with both Detmers and pitching coach Barry Enright, has changed considerably. Detmers moved his position on the rubber and changed his slider grip from a spiked grip to a more traditional hand position.

In fact, this slider is quite different from last year's slider and the sweeper we tested from time to time in 2022 and 2023. This pitch is more in line with the 2022 slider, more in the mid-80s than in the low-80s, with more movement in both. shaft. That's great, but he's not one of the two things I'm interested in.

Detmers has gotten much better against right-handed hitters.a many Better. All I know is that the platoon was split in his four starts, a small sample, blah blah, and that's all true. But consider that striking out reverse batters is the most important thing for left-handed pitchers. Most of the league is right-handed. It's not Detmers' fault. For generations, left-handed people have been thought to be possessed by the devil. Perhaps in 50 years it will be easier to find left-handed scissors. But until then, Detmers has two options for him. First, find a time machine, go back to the three-batter minimum, and live a comfortable life like Randy Choate. The second thing is to make sure the right-handed hitter gets out.

Until last September, Detmers was trying to do that with his breaking ball. In all of 2023, only 6.6% of pitchers threw changeups to right-handed pitchers. But by September, he was throwing a cambio nearly a quarter of the time against right-handed pitchers, and that percentage has remained more or less stable in 2024.

Based on raw movement numbers, Detmers' changeup is pretty unimpressive. However, his fastball tunnels very well and the average velocity difference between the two is 9 mph, a velocity difference that is difficult for hitters to cover.

But if this is the secret to Detmers' newfound success, it's not reflected in his secondary production numbers. That's reflected in his fastball numbers, which have gone from below average to around the top 10 among qualified starting pitchers.

So what's different here? Two things. Maybe three.

First, Detmers made subtle changes to his fastball. In the past two seasons, the number of vertical movements of pedestrians was well above average. This season, he's sacrificing 2-3 inches of run to get the same amount of gain. If you think about the movement from a pitcher's perspective, it would be approximately 11:00 to 12:00 p.m.

Armside runs are best when used to pull the batter's strings and make them swing on pitches on the edge of the zone or completely outside the zone. That's not really what Detmers was doing last year.

Last year, Detmers threw a fastball to the top of the zone and it kind of stayed there. With his new, more vertical movement, this is what he's doing with his 2024 fastball.

That is, instead of throwing a fastball into the zone and watching it cross the opponent's bat, Detmers throws a fastball at the top of the zone and it moves up and out of reach. I'm watching you do it.

When I looked for some kind of empirical support for the impact this had on swing and whiff rates, I found that 11.1% of Detmers' fastballs above the strike zone earned whiffs. This is almost double the probability on a similar pitch last time. Year. “This is pretty sure,” I thought, until I realized I had forgotten to check a few boxes in Baseball Savant. One of Detmers' nine total pitches turned out to be a fastball that whiffed at or above the top of the zone. The actual numbers are even more surprising.

In the Sam Blum article I mentioned earlier, Enright talks about training Detmer to be a confident pitcher. In the words of Enright (and late 20th century Australian poet and composer Bon Scott), “a big ball.”

So Detmers is a composite of two other pitchers I've written about recently: Max Fried and Lance Lynn. You need to pitch with confidence and avoid throwing fastballs to fastballs. look? After all, this task is not so complicated.