MLB Pipeline Pitching Lab: Rays' Bradley

Taj Bradley has added sharpened pitches to his arsenal over the last two years the way the rest of us tick off items on our grocery lists.

Mix his four pitches together, and Bradley has become MLB Pipeline’s No. 21 overall prospect and (perhaps more importantly) one of the Minors’ most consistently dominant pitchers of 2021 and 2022.

Last season, the Rays right-hander led Minor League full-season qualifiers with a 1.83 ERA over 103 1/3 innings. This year, he’s reached Double-A and Triple-A at just 21 years old, and he enters Wednesday with a 2.61 ERA and 122 strikeouts in 110 1/3 innings. He was the American League starter in July’s SiriusXM All-Star Futures Game at Dodger Stadium to boot.

“I like to learn on my own,” he said. “I'm different from everybody else, and everybody else is different from me. I feel like there isn’t a lot of the same stuff. Their stuff might work differently. Their approach might be different. So for me, I like to step onto the mound and go with the game.”

Back in July just before his Triple-A Durham debut, Bradley talked to MLB Pipeline about the development of his four-pitch mix. To illustrate that repertoire, we’ll be using video from his quality start at Charlotte on Sept. 4. As is the case in all Charlotte home games, Statcast data is available so you can follow along at home.

FASTBALL

The Georgia native was just 17 when the Rays drafted him in the fifth round in 2018, making him certainly raw in his early professional days, with the low-90s velocity to show for it.

That all changed in 2020.

“I never noticed it,” Bradley said of a velo spike. “The COVID year was probably when it hit, but I never had a radar gun at all. So I got to instructs, and they started telling me my fastball was starting to play up in the zone. Then I started realizing the velo was coming, but I never really did anything to achieve that.

“I had tried to play catch with whoever I could, whenever I could. I did workouts in the living room of my house with a physioball, a few bands and a dumbbell. Probably not as much strength training as you assume, but I guess work ethic brought me to perfect my craft.”

The result: velo gains that have carried late into the 2022 season as well.

Bradley sat 94-96 mph with his fastball in the start highlighted above, touching as high as 97.3 mph twice. (Note: the broadcast radar gun appears to be stuck on 81 mph in these clips.) His final pitch was a 96.8 mph heater that froze Carlos Perez for his sixth K of the night. In all, he threw 48 fastballs, accounting for 59.3 percent of his 81 pitches. He got called strikes or whiffs on 16 of those 48 heaters for a CSW rate of 33.3 percent, above the good standard of 30 percent.

CUTTER

We’ll call it a cutter because Bradley calls it a cutter.

“That’s my mindset on it, but some people say it’s more of a slider,” he said. “So maybe it’s a slutter if you want to chop two words together and do that. Some days, it’s a slider. Some days, it’s a true cutter. Some days, it’s in between.”

In this age of constantly changing pitch designations, it might not matter that much what you call Bradley’s best breaking pitch as an outside observer. But even thinking about its name has a place in the right-hander’s refinement of the pitch.

“In my mind, I’d say I want to treat it like a cutter so I stay behind it more and have late break to it,” Bradley said. “I don't want a sweeping pitch at all. I don't think it plays well with me.”

The breaker wasn’t quite as on in this look as it has been in Bradley’s other stops. He threw the mid-80s offering 20 times over his 81-pitch outing and got a called strike or whiff on it on only three occasions (14.3 percent).

That isn’t to say Charlotte was crushing the pitch either; the Knights actually fouled it off seven times and only managed one hit (a Lenyn Sosa double in the sixth). We’ve included those fouls, along with the called strikes and whiffs, in the video above to highlight how well the cutter can keep hitters off-balance because of its late break and tunneling off the heater.

CHANGEUP

A developing changeup is a cliché in the prospect world because many young hurlers never need it to dominate. That was the case with Bradley, who still preferred to eschew the cambio entering 2021 until the results told him he needed to reconsider.

“I remember in Kannapolis,” Bradley said, “my [Charleston] pitching coach told me that lefties were hitting .340, so I might as well throw it. What's the worst that could happen?”

By the time he left the Single-A level, left-handers’ average against him was down to .219. It’s back up to .249 across Double-A and Triple-A this season -- a modest bump but still well below where it was at the start of 2021.

In this Sept. 4 start, Bradley had impressive control of his changeup, with all nine of the ones he threw landing for strikes. He had more called strikes and whiffs (five) on the change than he did on the cutter, a rarity from his typical results.

There isn’t a ton of separation on it -- the low-spin pitch sat 89-90 mph and topped out at 91.6 -- but even a little difference off the heater and 10-14 inches of more vertical drop than the fastball are all Bradley needs to make the changeup an effective third pitch.

“I just use it as a change of speed,” he said. “If they’re looking fastball, I’ll change the speed up, get them out in front, get a ground ball. Maybe it’ll have some fade to it on a good day, and that's where it'll play best.”

CURVEBALL

Coming out of the high-school ranks, Bradley had a quality 12-to-6 curve, but the more the Rays studied it and the more comfortable the righty got with his cutter, the less he used the deuce in outings. Last year, it was completely scrapped, forcing Bradley to focus more exclusively on the breaking pitch that played best off his riding fastball. It’s back for 2022 to change batters’ eye line, but it’s still used relatively sparingly.

“I throw it in when it fits best in my mind,” Bradley said. “So if that's two per game, three per game, one per game, 10 per game -- I don't really have an ideal [usage] going in. But as soon as I read the game and where it's going, that's when I start having that process.”

Bradley dropped in four curveballs in Sunday’s outing, as seen above. Three of the four were used as the first pitch in an at-bat, while the fourth came when Bradley was comfortably ahead 1-2 in the count. It’s a show pitch, but even that has value in an otherwise special arsenal.