Last season, Red Sox lefthander Drew Pomeranz set about refining his ability to throw fastballs, change-ups and cutters to his arm side -- away from righties, in on lefties.
FORT MYERS, Fla. — Alex Cora thought he’d given perfect advice to one of the young pitchers in Red Sox camp earlier this spring.
“Follow the lefties — we have two of the best lefties in the league,” Cora remembered saying.
That night when he got home, however, Cora realized he’d misspoken.
“We have three,” he said.
Indeed, while David Price and Chris Sale have long been among the best pitchers in baseball, Drew Pomeranz has emerged as an essential part of a lefty-heavy Red Sox rotation.
For years a paragon of inconsistency as he struggled to define a role for himself, Pomeranz has established himself as a reliable big-league starter. He’s one of only six pitchers in Major League Baseball to have qualified for the ERA title and posted a sub-3.50 ERA in each of the past two seasons. The others? Corey Kluber, Chris Sale, Ervin Santana, Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander.
Long gone are the questions of whether Pomeranz had the stamina or the pitch mix to stick as a starter.
(Long gone, too, is the hand-wringing over Boston trading away top prospect Anderson Espinoza to acquire Pomeranz. Espinoza missed the entire 2017 season and is not likely to return in 2018, either, having undergone Tommy John elbow surgery last July.)
It didn’t happen by accident, however.
Pomeranz had just taken part in All-Star Game festivities midway through the 2016 season when the Red Sox acquired him from the San Diego Padres. He’d compiled a 2.47 ERA with the Padres. He wasn’t able to maintain that level with the Red Sox, tiring down the stretch as well as well as having trouble adapting to Fenway Park. Opposing hitters slugged .543 against him in his seven appearances (six starts) at his new home ballpark.
“Once I got over here,” he said, “it was evident that there were things I needed to work on. You can get away with some of that sometimes, but you can’t get away with it the whole year.”
The trouble, Pomeranz came to realize, was his approach. He’d always been a lefty who pitched in on righties, pounding their hands with fastballs to open up the plate for his curveball.
At Fenway Park, however, pitching exclusively in on righties was just an invitation for righties to hit the ball off or over the Green Monster.
“It was on me to put the pressure on them to hit it the other way,” he said. “Guys are looking in on me, anyway, since I attack in -- and you can cheat on one and not hit it well and still hit it out.”
And so Pomeranz set about refining his ability to throw fastballs, change-ups and cutters to his arm side -- away from righties, in on lefties. He moved to the third-base side of the rubber in May. That enabled him to throw his sinker and change-up in such a way that they’d clip the outside corner even as they tailed down and away. He began throwing back-door cutters for the first time in his career.
“Even if it was a ball, it was coming from what looked like more of a strike to the hitter,” he said. “If it just stays out there the whole time, they’re not going to swing at it.”
At the same time, Pomeranz began throwing his curveball less when he was ahead in the count and more when he was behind in the count -- another way of keeping righties off-balance and uncertain.
The result of that work? He posted a 3.44 ERA in 17 starts at Fenway Park last season, limiting opposing hitters to a .389 slugging percentage.
“If you can throw everything and everything is quality, they’re not marking pitches off like they probably did most of my career,” he said. “They’d be like, ‘He throws three pitches, but he can’t throw a changeup and doesn’t throw his curveball and he only throws four-seamers in,’ Now they can’t cross those off, and it’s a big advantage for me.”