Everyone know Ryan's tricky fastball is coming -- but they still can't hit it

MINNEAPOLIS – There’s nothing quite like Joe Ryan’s fastball. Hitters know it’s coming. They know what it’s going to do. And they’re still not ready for it.

“His fastball is just electric,” said Twins catcher Alex Jackson.

Despite averaging “only” about 93-94 mph, Ryan’s four-seamer is one of the best pitches in baseball. In an era of velocity, Ryan makes hitters look foolish with his combination of location, movement, and a rare mix of a low arm slot and high riding action.

• Box score: Twins 5, Angels 3

If you’ve never seen it before, good luck. But the Ryan fastball can fool even hitters who have seen it over and over again.

“You know what he’s got,” said catcher Ryan Jeffers. “You know his stuff. It’s just hard to handle it all.”

Ryan has always had an unusual fastball, going back to his high school days. The velocity has varied, sometimes touching 97, 98 mph, sometimes dipping near 90. The movement, location, and arm slot have not.

He’s a testament to a rather unusual concept in modern baseball: velocity is not actually everything. Ryan has averaged 93.5 miles per hour on his four-seamer this year, though he’s had games as low as 91.6 and as high as 94.6.

“If I only have [93 or 94] that day, I know that that also works,” Ryan said. “Because guys with 90 mile an hour fastballs get swing and miss too -- even 88. So I think it's more where you put it. More, are they off, out of timing, or looking for something else, maybe? Are they looking for a pitch but it’s in a different location?”

It’s hard to define what specifically makes Ryan’s fastball so special. It’s a variety of things. But if you’re boiling it down to one unusual aspect, it’s this: he throws a pitch that has four-seam, high-riding movement from an arm slot where hitters are used to seeing two-seam, sinking movement.

“When you see the slot where it’s at, you don’t think the ball is going to have the action that it does,” said Twins manager Derek Shelton. “He really does a good job, as low as he is, being able to stay on top of the ball and being able to get vert and go up top with it.”

Ryan comes at hitters from a lower angle than just about any starter in baseball. His average vertical release point on his four-seamer is 4.68 feet above the ground, the lowest on any four-seamer by a starter in baseball (min. 250 fastballs thrown) this season.

And yet, 26.7 percent of his four-seamers are in the top third of the strike zone -- one of the highest rates among starters. It starts lower than anyone, and ends higher than most. It’s a pitch that plays tricks with your mind.

“He throws from a lower slot than normal,” said Jeffers. “And guys who throw from a lower slot normally can’t get four-seam movement on the low slot. … There’s not a lot of guys like that. Low-slot four-seam guys are outliers.

“He gets a lot of arm-side run on his ball too, so there’s a lot about the fastball that’s just metrically different from anything else you see as a hitter.”

The end result is that it’s simply one of the best fastballs in baseball, at any velocity. At +72, Ryan has the highest pitching run value on four-seam fastballs since 2022, his first qualifying season.

Among the 85 pitchers with 200-plus swings against their four-seamer, Ryan’s 27.6% whiff rate is tied for 12th. All 11 pitchers above him throw their four-seamer at a higher average velocity than does Ryan (93.5 mph). He’s not throwing it unusually hard, but he’s throwing it by you just the same.

“There’s a difference between what it says on the radar gun at 94 and what the action of the pitch does,” said Shelton. “It’s the old adage of, it’s harder than it looks. Now we can just measure it.”

Of course, Ryan doesn’t just throw a fastball. He’s a curious, intellectual pitcher, and he’s now expanded his arsenal to include six pitches: the four-seamer and a sinker, a sweeper and a slider, a curveball and a splitter. He throws the sinker as hard as the four-seamer, and he’s evolved to where he throws the four-seamer less than half the time.

That means that even if you wanted to force yourself to adjust to the heater, to sit on it, you can’t. He can come at hitters two or three different ways in the same game.

“You can tell yourself, ‘I know how I need to try and hit this pitch,’ but the thing that’s made him so good and continuing to grow is you no longer can just cheat to his fastball,” said Jeffers. “If you’re hitting against him, there are so many ways he can get you out now that it’s almost impossible to be like, ‘Hey, he’s got this fastball, I have to do this to try and hit it.’ There’s so much else. You’ve got the curveball, the splitter, the cutter, the sinker. There’s so much else that you have to worry about now that it’s a lot for a hitter to try and figure out.”

But it all plays off the fastball, the one he’s thrown for as long as he can remember.

It’s just what he’s always done.

“My fastball always worked,” he said. “[Even when I was throwing] lower 90s. So then I was like, there has to be some uniqueness there. Then I got into people talking about lower slots. No one really knew at the time for a long time why it worked. It was just, it works.”