Hard-throwing lefties who become dominant relievers is a tale as old as time, but Miller will be able to tell a tale no other hard-throwing lefty can.
2024 stats: 73 G, 67.1 IP, 4-5 W-L, 3.88 ERA (3.67 FIP), 11.6 K/9, 5.1 BB/9, 1.31 WHIP, +0.4 fWAR
Many years from now, during a cold holiday season, Grandpa Erik Miller will sit down and tell his grandchildren about the five times he struck out Shohei Ohtani in a single season. If he continues to pitch at or better than his 2024 levels, though, that holiday tale might not become an Al Bundy-level boast*. It will be just one chapter in a larger story.
Having said that, since every waking moment of Shohei Ohtani’s 2024 season was the most important moment in Baseball history (as MLB led us to believe), then these 9 minutes and 23 seconds of imperfection on Ohtani’s part are important, too:
That’s the silly-fun part of this player review. The real meat of it comes in the form of this other surprise: do realize that Erik Miller wasn’t sent down at all this season? He made the Opening Day roster and then… just never went down. I thought for sure he had gone down as part of option shenanigans — but that wasn’t the case.
It’s a good thing to be a left-handed pitcher who averages 97 mph with his fastball.
It was as early as May that I took a look at his obvious impact on the San Francisco Giants in the bullpen.
It’s still early, of course, but Erik Miller is impressive sizzle. He’s making it very easy to imagine him joining the line of Camilo Doval and Ryan Walker as hard throwing relievers developed by the Giants.
Um, okay, well, so maybe not Camilo Doval, but at the time that post went up we had no idea how far off the rails Doval’s season would go.
At the time, the one data point that warranted some skepticism or simply a degree of concern was the walks. He had a 14% walk rate through May 3rd (15 IP). That rate did drop, though… down to 13% over his next 52.1 IP — though, it shot up to 16.5% over the final two months of the season. His velocity also dipped as the season went along.
That’s about what should be expected, though, since the 67.1 innings he pitched for the Giants in 2024 were the most innings he’d thrown in any season since 2019, when he pitched 118.2 innings combined for Stanford and A-ball for the Phillies (the team that drafted him). It’s a 5-inning increase over his 2023 workload, too, when he sported a 2.45 ERA across 62.1 innings for Richmond and Sacramento.
All of his pitch value is tied up in that four-seam fastball, according to Statcast. The +6 Run Value on his 97 mph average was 67th overall in MLB, right in line with a lot of relievers, including Michael Kopech, Carlos Estevez, Raisel Iglesias, and Ryan Brasier. It was also 90th percentile in FB velocity.
His high walk rate on the season (13.4% — 2nd percentile) was balanced out by a 30.6% strikeout rate (92nd percentile) and his 85% Whiff rate was also outstanding (85th percentile). He also had great expected stat results, with an xERA of 3.14 (87th) and xBatting Average of .190 (95th). In simpler terms, his fastball is elite.
It’s the secondary pitches that both contribute to that treacherous walk rate and prevent him from being an elite reliever. By run value, his changeup (0) and slider (-2) just haven’t been positive contributors to his arsenal. Now, he does have great spin on that slider (2,643 rpm) and it does carry a whiff rate of 37.5% — the most swing and miss of his three pitches — but something in his delivery doesn’t deceive hitters.
Statcast has a 24.7% Chase rate — as in, the rate at which hitters chase his pitches outside of the zone. That is 10th percentile. 327th out of 366 pitchers measured by Statcast. Basically, the only batter fooled by Erik Miller’s stuff this year was Shohei Ohtani. The rest simply couldn’t catch up to his fastball.
The Giants got him at the beginning of 2023 in exchange for Junior Marte, so, all things considered, this has been a great pickup. You’d like to hope that this year didn’t show us the very best version of him, but it does seem as though the walks will always be with him, and absent some tweak to his delivery, it’s plausible that his success will be determined solely by his fastball velocity.
Still, every year, a major league bullpen features a flameout and a guy who comes out of nowhere to have a magical season. Erik Miller was that magical season.