2025: the year of the Hicks sinker unleashed?
What caused Jordan Hicks’s fall from rotation revelation to relief liability is no great mystery. In fact it was anticipated from the very beginning. The transition from reliever to starter wasn’t going to be like flipping a switch. The arm would have to be stretched out, the legs steadied, the workload managed, new pitches learned — it would be a whole season affair of trial and error.
Then Hicks made himself indispensable. Through April he was the best starter on the Giants and one of the best in the league. By the end of May he boasted a 2.70 ERA (12 starts, 63.1 IP) and an impeccable groundball rate that limited opponents to a .218 batting average and .346 slugging percentage.
I don’t think anyone thought Hicks would be as good as he was at the start of the season, and by the time he started to burnout in June, we had grown accustomed to an excellence that couldn’t be sustained. He had guided San Francisco through the early season Snell malaise, the never-ending wait for Robbie Ray and Alex Cobb — by the time the cavalry had arrived, Hicks had ridden his own horse into the ground. Hicks had only thrown more than 1,000 pitches in a season once before as a reliever (2023) — a career high he eclipsed in early June.
Exhaustion had set in. Though the split-finger (a pitch he didn’t throw much as a reliever) had its uh-oh moments — most notably this one — reasonable analysis would conclude that Hicks was undone by his primary pitch. Though I am breaking from Savant’s Run Value here, I gotta believe the sinker was the stinker.
Format it. Make it bold.
Problematic pitch: the Sinker.
As a starter, the fastball usage hovered around 50%. The average velocity of the pitch when Hicks posted a sub-2.00 ERA in April sat at 95.6 MPH. In Hicks’s first career start, with adrenaline infusing his blood with a Fast & Furious NOS like boost, the sinker’s average velocity broke 97 MPH. Over his first 13 starts it matched a 95 MPH or higher average six times. Over his final seven starts, the sinker managed to crack the 94 MPH mark only once. By the end of July, when Hicks made his last start on the 23rd, the average velocity had dropped to 93.4 MPH. The pitch he threw at 104.6 MPH a season before had become a shell of itself.
Speed kills. Rather, too much speed too early kills. Opposing hitters who hit .238 with a .333 slug against the fastball in April had doubled both those averages by July. They were getting better at spitting on it if it was a ball, while hitting it and hitting it harder when it was in the zone.
Nightmare at-bats became more frequent. Prolonged battles in which Hicks struggled to put opponents away extended innings and inflated pitch count and heaped on stress and strain. The sinker didn’t have the kick it once had, nor did Hicks feel comfortable reverting to “closer mode” mid-game when there were more innings to navigate. He had to pace himself, and in an attempt to do so, it’s possible that he took on more work.
Without that elevated speed, the sinker was simply a different pitch in terms of movement. There wasn’t much change in horizontal movement from 2023 to last season, but in terms of vertical drop, the bottom basically fell out of it. The pitch didn’t “rise” as much as the season wore on. It didn’t boast as much of a flat horizontal bite as it did here against Tim Anderson…
or here against Tim Anderson…
or against Jurickson Profar in early April…
rather the sinker took on a lazier loop with no real zip or bite, one that could leak out over the heart of the plate, like it did here against Matt Carpenter in late June.
Inches determine whether that fastball handcuffs a lefty or wilts directly into his swing path — and Hicks no longer had the command to walk that fine line. The pitch wasn’t going where he wanted it to go, or doing what he wanted it to do. A combination of exasperation and exhaustion manifest perhaps in his ever-changing sinker arm slot.
Overall, the problem was not really the pitch itself but the circumstances it was being delivered in. Sinkers under duress, from an unacclimated, thus flawed, vessel. The good news is that Hicks won’t have to do that first year ever again. He worked his tail off through the All-Star break, tossed 100+ innings, and maybe it didn’t feel like it at the time, but his body and his fastball will be better for it.
Hicks and the Giants pitching coaches are viewing the high velocity he burst out of the gates with last season as less of an over-zealous mistake and more of a goal. A half-dose of high-velo sinkers while toggling between whiff-y secondary pitches like the split-finger and sweeper obviously worked well, so I’m sure they want to figure out a way to make that sustainable. Strength and durability and sustained velocity is the goal. Added muscle mass might help, and it sounds like those necessary physical adjustments have already been made: Hicks has added around 15 pounds to his frame, mostly in leg muscle.
A different mental approach might be required as well. In an Athletic interview in late January (sub. required), pitching coach J.P. Martinez said he talked with Hicks about not “holding back” in tough situations even if in early innings. The thinking is that baseball games aren’t linear. Plenty are lost in the first and second innings, so why should a pitcher save his best stuff for a later inning that might not ever come? Martinez believes that Hicks shouldn’t shun the closer mentality now that he’s a starter, rather use it as a weapon to close out each inning. Don’t tip toe around the rubber, but stomp on it. Dig deep and attack when the game calls for it. It’s a shift that would certainly alter Hicks’s approach on the mound to something more fluid and more fitting to his style.