Right at the start of the 2024 season, the New York Yankees traded cash considerations to acquire right-handed reliever Jake Cousins from the Chicago White Sox. With the tying run at the plate in the ninth and nobody out, the Yankees needed someone to come in with runners on second and third and put a stop to a ninth-inning rally from Chicago. It wasn’t Clay Holmes trotting out of the visitor’s bullpen in Guaranteed Rate Field however, it was Cousins himself coming in to try and secure the Yankees a win and put them back in first place.
With two strikeouts and a weak flyball, Jake Cousins killed the White Sox rally without surrendering a single run, and he’s become a dependable reliever for this team. It may not sustain itself all season, but Cousins brings a unique look to the table that allows him to deceive hitters and get punchouts.
How Horizontal Approach Angle Is Helping Jake Cousins Dominate With the Yankees
Jake Cousins’ slider is one of the best pitches in baseball, generating a ridiculous 44.6% Whiff Rate and .148 BA at a 66.5% Usage Rate. It’s his best pitch, and the Yankees are having him throw it as much as he possibly can. It’s your typical sweeping slider, the kind that has become extremely popular at the Major League level in recent years, but Cousins can throw hitters off thanks to how he releases the ball.
A true crossbody arm action, Jake Cousins has a 3.23 ft release point horizontally, and that’s important for Horizontal Approach Angle or HAA for short. HAA measures the angle of a pitch’s location relative to the point of release, and a sharp angle can create some difficult reads for hitters. Cousins averaged 5.6° of HAA on his slider, which compared to other sliders (1.7°) or sweepers (2.2°) is one of the sharpest pitches we’ll see in the league. This sounds great, but how are hitters affected by it?
Sharp angles towards a hitter (think a sinker from a right-handed pitcher to a right-handed hitter) will create more swings on the inside part of the plate and fewer swings away. For pitches away from a hitter, the inverse happens, with more swings on the outside part of the plate and fewer swings inside. When you look at where Jake Cousins throws his slider to lefties and righties, you can tell that he’s aware of this phenomenon to some extent.
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The graphic above shows you the heatmap of where Jake Cousins is throwing his slider to left-handed batters, and there are two spots where he’s aggressively attacking. The first is the backdoor slider, and this pitch is great because it gets so many called strikes. The red block represents the side of the zone where lefties are more likely to take a right-handed slider with a sharp angle toward them, so it makes sense that Cousins is going there in-zone the most.
By stealing strikes, he sets up the pitch that he’s going to get his most strikeouts on in these matchups, and that’s the slider down and in, as it’s too low to do damage with and inside which is where lefties are more prone to swing. He takes advantage of the matchup he has to a great extent here, and it’s why lefties have gone from having a .400 OBP from 2021-2023 against Cousins to a mere .241 OBP this season. He struggled early on because he wasn’t able to throw that slider down and in for chases, but in his second stint here he’s posted a 2.14 ERA.
We see a similar situation against right-handed batters, as Jake Cousins throws everything to the outer half of the zone or way off the plate in the same direction, knowing that a ball or even a walk is less consequential than a home run.
The only difference is that Jake Cousins can’t try to steal strikes with sliders on the inside part of the plate because those pitches tend to get hit very hard. He’ll get most of his called strikes in the middle of the zone, and once he’s up in the count hitters are immediately put in a very difficult spot. They have to hope and pray that he hangs one, because if not then he’s likely going to get the ugly chase that he’s looking for.
Having excellent stuff is a key part of being a great reliever, but to miss bats you have to locate your pitches in the right areas. Jake Cousins has improved the command and sequencing of his slider dramatically, and by learning where hitters are more prone to chase or take, he’s able to get ahead and set them up to chase pitches that would be considered uncompetitive in some scenarios.
The Yankees have found a gem off the scrap heap, something that they do at a pretty high rate for their bullpen, and while that unit has been massively disappointing and unreliable this season, Jake Cousins has gotten them out of some big jams.