Will Warren is who the New York Yankees will turn to while Luis Gil is on the IL dealing with back tightness, while the expectation is that he won’t be out for too long, it doesn’t take away from how important these games still are. Right now the Yankees are in the middle of a heated AL East race, sitting 1.5 games up on the Orioles for first place with a softer part of their schedule coming up for a chance to build momentum. Coming off of a strong start against the White Sox, the Yankees are going to ask Warren to keep them in games despite a rocky start to his Major League career.
It’s early, but there’s one element to Will Warren’s game that he could add that might allow him to become the exact kind of starter the Yankees need as they race to secure the top spot in the American League.
How Will Warren Could Elevate His Game And Help the Yankees
When you see how much movement Will Warren can generate on his five distinct pitches, it’s easy to see why the Yankees have high hopes for him. His sinker and sweeper can move over 17 inches to opposite sides of the plate while having a four-seamer and changeup that play well off of each other thanks to his lower release height and solid movement profiles. In many ways, he bears a striking resemblance to Michael King, who the Yankees moved to the rotation before trading him to San Diego in a package that yielded them Juan Soto.
They both feature the same four pitches with their only deviations being that Warren throws a cutter and King throws a gyro slider for their fifth pitch, but their results are complete polar opposites. While Michael King has generated excellent results with his signature sinker, Will Warren has seen his get blistered by Major League hitters, and that’s despite both pitches sharing a ton of similarities.
In fact, Warren’s sinker (97) has a higher Stuff+ than King’s (88), but there’s one key difference between how the two of them use their similar fastballs. First, let’s look at how Michael King deploys his sinker, a pitch that is 8th among sinkers in Called Strike% (min. 250 pitches) while sporting a +17 Run Value since 2022:
Michael King is attacking down and away to right-handed batters and up and in to left-handed batters, which means he’s throwing his sinker on the same side of the plate horizontally, only shifting his cues vertically. He’ll actually shift his sinker location dramatically if he falls down 1-0 in a count, being more willing to throw the sinker in, but why would the count affect when his sinker is more or less effective?
This stems from the concept of Horizontal Approach Angle (HAA), which we discussed with Jake Cousins when talking about why he’s so effective at confusing hitters. The larger the angle, the less likely it is that a hitter will offer at it, and since HAA measures the angle based on the location of the pitch relative to the release point, that means that where a pitch is located can completely change the tendencies a hitter will have on the same exact kind of pitch.
For right-handed pitchers with wide release points like Michael King and Will Warren, they’ll get the largest HAA by throwing pitches towards the first-base side of the plate, meaning that’s where they can steal the most strikes. With that context, it makes sense that Michael King has such a steady diet of sinkers to that side of the plate, since he knows batters are less likely to offer at it, and he’ll force more sinkers to the third-base side of the plate to righties because that’s an easy out pitch if a hitter gets jammed on the swing.
Will Warren does not take advantage of the phenomenon, as he’s actually throwing sinkers that are more likely to get swings from opposing batters.
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To be completely blunt; Will Warren is (intentionally or not) challenging hitters to try and do damage, and since sinkers aren’t really whiff pitches, he’s creating a mess for himself. Gerrit Cole can get away with throwing fastballs in parts of the zone where batters will swing because his four-seamer is designed to get whiffs, meaning there’s a much greater margin for error there.
By not leveraging his mechanical advantage in his favor, Will Warren’s sinker has become a liability he has to work around, when it’s supposed to be a pitch that can steal strikes for him and put him in the driver’s seat at all times. While Michael King throws a first-pitch strike 66% of the time and freezes hitters to set them down 0-1 right away, Will Warren is throwing first pitch strikes roughly 3% less than the average Major Leaguer, and as a result is behind in the count 33.8% of the time.
The average big leaguer is behind in the count 26.1% of the count, and I don’t think I need to cite data to explain that pitchers are at a massive advantage when up 0-1 in a count versus down 1-0. By attacking with front-hip sinkers to lefties and backdoor sinkers to righties, Warren can use his renown strike-throwing abilities in his favor, as instead of giving hitters something to ambush, he’s creating count leverage and putting them at an immediate disadvantage.
These next few starts could serve to teach Will Warren about the art of pitching, as he’ll get a better understanding of hitter tendencies and which ones he can use to his advantage. At the end of the day, saying “just hit this spot consistently” is so much easier said than done, and it took Michael King until his late-20s to figure out that he could make a living off of stealing strikes with the sinker and missing bats with either his four-seamer, sweeper, or changeup to put hitters away.
Clarke Schmidt was a five-and-fly starter who couldn’t keep the ball in the yard last season, Michael King was a brutal pitcher when he first came up, and Nestor Cortes was cut by multiple organizations (including the Yankees) early in his career. The Yankees are going to learn a lot about Will Warren’s makeup over the next few starts, as he’s going to have to learn how to iron out any mistakes with the big league squad. He’s got a chance to help the Yankees win or lose the AL East, and that might be exactly what he needs to gain comfortability being a big-league starter.