Chris Bassitt and his ‘like 40 pitches’ give Blue Jays righty a weapon for any occasion
Posted Feb 23, 2023 03:30:00 AM.
There’s a lot of time to think during the recovery from Tommy John surgery and Chris Bassitt did plenty of that after his procedure in May 2016. He’d experienced a touch of success in the big-leagues the two years previous, first with the Chicago White Sox in 2014 and then, after being part of a winter meetings deal for Jeff Samardzija, with the Oakland Athletics the year after. But he’d been hit around in the five outings before his elbow blew out and he recognized that if he kept pitching the way he had, constantly pushing for more and more velocity, he wasn’t going to last, even with his arm rebuilt.
“Everyone, even today, is like, you've got to throw hard, got to throw hard, got to throw hard and I understand the reasoning behind it, I get the numbers and the difference between batting averages versus 93 and versus 97,” says Bassitt. “But I quickly realized that throwing softer is a lot easier than throwing harder and I get to stay healthier a lot longer. I don't need to throw 95 to get guys out. I can sit 93. Give me two weeks, I can throw 95 but I don't know if I'm going to stay healthy doing it. So it was learning my body after T.J. and that you're good enough in the low 90's, you don’t need the mid 90’s.”
Following Alek Manoah’s session, a debrief between Manoah, Chris Bassitt and Don Mattingly. #bluejays pic.twitter.com/f3L4lVLhC3
— Ben Wagner (@benwag247) February 14, 2023
The 34-year-old from Toledo, Ohio has been proving that ever since, delivering 10 fWAR of value across 107 games, 100 starts, for the Athletics and, after a sell-off trade following the lockout, the New York Mets. The stability, consistency and intelligence he brings to a starting rotation were elements that landed him a $63-million, three-year deal with the Toronto Blue Jays in December, after a free-agency courtship he describes as, “I like you, you like me, let’s do it.”
While by no means is a fastball that sits at 93 m.p.h. slop, Bassitt and his six-pitch, varied arm-angle repertoire offer a counterbalance to a rotation stocked with the power arms of Kevin Gausman, Alek Manoah, Jose Berrios and Yusei Kikuchi.
The deep arsenal draws awe from his teammates, Gausman quipping that he throws 10 different pitches while Manoah takes the hyperbole to an extreme by saying “he throws like 40 pitches.”
On a more serious note, Manoah, an AL Cy Young Award finalist, added that watching Bassitt manipulate “the release points and how he uses his body, the mental cues that he uses can help me in many different ways.”
And the baseball IQ behind how he picked up six pitches good enough to throw in the major leagues and the management needed to keep him sharp offers another worthy resource, too.
That Bassitt has produced the type of success he has given where he started is proof of that.
Selected as a 16th-round pick in the 2011 draft out of the University of Akron, where he worked out of the bullpen, Bassitt says “everyone in the world projected me to be a fringe bullpen guy.”
He was throwing just a fastball and curveball then, but after some initial success, the White Sox offered him the chance to start at high-A Winston-Salem in 2012. That’s when he picked up a slider and after left-handed hitters kept doing damage against him, he thought, “let's add a pitch to help against lefties.”
“That led to the cutter,” he continues, “and from there it was like, all right, this year you're struggling against this type of hitter, let's develop a pitch that helps. We've done that for years.”
