6-12-24 – By Michael Castrignano – @412DoublePlay on X
Signed to a free agent contract for 3 years, $75M this past off-season, Sonny Gray was an AL Cy Young runner up in 2023, finishing with a 2.79 ERA, 3.64 xFIP and 2.83 FIP.
This year, the 34-year old has seen a small spike in his ERA to 3.29 but he’s dropped his FIP (2.73) and xFIP (2.65) to career-best rates mostly due to a sharpe increase in strikeouts.
Among qualified starting pitchers, only Tyler Glasnow (34.5%), Garrett Crochet (34.3%) and Jack Flaherty (33.5%) have a higher strikeout rate than Gray – 32.8%, which is the highest of his career and a 12.5% bump from his pace last season.
Free passes have surprisingly become a bit of an issue lately for Gray as he’s allowed 2 or more walks in each of his last 5 starts after permitting 1 or less in 6 of his first 7 outings. He’s also allowed 3 or more earned runs in 4 of his last 6 starts as those control issues have crept up on him.
Looking at Gray’s arsenal, he has a mix of pitches – low-90s fastball, mid-80s sweeper, low-80s curve, low-90s sinker, high 80s cutter and high-80s changeup – with the first five of those offerings being used 15%+ of the time.
His fastball velocity has dropped a bit over the years but while Gray has never blown batters away with his heater, it’s definitely become less effective even as he’s decreased its usage.
Fortunately (for him, not opponents), his other offerings have fared MUCH better with opponents batting .160 or less against his curve (.160), sweeper (.141) and sinker (.135). All three pitches also have oSLG under .290 and strikeout rate of 30% or more. His sweeper is especially effective with a 44.9% whiff rate and 59.2% K rate.
Pirates hitters will need to key in on the fastball and hope his control issues creep up again. They typically have played better against “good” pitching and played down the poor performers as they did yesterday against Mikolas.
While Gray has been much better at home (1.60 ERA) than away (5.14 ERA), there are ways to beat him and the Bucs will need to work counts and hunt heat in order to find success against Sonny today.
Let’s Go Bucs!
Steel City Pirates 
Even though this should be a year in which the Bucs start to finally turn the corner against big brother, Busch remains a house of … maybe not horrors like The Park Formerly Known As Miller, but I think nightmares we can say. Then again, I’m not sure this team has fared well against the division in general in a long time.
That said, Gray I could certainly understand their struggles with more than the others.
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