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Cardinals Ace is Stumping Hitters After Returning from Injury

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Sonny Gray has been stumping hitters through his first three starts of the season. Since returning from injury, Gray has started three games and didn’t allow a run in his first 17 innings of the season. The Cardinals offseason signing has been everything the team hoped he would be. Gray has been a force on the mound with a 1.04 ERA, good for eighth in the league. He’s issued just one walk this season out of 64 batters faced, good for the best walk percentage in the league. He’s struck out 23 batters with a 35.9 percent strikeout rate, the fifth-highest in the league. A combination of hitting his location and a deep pitch arsenal has landed him as one of the most successful pitchers in early part of the season.

“What we’ve seen out of him so far has been as advertised,” said Cardinals president of baseball operations before Gray’s third start. “It’s been fun to watch. It brings a lot of energy into our clubhouse.”

One of the biggest challenges batters have against Gray is not knowing what pitch is coming next. Gray has thrown one of six pitches in each game this season. He can deploy a four-seam fastball, a curveball, a cutter, a sweeper, a sinker and the occasional changeup.

Sonny Gray’s Return From Injury Has Been Key

Gray’s fastball is his most-often used pitch. He throws it almost 28 percent of the time. He averages 92.7 mph with it and has a 14.3 percent whiff rate on it. His fastball is less of his devastation pitch and more of the table setting for the rest of his arsenal. It’s where he goes after his fastball that has produced his dominant numbers.

Batters are whiffing 47.4 percent of the time on Gray’s curveball. When it comes after his fastball at 80.1 mph on average it’s more than a 12 mph difference. The pitch drops nearly 58 inches on average from his release point. Gray has thrown his curveball 50 times through three starts in 2024 and still nobody has gotten a hit off it according to Baseball Savant. Two-thirds of the time he throws it on two-strike counts as it has resulted in a strikeout.

Gray sports three other major pitches. His sweeper cuts and breaks and is above league average in both axis of movements. His cutter is drawing swings and misses from batters 29.2 percent of the time. The sinker is below league average in both horizontal and vertical movement, but it comes in at 93.3 mph — faster than his fastball — and as his fifth most used pitch it’s been effective in keeping batters thinking about what could be coming with 11 more inches of horizontal movement than his fastball. The changeup is coming on just 3.9 percent of his pitches, but batters are whiffing on it at a 40 percent clip.

Batters Making Soft Contact

The spread of pitches Gray offers keeps batters from hitting anything cleanly. Batters find the barrel on just 2.5 percent of the times they make contact with Gray’s pitches, meaning they find the optimal combination of launch angle and exit velocity. That’s the 16th-lowest rate in the MLB. Furthermore, batters are producing 95-plus mph off the batt just 27.5 percent of the time of Gray, which is the 13th-best rate in the league. They are swinging and missing on 31.9 percent of swings against Gray which puts him in the top 12 percent of the league at the metric.

The Run Support Isn’t There

In his two wins, the Cardinals scored three runs each time, in the loss the Cardinals were shut out. In his lone loss, a two-run single in the seventh inning gave him the loss. The Cardinals in that game, a 2-0 loss to the Milwaukee Brewers, the Cardinals went 0-9 with runners in scoring position.

“He did exactly what we needed,” said Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol after the game. “He went out there, gave us length, punched the world out and he gave us a shot. That’s why you go get a guy like that. He’s a stopper and unfortunately, we just didn’t score runs.”

The Cardinals offensive struggles has been the story of the season for the team. However, Gray himself is confident in the lineup.

“I just think something is going to click,” Gray said when asked about the offense. “I don’t know what it is, I don’t know where it’s going to come from. It can’t be forced, but something is going to happen at some point and it’s going to click and we’re going to go.”

Main Photo: © Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports

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