This article was originally published on June 7, 2023.
Imagine going six years without seeing your best friend.
That’s what Michael Lorenzen’s major league career has endured, only his best friend is his slider. To differentiate: Lorenzen has thrown a classic slider with up/down movement, which he calls his “bullet slider”, and a sweeper, which has more east/west movement.
He threw that bullet slider almost 39% of the time in 2016, his second big league season, and opposing hitters batted .187 on it. The former first-round pick commanded the strike zone, allowing just 2.3 walks per nine innings, along with 8.6 strikeouts per nine. He was just 24. The future was bright.
And then?
“That was a journey in itself for me,” Lorenzen, now a stalwart member of the Detroit Tigers’ starting rotation amid many injuries to the group, said as he stood in front of his locker prior to Tuesday night’s game against the Phillies in Philadelphia. “I would throw it and it wouldn’t do anything. Just didn’t do anything at all. And so I didn’t feel comfortable with it.”
A journey to find a number one pitch has followed. In subsequent seasons, Lorenzen’s most common pitch was the sinker in 2017 and 2018, a cutter in 2019, a four-seam fastball in 2020, cutter in 2021 and back to the sinker in 2022. He threw just 4.4% sliders last season.
“Then the sweeper came around, and it was just a pitch that I knew, it was gonna move,” Lorenzen said. “I didn’t know how much, but I knew it’s gonna at least move. And so I’ve been relying on that for a few years now.”
But Lorenzen didn’t become the star many imagined. He’s pitched mostly out of the bullpen, a walk rate hovering around four per nine, while his strikeouts jumped and dipped with each new version of himself. He hit the injured list in July 2022 with a right shoulder strain, a 4.94 season ERA, and at 30 years old. Not exactly the resume that suggests an ace is emerging, and his ADP in 15-team draft champions leagues this past offseason reflected this, 615.
But the Tigers, and owners paying close attention to his five September starts, would have seen something beyond a run of success—five starts and 26 ⅔ innings of 2.36 ERA pitching. They would have seen that Lorenzen’s old friend was back.
“I brought it out for a couple of games then and I really liked it,” Lorenzen said. “And I felt like I could command it really well again and it was the same—it was exactly how it was back in ‘16. It just felt like I could throw it whenever I needed to and go for a strike.”
The Tigers signed Lorenzen to a one-year, $8.5 million contract, but even so, they hadn’t done so expressly to let Lorenzen be the bullet-slider pitcher once again, at least at first.
“And so coming into spring this year, we were still relying on the sweeper a lot more than the bullet and I just felt like man, I have way more feel for the bullet,” Lorenzen said. “And everyone here agreed that maybe we should switch the usage from the sweeper, most of the time to now throwing the bullet a lot more. So it’s kind of it’s been a journey to get there.”
In April, Lorenzen threw them about equally. But he went to the slider five times as often in May, and continued to rely on it in June. His ERA in April? 7.07. Since the calendar turned to May? 1.83 over six starts and 39 ⅓ innings, going at least six innings in five of those starts and seven in half of them.
As you can imagine, Lorenzen’s thought quite a bit about how this happened. The cerebral pitcher’s thought about a lot of things. And he has a theory for this disappearing act.
“I know a lot of people lost their bullet slider when the baseball got really hard and the seams were really tight,” Lorenzen said. “I know there’s a lot of stories about people having trouble with their really tight sliders during those years. So I wasn’t the only one.”
But the difference between the Lorenzen who rediscovered his bullet slider during a bullpen session as he rehabbed in 2022, and the Lorenzen of today, is when he throws the slider. 45 of his 46 bullet sliders came against right-handed hitters last September. This season, he’s actually thrown more of them to lefties.
I used to hate throwing sliders to lefties,” Lorenzen said. “It’s not a pitch that I liked throwing [to them].. But this staff’s convinced me. I tried to sell the sweeper last year to lefties a lot and couldn’t land it in the zone enough. And so I’d get behind in counts and I think it was a high damage pitch for me. (Note: Lorenzen is correct, lefties hit .750 against his sweeper last season!) So to come in here, they’re like no, we liked the tighter slider against lefties, so let’s go with that one. So that’s why I’ve done it so much, throwing it to both sides of the plate now a lot.”
The slider checks in right around 85 miles per hour, too, so the differential with his four-seamer, at 94 MPH, makes it harder for hitters to square up on it. Meanwhile, the changeup, with a completely different action, comes at hitters right at the same velocity as the bullet slider. Effectively, Lorenzen has five pitches, since he is still using the sweeper—mercifully, to righties almost exclusively now—and a two-seam fastball that also checks in at 94. But as he pointed out, he’s either a three-pitch pitcher or a five-pitch pitcher, depending on how you define it. What matters, though, is that he knows which ones he wants to throw, and when.
That doesn’t just matter in a particular outing, either.
“Where that’s helped out a ton is between games,” Lorenzen said. “I don’t have to think about I don’t have to waste five pitches on cutters in bullpens and curveballs anymore … that’s 10 extra pitches I have to work on … those 10 pitches now get allocated to the changeup, making that better. My bullpens are shorter now between starts because I don’t have seven pitches that I throw.”
With the seven-pitch arsenal, Lorenzen would throw each one twice to begin a bullpen session. If he needed to work on one, or another, you get up to 25-30 pitches very quickly without polishing anything. Add in sequencing and it becomes untenable.
Preserving Lorenzen is vital, because as both he and the Tigers know, he’s topped 100 major league innings exactly once in his career, back in 2015. Since then, the highest total he’s reached in 97 ⅔ in 2022.
The Tigers, though, have been beset by a Springfield Nine-level plague—throughout the roster, really, but particularly among its starting pitching. Seven starters have at least two starts for Detroit in 2023, and four of them—Eduardo Rodriguez, Spencer Turnbull, Alex Faedo and Matt Manning are currently on the injured list. (This doesn’t even count the cornerstone pitchers Tarik Skubal and Casey Mize, both considered part of the future in Detroit and both injured as well.)
The other three are Matt Boyd and his 5.59 ERA, Joey Wentz and his 7.49 ERA, and Lorenzen.
“I mean the schedule and our injuries have not allowed us to be too conservative with that,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said Tuesday night, ahead of a Wentz start against the Phillies. “… as we get healthier, I think the question will turn to how are we going to have enough innings for all of our starters. But we’re just not healthy enough to have that dilemma yet.”
But after a career in which it feels like promising moments have been derailed in ways ranging from a Reds team that never seemed to quite figure out what they had in him to injuries at key moments, Lorenzen is pretty clearly established as a starter who will get the ball regularly in Detroit for the rest of the season.
What does it mean from a fantasy perspective? Well as of now, the walks are back down to 2016 levels. The strikeouts are rising steadily, with 22 over his last 25 ⅓ innings, and all three of his primary pitches served as out pitches in his last outing, a seven-inning, one-earned run performance against the White Sox, with no walks and six strikeouts. Even so, he’s rostered in just 41% of Yahoo! and 13.2% of ESPN leagues, so the best pitcher in baseball since May 1 is freely available in most formats right now. Needless to say, if you are in one of these leagues, grab him.
If you have any doubts, well, you should know Lorenzen doesn’t. He hasn’t shaken off his catcher in six games—yes, the best six of his season, and perhaps his career. He’s not allowing frustration to creep in between pitches, and says the pitch clock helps him process quicker. On Saturday, he was facing Chicago’s Andrew Vaughn, and missed with his fastball.
“But then I came set and I was annoyed at myself and threw another ball,” Lorenzen said. “And I knew that the reason why I threw another ball was because my mind wasn’t fully engulfed in making this pitch here.”
So he regrouped. He said in the past he’d often cycle through his many options, a pitch he didn’t execute would linger for six, seven offerings. Innings would spiral. Not this time. What did he throw?
His old friend, the slider. One pitch later, Vaughn had grounded out to second.
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