Andre Pallante Is Breaking Out

The right-hander’s rapid improvement has given the rotation a huge boost.

Andre Pallante is having a breakout season. In 14 starts, he has accumulated more fWAR than Lance Lynn has in 21 starts and he’s only 0.2 fWAR behind Kyle Gibson despite the latter having made 10 more starts than Pallante this season.

In fact, if we look at fWAR on a rate basis, Pallante has been better than every Cardinals starter not named Sonny Gray this year. Pro-rate Pallante’s 14 starts to a full season workload of 32 starts and we’re looking at a 3 WAR pitcher.

Obviously Pallante needs to show that he can maintain this level of success but Pallante has been the Cardinals second best starter down the stretch this year and that could be a huge development for the organization as it decides whether or not to keep Lynn and Gibson around for another year.

But that’s not the point of this article. That’s an offseason article. The point of this article is to look at just how Pallante managed to go from a negative WAR reliever last year to, potentially, the second best starter on the team.

The Numbers

As a starter this year Pallante has put up a 3.52 ERA, 3.65 FIP, and 3.77 xFIP. All of those marks rank second among Cardinals starters this year except for his ERA, which actually ranks first.

His 18.8% strikeout rate as a starter is also almost 5 percentage points higher than his strikeout rate last year and that jump has been paired with a 1 percentage point decrease in his walk rate.

He’s basically a brand new pitcher this year. He still has the same base skills, namely an ability to keep the ball on the ground, but he’s missing more bats this year and walking fewer hitters. He has also improved dramatically against right-handed hitters this year.

Pallante has typically been someone who shows reverse splits and has been able to shut down left-handed hitters but has been vulnerable against right-handed hitters.

And while he hasn’t completely changed his tendencies, his .327 wOBA surrendered to right-handed hitters is much better than the .390 wOBA he allosed to same-sided hitters last year. He’s also been even better against lefties, allowing a .254 wOBA to them this year after allowing them to produce a .302 wOBA in 2023.

So really the main point here is that he has improved his numbers dramatically this year. Some people may continue to be a bit lower on him because even with these improvements he doesn’t miss a ton of bats but while he may not be a big strikeout guy, he has an outlier ability to generate ground balls, ranking in the 98th percentile in that particular statistic, and that, paired with his ability to generate weak contact, means that hitters almost never find the barrel against him.

Will he occasionally (and sometimes more than occasionally) get nickel and dimed? Absolutely. But he ranks in the top 10 of all starting pitchers with more than 60 innings pitched out of the rotation when it comes to home run suppression. Pallante has given up just 0.59 home runs per 9 innings and while it’s fair to argue that some of that may be due to favorable batted ball luck, his HR/FB% is less than 2 percentage points below the league average of 12%.

His ability to suppress home runs is simply because hitters can rarely elevate the ball against him and they can have a hard time squaring him up. He’s basically the premier contact-manager that we hoped Dakota Hudson would become.

And I wanted to bring that up because I’ve seen plenty of comparisons between the two and Pallante is simply a much better pitcher than Hudson. He has better pure stuff, he gets ground balls at a much higher rate, he misses more bats, and he walks fewer hitters.

Frankly, it’s no comparison.

But what changes has Pallante made this year that have allowed him to have this kind of success? Let’s dive into his arsenal to find out.

The Fastballs

Andre Pallante’s bread-and-butter is his four-seam fastball. It’s the pitch that he lives or dies with. Last year that one pitch made up ²⁄₃ of Pallante’s arsenal. This year, though, he’s only throwing it 51.2% of the time.

You may think this is weird since the pitch was clearly Pallante’s best last year. In fact, no other pitch came close. The pitch allowed just a .302 wOBA, which was 96 points better than his next best pitch (curveball). If we look at run value we’ll see a clear gulf between his fastball and every other pitch too. His four-seamer had a run value of 19 while the rest of his arsenal combined for -15.

He was pretty much a one-pitch pitcher last year.

So, to get back to the point, why did he change? Why is he throwing his best pitch less?

The answer is because he found a way to deploy his arsenal more optimally.

While Pallante’s four-seamer is his best pitch, it’s overall numbers hide the fact that it doesn’t actually fare that well against same-sided hitters. Despite that, Pallante used the pitch as his primary offering against both righties and lefties.

This is what contributed heavily to his huge reverse splits last year.

Against lefties the pitch allowed just a .261 wOBA last year but against righties that figure rose to .374. In 2022 it was as high as .405. Even this year, Pallante’s primary heater has allowed a .379 wOBA to righties.

It’s simply not a good pitch in same-sided matchups.

So what Pallante has done this year is really refine his usage of the pitch. He still throws it almost 80% of the time against lefties, as he should, but he has dialed back the pitch’s usage against righties from 53% to 26% and that has made a huge difference for him.

But in order for him to cut his usage of the pitch in half against righties, that means he needs another pitch to lean on in same-sided matchups.

That pitch is his sinker.

I feel weird calling it a sinker since it actually sinks less than his four-seamer but a sinker is what Baseball Savant labels it so a sinker is what I will call it.

Typically sinkers tend to see larger platoon splits than four-seamers which is why this is a logical replacement for the four-seamer in same-sided matchups.

And the pitch has performed well too, being thrown almost exclusively to righties and allowing just a .307 wOBA while generating a healthy 15% whiff rate and limiting the average batted ball to just 81.7 mph off the bat.

This is the perfect antidote to right-handed hitters for Pallante and it’s a pitch that was notably absent from his arsenal in the past. Sure he threw 29 sinkers last year but they were sinkers like the ones he is throwing now.

The pitch isn’t exactly a “riding” fastball but it doesn’t exactly sink either. It sits between 14-15 inches of induced vertical break on average with 10.4 inches of running life at 95 mph.

That’s not a great profile overall but given Pallante’s weird release, the good velo, and the fact that he only uses it in same-sided matchups, it has performed well.

Something else stands out too – Pallante’s plan with the pitch.

He uses the pitch almost exclusively to his arm side on the inner half of the plate which is a good plan because Pallante doesn’t have good enough command of the pitch to consistently throw it to the glove side in an effort to chase called strikes.

Take a look at his heat map to see what I mean:

You’ll notice that Pallante often misses off the inner edge of the plate because his command of this offering isn’t great. That leads to him throwing the pitch in the zone just 45% of the time. Yet, despite that, Pallante is actually able to get an above average chase rate (28.8%) with the pitch which helps him tremendously since he needs to be able to get strikes with his primary offering against right-handers.

This is basically a new pitch for him and he’s already able to use it effectively with high usage. There are certainly more refinements that can be made as he gets more comfortable with the pitch but this offering filled the single biggest gap in Pallante’s arsenal by giving him a hard primary offering he can use against right-handed hitters.

What’s even more impressive is the effect that this pitch has had on Pallante’s other fastball. In the past Pallante has talked about how he would throw his fastball and sometimes it would sink and other times it would cut and sometimes it would run.

Now, with Pallante using a separate grip to get to his running fastballs (his sinker), he has been able to fine tune his cutting fastball (his four-seamer).

This year Pallante’s four-seamer runs an average of 0.2 inches to the arm side. That’s down from 2.8 inches last year.

That may not seem like a crazy difference but it means that Pallante has been able toi disentangle his fastball movement and really lean into the cutting action that he can get on the pitch.

Let’s look at it from a different perspective.

Last year Pallante got true glove side on 90 of his 757 four-seamers. That’s a rate of 12%. This year Pallante has gotten true cutting life on 366 of his 709 four-seamers. That’s a rate of 52%.

So instead of throwing a fastball with varied action that Pallante, at times, couldn’t control, Pallante has been able to separate his fastball into two distinct pitches – one with cut and sink and another with moderate riding life and running action.

This has made a huge difference for him. Now the righty has a fastball he can use to lefties and a fastball he can use to righties and he knows how both pitches are going to move and can effectively target the proper region of the zone for both pitches (arm side for the sinker and glove side for the four-seamer).

The Secondaries

I’ve spent most of this article discussing Pallante’s heaters because those are the most important pitches for him. He throws them over 70% of the time so those are really the pitches that drive his success.

But it’s important to look at the other 30% too.

This is because Pallante has a clear supination-bias. Basically what that means is that Pallante has a natural bias towards applying finger pressure to the outside of the baseball. You can see this in how his four-seamer has natural cut and how his sinker has much less running action than the average sinker.

Typically supinators struggle to throw high efficiency fastballs but are able to throw good breaking balls at high velocities. That’s another tip off for us because Pallante is able to throw an 88 mph slider with 5 inches of sweep and an 80 mph curveball with well above average depth. Pitchers with a pronation-bias, who have a natural bias towards applying finger pressure to the inside of the baseball, would typically struggle to throw breaking balls like this.

So, as you might imagine, pitchers with a supination-bias really tend to lean on their breaking balls because they tend to have a bit of a natural advantage when it comes to throwing them as finger pressure needs to be applied to the outside of the baseball to get glove side sweeping action.

It’s uncommon to see a supinator like Pallante whose best-performing pitches are his fastballs.

What that means is that Pallante has a ton of potential to get even better when he learns how to harness his breaking balls effectively. For instance, his re-shaped curveball has performed exceptionally well this year, allowing just a .195 wOBA while missing bats at a 36% rate. The problem is that he can’t locate it so he doesn’t throw it.

He throws the pitch in the zone just 27% of the time which is certainly too low but also a bit misleading without context. Pallante has thrown 178 curveballs this year. 105 of those have been thrown with 2 strikes.

That’s a 59% rate.

He’s not really trying to put the ball in the zone most of the time. The problem for Pallante is that the pitch is often uncompetitive so hitters don’t expand the zone with enough frequency. That’s an area of growth for him but it’s encouraging that the pitch has played so well when it has been competitive and that he is using it in optimal counts.

I would love to see him throw the pitch more, and to not restrict it to lefties as much as he does but this is still clear progress from a year ago when only 44% of Pallante’s curveball usage came in 2 strike counts.

The other improvement Pallante has made has been throwing his slider more exclusively to right-handers. Sliders typically have larger platoon splits than curveballs and with Pallate improvinghis curveball in the offseason, he has been able to deploy the pitch as a complement to his four-seamer when lefties step up to the plate. So much so, in fact, that the two pitches account for over 96% of his pitches against lefties.

This year Pallante’s slider usage has been restricted almost exclusively for same-sided matchups and while his wOBA (.344) leaves something to be desired, his xwOBA (.285) and his whiff rate is solid, if unspectacular (27.6%).

I wouldn’t be shocked to see the pitch morph into a sweeper in the future in an effort to get more whiff and chase out of it (and this is something I think Pallante will be able to do) but he has at least made strides in properly utilizing the pitch this year.

Final Thoughts

Andre Pallante has made a number of improvements this year which have helped him breakout in a way that has made him the Cardinals second best starter to date. These improvements include:

• Adding a sinker to his arsenal and using it as his primary offering against RHBs
• Refining his four-seamer to have more consistent cutting action and using it more exclusively against lefties
• Reshaping his curveball and using it more exclusively in two-strike counts
• Restricting his slider usage to RHBs only

All of these changes have helped Pallante take the step from mediocre-at-best reliever to good starting pitcher. We now need to see him show consistency with these changes and show an ability to maintain his level of production for a longer period than just 14 starts.

Still, this is an encouraging development and I think there’s still more development ahead of Pallante that can make him even better. These potential improvements include:

• Reshaping his slider into a sweeper to turn it into a true weapon against RHBs
• Improved command of his new sinker
• Improved command and increased usage (these go hand-in-hand) of his re-shaphed curveball

Pallante is fascinating to me and is a pitcher I have been high on for a while so it’s nice to see him break out and I would love to see him not only maintain his success but also continue to make tweaks and improvements to become an even better pitcher. I think he has it in him to do so and I hope to see continued development from him as he seeks to nail down a longer term spot in the St. Louis Cardinals rotation.

Thanks for reading.