PHILADELPHIA – Before the Futures Game and the All-Star Game, I asked a few players if there was another dugout they were looking forward to facing or hoping to avoid. Almost everyone – perhaps wisely, I must admit – turned down the opportunity to provide bulletin board material for World Series opponents.
But Jacob Latz bit.
“I’m trying to think who has my number so far,” she said. “I gave up a homer [Bryce Harper] in 2024. Ohtani will be cool, but he’s not playing. [Corbin Carroll]in fact, I like to deal with him. He is just a competitive at-bat. But maybe Harper is the guy I hope I never run into. With the home crowd of Philly, [if I give up a home run to him] that bell will ring for three minutes.”
My curiosity piqued, I went back and looked at those home runs from 2024. Latz was right to fear the two-time NL MVP, because this was a tank.
Last week’s All-Star Game was a bit of a snoozer; except for an eighth inning solo homer by Miguel Vargas, all the scoring came in the top of the first inning. The National League didn’t advance with a runner on second all night.
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So when Sal Stewart worked a two-out walk with the bases empty in the bottom of the seventh, it was a classic situation by that game’s standards. And AL manager John Schneider asked Latz to retire the dangerous lefty.
Harper and Carroll were both in the NL game – and hitting back-to-back, in fact – but Latz couldn’t avoid fulfilling his dream (and/or nightmare) when he retired Luis Arraez.
I know this was an exhibition game, but Latz is far from a household name. How does this fellow Schneider’s left weapon come out?
Latz was great last year; posted a 2.84 ERA in 33 appearances for the Rangers, including seven starts. But he bested his FIP by nearly a run, and his xERA by a run and a third. Out of 339 pitchers with 50 or more innings, Latz was 251st in K-BB%. Not exactly an All-Star performance in the making.
Two years ago, I wrote about a player class I called the “Token All-Star Relievers.” Every team must field at least one All-Star, and not every team has a player in a good spot to make the roster. But almost every team has at least one relief pitcher with a decent ERA who could carry the flag in the Midsummer Classic. Sometimes that’s Jonathan Papelbon, Mason Miller, or Trevor Hoffman. Sometimes, Evan Meek or Ricky Bottalico.
This year’s Rangers are not a bad team; they were actually in first place and two games over .500 at halftime. But their only starting pitcher with a mediocre ERA is Jacob deGrom, which is not what he was five years ago. Wyatt Langford and Corey Seager were injured. Third baseman Josh Jung (.298/.367/.452 in the first half) had a good All-Star offense, but I don’t know how to argue that he was better than Vargas or Junior Caminero. A reliever is easy to fit into a team.
And Latz, officially, has been excellent: a 1.57 ERA in 46 innings and 19 saves in 21 chances. He still hasn’t hit Andrew Miller’s numbers, but he has increased his K% from 21.8% last year to 28.1% this year, and lowered his walk rate from 10.6% to 6.6%.
At the same time, you get good results from communicating with him. He leads all professional pitchers in infield fly ball rate by a lot — an IFFB% of 29.5%, compared to 25.0% for runner-up Rico Garcia — and has the best wOBACON of any pitcher with at least 30 innings pitched this year.
I don’t think a realistic .151 BABIP is sustainable for anyone, but Latz gets a lot of bunts and weak contact. More than enough to justify the first All-Star.
So how do you do it?
Let’s go back to that at-bat with Arraez in the All-Star Game, because it shows what was already working for Latz before this year. This is pitch no. 1.
Latz’s slider isn’t an unholy Statcast controller in and of itself, but it goes pretty straight left-to-right from a pitcher’s perspective. As opposed to his 4-seamer, which is something an unholy Statcast outlier.
This fastball is not very fast; a 94.7 mph average is no longer exceptional heat for a one-inning reliever. It’s special because his upper arm angle creates great backspin. That means it lands less than a comparable fastball — 2.4 inches less, on average, according to Baseball Savant.
That is the normal way to free the left hand; the king of the mega-backspin fastball is Alex Vesia. But Vesia sacrifices arm speed to get high, while Latz produces above-average movement in both axes. Only two pitchers in the game got a bigger increase in their fastball than Latz, compared to the same pitches, while getting at least an inch more horizontal movement than the comparison: Dylan Lee and Erik Sabrowski. You may remember that both of those pitchers have done well this year, as Ben Clemens and I posted a pair on back-to-back days in May.
After Arraez took that get-me-over slide for strike one, Latz showed him four seamers. One missed the ball. One bounced into the top of the zone, and Arraez swung at it for two.
In terms of pitch and speed, that’s the same pitch Harper hit at the arboretum two years ago, but Latz has made some changes since then.
“I contacted the playing coach for this season,” he said. “It was my first time working with someone since high school, so he was able to check on me every day. Because sometimes we feel like we’re doing the right thing, but it might not be. An extra set of eyes helped a lot.”
Last season’s extra work wasn’t done by returning to the fold in the middle; Latz was supposed to start this year. He was trying to work on two things: First, improving the efficiency of his movement with an eye toward throwing more innings, and second, working on his curveball.
The fastball-slider combination worked well for lefties last season. He allowed a .240 wOBA to hit with the same arm in 2025. And even in relief work, his four-seamer came in the 19th-highest home run total in baseball, according to Baseball Savant. The two names ahead of him on that leaderboard were Tarik Skubal and Zack Wheeler.
Righties, however, tagged Latz with a .316 wOBA, and he hit better than .300 against both his curveball and changeup. Obviously, a startup will need a strong contribution.
“[The curveball] it was a pitch I never felt confident with, and now I’m throwing it for two strikes,” Latz said. It’s still his fourth-most used pitch, because he only throws it to righties, but opponents still haven’t recorded a hit off this season; they’re 0-for-15 with 10 strikeouts and Latz’s x6-handed catch. .097/.167/.183 line overall this year, that’s actually better, by 40 points wOBA, than he did against lefties.
His delivery job paid off big.
“I tried to get my arm in the best position possible, and it ultimately led to me continuing with the fastball,” Latz said. “Then I think it led me to hide the ball little by little. [the ball is] it’s just hidden in my body or in my ear a little better.”
Latz is getting a lot higher on the ball this year, but the difference is minute – three degrees on average angle, maybe an inch’s worth of change in release position on each side. Latz said he considers two to three inches of extension to be a significant change, and one to three inches of straight release length.
“But we are looking more for consistency than change in each area,” he said. “That wasn’t about design, it was about trying to be more efficient.”
The biggest change in tone movement is in the Latz shifter, which now has a drop over six inches lower than the comparable tone. That means he can throw something that has exactly the same movement as his fastball, but slows down to 10 miles per hour. He almost never throws those lefties (just seven in the regular season so far this year), but he went up and into Arraez in an attempt to hit a triple.
It almost worked. Arraez chased and came out miles ahead, but got a bump on the ball and crossed well.
Arraez got through on a 1-2 fastball coming off the plate, but when Latz returned to the mound and brought the ball down low, the Giants second baseman couldn’t handle it.
Latz got two whiffs on six pitches from the best contact hitter of the decade, a guy who swung and missed 58 times in 1,567 regular-season pitches in his career. It wasn’t Harper, and it wasn’t exactly a stressful situation, but it was a good day at the office.
