It started out as a joke: while Cal Raleigh is away, his pitchers will play. Cal’s clubhouse chair wasn’t even cold before Logan Gilbert made a start where he was throwing his cutter and sinker, two pitches his opinionated catcher does not like him to throw, as revealed in this in-depth analysis by Zach Mason. But three outings into spring training, it’s looking like the cutter might survive spring training for the first time since 2024.
Gilbert said he felt a little “off” timing-wise in his start
on Saturday, leading to him spraying his fastball some and missing arm-side, so he and Garver made the adjustment to go to the cutter, which moves more glove-side.
“It actually proved that there could be a little more value in the cutter than we thought.”
In Saturday’s outing Gilbert threw seven cutters out of 54 pitches, primarily to Chicago’s lefty hitters. Of those seven pitches, he got four swings: a foul in a 1-0 count that set up a strikeout, a weak-contact groundout, a foul in a 3-0 count that set up a groundout on the slider and a foul in a 2-0 count that set up a groundout on the curveball,. He also threw the pitch for a ball, in a four-pitch walk after he’d hit a batter, and got two called strikes on the pitch, one in a three-pitch sequence that went cutter-slider-splitter for a weak-contact flyout. On a day when Gilbert was “spraying the ball around” more than he wanted to, the cutter was a steadying force on the rest of his arsenal.
Here’s the groundout he got on the cutter, which came in a 2-1 count. You can see him shake Garver a couple of times before he gets to the pitch he wants.
Gilbert attributes the improvement in his cutter to the mechanical work he did this off-season cleaning up some things with his delivery, such as being attentive to a tendency to “cheat” on his front leg and swing open. Opening his hips early then brought his chest with it, causing his arm to fall into a slower slot.
“Now that I’m staying closed and a little more firm on my front side, I can get over it a little better,” Gilbert said, noting that in order for the cutter to be successful, he needs to make sure not to get “around” the pitch, which can cause the cutter to have more slider-like movement. But with his improved mechanics, he is able to be more consistent with the pitch.
“I feel like I’m in a better slot for it. That’s how I started in ‘24. I’m always north-south and if my fastball is true, my cutter does have glove-side movement. At the end of ‘24 and especially in ‘25 I was a little lower than I like to be, so my fastball was running a little bit. So my cutter actually didn’t really cut glove side, it almost got back to straight, which you don’t really want. So now that I’m a little more true on my fastball, I feel like the cutter plays off it better.”
Gilbert—perhaps fearing the wrath of his catcher—is careful to say that he’s not working on the cutter at the expense of his other pitches, and he focused hard this off-season on getting better with his slider and curveball. He says former Mariners manager Scott Servais told him that the cutter is best as an 8-10% usage pitch, but says in 2024 there were times where he used it more heavily, maybe double that.
“I don’t think that’s the goal or the role for it but like we saw today, it can get me out of a couple 2-0, 3-1 counts. I don’t want to oversell it—it’s definitely still like a third option—but there’s definitely a way to use it that can help get me out of some of those situations.”
So will the cutter make it out of spring training this year? Gilbert wouldn’t commit to a firm answer, even without the shadow of his catcher looming, but he didn’t outright shoot down the idea, especially after it bailed him out of some jams today.
“I think there’s a time and a place for it,” he allowed.
