As a relief pitcher playing on a one-year deal for a last place team, John Brebbia has to be prepared for a change of scenery.
But as he exited the month of May with a 7.71 ERA, he was starting to wonder just a little if his trajectory was tilted more toward his couch than the clubhouse of a contending team. The choppiness of an April interrupted by his second calf strain of the season, gave way to 14 runs and three homers allowed in 12 innings in May.
"I was looking into everything," Brebbia said. "Nothing got worse in May than it was in April. It just kind of all felt the same up and until I worked and made those changes, so I think I just got lucky."
One of the many times over the years that Aaron Bummer was discussing some minuscule mechanical tweak that got his sinker back over the plate again, I asked him how often some imperceptibly small thing was the difference between dominating and being dominated at the highest level of baseball.
"Way too much," Bummer replied with a laugh while contemplating the fickle nature of his professional existence. So the changes that Brebbia made to how high his glove arm gets in his delivery are very much in the same vein.
"We had to do some digging,' said pitching coach Ethan Katz. "His glove was getting really high. We went back to where he was in his best year, when his glove was lower. Since he's put his glove down, his numbers have been...I texted it to him the other day."
While Katz had to dig through his phone for the numbers, we can just cut to the chase. Brebbia has a 1.86 ERA in 9 2/3 innings in June, but more strikingly has struck out 15 of the 37 batters he's faced (40.5 percent) while walking just one. The only thing Brebbia really looks over on the dugout iPad after his outings is how his command was, and that's all the benefit anyone will tout from this move.
"He couldn't get his breaking ball to a good spot," Katz said of Brebbia's May struggles. "He's working this way [mimes direct route to the plate] instead of over [mimes popping up to get over his glove arm] and now he's getting his breaking ball to good locations and his fastballs are the same."
"[Katz] is like the brains behind pitching so I can't actually speak to what all it's doing, but it feels cleaner and smoother and more repeatable I guess," Brebbia said. "Just how my arm felt, arm path-wise, getting from set position to release, it felt smoother. It didn't feel like I was working really hard to thrust my hand out in front of me."
Saturday might have been Brebbia's first hiccup of June, where the top of the Tigers order greet him with three hard-hit balls--albeit none of them were lofted in the air, as he has not been homered upon this month. The three-straight outs to minimize the damage to a single run and the 5-1 lead he exited with made it easier to deal with than the first outing where Brebbia tried out the changes. The nature of this White Sox season is that every blip in reliever performance usually has a heartbreaking loss associated with it.
Brebbia's first game trying to lower his glove arm came on June 1, which has made it really easy to determine his splits with an altered delivery. But he also entered with two on and one out in Milwaukee. Brebbia struck out two of the four hitters he faced, but Gary Sánchez took a slider off the plate for a bloop two-run single to center with a 69 mph exit velocity. Brebbia asked specifically that the 69 mph exit velocity be mentioned.
"Never forget a good 69," Brebbia said. "Devastating. Especially because it felt like a good pitch. I looked at it and was like 'Oh cool, slider, off the plate, that's great.' And then you look at the result and oh, it's not great. Not only did I blow it but I cashed in someone else's runners. When you focus on results it's easy to say 'That's stupid, that didn't work.' But unfortunately in baseball, like I'm sure it is with a lot of things in life, you've got to give it a little time first, see if 'the process' is trending in the right direction or wrong direction. So that was a just awful way to start making a change, but you've got to stick with a little bit before you totally trash it."
Self-effacing humor is Brebbia's default state of being, so it's with that viewpoint that he asserts that command is essential to an approach where he throws his low-80s slider the majority of the time. Asked if he's an east-west or north-south type of pitcher, given that his pitches often tout a lot of movement on both planes, Brebbia said he's more of a 'nick the corners' guy.
"I would love to be able to have nasty shit, sweet life that is just gross and tough to hit," Brebbia said. "And I would only have to focus on being up here [at the letters] or down here [at the knees], but unfortunately I don't. So I have to try to focus on being up and over here [inside] or down and over here [away]. It depends on the hitter too. If a guy is really good at extending his hands out and over the plate, you eliminate side-to-side and focus more on up and down. It's super-dependent upon who's batting, but in an ideal world I'm trying to do both."
Brebbia is not in an ideal world. He has a 5.72 ERA on June 23. But he's also 34 and in his seventh major league season, with career numbers and 2024 advanced numbers that suggest he's pretty close to his normal self, if not a little nastier and grosser than some earlier stages of his career. His late-July marketability seems more dependent upon recent scouting looks than fretting about his May, and recent looks at Brebbia have been pretty good.
