After years of searching, SF Giants’ Anthony DeSclafani thinks he found a curveball that works

MILWAUKEE — A week ago, the bullpen behind the left-center field fence at Target Field transformed into Anthony DeSclafani’s personal pitching lab. Approached beforehand by pitching coach Andrew Bailey and a few other staffers from the Giants’ pitching department, they believed they had an answer to something for which DeSclafani had been searching for years.

The curveball. A bender. A potential putaway pitch to pair with his sinker-slider combination.

“It’s always been a pitch that’s been a pain in the butt for me,” DeSclafani said.

It was time to experiment.

Cycling through four or five different grips throughout the session, one clicked toward the end. It felt so good, in fact, that DeSclafani was eager to show it off in his next start, two days later. And it so seamlessly melded with the rest of his repertoire that he went to the pitch 19 times against the Twins last Wednesday, more than he’s ever thrown the curve in three years with the Giants.

“You saw the other day in Minnesota, he was able to glove-strike one early in the count,” Bailey said. “I would argue in the last three years that I’ve known him I don’t know if I’ve seen one of those. So I think that can speak to the comfort and the confidence that he has in that pitch right now.”

The process was fast. All it took was the one bullpen session before the pitch was game-ready.

And the results were immediate. The pitch swept across the strike zone with more horizontal movement than any previous iteration of his curveball this year. The bottom dropped out more, too, with the most negative vertical movement.

“The shape was pretty consistent to what they wanted,” DeSclafani said. “(Shoot), it’s probably one of the reasons I was able to get through five innings and get some key strikeouts.”

Rookie catcher Blake Sabol, who’s worked hard on his receiving skills, let a couple balls get past him to the backstop. He chalked it up the new curve’s movement profile.

“It’s a little sharper,” Sabol said. “That was definitely something new for me to learn on the fly a little bit, the new shape of that curveball. … I was happy to see he was pretty confident throwing it a lot. I think moving forward that’s going to be a big pitch for him.”

The idea was to give DeSclafani another weapon he can turn to in two-strike counts.

By all accounts, DeSclafani has returned to the sharp form he showed in 2021, putting an injury-plagued 2022 fully in the rearview mirror. He took a 3.09 ERA into that bullpen session, and even after being let down by his defense in a sloppy loss to the Twins, owns a top-five WHIP (1.05) in the majors. His command is as precise as ever, but he believed he could be even better.

“You’re having a great year,” Bailey told him. “You’re going to have a great year. Let’s raise the floor.”

Count leverage is a popular term around these parts — for example, an 0-2 count for a pitcher — and DeSclafani was doing a great job at getting it. But once he got there, he’s not been taking advantage enough to put batters away. His strikeout rate of 19.2% is below his career average and one of the few metrics still short of his ’21 season.

Last Wednesday, four of the 10 swinging strikes DeSclafani recorded came on his new curveball. He used it to finish off half of his six strikeouts.

“With Tony, he’s been awesome. He’s so open. We knew that we needed to attack that a little bit and just brought it to him, like, hey, how can we raise the floor up?” Bailey said. “For him specifically in two strike counts, the (non-competitive pitches) were a tick higher than we’d like. Then taking a look at what are we missing here and look at the curveball as an out pitch. That’s kind of it.”

It ended up being a minor adjustment that led to major results.

In need of a third pitch to pair with his two seamer and slider, DeSclafani has always thrown a curveball but has never felt comfortable with it consistently. With his fingers gripping the ball across both seams of the horseshoe, he said he would “kind of be choking the ball, a death grip of sorts.”