by Tyler Kepner
In 1989, his first pro season, Abbott went to spring training expecting an assignment to Double-A. But he made the Angels without a day in the minors, because his cutter was so explosive. Growing up in Flint, Michigan, Abbott had rooted for his catcher, the former Tiger Lance Parrish. Now he was hurting Parrish with a weapon that was ready for the majors.
“I rode one in on his thumb one day and he literally stood up and threw his glove on the ground, because his thumb hurt so much,” Abbott says. “It was a striking experience, like: ‘Man oh man, that’s Lance!’ And he started wearing this plastic thumb protector inside of his glove to stop it from running in on him. Definitely, some catchers didn’t like it all that much.”
Abbott won 40 games in his first three seasons with the Angels and peaked with a no-hitter for the Yankees in 1993. The final batter, the switch-hitting Carlos Baerga, chose to bat lefty against Abbott, to keep the cutter away instead of boring in. Abbott finessed him with a slider and Baerga grounded out to short.
The Yankees could have had another lefty with a cutter, Al Leiter, but by then they had traded him to Toronto. Leiter helped the Blue Jays win the World Series in relief that year, and two years later he began a decade-long run as a top-of-the-rotation starter, mostly for the Mets. With Toronto in 1995, he lost three times to the Rangers but still made a strong impression on their brawny lineup. After one of the games, Dean Palmer and others complimented him on his new pitch.
“When did you start throwing a cutter?” they said.
“A cutter?” replied Leiter, incredulous. “I throw a slider.”
“Man, you can call it what you want,” they said. “But that is a cutter.”
For Leiter, it was a revelation. In his early years with the Yankees, Ron Guidry and Dave Righetti had emphasized the slider to complement his fastball and curve. In time, Leiter threw the pitch harder and harder—and when the Rangers called it something else, he realized it wasn’t a slider anymore, but a fastball that cuts. To Leiter, that distinction is important.
“I’ve told minor league guys forever: ‘When you’re throwing your cutter, it’s a “fuck you” pitch,’ ” says Leiter, whose enthusiasm for his craft is so endearing that you look right past the language. “You’re offset and you’re throwing it with every bit the same effort as your fastball. Remember: a cutter is not a power breaking ball. It is a cut fastball, and that’s a different mind-set. You’ve gotta understand: ‘OK, I’m throwing a fastball and it’s gonna cut, so I’ve got the same aggressiveness—and that’s different than a slider.’ A slider’s a smaller, power breaking ball.”
The pitch now called the cutter was widely dismissed as flat and useless—faster than a slider should be, without the sharp, downward angle, and slower than a pitcher’s best fastball, without the precise location. Some pitchers knew how to use it; Leiter remembers Catfish Hunter describing how he baited pull-happy right-handed power hitters by cutting his fastball to get lazy flies to right center. But throwing cutters on purpose, with encouragement from coaches, was just starting to catch on in Leiter’s prime.
In the 2000 World Series, Leiter matched cutters twice with Andy Pettitte of the Yankees. Pettitte started using it the same year as Leiter, in 1995, with encouragement from Billy Connors, a coach who had worked in Chicago with Maddux. In his early years, Pettitte said, he angled the pitch more like a slider, boring in on the back foot of a right-handed hitter. Toward the end, with a different pitching coach, Larry Rothschild, Pettitte made it a pure cutter again to compensate for his fading fastball.
“I was getting in on guys, but I was still giving up a lot of jam-shot hits,” Pettitte says. “I was getting so frustrated, and Larry was like, ‘Well, why don’t we try to cut it like you used to?’ So my last year and a half I broke out my cutter on the belt again, and that was a game-changer for me. By that time I had so much command of my mechanics and such an idea of pitching, of what I wanted to do.”
In those final seasons, Pettitte had a winning record and a 3.49 ERA—better than expected for a pitcher over 40 who had retired for a year before his comeback. A few years later Pettitte suggested that C. C. Sabathia use the cutter, and Sabathia reversed three years of decline by throwing it almost 30 percent of the time.
But the cutter’s best salesman was a man who used the pitch to take the final, triumphant leap for an athlete: from star to stratosphere.
* * *
————
Mariano Rivera comes to the World Series every year now, as a favor to Major League Baseball, to present a reliever of the year award named for him. The setting is quite familiar, since Rivera may be the greatest October pitcher ever. His ERA, across 96 postseason appearances, was 0.70. He earned 42 saves, matching his uniform number.
Before a game in the 2016 World Series, under the right field bleachers at Wrigley Field, Rivera reflected on the spread of the cutter. Why was everyone throwing his pitch? Even a humble man had to state the obvious.
“Well, because they saw what I did for so many years, I believe,” Rivera said. “There’s no other explanation.”
And what, exactly, makes that pitch so devastating?
“It’s the rotation,” Rivera said. “For me, it was the four-seam fastball rotation. You think it is something that will be straight, and it’s not. At the end, it will move. That’s a true cutter. Most of the guys using the cutter, they’re kind of like sliders, because it has that slider spin; it doesn’t have a fastball spin. A true cutter, it has four-seam fastball spin, and it moves. They think they’re swinging at something that looks like a fastball, but it’s not—and it comes with power.”
Power was Rivera’s specialty in 1996, his first full season, when he helped the Yankees win the World Series as a setup man and fanned nearly 11 batters per nine innings. He never matched that figure again, because he never pitched another season without the cutter.
It came to Rivera before a game at Tiger Stadium in June 1997, while playing catch with teammate Ramiro Mendoza. Just as Mendoza reached for Rivera’s throw, the ball zinged about a foot to his right. Rivera could not explain the movement—he was simply throwing his regular fastball, he said—and after more of the same, Mendoza gave up. Rivera sought out the bullpen catcher, Mike Borzello, who would have equipment to protect himself from this sudden, violent action.
“He threw it at first and I’m like, ‘OK, what was that?’ ” says Borzello, who joined the Cubs’ coaching staff in 2011. “We took that ball out—maybe it was scuffed—and he did it again. I go, ‘What are you doing?’ He goes, ‘I don’t know.’ This was a guy who used to have pinpoint four-seam command. It was an easy catch. He threw 95, 96, but it was straight—and now it was cutting.”
Rivera got the save that night, but the next day he was still unsettled. He told Borzello they needed more work. The “cutter,” as such, was not really a pitch; at that point, Rivera had never even heard of the term. He missed his precision four-seamer.
“He used to be able to throw the ball wherever he wanted,” Borzello says. “So even though he pitched mostly with a four-seamer, he could use all quadrants of the strike zone. And now he didn’t know where the ball was going.”
After 20 pitches or so, Rivera still could not straighten the fastball. He kept trying to find it, for two or three weeks, but his old four-seamer was now a cutter. It was a gift so bountiful, Rivera would write in his book, that it might as well have been a million pounds of fish overwhelming his father’s nets back home in Panama. But he did not know what he had.
“I didn’t even try to do it,” Rivera says. “I didn’t try to make it. The Lord gave it to me. You ask me: ‘Why me?’ Well, I don’t know. I don’t know why me. You’ve got to ask the Lord that question.”
In time, with subtle changes to his grip and finger pressure, Rivera could place the cutter wherever he wanted. But as soon as he unwrapped his new gift, the factory settings wor
ked just fine: in to lefties, away from righties, the movement too late for hitters to detect.
It was enough to defeat a man before he even got to the batter’s box. Facing Rivera with one out to go in the 1998 World Series, the Padres’ Mark Sweeney lugged his bat to the plate with an unshakable thought rattling around his brain: Don’t strike out to end this. It was the only time in his career, Sweeney said, that such a pessimistic vision entered his mind as he prepared to hit. Sweeney succeeded—kind of—by punching a ground out to third and bringing Rivera to his knees in joy.
The Padres’ closer that fall, Trevor Hoffman, had 601 career saves to rank second on the career list. He stands in awe of Rivera.
“When you talk about pitching, you want to simplify things,” Hoffman says. “I would have loved to be able to go: OK, here’s ol’ number one, little cut on it, mid-90s forever. I’m gonna get inside your kitchen and break your bat for a left-hander, and I’m gonna get it on the edge of your bat for a right-hander. It was pretty amazing.”
Even those who could hit Rivera, like Ichiro Suzuki (6-for-15 lifetime) routinely call his cutter the single toughest pitch they ever faced.
“If you say one pitch, then it’s definitely Mariano Rivera’s cutter, because you know it’s coming and you still can’t hit it,” Suzuki says. “I think even if you take all the great pitchers that I’ve faced—besides the knuckleball, we’ll put that aside—but even if they have a 100-mile-an-hour fastball and a split, if you knew the split was coming, you could do something with it. But in Mariano’s case, you knew the cutter was coming, you knew it was coming, but it was still so tough.”
The reason, to Lester, was that Rivera’s cutter moved about two feet and did so later than anyone else’s.
“Other guys’ are back at 17, 18 feet from home plate, so there’s longer to see the cut,” he says. “Even though it’s a smaller cut, there’s longer to see it. That’s what made Mariano’s so unhittable: it was a four-seamer until it got to 12 feet. You have 12 feet to figure out how far that ball’s gonna move.”
Josh Donaldson ended the 2015 ALCS by bouncing a cutter from the Royals’ Wade Davis to third base for the final out. It was a bitter ending for Donaldson, who would be named MVP of the American League, but the next spring he was convinced he’d been beaten by the best. Davis’s cutter, he proclaimed, was the toughest pitch in baseball.
Maybe so—in that moment, anyway. But even Davis thinks Rivera’s pitch was a cutter above his own.
“He’s on a different planet,” Davis says. “People have said he’s the best because he mastered one pitch. It’s like: no, he didn’t master one pitch, he just threw a pitch that nobody else can throw. He had something that nobody sees. Hitters don’t see that. You don’t see a ball that moves like that, especially as accurate as it is. There’d be guys stepping in the box just waving at it, even later in his career, just waving at it. It’s just a different pitch. That’s why he’s in a whole different category.”
Rivera threw more than one pitch, and not just because of his extraordinary cutter command. He used a two-seamer effectively, especially near the end of his career, and always had the four-seamer to straighten a right-handed hitter who might be leaning over the plate. At the 2013 All-Star Game, he reminded the Giants’ Sergio Romo—famous for his sweeping slider—to always protect his best pitch. Romo already knew this; he had ended the previous World Series with a tailing fastball down the middle to the Tigers’ Miguel Cabrera, who was looking for the slider and never swung. Yet it thrilled Romo to hear the lesson reinforced from a master like Rivera.
“He protected that cutter the whole time,” Romo says, “and nobody knew it.”
The first two closers to eclipse Rivera’s highest annual salary—$15 million—were Mark Melancon and Kenley Jansen, who both thrive with cutters. Neither learned the pitch from Rivera—Melancon, a former Yankee, got the most help from Brandon Lyon, a teammate with Houston—but Jansen’s has a similar origin. He was throwing fastballs to Borzello, by then the Dodgers’ bullpen catcher, without recognizing the natural weapon he held.
“Borzy caught Mariano, and he’s the one who told me: ‘You know your ball’s cutting,’ ” says Jansen, a converted catcher. “That’s when I started paying attention, and from there I realized the pitch was gonna become good for me. Because when I began, I always threw fastballs and I was like, ‘Geez, why do they not hit that fastball?’ I still didn’t learn how to throw a secondary pitch, and they already put me in the big leagues without a secondary pitch. And then I find out my ball cuts.”
Jansen’s home mound, at Dodger Stadium, is right where Oakland’s Dennis Eckersley stood as he faced a hobbled Kirk Gibson in the opener of the 1988 World Series. The right-handed Eckersley tried a backdoor slider to the left-handed Gibson, who famously swung on one leg to launch an indelible game-ending homer.
Somewhere in the stands that night was a 17-year-old from West Covina named Jason Giambi. In seven years he would be teammates with Eckersley, and later spend many years with Rivera on the Yankees. Before Rivera, Giambi says, the backdoor slider from Eckersley was about the only inward-moving pitch that a righty would throw to a lefty.
“Mariano really revolutionized the cutter inside, because that was always taboo for a right-handed pitcher, like, ‘Oh, don’t throw lefties in,’ ” Giambi says. “You could bank on it: it was sinkers down and away, changeups down and away, an occasional fastball inside to push you off the plate and then maybe like a runner—a running fastball at your hip to come back—but never was anybody talking about cutters in to lefties. Then Mariano took that fear away. Because he was so dominating, everybody was like, ‘Shit, this guy’s got one pitch and he’s fucking dominating every lefty. I better learn it!’
“Because the advantage lefties had was, you would lean over the plate. If you really think about every pitch: changeup from a righty sinks down and away, a sinker sinks down and away, most guys’ overhand breaking ball doesn’t really break into you. There was Eck with the backdoor slider, but if you start to look, everything else is out over the plate—and Mo changed that. Everything started to be: pound you in, pound you in and then go away. So he really was a game-changer.”
And if all that weren’t enough, Giambi says, teams began to use more and more infield shifts toward the end of his career, which stretched through 2014. If lefties managed to pull the cutter fair on the ground, there was often another infielder stationed there to gobble it up.
Lots of cutters, lots of shifts, lots of misery for hitters.
“Now you’re screwed,” says Giambi, who was the oldest player in the league when he retired, a year after Rivera and apparently not a moment too soon.
* * *
————
Stephen Strasburg pitches for a living, and only hits because National League rules require it. The first cutter he ever saw from a batter’s box came in a major league game, from the All-Star left-hander Cole Hamels. It terrified him.
“It looked so good,” says Strasburg, who hits right-handed. “I was squared out there for the bunt and that thing comes right in on your hand. Your heart stops a little bit. You see it, you see it, you see it—and then all of a sudden you’re like that.”
Strasburg mimicked himself in a panic, reeling back his bat as the ball screams in and plunks it for a foul. Even if he had faced cutters as an amateur, the feeling then would have been much different, because of what he held in his hand. A hitter with an aluminum bat can still get jammed and make solid contact, because the whole bat is a sweet spot. A hitter with a wood bat knows how vulnerable it is; Rivera was so famously destructive that the Twins gave him a rocking chair made from lumber shards as a retirement gift.
“In college, with aluminum bats, the effects of a cutter weren’t as apparent,” Abbott says. “It wasn’t until I started facing wood bats in spring training of my rookie year—when I broke a lot of bats, and
a lot of balls got in on right-handed hitters—that the talk started coming: ‘Oh, wow, what a cutter!’ The wood bats really showed it more dramatically, the effectiveness of the pitch.”
Even if pitchers resist the cutter as amateurs, they are wise to learn it quickly in the pros. The pitch is so easy to pick up and makes young hitters so uncomfortable that it can help achieve instant results. In the first decade of the 2000s, veteran hitters say, the cutter was not even mentioned on most advance scouting reports. Now it is essential for many pitchers to advance.
“Because it’s so hard to handle opposite-sided hitters, the remedy by most pitching coaches in most organizations is, ‘OK, we’ll teach him a cutter,’ ” Astros manager A. J. Hinch said. “And as matchup-oriented as we’ve become as an industry, in order for guys to stay in the game and not be replaced by a specialist, most pitchers have resorted to the cutter.”
As the cutter evolves, pitchers have become increasingly bold in where they throw it. The Angels’ Mike Trout, the best player of his generation, calls the cutter the toughest pitch he faces—but not the kind from a left-hander.
“The front-door cutter,” says Trout, a right-handed hitter. “If they have a two-seamer in and then they run a cutter front-hip, it’s tough.”
That’s a risky pitch, designed to start on the hitter’s body and then clip the front edge of the plate for a strike. If it catches too much of the plate, without the full force of a fastball, it can go a long way, which partially explains the surge in home runs in the middle of the 2010s. A lot of experiments blow up.
“Guys are getting killed with cutters, because hitters are adjusting to them,” said Dave Duncan, the retired pitching coach, in late 2017. “They’ve been thrown enough of them now that they’re reading them, number one, and they’re not swinging at the ones that are off the plate inside. They’re waiting for that pitcher to make a mistake with it, and when he does, it’s like a batting practice fastball. More and more pitchers are getting beat on cutters and going, ‘Goddamn, that was a good cutter!’ Well, it wasn’t a good cutter, because it was a strike.