Five things Rich Hill does very well:

1) Spins the ball. With roughly 2400 RPMs on his fastball and roughly 2900 RPMs on the curve, he is consistently in the upper tier of the league. This is how he creates such great movement separation between the two pitches.

Spins the ball *efficiently.* Hill’s has 94% active spin on his fastball and 100% active spin on his curveball. Not only does he have high spin, nearly all of the spin contributes to magnus movement. Put another way, the two pitches essentially move in opposite directions.

3) Pitches backwards. While Hill has one of the best curveballs in baseball, he often goes to the fastball to put hitters away with two strikes. Since the start of his late career renaissance, Hill his struck out more hitters via the fastball than the curveball.

4) Tunnels his pitches. By design, Hill concentrates the fastball high and the breaking ball low (Think Nick Anderson, Tyler Glasnow). Because of this, Hill is able to make his pitches look similar up to the point a hitter needs to make a decision whether to swing or not.

5) Mirrors his spin. This is my favorite thing about Hill and possibly the thing he does better than anyone in baseball. On top of Hill’s ability to achieve both high and efficient spin, he is also able to throw both pitches on a nearly identical axis.

This is important because hitters do have the ability to decipher differences in spin axis as well as fourseam and two seam orientations, but they can NOT decipher spin direction. It is impossible for hitter to see whether a pitch has backspin (fastball) or topspin (curveball).

All of this *together* is what continues to make Hill so deceptive despite his age and having low fastball velocity.

#RaysUp