Bryce Miller was a fourth round pick by the Mariners in the 2021 MLB draft and never appeared higher than 98th on MLB Pipeline’s Top-100 prospect list.
Still, he reached the major leagues after just 160 total innings in the minors and enjoyed immediate success. That success faded quickly, but he’s done an incredible job reinventing himself as a pitcher over his brief career and looks to be on the verge of stardom.
Here, I’m going to talk about the adjustments he made on his way to breaking out, why they worked, and what to expect from him next season.
I’m writing these break out pieces every week. Check out how Hunter Greene is on the path to becoming an ace from last week and how Tarik Skubal became the best pitcher in baseball two weeks ago.
Pitching is Easy?
Bryce Miller burst onto the scene in 2023 as a fastball-forward, power pitcher who wasn’t afraid to challenge hitters. Initially, that was a great plan.
In his MLB debut, he took a perfect game into the sixth inning. Over his first five starts, he had a sparkling 1.15 ERA – lowest in the league – with 28 strikeouts, three walks, and completed at least six innings in each start.
At the same time, Miller was throwing his fastball 70% of the time. That was more often than any other pitcher in baseball. And it worked because he came to the majors with one of the most explosive fastballs in the league.
It had above average velocity, significantly above average induced vertical break, was difficult to barrel up, and hitters had no answers despite Miller filling up the zone with it.
Everything was perfect! Easy, even. Show up and throw a bunch of fastballs in the strike zone. They’ll never hit it, right? This major league baseball thing is simple.
Well, that turned out to not be true. The Yankees lit Miller up for eight runs in his next start and he went on to have a 5.31 ERA over his next 20 outings to end his rookie season. He began to tinker a bit during these struggles by adding a two-seam fastball and sweeper while more changeups, but couldn’t pull himself together.
That gave him a new tenacity to attack the offseason with. Thomas Nestico wrote a great thread about how Miller used science to become an ace and this excerpt he used taken from an interview with Brandon Gustafson says it all.
Passion, open-mindedness, creativity, desire to be great, whatever you want to call it was at the center of Miller’s breakout.
Do the Splits
The first step for Miller was finding a better way to attack left-handed batters. Simply put, they torched him during his rookie year.
So, he went straight to the lab and was determined to develop a splitter. Here’s a video from his own Twitter account last winter showing his progress with the new pitch.
That was on December 22nd and he was already so confident in the pitch that he broadcasted it from his own social channels (shoutout B Money). He even included the pitch’s characteristics that his Trackman captured.
By the time the regular season rolled around, his splitter had been featured in countless articles, videos, and even got the Pitching Ninja treatment in spring training.
Clearly chomping at the bit, he threw it 20 times in his 2024 debut – 16 of which to lefties – and it forced six whiffs, earned a 40% chase rate, and allowed just one measly single. He also nabbed his first two strikeouts of the season with it as looked downright nasty in the process.
With the early success, the pitch was still very new and thereby inconsistent. Splitters are often inconsistent by nature, but Miller’s was extreme even by normal splitter standards. Check out the pitch movement chart for Miller’s split compared for Shota Imanaga’s from this past season.
David Adler wrote a great piece about this bizarre movement pattern in May and said that Miller basically had three different splitter variations inside the one pitch. Miller told him all he was trying to really do was locate it below the zone and “if it’s moving either direction, or just straight down, that’s fine.” He also said the pitch “kind of has a mind of its own sometimes,” to Adam Jude of the Seattle Times in April.
While wonky, the pitch was working. It had a 38.5% whiff rate in April and Miller had a 2.04 ERA at the end of that month. Yet, its effectiveness began to fade as the season wore on.
It missed fewer bats in May than it did in April, then fewer bats in June than it did in May. Between those two months, Miller’s ERA spiked to 4.94 and he once again needed to find a new wrinkle to break out of his slump.
‘Death’ to Batters
Some pitchers just have a knack for picking up new pitches. Yu Darvish and Zack Greinke seemed to pick up new ones or add variations to their existing ones whenever they felt like it. Miller’s teammates George Kirby and Logan Gilbert have picked up a few each in their short time in the majors, too.
Miller is no different. He adapted with his two-seamer as a rookie, his splitter soon after, and then a curveball that would push him towards ace status.
The Mariners acquired reliever Mike Baumann from the Orioles on May 22nd. He was designated for assignment on July 19th. In those 50 days, Miller was able to learn his patented ‘spike curve’.
“It was like a ten second conversation,” Baumann told Lookout Landing, “and all of a sudden he was throwing it in games.”
Uncanny. He debuted the new knuckle curve on June 29th and that started a string of 15 starts to end the season where he had a 1.94 ERA.
Interestingly, Miller experimented with a curveball the year before, but it was a more traditional, looping curve and he scrapped it after throwing just 20 in games. Check out the different movement profiles between the old and new curveballs.
The new pitch is coming in much harder and moves more straight up and down. That classifies it as a ‘death ball’ shape. Jeff Passan popularized the Death Ball trope last postseason when Jordan Montgomery rode it to World Series glory.
All the death ball classification really means is that the pitch is dropping due to its gyro spin rather than falling over itself with top-spin, like most other curveballs. When you hear gyro spin, think about the way a football leaves your hand when you throw a spiral.
If I can nerd out for a moment…
Death balls are more so a variation of gyro sliders than actual curveballs because they share the same spin characteristics as the gyro slider, just with more drop. Also, the death ball especially kills side-to-side movement and can be thrown much harder, just like those sliders. Miller already threw a gyro slider which is why the death ball likely came easy to him.
Lance Brozdowski has a great YouTube Video explaining death balls more in depth if you want to learn more.
Don’t worry too much about that death ball moniker, though. It will not be the new sweeper. Just a more specific pitch classification that’s meant for players, coaches, and fellow nerds.
Anyway, here’s an overlay from Thomas’ thread showing how well the death ball plays off his fastball.
When working on his knuckle curveball, Bryce Miller wanted a pitch to specifically play off his fastball.
“I’m hoping it looks like a fastball, and then just drops” (@TheBGustafson)
Let’s see how this interaction worked out against NL MVP Finalist, Francisco Lindor
14/ pic.twitter.com/l7thnHiHiX
— Thomas Nestico (@TJStats) October 22, 2024
Pitch shape jargon aside: this is really all that matters: the pitch looks like his fastball and then the bottom falls out. It’s exactly what Miller needed to tie his repertoire together.
Results
While his season took many twists and turns, it was still very good on the whole. Miller wound up with a 2.94 ERA across 180 1/3 innings with 171 strikeouts for the season. That made him the seventh most valuable starting pitcher for fantasy – better than Seth Lugo and Corbin Burnes – according to FanGraphs’ player rater.
If you segment from when he first used his knuckle curve (or death ball hehe), Miller’s 1.94 ERA trailed only Blake Snell, Paul Skenes, and Chris Sale while his 0.91 WHIP trailed only Snell and teammate Logan Gilbert. He was also in the top-20 in SIERA and K-BB%.
That is superstar level, SP1 quality with a clear and obvious material change that spurned his success.
What’s Next?
I’m incredibly bullish on Miller mostly because of how dominant he was once he had both the curveball and splitter at his disposal. Sometimes we can muddy the water looking at splits in our analysis, but Miller had true, material changes that turned him into a stud.
Yet, he’s currently the SP13 – between Imanaga and Aaron Nola – in early drafts over at the NFBC. That’s surprising since he beat that price last season, got markedly better, and remains in one of the best situations for a pitcher in baseball with the friendly confines of T-Mobile Park in Seattle.
Perhaps his price is relatively low because he’s outshined by teammates Gilbert ad Kirby who are each being drafted inside the top-40 picks overall. Or maybe there’s fear Miller will take another half step back as he’s done each of the first two times he vaulted himself forward.
I wouldn’t let either of those dampen the shine of what Miller can do. We have a starter in one of the best pitchers’ parks in baseball with a rock-solid fastball, multiple effective secondaries, and a knack for picking up new pitches whenever the moment strikes. He is a star.
