Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
Podcasts hosted by athletes — I don’t know about all that. But I did enjoy a recent clip from Mookie Betts’ podcast where he was talking to Cal Raleigh, who was comparing Zack Wheeler — perhaps the best pitcher in baseball — to his batterymate Bryan Woo. “[Wheeler] is kind of like Woo,” Raleigh said. “He glides down the mound. And it’s so effortless. Some guys just have that natural glide down the mound, easy, and [the ball] just gets on you.”
Coincidentally, in a conversation in late August, Phillies minor league pitching coach Riley McCauley made the same comparison. “[Woo] is very Wheeler-ish,” McCauley told me. I’d messaged McCauley because I wanted to better understand how Woo’s movement related to his remarkable performance.
He throws so many fastballs — nearly three-quarters of Woo’s pitches are either four-seamers or sinkers. And those fastballs are almost always in the strike zone — he ranks first among all starters in both zone percentage and walk rate. And yet nobody can square him up. Even accounting for the three homers he allowed against the Angels on Saturday, hitters are batting .194 and slugging .304 across his 94 innings pitched. The expected stats line up with his results — his .246 xwOBA allowed is better than any pitcher this season.
How can Woo throw so many fastballs in the zone and walk away unscathed? I think it’s mostly because he is a pretty tall guy throwing from a crazy low release point. Standing 6-foot-2, Woo releases the ball just five feet off the ground: Among the 115 pitchers who have thrown 500 four-seam fastballs in the 2024 season, Woo’s release height is the sixth lowest.
That super low release height means his fastball enters the strike zone at the third-flattest vertical approach angle (VAA) in baseball. Only Joe Ryan and Craig Kimbrel throw flatter fastballs. Fastballs thrown high in the zone with a flat VAA like Woo’s or Ryan’s are as close to an unhittable pitch as exists in baseball.
Even though the shape is otherwise ordinary — the pitch’s vertical and horizontal movement are both within a handful of percentage points of the league average — Woo’s release height negates these ostensibly mediocre shape concerns.
That might lead to a natural question: If throwing hard fastballs high in the zone from down low is so effective, why doesn’t every pitcher just do it? The answer is simple: Not everybody can move like Woo.
When Woo was a “midlevel” draft prospect, Trent Blank, a pitching strategist for the Mariners, told president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto that if he had the first pick in the 2021 Draft, he’d take Bryan Woo. (Henry Davis went first overall; Woo fell to the Mariners in the sixth round.)
Blank explained why he felt so exuberant about Woo in a July 2024 interview with the Seattle Times’ Adam Jude. “What Bryan has that’s really interesting is, he’s a guy with strength and stability and mobility, all at the same time, with good timing (in his delivery),” Blank told Jude. “You’ve got this unicorn of a mover who’s really strong and mobile… He popped for us.”
You can draw a direct line from this unicorn movement to Woo’s ability to consistently throw strikes from a low release point with above-average velocity. Each of these qualities can be explained by the specifics of his movement.
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