San Diego Padres closer Mason Miller has already turned a strong trade deadline pickup into something bigger: the best closer in baseball, and he says the difference has come down to one simple thing.
As he heads to the All-Star Game, Miller explained his rise in a piece by AJ Cassavell of MLB.com, and he kept coming back to the same word.
“It’s just been consistency, really,” Miller said when asked about the driving force behind his success. “There are times and stretches throughout the season where you throw the ball really well and times where you’re throwing it a little bit worse. But [it's] just being able to compete when you don’t have your best stuff.”
That idea showed up in a mid-May game against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Miller walked the first two hitters he faced in the ninth inning, then made a reset with his mechanics and finished the inning by throwing 12 straight strikes to get the last three outs.
“You take away probably two games from my year last year, it’s a really great year,” Miller said. “I’m kind of the same guy, just being a little bit more consistent.”
For Miller, the strike zone is the whole story. He knows the fastball and slider work best when he can land them for strikes, and he pointed to improvement in how he attacks hitters now compared with his last All-Star trip.
“Zone percentage, count leverage -- I think I’m just a little bit better than I was then,” Miller said. "That’s kind of the natural course as you spend more time in this game.”
The numbers are modest, but they fit the picture. His strike rate with both the fastball and slider has ticked up, and that small gain has helped sharpen his edge.
Miller is also part of a broader trend in the game: even power arms are leaning more heavily on multiple pitches. He’s making hitters choose between his slider and fastball, with the slider coming 54.2 percent of the time and the fastball at 42.8 percent, plus an occasional changeup as a show pitch.
“If you’re not able to take your A-swing, because you have to respect another pitch, I think that probably helps,” Miller said earlier this year. “If you set somebody up or lead a guy one way, then execute a heater, you end up with more strikeouts looking. Or more take strikes on a fastball that’s executed.
“If you go soft, go soft, then you go heater, it’s kind of putting a guy in a really hard situation to succeed against it.”
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