Freddy Peralta has started looking a lot more like the pitcher the Rays believed they were getting.
In his last five starts with Tampa Bay, he’s posted a 2.73 ERA and a 3.80 FIP, and his walk rate has dropped sharply from 9.4% with the Mets to 4.5% with the Rays. Kyle Snyder and the Rays staff helped him tidy up a few mechanical details so he could get lower down the mound, but the bigger story is how Peralta has reshaped the way he uses his pitches.
That fits right into the Rays’ pitching playbook. They want pitchers to win the race to two strikes, then attack the edges and get hitters to chase. Peralta is doing exactly that, just in a more nuanced way than a simple slogan suggests.
He’s actually throwing fewer pitches in the zone with the Rays than he did with the Mets - 40.5% compared to 43.2% - but his strike rate has climbed to 64.1% from 60.5%. The difference is in how each pitch is being deployed.
His fastball usage in the zone has only changed a little, dropping from 50.0% to 47.7%. The real shift has come with the rest of the arsenal.
His changeup has gone from 34.9% zone usage with the Mets to 23.2% with the Rays. His sweeper has fallen from 47.4% to 27.0%.
And his curveball has jumped from 34.8% in the zone to 61.9%.
That gives every pitch a more specific job.
Peralta’s changeup doesn’t create much velocity separation from his fastball, so it’s not the kind of pitch that’s going to pile up in-zone whiffs. The Rays have pushed him to lean into its vertical separation instead and use it as a chase pitch.
His usage of it has risen, especially against right-handed hitters, and the key change is that he’s now using it out of the zone instead of trying to steal strikes with it. The sweeper is serving a similar purpose, mainly as a chase weapon against righties.
The curveball is where things get especially interesting. It’s more of a neutral pitch in terms of platoon, but it doesn’t have the velocity or depth to shut down contact on its own. Tampa Bay has turned it into a strike-stealing tool, especially in counts where hitters usually aren’t ready to swing at a breaking ball.
Peralta is throwing curveballs nearly a quarter of the time on the first pitch of an at-bat, and hitters are offering at only a 20% clip. Meanwhile, he’s getting called strikes on 54.3% of them. That’s the Rays in a nutshell: using a pitch hitters aren’t geared up for to grab strike one before they can settle in.
Once he’s ahead, the rest of the arsenal can do the rest of the work. When the count is even or in his favor, he’s throwing 45% fastballs and just under 40% offspeed pitches.
The tunnel between those looks is strong, which lets him challenge the zone without making life easy for hitters. He’ll mix in a breaking ball now and then to keep them guessing.
And there may be another layer coming.
Peralta appears to have introduced a cutter in his most recent start against the Braves. Two pitches Hawkeye classified as four-seamers looked much more like cutters based on their movement. They came in around the upper 80s, showed less vertical movement than his fastball, and had glove-side movement that lined up more with his breaking balls.
It’s still a work in progress, and the shape will probably keep changing as he refines it. But the pitch could become a useful bridge to his sweeper against right-handers.
Right now, hitters can separate his four-seam fastball from his sweeper fairly easily out of the hand. A cutter sitting between those two shapes would add another layer for hitters to sort through.
Both of the cutters were aimed down and just off the glove-side edge, which is also where Peralta’s breaking stuff does its best work.
The cutter could also help him in a different way against lefties. It’s not a perfect tunnel because of the vertical movement, but the velocity gap between the cutter and his offspeed pitch is basically gone.
The cutter and offspeed sit in the same speed range, while separating by nearly two feet horizontally. That kind of contrast could make life miserable for hitters trying to protect with two strikes.
It’ll take time for Peralta to settle on a consistent version of it, but the fit is obvious. The curveball has already given him a new way to steal early strikes.
A cutter could make those strikes tougher to anticipate, while also opening up more room for the sweeper and changeup once he gets ahead. For the Rays, that’s exactly the kind of evolution they want to see.
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