Podcasts hosted by professional athletes — I don’t learn about all that. But I did delight in a current clip from Mookie Betts’ podcast where he was speaking with Cal Raleigh, who was comparing Zack Wheeler — maybe the very best pitcher in baseball — to his batterymate Bryan Woo.

“[Wheeler] is kind of like Woo,” Raleigh stated. “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 discussion in late August, Phillies minors pitching coach Riley McCauley made the very same contrast.

“[Woo] is very Wheeler-ish,” McCauley informed me.

I’d messaged McCauley since I wished to much better comprehend how Woo’s motion connected to his impressive efficiency. He tosses a lot of fastballs — almost three-quarters of Woo’s pitches are either four-seamers or sinkers. And those fastballs are generally in the strike zone — he ranks initially amongst all beginners in both zone portion and walk rate. And yet no one can square him up.

Even accounting for the 3 homers he permitted versus the Angels on Saturday, players are batting .194 and punching .304 throughout his 94 innings pitched. The anticipated statistics line up with his outcomes — his .246 xwOBA permitted is much better than any pitcher this season. (Mikey Ajeto blogged about Woo’s damage suppression abilities in a fantastic post for Baseball Prospectus the other day.)

How can Woo toss a lot of fastballs in the zone and leave unharmed? I believe it’s mainly since he is a quite high guy tossing from an insane low release point. Standing 6-foot-2, Woo launches the ball simply 5 feet off the ground:

Among the 115 pitchers who have actually tossed 500 four-seam fastballs in the 2024 season, Woo’s release height is the 6th most affordable. That extremely low release height implies his fastball goes into the strike zone at the third-flattest vertical technique angle (VAA) in baseball. Only Joe Ryan and Craig Kimbrel toss flatter fastballs.

Fastballs tossed high in the zone with a flat VAA like Woo’s or Ryan’s are as near an unhittable pitch as exists in baseball. Add in Woo’s above-average speed (he averages 95 miles per hour and can ramp it approximately 97) and extraordinary strike-throwing capability, and you’ve got the dish for a pitcher who can non-stop assault players with his four-seam fastball. Even though the shape is otherwise regular — the pitch’s vertical and horizontal motion are both within a handful of portion points of the league average — Woo’s release height negates these seemingly average shape issues.

That might cause a natural concern: If tossing difficult fastballs high in the zone from down low is so efficient, why doesn’t every pitcher simply do it? The response is basic: Not everyone can move like Woo.

When Woo was a “midlevel” draft possibility, Trent Blank, a pitching strategist for the Mariners, informed president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto that if he had the very first choice in the 2021 Draft, he’d take Bryan Woo. (Henry Davis went initially general; Woo was up to the Mariners in the 6th round.)

Blank discussed why he felt so abundant 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 informed 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 motion to Woo’s capability to regularly toss strikes from a low release point with above-average speed. Each of these qualities can be discussed by the specifics of his motion.

McCauley discussed to me that the different positions Woo enters are “pretty extreme,” even compared to the common big league pitcher. What separates Woo even further from the population is that he keeps his balance while moving his body into these severe positions.

I asked McCauley to stroll me through a few of the stages of Woo’s shipment: the leg lift, the hand break, the front foot strike, and lastly ball release. First, the lift:

Woo raises his front leg method up, bringing his knee approximately the letters on his uniform. The high leg lift leads straight into and affects the next stage of the shipment — the hand break, or the minute when the pitcher separates the ball from the glove.

At hand break, McCauley states, Woo extends the front of his body forward while preserving stability on his back foot:

“This is very, very, very Wheeler-ish,” McCauley stated. “The glove and the leg are both pretty extended. The hand break is pretty long, so he’s creating a ton of rotational capacity in his delivery, which is going to allow the front foot to swing open and the upper half to stay closed.”

At the front foot strike stage, Woo is taken part in maybe the most severe position in the shipment. As he moves the front of his body towards the plate, he’s all at once moving the back half of his body in the opposite instructions, producing noteworthy hip-shoulder separation.

Woo gets “a ton” of thoracic spinal column counter-rotation even as he orients his front hip towards the batter, McCauley states. All big league pitchers most likely do this to some degree, however Woo — and Wheeler — stand apart amongst even this elite population.

“It’s a pretty rotational lower half where he’s swinging the front leg open, but he’s mobile enough in the upper half to — you can see his chest is pointing towards us right now,” McCauley stated, describing the video frame listed below:

All of that lower-half motion brings Woo to his last location method down the mound, completely well balanced, carrying almost all of his possible energy into the release of the pitch.

“Once that front foot hits, he’s very good at getting linear and holding, so now he’s taking that low slot because he’s creating a very stable base for that trunk to get linear and forward with,” McCauley stated:

What’s impressive about Woo (and Wheeler, McCauley mentions) is that he can move like that without falling out of series. There are benefits to severe positions: They assistance pitchers reach peak speed and get to the disastrous low-slot release point. But a normal college or minors pitcher with a shipment like this, McCauley discussed, may encounter command issues by trying to duplicate this enthusiastic shipment pitch after pitch.

“For some guys that get in this extreme of a position, it could probably cause a lot of inconsistency,” McCauley stated.

That being stated, “good” pitching mechanics are not practically accomplishing severe positions, however efficiently timing the series of these positions.

Grant Messner, then a pitcher at Caltech, blogged about going to Driveline in 2018 to figure out some speed problems; I’d advise checking out the whole post. Driveline discovered that a person thing holding Messner back was the timing of when his hip and shoulder, respectively, struck their optimum speed. Messner was at essentially absolutely no seconds — to enhance his speed, he required it to be more like 0.05 seconds. Five-hundredths of a 2nd, simply put, apart ineffective mechanics from ideal mechanics. And that’s simply one stage of a shipment that Messner poetically refers to as an “infinite-dimensional mechanical problem.”

“Guys that create positions like this — those are the guys you’re typically seeing have higher walk rates, spray the ball, get very inconsistent ball flight,” McCauley stated.

As I mentioned in my post on release angles last month, the next Bryan Woo may be recognizable from a handful of pitches in front of KinaTrax electronic cameras. The exact variables caught by a business like KinaTrax — hip-shoulder separation, core stability, leg extension at hand break, and so on. — can be determined and compared to other specialists to search for outlier entertainers.

You might most likely take a look at Woo’s biomechanical information, for instance, and discover proof for Cal Raleigh and Riley McCauley’s observations that Woo relocations like Zack Wheeler.

Wheeler and Woo both prosper since they toss high-velocity fastballs from unique slots with extraordinary command. A fastball like Wheeler’s or Woo’s “just gets on you,” as Raleigh explained it. And the capability to toss that fastball can be linked straight to the method these pitchers “glide down the mound,” utilizing athleticism that sticks out even amongst the extremely skilled individuals who toss baseballs for a living.

“This is subjective, but from what I’ve seen, the bigger positions you get into, it’s going to be harder to create tension and throw strikes in those positions,” McCauley stated. “But that’s where you get guys — like Joe Ryan or Wheeler or Woo — who have somehow found stability in these crazy positions. You’ve now created a monster of a guy that has elite command and very unique delivery. And now you’re talking about a beast.”