Pedro Martinez Explains How Young Red Sox Hurler Can Take Next Step

The Boston Red Sox's 2022 season can be looked at as a tryout for young players amid an injury-plagued year where postseason contention was ruled out early on. 

One of the first pitchers to earn a shot last season was Josh Winckowski. The 24-year-old went 5-7 with a 5.89 ERA, 44-to-27 strikeout-to-walk ratio and a .300 batting average against in 70 1/3 innings pitched across 15 appearances (14 starts). 

The eye test would indicate that he was better than his numbers, as would his 4.84 expected ERA and 4.95 FIP, but there was one massive flaw in his game. 

Winckowski ended the season in the second percentile in both chase and whiff rate, and in the third percentile for strikeout rate. In other words, he couldn't generate swings-and-misses if his life depended on it.

I asked Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez if there was anything Winckowski could do to increase his chase and whiff rates. 

There are some things that could be done, but it takes a lot of work," Martinez said on Friday. "Sometimes people misjudge how difficult it is to improve one pitch, to improve on one area of pitching."

The Hall of Famer then dove into some specifics as to how Winckowski can optimize his skillset. 

"He needs a lot more pitch movement, he needs to create bigger gaps between some of the pitches." Martinez said. "Hopefully we'll be able to work and pinpoint those areas and find ways to improve on those with the talent he has."

To Martinez's point, Winckowski does feature too many parallels with his current repertoire. The 24-year-old throws a sinker (38.4% usage), slider (28.6%), four-seam fastball (12.9%), cutter (10.3%) and changeup (9.8%). 

His fastball and sinker only have a 0.3 mph difference, and his sinker doesn't have enough movement to drastically differentiate the two. 

However, Winckowski's biggest issue, and likely the main point Martinez was alluding to, is his lack of contrast between his cutter and slider. The cutter is thrown just 3.8 mph harder with similar horizontal movement. His slider has significantly more vertical drop, which really is the lone difference between the two pitches. To make matters worse, he tends to only throw both pitches to the right side of the plate. 

Josh Winckowski Pitch Breakdown

Slider vs. Cutter Heatmap