Sliders are tough. In 2010, the league threw just about 13 percent of its pitches as sliders. That year, the run value of a slider for a pitcher was 0.56 per 100 sliders thrown, the highest among all pitch types, and the only breaking pitch with a positive value. I don’t bring this up to mislead you: pitch-level values are a strange beast, because pitchers use their arsenals to set up and/or bamboozle hitters, and the slider may only have a positive value because it’s well set up by a fastball or similar. In any case, though, sliders were good, perhaps because they weren’t thrown very often, but they were good nonetheless.
Austin Riley and the slider
