I would never tell you how to appreciate baseball, but I’m really going to urge you to take a second to relish Dillon Maples’ crazy cutter. This pitch is among the most filthy in baseball and, quite frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.
The David Wallace (that’s an Office reference) of Cubs Insider, Evan Altman, spoke with Maples earlier in the offseason about how the breaking pitch revolutionized the reliever’s career. The two talked about Maples changing his sequencing by pitching backwards. The former top prospect returned to a strategy of establishing the strike zone with a cutter/slider early in the count instead of a fastball.