One of my favorite articles published in recent VEB memory was alum Lance Brozdowski’s dive into Michael Wacha’s curveball last spring. I’ve talked about this article a few times, but it was a really incisive dive into why a pitcher might throw an honestly pretty poor pitch. The upshot of it was, Wacha was using his curve to steal strikes early in counts, because he couldn’t put batters away with it.
Now, in 2018 that kind of worked. His curve wasn’t great, but it was at least serviceable. He threw it 15% of the time (27.