Andrew Painter Makes Five Appearances as Phillies Tinker Pitch Mix
Andrew Painter has made five big league appearances in his first month in the majors, and the Phillies are already changing how they deploy him. He has four starts and one relief appearance because of a migraine. The results have been uneven, but the usage plan around him is becoming clearer.
Painter and Caleb Cotham
Pitch usage is the story. The Phillies and Caleb Cotham are trying to separate Painter’s shape by hitter handedness, using his sinker, four-seam fastball and slider in different ways against right-handed and left-handed hitters.
Against right-handed hitters, his sinker usage jumped from roughly 6% in AAA last season to 31% in the majors. He has thrown that sinker exclusively on the inner-third of the plate to right-handers, while his four-seam fastball usage against that same side has fallen to 28% and his slider usage has dropped to 14%.
Right-Handed Hitters
That change fits the numbers. Painter’s four-seam fastball averages 3.2 inches of arm-side movement, and the Phillies have been asking him to throw it glove-side or inside to left-handed hitters instead of leaning on it the same way to right-handers. He is also allowing a.343 average and a.929 OPS against right-handed hitters, which is the clearest sign that the adjustment is being driven by contact quality as much as by usage.
Last season in AAA, he threw his sinker against right-handed hitters roughly 6% of the time and his four-seam fastball roughly 40% of the time. In the majors, those numbers have moved sharply, and the pitch mix now looks less like a broad fastball plan and more like a targeted split built around what each hitter side is seeing.
Split-Change and Slider
The other side of the plan is showing up in the off-speed mix. Painter is backdooring the slider for called strikes and working a tunnel with his split-change, which has produced a 36.8% whiff rate against left-handed hitters. He has also flipped some curveballs for strikes and shown the ability to get chase.
Those pitches give the Phillies more ways to attack without forcing the four-seam to do all the work. The hard part is that Painter’s first 24 big league innings still produced a 5.25 ERA and a 3.34 FIP, a split that says the stuff has not always matched the run prevention.
Phillies’ Early Read
That gap is why his first month matters beyond the raw count of appearances. The Phillies joined this with an 8-8 start, ten straight losses and a managerial change before 30 games into the season, so every usable arm has carried extra weight. Painter is being evaluated in real time, not just for results, but for how quickly he can turn a mix of fastballs, sinkers, sliders and split-changes into more whiffs or strikeouts.
For now, the 5.25 ERA is only part of the picture. The more revealing number may be the 3.34 FIP, because it leaves room for a cleaner version of the same pitcher if the pitch usage keeps moving in the right direction.
