Camilo Doval Is Down and Away in More Ways Than One

On Sunday evening, Camilo Doval stepped to the mound without his usual light show. He showed the range of his game right away – after striking out the first two batters he faced, he walked Greg Jones, who promptly stole both second and third. Then Nolan Jones ripped a scorching line drive to center for a triple, Elehuris Montero stroked a line drive single, and two runs had scored just like that. To make matters worse, this wasn’t even against the Rockies – it was against the Triple-A Albuquerque Isotopes.

It’s hard to wrap your head around Doval’s sudden fall from ace closer to minor leaguer. He debuted in the magical 2021 season, picked up closing duties at the tail end of that year, and looked like one of the best relievers in the sport almost immediately. In 2022 and ’23, he pitched to a 2.73 ERA and 2.87 FIP. He was wild at times, overpowering at others, and impossible to square up in every iteration. When you have a 100 mph cutter and a tight 90 mph slider to throw off of it, you don’t need much else. He was fifth in baseball in saves, ninth in reliever WAR, 10th in innings pitched among relievers; in other words, he was a one-man back-of-the-bullpen for the Giants.

One thing always bothered me about Doval, even when he was dominating the opposition for the last two years: His cutter doesn’t cut correctly. That sounds nonsensical, or at best like a weak nitpick. But here, take a look at his cutter as compared to Emmanuel Clase’s best-in-class offering, using our pitch-type splits:

The “cut” in a cutter refers to glove-side movement. A good cutter looks like a fastball out of the hand before the spin takes over; then it veers sharply away from the four-seam path that hitters have spent their whole lives tracking. It’s not just a matter of how differently shaped the cutter is from the rest of a given pitcher’s arsenal – just ask Mariano Rivera. Instead, it’s more about defying the brain patterns batters have built up over decades of playing baseball. That’s just not where a fastball should go, and so hitters either swing fruitlessly over it or, in the case of opposite-handed batters, end up breaking their bats when the pitch bores in on their hands.

Doval’s cutter doesn’t do that. Clase’s breaks two inches toward his glove side, in on lefties; Doval’s stays arm side. There’s a six-inch gap between the two. Think of it this way: Four-seamers thrown by righties this year have broken about two inches farther toward righties than Doval’s cutter – and eight inches farther than Clase’s cutter. Clase’s is fooling people; Doval’s looks like a four-seamer turned down a few notches.

This comparison is unfair to Doval, of course, because Clase is the best reliever in the world. But even if you compare Doval to everyone who throws cutters, he stands out in a bad way. This year, 35 pitchers have thrown at least 50 hard cutters (92+ mph); Doval’s arm-side movement is by far the most. The only one within three inches of him is teammate Sean Hjelle, and Hjelle’s pitches are all bizarre, thanks to his 6’11” frame and unorthodox delivery. To make matters worse, Doval has lost some vertical movement on his pitch this year. It used to be one of the most back-spinning cutters out there, but he’s inducing two inches less vertical break this year, which means it’s kind of a two-seamer that doesn’t run.

That marginal difference definitely matters – both of our pitch models have gone from considering the cutter a plus pitch to a below-average one, and Baseball Prospectus’s StuffPro model agrees. But none of these models ever loved the pitch. PitchingBot thinks that even before this year, Doval’s cutter was a 53 overall on the 20-80 scale. Stuff+ (using Pitching+, its estimation of stuff plus command) gave it a 97. Clase’s cutter is a 65 or a 111, depending on which model you’d prefer. Doval’s supposed “go-to pitch” has been bad all along, so we’re going need a better explanation for why the results have fallen off so hard this year.

The secret of Doval’s game is that he’s not really a cutter-first pitcher despite the eye-popping velocity. Sure, he throws a lot of cutters – but he doesn’t throw a lot of cutters for a cutter-first pitcher. He throws his slider half the time, in fact, and mixes in 15% sinkers. In his career, his cutter has produced the worst results of any of his three primary pitches. It doesn’t miss many bats. It allows loud contact, and plenty of line drives. It induces a shockingly low chase rate – only 20.3% for his career. Over the past four seasons, 46 pitchers have thrown 500 or more cutters; Doval’s chase rate is the second lowest in that group. Our estimation of pitch values has the cutter three runs below average for his career; Statcast’s measure, which takes base/out state into account where ours doesn’t, has it at two runs above average. For reference, we think his slider has been 22 runs better than average, and Statcast is even more optimistic, at 32 runs.

Look at Doval’s pitch usage by count, and it’s clear that he knows what he’s best at. He throws his slider more frequently than any other pitch type in every count except for 0-0, 3-0, and 3-1. The extra fastballs on the first pitch are likely about Doval trying to get ahead against passive opponents. His 3-0 and 3-1 pitch selection is all about avoiding walks against batters who know he’s wild. But even on 2-0, he’d rather throw a slider than a cutter, because it’s his best pitch by a mile.

That gets to what I think has doomed Doval this year. He’s never had great slider command, but it’s always been good enough to get by. It’s hard enough and dips enough that batters geared up for his velocity basically just swing over it every time. My best comparison is Ryan Helsley’s slider, and the two have been similarly overpowering as putaway pitches because they, in terms of velocity, are not overpowering; 89 mph pitches just aren’t supposed to dip like that. As a point of comparison, Doval’s slider sinks six inches more than Kyle Hendricks’s similar-velo sinker. It looks like an optical illusion both on camera and to hitters.

That’s great when Doval lives around the strike zone, because it leaves hitters with few good options. But he’s increasingly failing to hit the mark with his early-count sliders. I define “around the plate” as the heart and shadow zones – I use these Baseball Savant attack zones quite frequently, but here’s a refresher if you’re new here. Early in the count (0-0, 0-1, 1-0, and 1-1), Doval used to locate his slider around the plate roughly two thirds of the time. But he’s completely lost the plot, and the plate, this year. He’s leaving everything down, and too far to his glove side, away to righty batters. If you ignore my fuzzy zone definition and instead just look at whether he hits the rulebook strike zone, it’s even worse:

The result of this is straight forward: Doval has to pick between two bad options. He can either keep throwing sliders and fall behind in the count too frequently, or he can challenge hitters with his so-so cutter and risk getting shelled. He’s picked a mixture of the two this year. His 14.3% walk rate is by far a career high, and opponents are absolutely tattooing his cutter when he attacks with it early in the count.

This isn’t some deep secret. Bob Melvin identified two reasons Doval got optioned to the minors: strike throwing and time to the plate. Time to the plate has been an issue for him since the stolen base explosion of 2023; Statcast calculates base advances prevented by pitchers, and Doval is the second-worst reliever in baseball when it comes to that skill. It’s honestly not a huge issue, because plenty of those runners would get free advances via his walks anyway, and he still strikes out a ton of batters. But it’s a clear place to improve, and the way to improve there is obvious: Just shorten the time it takes to deliver the ball.

Far less obvious is how Doval will regain his slider command. If I had a simple fix that I could tell you here, I wouldn’t be writing for FanGraphs; I’d be collecting ludicrously large consulting fees from major league teams to make their relievers better. Watching his mechanics didn’t help me out, either. Here’s a slider from 2023:

And one from 2024:

They’re very similar sliders, only he left this year’s pitch so far inside that even swing-happy Miguel Rojas didn’t offer at it. If you’re interested in going all Zapruder on these two deliveries, here are the video links — the first clip and the second one — but I can’t discern any mechanical flaws that have suddenly cropped up. He does seem to be striding less, and his extension is down this year, so maybe that’s it? His release point hasn’t changed that much, so I don’t think that’s an obvious culprit, but it’s at least something that has changed year over year. He’s just missing down a lot more, at the end of the day.

Whatever the cause, the effect of this loss of command has compounded on Doval. He’s around the zone less, so he’s getting behind in the count more frequently. Being behind in the count more frequently is particularly bad for his slider-dominant approach; as we covered earlier, his go-to pitch in 2-0 and 2-1 counts is his slider, and now he can’t locate it. His cutter has never been the kind of pitch he can throw with impunity to get back into the count, so even as he’s struggled to hit the zone, he’s continued to spin sliders in hitters’ counts.

The fix is as simple as it is challenging: Just start locating the pitch better. And despite his awful numbers this year, Doval isn’t that far away from being right. He’s still missing bats at a colossal rate; his 15.4% swinging strike rate is the best of his career and top 20 across all relievers. He’s getting a pile of grounders, too, particularly against his slider. His issues all stem from what happens when he can’t get the slider over the plate. Fix that one devilishly difficult problem and he’ll be back to his old self in no time. The question is simply how long it will take to do that.