An in-depth look at the newest Red Sox arm, Kyle Barraclough
Barraclough was officially promoted to Boston Wednesday afternoon.
Kyle Barraclough has been a sneaky good pickup for the Red Sox, as the right-hander was promoted to Boston following a 2.57 ERA in seven starts for Triple-A Worcester since being picked up by Boston. The 33-year-old has 288 career big-league outings but only 18 since 2021. His career was revived as a starter this year following a start to the season in Indy ball, as he had never started previously; looks like he’ll be in a bullpen role for the time being.
Now, if you go on Savant and the Prospects Live Statcast app, it’ll say Barraclough throws just four pitches. However, it’s pretty evident that he mixes in a sinker as well looking at the visual of his movement profile — the second pile of green dots to the left seems to be the sinker. That’s in addition to his current four-seamer/cutter/slider/changeup arsenal.
He’s occasionally hurling the changeup at a very small usage rate, which both pitches — the sinker and changeup — seem to be additions made during the offseason given last year’s movement profile. He only threw a fastball, cutter, and slider last year in eight relief outings for the Angels. The movement profile looks much different now given the two additional pitches. See below:
He throws the four-seamer at ~91 with ~17" of carry and a ~-5° VAA which doesn’t miss many bats given its lower approach angle and is a very fringe pitch stuff-wise — it got a solid 90–100 Stuff+ last year depending on the model but overall it’s not the greatest pitch.
The sinker I’d imagine would be around a -5.5° to -6° VAA and likely gets decent ground ball action but again not much whiff action; judging off the movement profile visual it seems as if the pitch gets ~15" of run at ~10" IVB with velocity seemingly a tick lower than the four-seamer in the high 80s. It’d be much easier to get the true data on it if the four-seam data wasn’t mixing in with the sinker data.
Barraclough then mixes in a cutter, a pitch in the mid-to-high 80s that gets ~9" of carry and ~1" of run (~90 Stuff+) at a ~-6° VAA and ~-3° HAA. It doesn’t get many whiffs but he throws it at a 20% called strike rate. The changeup is also only thrown a few times per game at ~86 with a -7.5° VAA, ~6" of ride and ~12" of arm-side run.
His slider/sweeper, however, is the main attraction. At ~78 and a -8° VAA, it gets 16" of sweep and its authored a 22.5 SwStr% as well as a 45 Whiff% for Triple-A Worcester — and it got decent swing-and-miss action at the big-league level last year as well. It’s been the biggest factor in what’s led to a 2.57 ERA for him with the WooSox. Both Pitch Profiler and FanGraphs’ models had it at around a 120 Stuff+ last season.