Why is Yennier Canó’s Sinker so Much Better this Season? More Sink and Seam Shifted Wake

Yennier Canó has emerged as one of the most dominant relievers so far this season, with an elite 0.93 ERA, 1% walk rate, and 30% strikeout rate through 29 innings pitched. How has he been doing this? His revamped sinker is a huge part of it.

If you prefer video breakdowns, check out this video:

Sinker Comparison: 2022 vs 2023

Canó started throwing his sinker 16% more often this season and it has elite results:

Here is a video of the 2023 sinker:

How did he improve the results of his sinker this dramatically over the off-season?

There were two major changes I noticed when comparing the sinker’s shape from last season to this season:

1. Canó added 6 inches of sink.
2. There is a much larger deviation in spin axis this season when comparing the axis at release to the axis at the plate.

What do those two points mean?

Adding 6 inches of sink means that Canó revamped the pitch so that he could still throw it hard (~96mph), but it now also gets an additional 6 inches of downward movement.

The second point about the differing spin axes is a little more complicated, but a very important aspect of why the pitch is so successful this year:

How Balls Spin and Seam Shifted Wake

To understand this point, let’s first understand how a ball spins. When a ball spins, it does so about an axis, called the spin axis. In this example below, the ball has backspin and is spinning toward us around that blue line.

These charts below from Baseball Savant are trying to tell the same story, of how each of Canó’s pitches spin. The colored blocks attached to the clock indicate at which angle the ball is spinning and are representative of the arrow that I have in my simplified example above. 

Depending on the pitch type, the ball is either rotating toward you or away from you. The spin axis would be perpendicular to those blocks and can be different for each pitch type based on the angle of the spin. The image on the left represents the axes at release. The image on the right represents the axis at the point when the pitch crosses the plate.

Let’s now focus on just Canó’s sinker, which is shown in orange on the Baseball Savant chart. We’ll start with the axis at release. I lined up the sinker on my own clock below on the right with an arrow to make this easier to understand.

The sinker is concentrated around 3:00 and is spinning toward us at a tilt. That orange block on Baseball Savant’s clock is saying the same thing as the blue arrow shown in my clock, and demonstrates the tilt of the ball. The spin axis is now perpendicular to the orange pitch line.

Below, we have a graphic that represents the sinker’s axis at the time the pitch crosses the plate.

The orange block is now concentrated around 4:00, and the spin axis has shifted to remain perpendicular to the block.

Below we have a comparison of the two points in the pitch’s flight: at release and at the plate.

We can see now that there is a huge difference (about 1 hour) between the two blocks and the two axes. When there are major differences like this, seam shifted wake is often a factor.

Seam shifted wake at the highest level describes the effect that’s seams have on pitch movement. Based on the way certain pitchers grip their pitches, the seams will cause more or less air to flow off of ball and causes the spin axis to shift. That ultimately leads to varying movement by the time it crosses the plate.

This is important for deception. Hitters think they know how a certain pitch will move, and then it moves different, making it much harder to make quality contact. While seams have always had an impact on movement, new technology allows teams and players to understand which grips can maximize this effect and cause increased pitch movement.

So while I don’t have any data that confirms that is what’s going on in Canó’s case, I think there is a chance his sinker does experience seam shifted wake due to the difference between the spin axes at the point of release versus at the plate.

For comparison, in 2022, Canó’s sinker only had a 15-min deviation in spin axis.

Concluding Thoughts

These two major improvements indicate that Canó spent a lot of time working on further developing this pitch in the off-season, and likely made alterations to his grip and seam orientation to achieve the new shape and movement profile.

Ranking third in reliever ERA this season after putting up an 11.50 ERA in 2022, his hard work is clearly paying off.