“I feel like I’ve kinda got in the game at the right time … ” Ethan Roberts started to tell me last week. I’m cutting off that quote – I’ll share the rest down the post – as means of an introduction. It’s so true and it’s so essential in talking about why Roberts deserves a 40-man roster spot when the Cubs decide which prospects to protect from the 2021 Rule 5 Draft at tomorrow’s deadline.
Ethan Roberts, the Cubs’ 4th rounder in 2018, is 5-foot-9. He’s the first player from his hometown to play Division 1 baseball in a quarter century. In 2019, he averaged about 90 mph with his fastball. By baseball’s conventional standards, say, in between the Cubs last two World Series titles, Roberts would not necessarily be a valued commodity. Folks might worry about the size, and thus explain away his impressive career minor league numbers: 9.8 strikeouts per nine innings, 4.21 strikeouts-per-walk, 1.06 WHIP, 3.09 ERA. All those marks were improved by his 2021 performance, by the way.
But in recent years, baseball has begun to better prioritize players with unique ways of accomplishing success. Roberts, for instance, has an all-world ability to spin the baseball (we’re talking 97th-plus percentile). His breaking balls live above 3,000 rpms, his fastball in the ridiculous 2,700 rpm territory. This is balanced by 90th-percentile control, with the 147th-lowest walk rate of 1,156 pitchers that threw 100+ innings of pro ball between 2019 and 2021.
And Roberts’ height, once potentially seen as a disadvantage, allows him to release the ball lower than the vast majority of pitchers, giving Roberts the advantage of a flat Vertical Approach Angle (a concept I wrote about last year). This is an evolution against the way hitters have been taught to swing during the power boom of the last 20 years.
“The way I throw, and what I throw, fights launch angle,” is the second half of the quotation at the start of this piece. It’s the secret sauce to Roberts’ success. “You try to do launch angle on me you’re gonna literally have to be perfectly on time to get a barrel on it, otherwise you’re going to swing and miss.”
3 up, 3 down for Ethan Roberts in yesterday’s 9th inning 🔥
(📸: @smokiesbaseball) @EthanXXVI pic.twitter.com/iqljtxHVMc
— Cubs Zone (@CubsZone) July 5, 2021
In 2021, Roberts increased his strikeout rate to a whopping 32.6% from the still-respectable mark of 21.8% from his first two years of professional baseball. He did that despite splitting the year between Double- and Triple-A, and he did that by further flattening his VAA. That statistic is made up of a few factors, two of which (release height, spin) we’ve already mentioned. But a third is key to the strikeout uptick in 2021: velocity.
“I knew all my peers around me [in 2019] threw freaking gas,” Roberts said. “It’s hard for this little body to throw gas but I was like, I’m gonna juice it and I’m going to literally squeeze it like a lemon and get everything I can out of it this year.”
With that in mind, Roberts spent his 2020 pandemic year attacking the weight room. He squatted everyday for a month in the hopes of “shocking” and building up his lower half. CrossFit workouts – inspired by his hometown’s most famous alumni, Rich Froning – dominate Ethan’s daily routine. He added explosive workouts with medicine balls and bands, and the lost COVID season allowed the right-hander to spend two months focusing on throwing exercises like long toss, run-and-guns, and pulldowns. Ethan saw his top-end velocity increase all the way to 97 mph, and his average fastball jumped almost three miles per hour from where it was in 2019 (90+ to 93+).
The gains also paid dividends with his breaking ball. In the second half of 2019, with the Myrtle Beach Pelicans, Roberts consulted Chad Hockin – the Cubs 2016 sixth-round pick – on how he threw a slider. Ethan had been throwing his around 80 mph and saw the pitch too often bleeding into his slurvy high 70s curveball.
“I was like, ‘How the heck do you throw your slider 87?’ Because if I can do that, I’ll be chilling,” Roberts said. “He showed me this grip, and he throws it a lot like a fastball so you feel like you can throw it harder. I feel like it’s been life-changing for me because my slider’s my best pitch, and it’s his slider.”
Between Hockin’s grip and the added velocity, the slider is now firmly in the mid 80s, and plays perfectly off a four-seam fastball that also moves significantly to the glove side. In fact, Roberts’ four seamer generally plays like a hard cutter (5-6 inches(!) of cut-side break), giving right-handed hitters fits with two gyro-spinning pitches moving horizontally away from them with different velocities and vertical breaks. Good luck.
Roberts has also always enjoyed success against left-handed hitters, mostly thanks to that cutting fastball (which, I see you nerds, definitely enjoys some seam-shifted wake with its low-efficiency profile) riding into their hands. But in 2021, the Cubs also switched his curveball to a spike grip, leading to a more vertical, up-down movement profile. The pitch works well to change the eye level against lefties.
This offseason, the right-hander is toying with ways to add more ride to his fastball, which will only work to further flatten his vertical approach angle. He pointed me to one particular outing during his final month in Triple-A, and particularly the plate appearances against stud Omaha Storm Chasers hitters Bobby Witt Jr. and Ryan McBroom. This shows the core competency of Roberts’ bread-and-butter that he can continue to tweak and improve.
Ethan Roberts, 9/14/21, versus two of AAA’s most dangerous hitters. 4 whiffs on fastballs. pic.twitter.com/WjsTT8ntNH
— Cubs Prospects – Bryan Smith (@cubprospects) November 18, 2021
Tomorrow, the Cubs face a significant decision in determining whether to add Roberts to the 40-man roster, protecting him from the Rule 5 Draft. Ethan understands that it’s difficult, due to the fungibility of competent relievers, for a player with his more niche profile. But he desperately wants to contribute to the team that took a chance on him in the 4th round of the 2018 draft.
“This is one of the best orgs to play for, we’ve got literally anything you could possibly ever want,” Roberts said. “I hope I stay because of that but also because I’ve met and worked with so many good dudes that are still there.”
So much was made in 2020 of the Tampa Bay Rays bullpen and the variety of looks they could throw at hitters. You can bet teams across the league are working to copycat that approach to bullpen-building, and if Roberts is exposed to the Rule 5, the unique traits he possesses will be very appealing to those types of organizations. Here’s to hoping it doesn’t get that far.