Where did this reformed Brayan Bello come from?

Brayan Bello has had some of his best starts of the year over his last few outings — what’s working for him?

Well, let’s first start with what’s not working for him: his changeup. Or, as I more eloquently put it a few weeks ago,:

After deploying his sweeper and changeup at similar rates last season, Red Sox starter Brayan Bello’s changeup has completely fallen off this year. This has led to his sweeper becoming his prominent off-speed pitch by far since the second half of May.

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Since then, he’s been able to pair this well with a sinker that has similar spin-based movement to the sweeper but is 10 mph faster and has the complete opposite spin direction. These similarities on the spin front have allowed him to tunnel the pitches rather effectively, it seems, but fool batters with the differing movement profiles.

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This has worked because of both the makeup of the pitches themselves and the different ways in which Bello uses them. I think the location of his sinker is more directly impactful, as we saw in his start against the Rays on Monday, as he’s really refined his placement of it over his last few starts. Focusing on using this as a strikeout challenge pitch and not a chase pitch has, in turn, amplified the effectiveness of his sweeper. He can instead use the sweeper as a chase pitch to generate swings and the sinker as a pitch to dot and challenge hitters.

Across his last three starts, Bello’s sweeper has a ~40% Chase% and Chase Miss% of 32%. For his sinker, he’s thrown it on the edges of the zone 50% of the time, which found him the most success yet on Monday, as he consistently went to the pitch in strikeout counts and had a few beautiful paint jobs throughout the game.

He also had a beauty against the Angels last week, where he struck Jorge Soler out with two runners in scoring position.

His sweeper is his only pitch this year that has generated a wOBA under .300 (.293), and he’s really refined his usage of his sinker with two strikes to make it into a strikeout, or at least out-inducing, pitch.

In his last three starts, Bello has gotten effective results with his sinker in two-strike counts by striking out two, invoking three groundouts, and allowing only two hits across five batted ball events over 12 total pitches. While it’s not ideal that his changeup has effectively fallen off the face of the Earth over the past year, if Bello can continue to balance his sweeper with an edge-honed sinker, he should be able to keep up general success with his slider and four-seamer to throw in the mix as well.