There are a few things that jump to your mind when you think of Zach Maxwell if you’ve ever seen him pitch. First is that he throws harder than just about anyone you’ve watched before. Last season he topped out at 102.5 MPH. Only six minor league pitchers topped that mark last year. Second is that he’s a large human being – he’s listed at 6′ 6″ tall and 293 lbs. And if you happened to watch the Spring Breakout game you might think of how after he struck out the final batter of the game he gave a thumbs down reminiscent of a scene from Gladiator.
While we don’t have full data from every single game that Zach Maxwell as pitched in during his professional career, we’ve got data from a month in 2022, four months of 2023, and five months from 2024. In all of that time he never threw a cut fastball. But this spring he started to show one.
There was pitch tracking for four games that he pitched in this spring and in three of the four games he threw a cutter. In total there were just five of them out of the 67 pitches that he threw in those four games. He threw three of them out of 22 pitches in the last game he threw in with the big league club on March 13th.
Sometimes you will get pitches that get misclassified. Sometimes sliders will be labeled as cutters or vice versa. That’s not the case here. The two pitches are very different. The slider for Maxwell averaged 87.8 MPH this spring. His cutter was averaging 94.9 MPH this spring. The fastball, for those wondering, averaged 98.3.
The reason that sometimes a slider and cutter will get classified as the other is that for some guys the two pitches are close to each other in terms of how they move. For Maxwell, that’s just not the case. The cutter has about 8 inches more vertical movement than the slider does.
Before this spring, Maxwell had always been a 2-pitch guy as a professional. Fastball and slider. The velocity difference was about 10 MPH. If he continues to throw the cutter in the regular season then he’s going to have a pitch that falls right in the middle of that range with regards to velocity. Three looks – all pitches with plenty of velocity – just adds another layer.
For Maxwell the biggest thing is and always has been about whether or not he will throw enough strikes. But if he can get to the point where he can, adding in a cutter is certainly going to help him out when it comes to getting hitters out even more than he already does.