Dustin May of the Los Angeles Dodgers is one of the top prospects in baseball, ranking 19th in my preseason top 100, and has turned in some eye-opening performances this year, including some viral two-seam fastballs with sink and run up to 100 mph. I watched his outing Sunday against the Los Angeles Angels and wanted to break him down in the way that I would a prospect if there were minor league games going on. A young right-hander just losing his prospect eligibility is the next best thing.
For reference, I'll be grading May on the 20-80 scouting scale, where 50 is league average, 80 is all-time great, 55 is above-average, 45 is below average, 60 is termed "plus" (one standard deviation above average for the statistics types) and 70 is "plus-plus." A 60/70 pitch is a 60-grade pitch at present that will be a 70 in the future, at maturity.
Sinker: 70/70
May's primary pitch is a two-seam fastball and it's the hardest you're going to see in the big leagues these days, averaging 97.9 mph. StatCast had him at 96-99 and hitting 100 mph (well, 99.5) in the first inning against the Angels and holding 96-98 when he came out with a pitch count in the high-80s in the fifth inning.
Fastballs are somewhat distinctive in traditional scouting reports because you can grade multiple components of the pitch on the 20-80 scale as well. If a curveball is a 60, there's only one grade given for it on the report, whereas a fastball will often get separate grades for velocity, movement, command and overall effectiveness.
May's sinker velocity alone makes for an easy 80-grade pitch when considering the starting role and the movement is at least plus -- with above-average sink and elite run to the arm side per StatCast. The command is also plus, but there are some inherent limitations with throwing a sinker. May is in the zone a lot and throws his sinker a lot, and doesn't get many whiffs on it, which is, to most analysts, the single most important quality to look for in a pitch.
May's sinker is elite but can't really be projected to be an 80 pitch in its current form, thrown low in the zone to get weak contact, with a short track record against MLB hitters. Pitchers also tend to lose a tick of velocity each year or two, so command usually improves as that happens to hold overall fastball quality over time.
He got zero whiffs on 42 sinkers thrown vs. the Angels, and only two whiffs on 38 sinkers thrown in his previous start vs. the Padres, where he struck out eight hitters but drew five swinging strikes in the whole start. This gives him a small margin for error in locating the pitch, though he does well with that and overall command is a separate grade in this format, but you can round up pitch grades a tick.
To be clear, this is the one weakness of May's sinker -- all of the other parts of it are at least plus while a few characteristics are elite. But this issue is summed up well by the hardest-hit balls the Angels had on May, all off the sinker: 112 mph exit velocity by Jo Adell (for a single), 107 mph by David Fletcher (for a single), 106 mph by Adell (ground out), 105 mph by Mike Trout (single), 102 mph by Anthony Rendon (homer), 100 mph by Rendon (lineout).
May will give up some hard contact -- and he still had a league-average hard hit rate allowed vs. the Angels -- but it will be mostly at harmless launch angles because of his feel for command and sequencing, along with the deception of tunneling (more on that below). I could see this playing out next summer, when there's a big enough sample to show definitively how May can affect contact quality in a way that makes up for a lower whiff rate to maybe slap an 80 grade on this pitch.
Cutter: 60/60
Here's another outlier characteristic for May: entering the Angels start, he threw 54% sinkers and 36% cut fastballs. That's some kind of fastball making up 90% of his pitches! That's still behind Mariano Rivera, but not many other pitchers.
The cutter is also an elite pitch, it's the second-hardest in the league by velocity (averages 93.7 mph) and has the fourth-highest spin rate. The movement is subtle on TV and it isn't hellacious on StatCast by movement, but it's a very effective variation on the sinker because it's just as hard, moves in the opposite direction and can also be used against both righties and lefties. The sinker is thrown primarily in the bottom half of the zone and a little more to his arm side, and the cutter is thrown to the glove side -- inside to lefties and mostly down.
This is May's swing-and-miss pitch because he uses it so much, so he gets the most whiffs on it while it isn't the best on a per pitch rate. It's similar enough to his sinker to effectively work to get hitters off of that bread-and-butter pitch and weaken the quality of contact on both pitches, breaking in opposite directions at similar speeds.
Changeup: 55/60
The changeup fits into this sinker/cutter structure as a down and armside pitch, but one that's coming in at a different speed than the sinker, and he used it more than usual vs. the Angels, at 14% of his 88 pitches.
I hadn't seen the pitch that well in the past and the best one on Sunday was a 60-grade pitch, so I'll be charitable and say that even with a TV look and a short history with the pitch that there's a shot for a consistent 60-grade pitch in there, but he'll need to throw it a bit more often. The changeup has a similar shape to the sinker but comes in slower enough (averaging 90-91 mph vs. the Angels) to give a third subtle variation to the "hard and moves some" repertoire.
Curveball: 55/60
The last part of this foursome of firm pitches is the hellacious breaking ball that was a big reason why May was a touted prep prospect in the first place. At 87 mph, it's the the hardest curveball in the big leagues by a good margin, it has the second-highest spin rate of all curves in the big leagues but it has a slurve shape -- it can be that hard only with some slider DNA in it -- so the efficiency of the spin (i.e. the proportion of spin that leads to movement) is below average and the movement profile is somewhat ordinary.
To the eye, some of the best curves, particularly back-footing left-handed hitters, are easily plus pitches, the Platonic ideal of a hybrid breaking ball on its best days. It is probably best paired primarily on the glove side of the plate with the cutter as the slower, bigger-breaking version of it, as the changeup is the slower version of the sinker on the arm side. The pitch has slowly been phased out (thrown just 7% of the time vs. the Angels, 12% vs. the Padres) as it doesn't fit as well in his present repertoire. Whether it's chicken or egg, the command is lacking a bit on this pitch as well: 7 of 10 thrown against the Padres were called balls and 3 of 6 vs. the Angels.
A quick aside on repertoire
The beginning of advanced pitch analysis (say five to 10 years ago) focused more on the individual characteristic of pitches -- velocity, overall movement, spin rates -- while now I hear analysts and executives talk a lot more about the interplay of pitches, movement profiles, and spin efficiency. One big part of that is the biggest possible gap between the movement profile of pitches -- their horizontal and vertical movement, often visualized on a plot -- coming from the same arm slot, and in the same tunnel.
An example is recent first-rounder of the Angels LHP Reid Detmers. By raw stuff, his pitches are all 50's grade-wise or maybe 55's on a good day, but he has optimized in a way with a high-slot, high-spin four-seamer with rise at the top of the zone and a slow, big-breaking overhand curveball that acts well as the opposite at the bottom of the zone. The characteristics of the curveball to the eye and an analyst at first glance -- where slow and big-breaking, lacks "bite" -- aren't good at first glance, but the interplay with his other pitches makes each pitch more effective, in addition to his command and savvy for pitching.
All that said, May's sinker (98 mph), cutter (94 mph) and changeup (90 mph) are all subtle variations of one another, traveling nearly an identical path until the hitter's decision point, then darting late in various directions without easy ways to identify them, like the "hump" on a lot of curveballs. The amplitude of the movement is small, and 98 mph isn't a problem for big league hitters, so that ends up not generating a lot of whiffs.
Is it problematic in some way long term? Not really. There are crafty lefties doing a version of this about 10 mph south of where May is on his average pitch velocity, and it might take 10 years for his velocity to tail off into an area to where he would need to make real adjustments to survive. Mike Soroka has some similar qualities and was one of the best young arms in the NL with a 90-94 mph sinker. Dallas Keuchel won a Cy Young while throwing 88-91 mph sinkers 56% of the time as a 27-year-old.
Command: 55/60
May is a good athlete and shows all the elements for plus command, though I'd call it more of a 55 right now, with a couple too many center-cut mistake pitches. You can look at his pitch plots and see that he's executing his plan, with the pitch locations clustered in the areas that make sense for his repertoire. It looks as if he'll get an above-average rate of called strikes and weak contact with plenty of margin for error due to velocity and location.
The real question going forward for May is if he settles in as something similar to what he is right now (a No. 3 or No. 4 starter, a 55 present value on the scouting scale) or if he can find another gear. What would that look like? Developing Shane Bieber-level command, or finding a way to squeeze more whiffs without changing the stuff that's working and reach the frontline starter potential that's in the tank for the 22-year-old.
I think more off-speed pitches, more of those as chase pitches just out of the zone, and either just more of the present version of the curveball or a tweaked curveball grip might be some of the ways to get there.