The foundations for Kenta Maeda‘s grand, potentially job-saving experiment, began in the worst start of his professional career. Did you notice it? Because I sure didn’t:
That pitch, bounced low and in to Jake Lamb, was Kenta Maeda’s first cutter thrown in MLB. It shows up better here, a plot of the horizontal movement and velocity of Maeda’s pitches from that day, courtesy of Brooks Baseball.
The first one wasn’t executed, but it was proof that he could do it. Of the 3137 tracked pitches Maeda threw in the regular season, that was his very first cutter.