An ode to Nabil Crismatt

Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports This wasn’t the article I planned on writing this morning. I was perusing Statcast data looking for free agent pitchers to cover, which led me to the “active spin” leaderboard. For the uninitiated, active spin looks at how much a pitcher’s spin rate contributes to the movement on their pitches. You can read up on the metric here if you are so inclined, but that won’t be necessary for our purposes.

Among the 301 names listed, three of the top four in active curveball spin were Cardinals last season: Alex Reyes, Adam Wainwright, and...Jake Woodford. You probably thought that third name was going to be Nabil Crismatt, didn’t you? Come on now, it’s never that simple.…