No one questions Peter Fairbanks’s stuff. He regularly amps his fastball up into the high 90’s, and his slider is harder — while dropping more — than almost any hard slider in the league. There was a reason the Rays traded a solid prospect in Nick Solak to get Fairbanks, and a reason Tom Verducci used him as the centerpiece of his excellent article on the Rays approach to pitching and pitcher acquisition.
But Fairbanks hasn’t always gotten the results you’d expect with that stuff.
Part of that is command. It doesn’t matter how good your slider is, this is not where you want to put it:
But there are times when we’ve seen opposing players put good swings on good sliders in good locations; better than they should be able to if they’re gearing up for 99 mph.