What Can Eric Lauer's Strange Splits Tell Us About His 2023 Projections?

Throughout his career, Eric Lauer has had reverse platoon splits. Despite being a left-handed pitcher, he’s always gotten righties out better than lefties. Since he established himself with the Brewers in 2021, though, that has at least begun to change.

Eric Lauer, Platoon Splits, 2021-22 and Career

Lauer is hardly alone in this way, though. Plenty of pitchers (especially starters, and especially lefties) have neutral or reverse splits. What makes Lauer unique is the way his splits break down, at a more atomic level. Here are his splits for 2022 alone, using some different data.

Eric Lauer, Platoon Splits, 2022

Now, we’re starting to hit on something truly unusual. Most pitchers who are tougher on opposite-handed batters manage that by limiting hard contact and keeping the ball on the ground against them. Lauer’s splits in that regard are extreme in their magnitude, but ordinary in their direction. He’s a ground-ball guy who induces soft contact against lefties, and a fly-ball guy against righties who gives up plenty of well-hit balls. 

Pitch mix comes into play here, and really highlights the oddity of Lauer. Most hurlers with big splits in terms of contact quality and trajectory are sinkerballers; Lauer relies on a four-seam, rising fastball. Most guys who miss more bats against opposite-handed hitters have great changeups. Despite a few stories about his work with one early last year, that’s not Lauer, either.

In fact, here’s an especially quirky finding. Since the start of 2021, Lauer has gotten whiffs on 30.9 percent of swings at his four-seamer by right-handed batters. Of the 52 lefties who have gotten at least 300 swings against their heaters by righties during that time, only four induce whiffs more frequently. Flip the batter to the left side, though, and only 16.2 percent of opponent swings have come up empty. He’s 57th of 67 qualifying southpaws. His whiff rate is nearly twice as high against opposite-handed hitters with his fastball. As the drastic change in his ranking implies, that’s not normal.

Why is it so? Why does Lauer get so many more whiffs on his heater against righties? It’s almost entirely a function of location, and it’s at least partially intentional. Here’s where Lauer got whiffs with his four-seamer in 2022:

Here’s where he threw his four-seamers to righties:

And here’s where he threw it to lefties:

When he arrived in Milwaukee, Lauer was a soft-tossing southpaw with subpar extension. His fastball lacked the ability to effectively miss bats anywhere in the zone. With his shorter arm path and increased efficiency in his mechanics, though, he now has average velocity and average extension. That means that he can get whiffs with the pitch–but only at the top of the zone. Craig Counsell noted in a story as far back as early 2021 that Lauer “is a left-hander who likes facing right-handers, because he likes to throw it up in the zone and likes to throw it in on their hands. But you have to have the confidence to do that, because there are thin margins when you do that."

Indeed, Lauer works almost everything in his arsenal toward the glove side (in on right-handers, away from lefties), and at the same stage in 2021, he discussed the importance of feeling comfortable with his approach. 

"I know myself better than anybody else. Anybody can say on paper, ‘Hey, this is your best pitch.’ But, to me, there’s a way I get to that and there’s a way that I make that my best pitch,” Lauer told Curt Hogg of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “People could obviously see that it made sense, because I could actually execute instead of just flailing stuff out there.”

In the case of his four-seamer, that craving for comfort and confident execution manifests in Lauer working lefties down and away. That’s one reason why he’s been more successful recently against them, despite his inability to miss bats against them. He induces many more called strikes on the four-seamer against lefties, part of the way he uses that pitch, his slider, and his cutter in symphony on the outer part of the plate.

"I don't throw extremely hard, I don't have incredibly hard breaking stuff, but the more I can get pitches to look like each other and then go opposite ways or split, I think that's kind of the way that I find success," he told Hogg back then.

This can tell us much about Lauer’s 2023. There might be upside left for him, if he can start confidently applying the same principles he uses to get weak contact against lefties to his battles with righties. He could also find more whiffs against lefties, just by working up in the zone with the fastball a bit more often against them. Next week, we’ll delve more into his statistical outlook, but before that, we need to discuss one more aspect of his revamped delivery and his repertoire: where it’s coming from. That’s a story for Thursday.