Anthony Banda’s minor adjustments keyed a major resurgence for both him & the Dodgers

When the Dodgers acquired Anthony Banda from the Guardians and quickly added him to their Major League roster in May, he was among a bevy of journeyman pitchers Los Angeles had called upon to aid a pitching staff ailed with injuries and underperformance. Five months later, when the Dodgers won the World Series, Banda had solidified himself as one of the most effective relief pitchers on their postseason roster.

How he went from just another arm to a key reliever is a story on its own.

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Equipped with a fastball and sinker whose velocities climb toward the upper portions of the mid-90s, paired with a devastating slider 5-10 mph slower, Banda climbed into manager Dave Roberts‘ circle of trust by the time October rolled around, posting a 3.08 ERA and 3.67 FIP in his 49.2 innings of work.

Roberts and the Dodgers’ faith in Banda was rewarded during the postseason, as Banda posted a 1.13 ERA over eight frames. Despite struggling with his command via walking six, his stuff played well and he struck out 11 batters, usually in leverage situations. He was especially crucial in the NLCS, when the top lefty in the Dodgers bullpen, Alex Vesia, was sidelined with an injury. Banda stepped up when they desperately needed him to, and he continued to climb the ladder of a Dodgers bullpen recognized for their dominance throughout the 2024 postseason.

Prior to his time with the Dodgers, Banda had accumulated a 5.69 ERA across 118.2 innings spread over six starts and 84 relief appearances. In parts of seven seasons, he had basically been the definition of a fungible relief arm, without much the way of indicators that he was an undiscovered gem.

Yet as the Dodgers often do, they clearly saw something in Banda that many other teams did not when they acquired him. Not only did the Dodgers lower Banda’s arm angle to 34 degrees as opposed to 43 in 2023, making him especially tough on lefty batters, but they also improved fastball by a tick of velocity and the batting average against it thus dropped from .316 in 2023 to .231. Most importantly, they helped him revamp his seldom-used slider, which stands out as the biggest reason for his breakout 2024 campaign.

As Banda told Fabian Ardaya of The Athletic, shortly after acquisition the Dodgers surrounded Banda with pitching technology and tweaked his “unorthodox” slider grip, advising him to dig into the ball more and throw it with more sharpness, a way to generate more intense break without necessarily losing control of its path. Immediately, the Dodgers had fixed what nearly half the league had been unable to.

“It was like a ‘thank you’ moment. I went through, what, 11 organizations? And no one could find that for me. He did it within 24 hours.”

Banda’s new slider generated a dominant .154 batting average and a 13 wRC+ against (a stat in which league average is 100) in 2024, while his primary breaking ball before was a curve that had been smashed to a .262 BA and a whopping 138 wRC+. In a small sample in 2023, another version of the slider was touched up to a .400 BA and 131 wRC+. That slider had 1.6 inches of vertical drop, while in 2024 that jumped to 3.4 inches. This doubling of movement added depth, and coupled with a significant increase of its usage (11.3% compared with 28.2% of his total pitches in 2024), the hard hit rate dropped from 25% to 18.5 and generated a whopping 51.3% of whiffs on swings as opposed to 20% in 2023 (and 27% on his curves).

Anthony Banda, Dirty 87mph Slider. 😨 pic.twitter.com/LNqTG6Bobn

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) October 21, 2024

So the new slider grip and arm angle (along with a tick more velo) morphed him from a fringe bullpen arm into a dominant lefty, one of the hottest commodities on any MLB roster trying to compete for a championship. Now armed with two significantly above-average pitches instead of one, Banda became an absolute force to be reckoned with on the mound, being able to rely on his elite stuff even when his command occasionally wavered.

One of the biggest breakout relief pitchers of 2024 and a key piece of the Dodgers’ 2024 championship run, Anthony Banda seems primed not only to help the Dodgers in their quest to repeat, but has also turned a career defined by perseverance into one now defined by effectiveness.