Justin Lawrence is not trying to be trendy. It just so happens that his most devastating pitch happens to be the “it pitch” in baseball right now.

It’s called the sweeper.

“It’s kind of a cool name, don’t you think?” the Rockies’ right-handed reliever said. “It’s a good description.”

The pitch, which is even more effective for Lawrence because he throws it with a sidearm delivery, has made him one of baseball’s best relievers through the first month. Entering Colorado’s weekend series against the Mets in New York, Lawrence had a 1.65 ERA and 0.918 WHIP in 13 appearances (16 1/3 innings). Batters were hitting just .167 against him.

In simple terms, a sweeper is a slider with more horizontal break than a traditional slider. Despite all the hoopla it’s garnering, it’s not really a new pitch. David Cone threw an effective sweeper for the Yankees in the 1990s and early 2000s. Adam Ottavino, now pitching with the Mets, used an evolving form of the sweeper when he pitched for the Rockies from 2012-18.

What is new is the name and the buzz.

This season, Major League Baseball’s Statcast created a new classification for the pitch, so now “sweeper” is appearing on scoreboards and broadcasts alongside fastball, curveball, slider and changeup. Angels phenom Shohei Ohtani frequently shows up on highlight videos, making hitters look helpless as they wave at his devastating sweeper.

Lawrence decided he officially wanted to rename his slider after the Rockies played at Seattle in mid-April. He noticed that the Mariners posted “sweeper” on the scoreboard when Paul Sewald pitched.

“It started out as kind of a joke … but then we thought it would be cool to call it a sweeper on the board,” Lawrence said.

So Lawrence asked Brittany Haby, the Rockies’ manager of research and development if his slider could get a new name. Haby then requested MLBPitchClass, MLB’s official account for updates on pitch types and classifications, to switch his slider to a sweeper.

The sweeper is part of the right-hander’s one-two punch. According to Baseball Savant, this season he’s throwing his sweeper 56% of the time and his sinking fastball 44% of the time.

“For me, it’s been big knowing that I have a good fastball and it has good movement on it, but I needed more,” he said. “I didn’t want to be known as just a one-trick pony. I could have settled on just an OK slider and maybe gotten by, but if you want to pitch in the back end of the bullpen for a long time, you have to have at least two elite pitches.

“And when you have only two pitches, you have to make sure they are both very good. So that’s something I worked on in the offseason, making sure it’s got the right shape and I’m spinning it the right way.”

According to Rockies manager Bud Black, Lawrence’s side-winder delivery makes the sweeper a lethal pitch, especially against right-handed hitters.

“It’s about the release point from the sidearm and the spin he puts on it,” Black said. “That’s the uniqueness of it. If a batter doesn’t see the pitch for a week, two weeks, a month, it gets them. It stands them up. They go, ‘Whoa!’ ”

A classic slider, like the one thrown by the Yankees’ Gerrit Cole, is sometimes called a “gyro” slider. The pitch is meant to look like a fastball to hitters, who tend to swing over the top of the ball as it breaks downward. The sweeper, on the other hand, never looks like a fastball but tempts hitters by looking like a hittable breaking ball before running away from the bat.

“A right-hander can start it at the hitter and break it over the inside corner for a front-door sweeper — I’d start that right at their hip,” Cone, now a television analyst for the Yankees, told The New York Times. “That pitch was kind of frowned on by old-school pitching coaches, because a mistake is a home run: off-speed and on the inner part of the plate, if hitters recognize it, they can launch it and pull a fly ball.”

Cone added that the sweeper can be thrown to different spots to keep hitters off-balance.

“It’s about shape,” he said. “A sweeper’s got that bigger, flatter break, and designed for a swing-and-a-miss or a flinch. If it’s front-door, it’s to get the guy to flinch. When you’re throwing it away, it’s to get them to swing and miss.”

Two of baseball’s most dominant pitchers, the Rangers’ Jacob deGrom and Angels’ Ohtani, attack hitters with decidedly different sliders/sweepers. According to a study by Justbaseball.com, deGrom’s more conventional slider has 28.6 inches of vertical drop and 4.9 inches of horizontal break. Ohtani’s sweeper has 36.6 inches of vertical drop, 17.5 inches of horizontal break.

Technically, Ohtani’s sweeper drops more than deGrom’s slider, but the ratio of vertical to horizontal break for Ohtani is less. deGrom’s slider drops 5.84 inches for every inch of horizontal break, while Ohtani’s sweeper drops just 2.09 inches for every inch of horizontal break.

Lawrence gets tremendous movement on both of his pitches. According to Baseball Savant, his sinker, on average, moves 17 inches toward a right-handed batter and drops 29 inches. The league average is 15 inches of horizontal movement and 23 inches of drop. Lawrence’s sweeper moves 14 inches away from a right-hander and drops 36 inches. The league average is 15 inches of horizontal movement and 39 inches of drop. But, as Black noted, Lawrence’s unique delivery makes his pitches appear to have even more action.

Another difference between the traditional slider and a sweeper is velocity. According to Baseball Savant, the average speed of a traditional slider is 85.1 mph vs. 82.2 for a sweeper. Lawrence, however, is an anomaly. As he evolved from throwing a slider to a sweeper, and as he changed the spin, his velocity increased. His average slider velocity in 2021 was 81.9 mph, while the velocity on his sweeper this season is 84.8.

When he came out of Daytona State and tried to make his mark in pro baseball, he relied on a fastball that he could unleash at 100 mph. But he couldn’t command the pitch with any consistency and posted an 8.64 ERA in 2021 over 19 big league appearances. He’s since come to realize that controlled movement sometimes trumps pure heat.

“Throwing the ball 100 mph is cool and all, but when you’re starting out every hitter 2-0, you’re in trouble,” Lawrence said. “These are the best hitters in the world and 100 won’t matter with a 2-0 count.”

By harnessing his sinker and sweeper, Lawrence is becoming the pitcher he always thought he could be. In Black’s view, he’s becoming the full package.

“We’ve seen that with Justin — the natural maturity, confidence, self-belief,” Black said. “Within that is his pitching mechanics becoming more consistent.  All of that. put together, lets you become consistent with your repertoire. He’s becoming a pitcher.”

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