February 7, 2021 Garrett Richards has an uncanny ability to spin a baseball. Per Statcast, the 32-year-old right-hander — recently signed to a free-agent contract by the Boston Red Sox — was 99th percentile in curveball spin last year, while his four-seam spin ranked in the 97th percentile. Moreover, the most-effective weapon in his arsenal, a 2,746-RPM slider, was topped only by Sergio Romo’s 2,913 RPMs among hurlers who threw the pitch at least 200 times. Richards’s least-effective offering in 2020 was a two-seamer that’s hard to put a positive spin on. The erstwhile San Diego Padre threw 66 of them, and the ones that were put into play tended to get punished. Opposing hitters whacked them to a tune of a .467 batting average and an .867 slugging percentage. And it was even worse in 2019. While a 28-pitch sample obviously needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt, numbers like .500 and .875 stand out like a sore thumb. I asked Richards about his plans going forward, anticipating that the pitch might be going into mothballs.