Can Suero find consistency using more off-speed pitches?

Wander Suero has thrown 2,360 pitches in his major league career, and 1,762 of them have been cutters. That's just a shade under 75 percent. Yes, three out of every four pitches he throws are cutters.

Ask him why so many, and the Nationals reliever smiles and responds in English for the first time in a long Zoom session with reporters earlier this week: "It's my best pitch."

That it is. Suero has spent most of the last three seasons in the majors because his cutter - when thrown well and located properly - is a devastatingly effective pitch. Coming out of his hand at 91-92 mph, it has the velocity of a fastball but the movement of a slider. It leaves right-handed batters flailing at pitches well outside the zone and left-handed batters with stinging hands upon getting jammed.

But if you're going to be a successful one-pitch pitcher in the big leagues - and there have been very few of them historically - you better be able to throw that pitch well nearly every time you attempt it. Hitters know it's coming, so if you leave it over the plate they're more than ready to whack it with authority.

And that's why Suero's career to date has been so maddening. Most of the time, he's very good and looks like a long-term, late-inning solution for the Nationals bullpen. But some of the time, he's quite bad and looks like he doesn't even belong at this level.

Consider the difference between "Good Suero" and "Bad Suero." Over the last two seasons, he has made 100 appearances for the Nats. In 68 of them, he has allowed zero or one batter to reach base and posted a sparkling 0.54 ERA and 0.573 WHIP. But in the 32 games in which he has allowed two or more batters to reach base, his ERA skyrockets to 13.02 and his WHIP to 2.718.

In other words: Two out of every three times he pitches, Suero is great. The third time, he's awful.

Suero knows all this. He's an astute 29-year-old who doesn't need to be told the importance of consistency.

"What can I say? This game is all about adjustments," he said in Spanish, with Octavio Martinez interpreting into English. "I try to make the adjustments as quickly as possible from game to game. I work hard on my location, which is one of the reasons where there might be some kind of inconsistency. But I feel like the more consistent you are as a ballplayer, the more successful you can be. And that's what I try to work on."

And so what Suero has especially worked on this spring is everything but his best pitch. Ditching the cutter whenever he can, he's throwing far more curveballs and changeups. And he's seeing increasingly positive results.

In his first five Grapefruit League appearances, Suero allowed only three batters to reach base (two on hits, one via walk). He did not allow a run. He struck out nine of the 18 men he faced. A little hiccup Friday night against the Astros, in which he surrendered his first run, raised his ERA from 0.00 to 1.50, but that hardly diminishes what he accomplished in those previous outings.

"This year his changeup looks really, really good," manager Davey Martinez said. "He threw it the other day on a 3-2 count and got a strike, looking. And we talked about that, not just throwing it but being able to throw it for strikes. He's done that so far. That, to me, is going to be a weapon because his ball cuts and sinks."

The Nationals don't want Suero to get away from what got him here in the first place. They still want him to throw his cutter the majority of the time. But on those nights - the one out of three nights - when the cutter isn't working, they want him to be confident enough in his off-speed pitches to get him out of a jam.

Is he?

"Absolutely," Suero said. "If you've noticed in these games, I've made some adjustments with my secondary pitches, my off-speed pitches. Mainly locating, for instance, my curveball, getting it over for a first-pitch strike. My changeup has improved quite a bit. I feel like my secondary pitches are absolutely much better, and I've been showing that I can definitely, basically rely on them to get out of the innings."

To say the Nationals need this to work out is an understatement. A bullpen that appeared to be five-deep with experienced late-inning arms only two weeks ago has now seen Will Harris learn he has a blood clot in his right arm that will likely prevent him from opening the season on the active roster, Tanner Rainey spend the last several weeks trying to play catch up after suffering a minor muscle strain near his collarbone and Jeremy Jeffress get released for what the club will only describe as "personnel reasons."

Martinez mentioned Suero (along with Kyle Finnegan) as a potential candidate to assume a more prominent role in the bullpen to begin the season.

Ultimately, it'll boil down to the answer to a simple question: Can the Nationals get "Good Suero" to perform more than two-thirds of the time he pitches?