Batters Are Facing The Final Boss On Easy Mode

Apologies for the title, but I couldn’t help but play on the best nickname in professional sports.

Seung Hwan Oh’s debut in MLB last season was nothing short of a resounding success. His 2.6 WAR was the fifth-highest mark among qualified relievers. He mainly mixed a low 90s fastball with a nasty slider as his strikeout pitch that made opposing batters look like poor Melvin Upton Jr. here:

In April of 2016, August Fagerstrom wrote an article titled “Seung Hwan Oh Has Been Completely Unhittable“. Fagerstrom’s piece, among other things, was an ode to Oh’s beautiful slider. You should go read it just for the wonderful .gifs of one of the best sliders in baseball last year.

After half a season of making batters look silly in the seventh and eighth inning, Seung Hwan Oh took over the ninth in June of last year and fully lived up to his nickname. He was The Final Boss.

On Opening Night this season, the Cardinals took a 3-0 lead into the top of the ninth inning versus the defending World Champion Chicago Cubs, and Oh had his first chance to close a game in 2017. It didn’t go as planned. After hitting Ben Zobrist, he struck out Addison Russell with a high fastball and then allowed a single to Jason Heyward bringing the tying run to the plate. After getting ahead in the count to 1-2 with a slider for a called strike and two fastballs, Oh went back to his slider to get the strikeout and try to work out of the jam he had created for himself. Instead, this happened:

Willson Contreras tied the game with one swing on a slider Oh left hanging right over the centre of the plate. While the Cardinals would score a walk-off run in the bottom of the ninth and win the game, Oh and his slider wouldn’t be so lucky. Halfway through 2017, his formerly nasty slider has been a shadow of its 2016 self.

Those numbers are just really ugly. Opposing batters are practically teeing off on the pitch, and he’s already allowed more home runs off his slider through half a season than he allowed all of last year. It just isn’t the same pitch that he relied on to get outs last season, and when we compare his heat maps from 2016-2017 it’s easy to see what’s going wrong:

2016:

2017:

Instead of burying his slider down and outside of the zone like that beautiful pitch to Melvin Upton Jr., it’s leaking back over the plate where it can be punished. On top of worse location, his slider also has less horizontal movement in 2017. He’s not just missing his spot; he’s not getting as much bite as last year and it’s probably a lot easier for opposing batters to see and hit.

None of these things are good, and it’s not just his slider that’s giving him trouble. He mixed in a change and curveball in 2016 (96 and 10 thrown respectively, or 7.9% of his pitches) and while they weren’t nearly as valuable as his fastball and slider, they also weren’t complete liabilities. This year he’s allowing an OPS of 1.095 on the change and 1.000 on the curve with three home runs between them, as well throwing them more often (10.4% of his pitches). He has increased his fastball usage every month this season. I don’t know why he’s going to his other pitches more (especially when the off-speed pitches aren’t effective at all), but can only guess that with a diminished slider, he’s trying anything he can do to get outs.

All of this is too bad. Cardinals fans can’t be happy about this and I know lots of fantasy owners are upset as well. For me, baseball is just more fun when guys with awesome nicknames live up to them. Unfortunately for now, we all just have to hope he can figure out what’s going on with his slider and turn back into the true Final Boss.