Early in the baseball season, I’m always checking the statistical leaderboards to see who sticks out. Sometimes it’s a batter with an incredible ISO (Thames), a hitter with a laughably low BABIP (Schimpf), or in this case, a pitcher whose swinging-strike percentage sits significantly higher than his career mark (Samardzija). While we’re only a few weeks into the season and the simple reasoning that small sample sizes shouldn’t be trusted looms large, occasionally a player makes a change that draws my interest. In Jeff Samardzija’s case, dating back to the last few months of the 2016 season, he’s undergone a noticeable modification in his pitch peripherals.

Pitchers are always making adjustments. Adding in new pitches, subtracting some from their mix, or altering a pitch to complement the rest of their offerings. While it shouldn’t come as a surprise when a pitcher does tweak a pitch, it stands out when the results are as drastic as Samardjiza’s. Let’s take a look at Jeff’s horizontal pitch movement for three of his most-used pitches dating back to the start of the 2016 season to see if anything jumps out.

Horizontal Movement

Nothing crazy happening here, other than a slight shift in the movement of his slider. It went from breaking away from righties, to not breaking at all. A difference of about an inch or two which can certainly add up under the right context. Now, for the vertical movement.

Vertical Movement

Over the course of the 2016 season, the continued refining of the slider is quite apparent. Consistently, month over month, the pitch featured less vertical movement than before. This mix of pitches starts to form around July to August of last year, and takes a huge step forward in 2017. The difference in vertical break between the three currently sits at less than an inch and a half.

Think about that from a batter’s perspective. Three pitches, all coming in with comparable downward break, yet two will feature severe break in on a right-handed hitter (sinker and splitter) and one won’t break in at all (slider). The batter is left guessing about which lateral direction the pitch will go in its final moments before crossing the plate. Previously, with a noticeable difference in vertical movement, the hitter had a better idea of what pitch was coming in. He could see the drop associated with a slider, leading to a more confident prediction of how the pitch would break. While the sinker is thrown harder, around 93, compared to the slider and splitter, both around 85-87, the combination of the three seems to have thrown hitters for a loop, as evidenced by the stark increase in whiffs.

Whiff Percentage

Notice how, starting in August of 2016, the splitter features a huge up-tick in whiffs. This was right when Samardzija was altering the vertical movement of the three to mask their identities. By this season, when the three became even closer in nature, the whiffs skyrocketed. The batter’s utter confusion in trying to classify each offering results in more whiffs.

Samardzija certainly seems to be onto something here. Again, while this is a small sample, it makes me wonder about usefulness of quantifying pitches individually by their velocity and movement. Before, his slider featured more movement, yet Jeff’s cumulative whiffs were lower overall. Once he changed the pitch to look more his like other offerings, the results improved. Perhaps a more holistic approach is necessary when we look at a pitcher’s individual pitch performance. How effective a pitcher’s repertoire appears is more than a sum of its parts, as seen in Samardzija’s recent changes.

Francisco Lindor has seemingly always been the platonic ideal of a shortstop since was drafted eighth overall in 2011. Most shortstop scouting reports contain phrases like “if he can stick at the position” or “will likely move off the position as he develops,” but Lindor was the rare prospect that scouts universally believed to be a shortstop. Lindor was clearly a major-league shortstop, but whether he was an everyday player or All-Star hinged on his bat. In his first season, Lindor showed his bat belonged in the majors, hitting .313/.353/.482 for a 126 wRC+ with 12 home runs and stolen bases in just 99 games. Defying calls for regression, he followed up with a .301/.358/.435 line for a 112 wRC+ in 2016, while essentially tying Brandon Crawford as the most valuable defender in baseball. He was Andrelton Simmons with a bat.

However, it appears Lindor isn’t satisfied with being a perennial All-Star. He is gunning to dethrone Mike Trout for American League MVP. In a mere 42 PA in the 2017 season, Lindor already has four dingers and is topping the offensive leaderboards with a 216 wRC+. While Lindor has yet to collect 50 plate appearances this season, there are indications that Lindor has taken another step forward and will frighten pitchers as much as he does ground-ball hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

Yankees right fielder Aaron Judge is, to say the least, an imposing figure in the batter’s box. Judge is one of only three position players in baseball history with a height and weight of at least 6’7” and 255 pounds, respectively – the other two, for those curious, being 1960s power hitter Frank Howard and current Tigers minor league Steven Moya – and with his enormous size comes enormous strength. According to Statcast, 59.5% of Judge’s batted balls last season left the bat with an exit velocity of at least 95 miles per hour, a mark that trailed only those of the Brewers’ Domingo Santana and the Mariners’ Nelson Cruz. Further, Judge’s average exit velocity ranked second among the entire league, with only Cruz ahead of him. However, the player comparison that most swiftly comes to mind is the Marlins’ Giancarlo Stanton, who, incidentally, finished third in average exit velocity last season. When Judge truly barrels up the ball, as exemplified here, his raw power tends to elicit the type of awe usually reserved for Stanton.

Unfortunately for the Yankees, Judge was largely unable to capitalize on this strength in 2016. Although he only saw 95 plate appearances, he batted an uninspiring .179 with an astronomical 44.2% strikeout rate. Even his ISO, above average at .167, was still disappointing for a player claiming raw power as his most prominent attribute.

The Yankees, of course, were fully aware that their right fielder’s approach at the plate needed an adjustment. Said Yankees assistant hitting coach Marcus Thames during spring training:

“I thought [Judge] started expanding a little too much… At the big-league level, the game’s a little bit more physical, it’s a little bit faster and I thought it sped up on him a little bit and he started expanding.”

A cursory look at Judge’s 2016 batting statistics plate surprisingly suggests that plate discipline may not be as big a problem as one would expect based on Thames’ comments. Among 451 position players with at least ninety plate appearances in 2016, Judge’s O-Swing percentage was tied for 119^th at 33.6% (27^th percentile), and his Z-Swing percentage of 63.5% ranked nearly identically, at 112^th (68^th percentile).  Judge, surprisingly, rated fairly well in both measures: he chased far fewer balls than the average hitter, and he swung at a healthy percentage of strikes.

His contact rates, on the other hand, did not inspire quite the same sanguinity. Last season, Judge ranked dead last in overall contact percentage, as well as on pitches outside the strike zone. On pitches inside the strike zone, his contact percentage saw a slight improvement relative to his peers, but still ranked 42^nd from the bottom. BaseballSavant’s pitch heatmaps suggest that Judge seemed to have the most difficulty with low and away pitches, both in and out of the strike zone. The following graph displays the locations of Judge’s swinging strikes from 2016 (not including foul balls):

As the preceding heatmap illustrates, the crux of Judge’s contact problems occurs in the low-and-away portions in and around the strike zone. However, a heatmap of Judge’s hardest-hit balls (exit velocity >= 100) shows that Judge’s best contact occurs on pitches that aren’t located anywhere near the low and away sections of the zone. In fact, the pitches Judge hits best are on the inside half of the plate:

Now, let’s see where Judge’s weaker contact (exit velocity <= 99) falls in the strike zone.

So, low and away pitches not only induce a league-leading whiff rate for Judge, but even when he does manage to connect, he connects with his weakest exit velocity. Marcus Thames’ comments, therefore, may require a slight adjustment: Judge didn’t necessarily expand the zone in 2016, but he certainly didn’t make the most efficient use of it. Courtesy of Brooks Baseball, the following graph illustrates Judge’s 2016 whiff rate by zone:

From these charts, we can observe Judge’s whiff rate slowly rising from left to right (inside to outside) across the strike zone. To cut down on his high swinging-strike rate, which was the third-highest in the league among those 451 batters, Judge should reduce his swing rate on low and outside pitches – at least, until the count or game situation demands a more aggressive approach. Ahead in the count, however, Judge should look primarily for the middle-in pitches that have produced better and more frequent contact. He shouldn’t even consider swinging at anything on the outer sections of the plate, as he did last season while ahead in the count (heatmap from FanGraphs):

As of Tax Day afternoon, the Yankees are only 11 games into the season, so it’s admittedly a bit early to draw any major conclusions. Even so, we should note that Judge has shown signs of legitimate improvement over last year’s campaign. In 33 at-bats, Judge is slashing .276/.364/.621, and although a 175 wRC+, .345 ISO, and 50% HR/FB rate are all but guaranteed to decline, there’s still reason to believe that Judge has made significant strides in his approach at the plate. Last year, Judge saw the 18^th lowest percentage of fastballs in the league at 49.8%, a percentage that this season has dipped even further, to 45.5%. Pitchers, expecting Judge to flail as in 2016, have fed him a steady diet of low and away breaking balls. The following chart reflects all off-speed pitches Judge has faced to date in 2017:

Even with this steady diet of low and away breaking balls, Judge has managed to cut his O-Swing% from 34.9% to 23.9%, and his swinging-strike percentage has fallen from 18.1% to 12.0%. This is especially impressive considering that, like last year, pitchers have thrown him a fairly low percentage of strikes (about 41%).

The Yankees have lots of reason for optimism regarding their young slugger. As the starting right fielder in Yankee Stadium’s less-than-spacious right field, Judge’s value to his team will derive mostly from his batting output. If Judge can consistently lay off of the low and away pitches that gave him problems last year, he’ll have more opportunity to mash the balls that find the inner half of the plate – like this beauty from last Wednesday. If his early 2017 performance is any indication, Judge’s offseason adjustments have the potential to transform him into a Giancarlo Stanton-caliber power hitter.

At 24 years old, Adam Wainwright burst onto the scene, closing out the 2006 World Series and bringing the Cardinals their first championship in almost 25 years. Over the next 10 years, he was the opening day starter five times and racked up the 7th-most wins of any pitcher despite missing the entire 2011 season and most of the 2015 campaign. If you prefer to measure a pitcher’s performance in Wins Above Replacement as opposed to wins, Wainwright was still a top-10 pitcher from 2007-2016.

If you’re still not convinced, he finished in the top three of Cy Young voting four times and received MVP votes in 2009, ’10, ’13, and ’14. By all accounts, Adam Wainwright was an elite player for the better part of a decade, even after recovering from Tommy John surgery in 2011. Still, by all accounts, he has been anything but elite since.

What happened?

In 2014, Wainwright’s last dominant year (6.1 WAR), he threw almost 230 innings on his way to a 20-9 record with a 2.38 ERA. Since then, he has posted a 4.35 ERA — almost a full 2 runs worse than 2014. Is this just the decline that comes with age, especially as he pitches in his age-35 season? Is it lingering effects from his devastating Achilles injury in early 2015? Admittedly, it’s probably a combination of both. They key, however, is the pitch he used to break onto the scene way back in 2006.

The curveball, which was his go-to pitch for years, is no longer devastating hitters with the consistency that it once did.

There has been a consistent decline in the percentage of whiffs Adam gets on his curveball. It peaked at 17.22% in 2014 and has fallen to 10.26% early in 2017 — a 40% decrease.

But a decreasing whiff rate doesn’t necessarily mean the pitch is failing him; maybe the batters are just making more contact?

When looking at how the vertical movement of his curveball has changed over the last few years, it is evident that the pitch has regressed.

From 9.22 inches in 2014 to 7.54 inches in 2014, the movement on Wainwright’s curveball has decreased by almost 20%. No wonder the whiff rate decreased by so much — the curveball doesn’t have the necessary movement to trick hitters.

This is probably a result of age. How many pitchers maintain the efficacy of their best pitch for their entire careers? None. But the most important thing to do, especially with a curveball, after realizing you can’t get the ball to move like you once could, is to selectively pick when to use it. If Wainwright used his regressing curveball more sparingly, it might be more successful. Instead, he has taken an obviously less effective pitch and increased how often he uses it.

Wouldn’t it make sense to use a decreasingly-effective pitch less often? As you can see, instead of markedly decreasing how often he uses his curveball, the long-time Cardinals ace actually increased its usage rate. Now, the graph shows a variance of only a few percentage points — relatively insignificant. Notably, the 28.89% usage rate is the most Wainwright has ever used his curveball.

Let’s do a quick recap. Adam Wainwright is not getting whiffs from hitters because his curveball doesn’t have the movement it once did. And instead of lowering its usage rate, he increased it to an all-time high.

What should we expect to happen when a less-effective pitch is used more and more?

The batting average against his curveball has risen to .380 in 2017 — more than doubling since 2014. This is alarming. It leaves hitters hoping Wainwright throws them a curve — a stark contrast from a pitch that used to buckle knees.

Recently, we’ve seen less of Wainwright’s dominant curveball, and more of his less-effective curveball, leading to more hits, runs, and losses. Wainwright’s success is directly linked to the effectiveness of this pitch. While it may no longer be elite, it can be effective if he saves it for the right moments.

Last week, the Cardinals announced that Kolten Wong would be part of a platoon with Jedd Gyorko. As Mark Saxon noted, Wong did not react well to the news (although he later clarified that he would prefer to stay in St. Louis). Kolten and the Redbirds agreed to a five-year, $25.5-million contract last spring, but what might have served as a confidence booster for the young second baseman resulted in a slash line of .240/.327/.355 over 121 games.

The reason for this platoon is Gyorko’s bat. He did lead the Cardinals with 30 home runs in 2016, a number that had him tied for 11th in the National League. But is Gyorko that much better offensively to offset Wong’s defensive attributes?

Let’s look at this from two different perspectives: in the field and at the plate.

In the Field

Using data from 2015 and 2016, Wong and Gyorko played over 1000 innings at second base — a large enough sample size to use in an analysis. Examining the Ultimate Zone Rating per 150 games (UZR/150), we see that Kolten and Jedd have scores of 3.1 and 4.2, respectively. So, while Gyorko seems to have an advantage here, over the course of a 162-game season, this is a relatively insignificant difference.

Looking at Def, which measures the number of runs above or below average a player is worth, we see that Wong scores 8.2, while Gyorko scores 5.3. According to FanGraphs Rules of Thumb for interpreting this statistic, both players are between “above average” and “great defenders.” Wong’s advantage here equates to about 1/3 of a win. Again, no significant difference in their fielding abilities.

If we look at the Inside Edge Fielding statistics from FanGraphs, we see, as a whole, that Kolten makes more difficult plays, but Jedd makes the easier play a greater percentage of the time. For instance, look at the percentage of “unlikely” plays that each player made. An “unlikely” play is a play that is made 10-40% of the time. Kolten made 27% of these plays, while Jedd did not make a single one. At the same time, looking at plays that are “likely,” Kolten made 73% of them, while Jedd made significantly more (88%).

An analysis of these statistics shows us that, in the field, Kolten may make more web gems, but Jedd is the more consistent everyday second baseman. Nevertheless, there is not much separating these two on the defensive end.

At the Plate

At first, this part of the debate seems relatively simple. Gyorko led the team in HRs last year, he is clearly the much better hitter, right? Let’s take a look. At first glance, the players look very similar, with Jedd posting a line of .245/.301/.445 and Kolten producing a line of .254/.323/.375.

One key aspect of a platoon is starting the right-handed hitter against southpaws and vice versa. So let’s look at the zone profiles.

Kolten vs. Righties

Jedd vs. Lefties

Kolten is, far and away, the better hitter in this platoon in terms of average. But Gyorko’s greatest success was his power, right? So let’s look at the slugging zones.

Kolten slugging vs. Righties

Jedd slugging vs. Lefties

Although there are places where Jedd has the higher slugging percentage, Kolten has slightly lower, but similar zone ratings over a longer period of time. Even with advanced statistics, these two players are very difficult to separate.

By the eye test, Kolten seems to have the advantage in the field, but the statistics tell us that these two players are actually very similar. In addition, Jedd seems like the better hitter, but the statistics tell us that, again, they are very similar. Perhaps there is one thing that we can glean from this analysis: Kolten should be put in a place where he can reach base in front of players who drive the ball and Jedd should be placed where he can drive runners in.

To respond to the question asked at the beginning, should this platoon continue? The statistics tell us yes. As a younger player who just signed a large extension, Kolten has more upside. However, if we are to make a decision for this year, not the future, the numbers tell us that the platoon should continue because neither player has separated himself from the other.

Luis Severino had a great 2015 in his two-month debut, and was supposed to take a big step forward in 2016. Luis Severino took a big step backward in 2016. He was sent back to Triple-A in May, and when he came back late in the season, he was almost exclusively used as a reliever (albeit with incredible results). The reason for his struggles is pretty clear, even on the back of his baseball card – a 1.39 HR/9 rate. So clearly, the homer problem is what we’ll be looking into today, but what if I showed you this?

*as SP

You’ll see that I only used his numbers as a starting pitcher; they would be skewed in his favor if I included his dominant innings as a reliever. Even so, the number of fly balls were extremely low, he wasn’t being hit very hard…in fact, he was generating a lot of infield pop-ups and a lot of soft contact in general. This is the opposite of what one would expect from a pitcher with a homer problem. It gets even weirder.

His issue in 2016 was homers, but in the roughly one-third of his innings as a starter in the first time against an opposing batting order, he beat the league average and his own 2015 mark, which had actually been below league average. And for good measure, in the other roughly one-third of his innings that he was a relief pitcher, he gave up zero home runs. That’s befuddling. But there is a silver lining to this; we now know where the problem is. Clearly, Severino’s problems lie in the second and third time through the opposing order. We can finally find the glaring problems there.

Severino’s problems can be summed up in this table. While his groundball rate was still healthy and even above league average, there was still a significant decrease from the 51.9% mark he posted in 2015 in the same circumstances. When his groundball rate dropped, his line-drive rate rose to the point that would tie Mike Fiers for the league lead (and that isn’t a good thing). So the increased line drives were part of the problem, and as the saying goes, increased line-drive rate equals higher BABIP. In Severino’s case, “higher” means .394, which is, by the nature of the statistic, absolutely unsustainable. Additionally, the 3.0 HR/9 is extremely ugly (as expected, since this is where we deduced the homer problem to be), and yet the HR/FB rate can expect positive regression as well.

Now, before we pin all of Severino’s troubles on luck, let’s remember that he is responsible for turning those ground balls he was getting in 2015 into line drives. Severino went from throwing his changeup 12.8% of the time in 2015 to only 8.9% in 2016, essentially becoming a fastball/slider only pitcher. Without an offspeed pitch or even a third offering of any sort, Severino naturally became rather predictable as the game went on. I am not sure exactly why Severino scrapped his changeup, and this Eno Sarris chart you’re about to see will only puzzle us further.

The entire article deserves a full read for context, but by Sarris’ metric, Luis Severino had the 16th-best changeup among starters in 2015. Maybe there are some imperfections with PITCHf/x, maybe the sample size was too small, but batters only hit .222/.323/.259 against it, so the results back up the metric. That kind of effectiveness would have gone a long way for Severino in 2016. To the Yankees’ credit, the only instructions they gave Severino when he was sent back to the minors were to work on his changeup. Later in the season, after the Yankees called him back up to New York, Severino was deployed as a relief pitcher, allowing him to continue his two-pitch ways.

Clearly, there are two factors we were able to pin down that derailed Luis Severino. Some of the problem for him was terrible luck, as the .394 BABIP and 31.0% HR/FB are likely to come back down to earth. Some of the problem was self-inflicted, like the abandoning of his changeup, which at 57.9% in 2015 was a groundball machine, leading to more line drives in 2016. The recipe for success is there for Severino, both in his right arm and in the wishes of the Yankee management. Take spring-training stories for what you feel they are worth, but it sounds like Severino is working on reincorporating that 2015 changeup back into his repertoire. If it is indeed back, beginning with his first start scheduled for April 7, expect Severino to take the step forward in 2017 that he was supposed to take in 2016.

All stats via FanGraphs

Jeff Samardzija is incredibly frustrating at times.  For the first few months of 2016, Giants fans saw a pitcher who would more than earn the five-year, $90-million contract he had signed in the offseason.  In April and May, Samardzija posted FIPs of 3.67 and 2.45, as well 11.9% and 19.1% K-BB rates.  Those numbers are pretty worthwhile considering Samardzija has forged himself into a workhorse, averaging over 200 IP over the past four seasons.  The Giants would be plenty happy with that for a full season.  All seemed well in Giants land.  The free agents were proving their worth, Madison Bumgarner’s greatest concern was with his own hitting (that may always be true), and Buster Posey was healthy.  The even-year sorcery seemed to be working.

June and July came around, though, and Samardzija saw himself regress into what looked like the 2015 version of himself.  In June and July Samardzija posted FIPs of 7.09 and 5.06.  Samardzija was giving up homers at an alarming pace and he was desperately struggling to strike people out.  Oddly enough, Samardzija was drastically altering his pitch mix in the middle of the year.

Holy cow.

That looks experimental more than anything else.  For Samardzija to maintain his level of performance even in his good months is pretty solid given such drastic changes in pitch mixes.

For reference, here is Samardzija’s FIP throughout the course of last year.

You can see the success I mentioned earlier before June and July came around, but Samardzija also set out on a strong end to the season, posting a 3.67 FIP in August and a 2.38 FIP in September/October to somehow bring his FIP below the league average.  That final stretch also saw Samardzija posting a 21.8 K-BB% as well, maintaining a similar walk rate he posted all season while striking out 28.6% of batters.

Staring through the bevy of pitches Samardzija featured through the season, you can see where he was getting to in the end.  He almost entirely ditched his cutter and found a balance between his four-seam and two-seam fastballs.  The curveball usage held steady, the slider usage went down, and the splitter continued to emerge as a favorite.  The splitter usage has appeared to come about as Samardzija’s neutralizer towards lefties, and it has worked well.  Lefties have given Samardzija trouble for his whole career and the near-60-point difference in wOBA versus lefties last year is fairly alarming (.331 vs .276), so an offspeed pitch that moves away from lefties is crucial.

That splitter itself is fairly similar in movement to Masahiro Tanaka’s.

Samardzija: -6.7 x, 3.9 z

Tanaka: -6.7 x, 3.3 z

Should Samardzija use the splitter versus lefties as much as Tanaka does (nearly 30%!) and locate it as Tanaka does (low and away from lefties), it should be effective, given his SwStr% with the pitch throughout his career (19.5%).

Here is Samardzija in his last tune-up before the season.

(Skip to 0:13 for the nasty nasty.)

In those final two months last year, Samardzija was able to continually do better against righties while limiting lefties to a somewhat manageable .410 SLG.  Should Samardzija maintain a similar pitch mix, he would look more like his four-win 2014 campaign.  Pitching isn’t that simple, but he’s making his way back to something that had worked quite well for him in the past.

The 2016 Giants season became all about the monstrous second-half collapse, but hidden in there was a bit of a Jeff Samardzija resurgence.  In 2017, Samardzija will almost assuredly be worth his salary in durability alone.  But if he can continue to utilize his splitter as he had toward the end of 2016, I would expect him to outperform his projections (Steamer 3.84 ERA 3.78 FIP 4.09 xFIP) and deliver a performance more in line with his 2014 season.  The Giants rotation already runs deep, but they could be looking at one of the most durable and effective groups of front-line starters in the game.

On April 7th, Vince Velasquez pitches the Phillies’ home opener. His electric talent makes him a linchpin for the team’s plan to return to contention, and his four-seam fastball could be the key. It’s his best pitch, and it had the 12th-best weighted value among pitchers who threw at least 130 innings last year. MLB’s 5 Statcast Storylines for the team features him and the 27.4% swinging-strike rate he got on it, tops in the league.

And oddly, even more than his dubious health, it could be his biggest obstacle to stardom.

Corinne Landrey at Crashburn Alley found that Velasquez was in the top 15 for overall fastball usage last year, and top three in two-strike counts. Immediately, we could reason he threw it too much, even when acknowledging the rankings above. But it’s worth noting how, exactly, it looked.

380 of his 428 two-strike fastballs were four-seamers. They accounted for 60% of his two-strike pitches. It’s not just that he threw a ton of heat when hitters had their backs against the wall. It’s that he didn’t use his secondary offerings to keep hitters honest.

The top 10 qualified pitchers by K/9 last year  —  and some of the best pitchers in the game  —  present various paths that can be taken with two strikes. The range between their most used and second-most used pitches in those counts goes from 1.1% to 27.3%. The range for Velasquez screams from the page: 43.7%.

It might be easiest to think of this like kids on a seesaw. His four-seamer was like a particularly stout kid (maybe Billy Butler) and his curveball was like a particularly scrawny kid (say, Jose Altuve). The way he used these pitches in two-strike counts didn’t lend itself to a fluid, balanced approach during the most advantageous situations.

The problems Velasquez’s fastball created were subtle because overall it was so good. Guys weren’t driving it out of the park or putting up crooked numbers against it, but they were letting him wear himself out. While he got a whiff nearly 26% of the time in a two-strike count when using his four-seamer, there was also better than a 2:1 chance the at-bat would continue because it was either fouled off or called a ball. The foul balls were a major reason he worked a ton of deep counts last year, and what made making it through even six innings a coin flip all year.

There’s a chance that could be due to where he was locating his heat, too.

A look at his heat maps shows Velasquez hammered the zone with his four-seamer when behind (left). When ahead, as he would be with two strikes, he threw it higher (right). That’s generally good when thinking about sequencing, changing the eye level of hitters, and possibly the concept of having a pitch to spare.

But Velasquez’s fastball is a riser  —  it averaged 9.75 inches of positive vertical movement last year, or about a full inch more than the league average. While the maps of different counts will show slightly different locations, the big picture suggests his four-seamer could have been easier to take when higher in the zone because hitters and umps alike perceived it was already up.

Landrey also found that Velasquez was beginning to favor his changeup toward the end of the year as a lead secondary offering. While that’s positive, it’s bizarre that it took so long to show up in the majors since it was lauded through the minor leagues. Right now, the opposition knows he’s dynamic but can be worn down and sent out before the sixth inning. As he matures, he could become a force they genuinely dread.

Jose Ramirez broke out for the Indians last season. Long seen as just a placeholder for Francisco Lindor, Jose hit well enough all year to keep getting starts in a utility role, and eventually moving up to become the full-time third baseman for Cleveland. Ramirez derived the majority of his value from an elite contact rate, and excellent base-running, swiping 22 bags and hitting for an average well over .300. All in all, Jose was worth nearly five wins above replacement. There has been a lot of speculation as to whether he can repeat his huge breakout last year, if we may have already seen his peak, or maybe, he’s just getting started and there are even greater things to come.

Looking at Jose’s numbers from last season, I can see three areas for improvement. First off is defense. According to defensive runs above average, Jose was only worth 0.5 throughout the 2016 season. Jose is a shortstop by training; however, he spent most of the first half of the season bouncing around positions in a utility role, before landing at third base full-time. Considering this and the fact that he has rated out as a plus defender in past seasons, I think it is safe to project an improvement here with a more consistent role.

Second is his walk rate. Jose walked in 7.1% of his plate appearances in 2016. To compare, in 2015, as well as in his Triple-A career, his walk rate hung right around 9%, so there is possibly some room for improvement there as well.

The final area for improvement is Jose’s home-run hitting. Despite recording 60 XBHs last year, Jose only left the yard 11 times. It is very difficult to put up an MVP-quality season with lower-end HR numbers. Since 2011, there have been 29 positional-player seasons worth 7+ WAR, and every single one of them included over 20 HRs.

So what will Jose look like in 2017? It’s hard to tell, unless of course you decide to overreact to this week’s opening game, in which case…

WELCOME TO THE MVP RACE JOSE RAMIREZ

Jose batted four times in the opener, and he had one walk and one HR. THE TWO THINGS HE NEEDED TO GET BETTER AT!!! Now obviously this article is a bit tongue-in-cheek, and a sample size of one game means VERY little. The walk especially tells us just about nothing. You give me 4 PA in a major-league game and I might even luck into a walk. However, there is reason to take note of the home run.

Prior to 2017, Jose Ramirez had hit 19 home runs in the majors. His previous best exit velocity was 107.8 MPH on a HR. The longest HR of his career had traveled 437 feet. Jose’s HR in game number one left his bat at 109.3 MPH and traveled 447 feet.

So MAYBE this is a hint that Jose has added some power since last season. That would be a reason to get excited. If you take Jose’s 2016 numbers, then bump him to a 9% walk rate, 22 HRs, and plus defensive value, and even account for a few points of BABIP regression, he’s a 7-8 WAR player, and looks real similar on paper to Mookie Betts.

So, if we overact to opening day, this would make Jose a legitimate star and MVP candidate. His season will be extremely exciting to follow, although in the end probably overshadowed by Madison Bumgarner’s race to 60 dingers.

Beerrios! That’s a way better title, but we’ll stick with the original. So I’m spending my Saturday brewing a batch of beer and dealing with some pitchFx data. If everything goes well, you’re going to get some baseball info and some brewing highlights. But also Happy Opening Week! It’s the greatest time of the year.

All right, let’s deal with some baseball first. Jose Berrios had a pretty brutal 2016 with the big club — all in all, he started 14 games and rattled off a 3-7 record with an 8.02 ERA, an ugly 1.87 WHIP, and a not-top-of-the-rotation strikeout rate of 7.6 K/9. His FIP and xFIP were better but still not great at 6.20 & 5.64. His BABIP certainly didn’t help his numbers, sitting at 0.344, but that alone can’t explain how truly atrocious his numbers looked in his first taste of the big leagues. I’m going to use the pitchRx package to look at pitching data from 2016 and see if we can figure out what went wrong and how we can fix it.

All right, now on to the beer portion. Today I’m making my Deep Lake Dark Lager. Behind every great beer there is a great story. This story begins when I worked out at a remote research camp and fridge space was not reserved for amateur beer-making. A key process in lagering a beer is fermenting the beer at low temperatures, which is why I mentioned the fridge space. We got around lagering our beer in the fridge by putting the fermenting beer into a keg and dropping the keg into a lake to about 15 meters deep (~49 feet). At this depth the temperature was steady at about 5°C (41°F). A little tip for any newcomers to the brewing community: Your beer needs to maintain command, something Berrios couldn’t do. Zing!

If anyone wants to take a quick look at some gifs of Berrios’ sick curveball (and other pitches), check them out here: http://www.pitcherlist.com/Jose-Berrios/

I tried to find a comp for Berrios related to pitch velocity, and if we ignore his slider, Jacob deGrom comes out looking like a pretty good match. Here are how their pitch velocities line up using 2016 pitchFx data. I know it’s not a good idea to exclude one of deGrom’s best pitches, but I’m more interested in consistency between starts.

Just eye-balling, they look pretty good. Let’s take a look at pitch velocity by start.

Just looking by eye, it’s hard to tell if you could consider one guy more consistent than the other. But obviously we might be able to give deGrom the benefit of the doubt here, since he was pitching with scar tissue or bone spurs in his elbow. Either way, he was pitching in discomfort. There is one thing that catches my attention, though — it’s those last 11 starts by Berrios, and you can see his change-up velocities start to sneak up from ~83.5 to 86 MPH. The unfortunate thing is that there is no concurrent increase in four-seam (FF) or two-seam (FT) velocity. Near the end of the season Berrios was trying to complement his fastballs with a change-up that had a really poor velocity difference. Let’s check that out in a bit more detail.

Okay, you give that plot a bit more thought. My timer just went off and I’ve got to go sparge the grains. I converted a five-gallon water cooler into a mash tun for steeping my brews, which works awesome, because it’s insulated so it holds the heat really well. The aspect I really love about this beer is that is has a really light lager taste, but it has a nice dark colour, which makes it a great spring beer. And to get this effect in your beer is really simple. For the 45 minutes where you are steeping your grains, only add the light grains, then just before you sparge, throw on your dark grains (in my case carafa III). That way, as you sparge you get the colour from the dark grains and none of the taste. Yaaaay beer. Everything is all sparged and now I’ve got to bring the wort to a nice rolling boil.

All righty, let’s discuss that velocity difference. I’d say there is a similar trend from his early-season call-up and his late-season starts as well. He starts out with a pretty decent velocity difference, but with each start that difference gets smaller and smaller. Especially in the second half of the season — he started out with a fantastic velocity difference. That combination should have led to some really effective pitches, but as we move into September and October those pitches are starting to look more and more similar and their effectiveness all but disappears.

Back to brewing — boiling achieved! I’ve got to let the liquid boil down for a couple hours, so through the magic of the internet, let’s fast-foward to the next step. And what a fantastic surprise, the battery in my scale is dead and of course it’s some weird specialized kind that I don’t have on hand. Well luckily I wrote the weight on the bags when I packed the hops last fall so I’m going to eyeball it and hop(e) for the best. At least now I can honestly say I can never reproduce this batch, but that’s part of the fun. So I figure I added about an ounce of hops; we’ll really never know. I’ve got to let that boil for another 40 minutes then add the flavour hops and some irish moss.

I think we can agree that this was not a season marked by consistency for Jose Berrios. But I was curious as to how his release point affected the velocity of each pitch. For all of the data presented here, I used the pitchRx package to download and store the 2016 pitchFx data. In the pitchFx data, you can pull out the release point for each pitch recorded throughout the season. Using this data, I created a general additive model using the bam() function for the R peeps out there, and within the bam function I modeled pitch velocity and pitch break separately using a Gamma link. I like to use the Gamma link because, in a not very sciencey description, it’s very flexible and fits a wide range on models. So first, a couple of notes; 1) There are two plots coming up; the first predicts pitch velocity and the second predicts pitch break length (movement). 2) Pay attention to the prediction window, the coloured box, for each pitch. And 3) These models were only run on Berrios.

And pitch break (break_length):

You can tell that velocity and break length change with different release points. I mean, there is a pretty complicated relationship with how his release point affected both the pitch break and the velocity, and I’m not really sure what the sweet spot actually is. His change-up velocity plot has a really nice faded red area sort of right in the middle of the prediction grid. This area represents roughly an 84.5 MPH change-up which would complement his 93 MPH fastball quite nicely, but unfortunately his arm slot seems to be drifting along an axis which we will get to in a second. Did you happen to notice how the coloured boxes moved slightly among pitches?

So remember how Berrios was apparently tipping his pitches this past year? Well, if not, check this out. So the way he was delivering the ball basically gave the batters a full view of what was coming. I mean, I know I don’t possess the ability to spot small things in deliveries and assess pitches. I watched gifs of Berrios throwing all of his pitches over and over many times and I can’t pick anything up. But I am sure that there are players out there who can pick up those minor details. So I’m thinking there may be more to this than just how he started his wind-up, and where he was releasing the ball was also giving batters a clue as to what was coming. Check out this plot showing how Berrios and deGrom released their pitches.

So you’re probably wondering what’s going on there. Each ellipsoid represents a different pitch, curveballs in blue, 2-seamers in orange or orange-red etc. Each ellipsoid contains 95% of the pitches thrown for each pitch type. Generally deGrom releases the ball about a foot over in comparison to Berrios, but that’s not what it important. What’s important is how each pitcher’s change-up overlaps with their respective fastballs. deGrom has remarkable consistency to throw both types of fastballs and his change-up, and the ellipsoids are basically completely overlapping. Right away we can see that something is going on with how Berrios is releasing his change-up. It only overlaps with about half of his fastball release points, but his arm angle also seems to be drifting, and you can see the ellipsoid is stretched one direction. So I’m guessing he’s not only tipping his pitches in his wind-up, but there is also some release-point trouble happening here that no doubt some hitters are able to pick up on.

Final update on the beer: I added in the flavour hops and irish with about five minutes left and took everything off the heat. Luckily, it’s still a bit cold here so I left the beer outside to cool for a couple hours to get it down to room temperature so I could pitch the yeast. And fast-forward a couple of days…I let the yeast start the fermentation process at room temperature for a couple of days, then moved it into a fridge. I’ll leave it there for about three weeks, transfer the beer to a keg, and then it’s basically ready to drink!

Thanks for sticking it out to the end; I hope you enjoyed “Beerrios.” This ended up having a lot more deGrom in it than initially planned, but I think it was a good comparison to include. I think we were able to successfully identify a couple serious flaws from Jose Berrios’ debut season, and hopefully he’ll be able to shake that off, work on fixing his mechanics, and take another shot at the majors in 2017. I have a feeling we are going to see him mid-April or early May, and I really hope we get to see what he can do over an entire season. If he can transfer just a fraction of his minor-league success to the majors, we will get to see a pretty dynamic young pitcher, and the Twins have been waiting a long time to get a pitcher of this caliber back into their rotation.