Examining the Tendencies of the Rockies’ Rotation

Don’t you just love how talking about one topic in baseball can bring you to a completely separate topic than the one you were discussing? For instance, my friend and I were discussing possible landing spots for Mark Trumbo (before he decided to head back to Baltimore). One team that came up was the Colorado Rockies and how they shouldn’t have signed Ian Desmond and should’ve gone with Trumbo instead. This led to talking about the Rockies’ rotation and the fact that it wouldn’t matter what sluggers they had if the rotation was — for lack of better words — “trash.” This led me to think what I’m sure many of you are wondering: How is the Rockies’ starting rotation?

Now, we can look at ERA, FIP, and whatever advanced metric you prefer until we’re blue in the face. But what I wanted to focus on is what type of pitchers they bring into Coors Field, mainly in regard to batted-ball statistics. I want to see if the front office prefers to bring in ground-ball pitchers to combat the altitude and ballpark factors of the stadium. I also want to take a look at the pitch mix of their starting five to see if that has a hand in how their rotation is selected.

One would imagine that a pitcher with a good mix of ground balls and fly balls would be preferred in a starting rotation. Too many ground balls and you have a better chance of giving up more hits. Too many fly balls and you risk the opportunity for more home runs. Like the library on FanGraphs says, “If you allow 10 ground balls, you can’t control if zero, three, or nine go for hits, but you did control the fact that none are leaving the park.” Considering a park with the altitude and home-run factor of Coors Field, you would expect a rotation of primarily ground-ball pitchers to lessen the chance of a home run.

Let’s look at Tyler Chatwood and Chad Bettis first. Chatwood and Bettis have very similar stats across the board in addition to being the only two that are above-average ground-ball pitchers. While their HR/FB% are close and below league-average, where they both differ are the home and away splits. While Chatwood seems to get lit up at home, Bettis goes the opposite direction and actually has more fly balls go for home runs when he isn’t starting in Colorado.

Now let’s look at Jorge de la Rosa. Jorge has the worst HR/FB% of any starter on the team, by far. In fact, he was ranked 20th overall in 2016 for HR/FB%. Another stat that Jorge is last in for the starting rotation? Fastball usage, and by a considerable margin. For all MLB starting pitchers with a minimum of 60 IP, he ranks fifth-last in fastball usage in 2016. Maybe this is why the Rockies prefer to stick with fastball-type pitchers. Since 2011, the Rockies have used 21 different starting pitchers. Of those 21, 13 (62%) have been above the league average in fastball usage. In the four years that Jorge has been used as a starter, he’s sat at the bottom of the list three times (he was ranked eighth-last in 2013).

Something else I found noteworthy in the chart is that all five starters have higher fly-ball rates when pitching away as opposed to at home. While the difference for Tyler Anderson is very minuscule (0.2%), the fact that all five fall under this criteria makes it seem more than coincidental. Could they be pitching differently at home than they are when they’re away? Let’s take a historical look.

According to Baseball-Reference, this is the list of the most common Colorado Rockies starting pitchers from 2011 – 2016. The list gives us 30 total pitcher-seasons and 21 unique pitchers. Out of the 30 pitchers listed, 21 (70%) have a lower fly-ball rate at home than they do when pitching away. Additionally, 23 (76%) have a higher ground-ball rate at Coors as opposed to any other stadium. This leads me to believe that Rockies pitchers are conditioned to pitch differently when they are at home versus when they are away. This would make sense, since Coors has the highest park factor in all of baseball and anyone from a fair-weather fan to a front-office executive understands that keeping the ball on the ground in that park is best.

The last question we have to ask is, “Is this change effective?” The short answer is, not really. As seen, 14 out of the 30 (46%) pitchers have a higher HR/FB% when pitching away, while 15 out of the 30 (50%) pitchers have a higher HR/FB% when pitching at home (Eddie Butler in 2015 is the odd man out at an even 0.00%). The good news is that four out of the five latest seasons have the Rockies’ starting rotation having a lower HR/FB% than the league average for starting pitchers. The bad news is that all five seasons were losing seasons.