Alex Wood Is Finding His Strikeouts Again

Just before the trade deadline, the Braves, Marlins, and Dodgers struck a big deal, at least in terms of quantity of players and money being moved around; 13 players changed uniforms, and when the dust settled, the Dodgers came away with a trio of pitchers to upgrade their staff: starters Alex Wood and Mat Latos, along with reliever Jim Johnson. While they had been a heavily-rumored destination for frontline pitchers like David Price, Johnny Cueto, and Cole Hamels, the Dodgers ultimately decided to with depth over star power, adding multiple good arms rather than one great one.

Of course, a large driver of that decision was the relative cost, as they could acquire these kinds of pitchers without surrendering any of their best young talents, and they’ll also control Wood’s rights through the 2019 season; he won’t even be eligible for arbitration until after next year, so he’s going to make something close to the league minimum next year. So, while no one thinks Wood is on David Price’s level as a pitcher, he offered a better value when future years of control and financial obligations are factored in.

But choosing Wood and Latos over one better pitcher wasn’t just about getting a cheaper pitcher, or even just about getting a guy they could control for multiple years. In Alex Wood, the Dodgers were attempting to buy low on an asset with significant upside, which is exactly the kind of move that they’ve been making ever since Andrew Friedman and Farhan Zaidi took over the baseball operations department last winter.

If you want to know why the Braves were willing to trade a 24 year old pitcher with four years of control remaining after this season, you can essentially sum up their reasoning in one easy table.

Those are his numbers with the Braves over the last three years, and you’ll note that Wood has lost 2.5 mph on his fastball since his big league debut; this year, his strikeout rate took a big tumble as well. If you are looking for statistical signs that a pitcher is breaking down, decreases in velocity and strikeout rate are usually the first two places you want to look, and Wood’s 2015 performance raises enough red flags that the Braves were rightfully concerned that his value may have already peaked. From their perspective, dealing Wood now may have been salvaging some value from a declining asset before that value went to nothing. If you’ve seen Wood pitch, you’ll know that his delivery looks painful even on a good day; it isn’t hard at all to imagine a guy who throws like that is going to have a short career.

But as both Eno Sarris and Daniel Brim have written, deeper dives into his pitch qualities don’t seem to support the idea that Wood’s stuff is rapidly diminishing. By and large, he’s throwing mostly the same pitches this year as he threw a year ago, and he ran a 24.5% strikeout rate in 2014, a year in which he was one of the game’s most effective starting pitchers. Sarris’ early-season look at his issues concluded that he may just be struggling with command issues, while Brim noticed that he was throwing from a lower arm slot, a change that could suggest his mechanics may just need to be tweaked somewhat.

A lowered arm slot generally leads to larger platoon splits, as it gives opposite-handed batters a better look at the ball and makes it more difficult to throw strikes that aren’t diving right into a hitter’s power zone. And, sure enough, Wood was struggling to get right-handed hitters out this year after doing just fine against them the last two years.

So, yeah, Brim could very well be correct, and if the Dodgers could get his arm slot raised back up, perhaps they could help reduce the success right-handers had against Wood during the first four months of the season. But while Wood has still been highly effective against left-handed batters this year, his strikeout rate has taken a tumble against them as well, falling from 26% last year to 19% this year. So this probably isn’t just an arm-slot issue, and there might have been a more systemic problem causing his strikeouts to disappear this year.

And it’s possible that the systemic issue goes by the name A.J. Pierzynzki. The Braves signed the veteran catcher as a free agent this winter after catcher-of-the-future Christian Betancourt flopped in his debut last summer, and while Pierzynski has been excellent as a hitter for the Braves — putting up a .300 average with some power in regular playing time — his work behind the plate leaves a lot more to be desired. Especially when it comes to helping his pitchers get marginal calls.

Among catchers who have been behind the plate for at least 4,000 pitches this year, Pierzynski ranks as the game’s fourth-worst pitch framer, according to the calculations from StatCorner. 15% of the pitches that he’s received in the strike zone have been called balls, four or five percentage points higher than the guys who rate well by the framing metrics. No one is ever going to be able to get every call to go their way, but Pierzynski gets fewer than most, and this may be having a particularly negative impact on Alex Wood.

We have Heat Maps that show the percentage of pitches being called strikes in a given area. Here’s what the league average called strike rate looks like for 2015.

And now, here’s what Alex Wood’s called strike rate looked like in Atlanta this year.

In particular, look at the box in the corner of the zone that represents low-and-away pitches to left-handed batters. On the whole, umpires are calling a pitch in that area a strike 81% of the time when hitters don’t swing, but when Wood was on the mound with the Braves, they were only calling that pitch a strike 68% of the time. With 60 pitches in that zone that hitters haven’t gone after, that’s 10 pitches — just in that one zone — that most pitchers get for strikes, where Wood has had it called a ball.

And if you look at the boxes around that zone, we continue to see Pierzynski’s possible influence on Wood’s outcomes. In the box representing pitches just off the outside corner at the knees, the average pitcher is getting a called strike on 12% of pitches; Wood was getting called strikes on 7% of his pitches in that zone. In the box just below the low-and-away corner, which represents pitches just below the knee but still over the plate, the average pitcher is getting the call 7% of the time; Wood was getting that same call just 2% of the time.

The low-and-away breaking ball is the bread-and-butter out-pitch for nearly every pitcher who throws from a low arm-slot, but when Wood is pitching to the area around that lower-left (from the catcher’s viewpoint) part of the strike zone, he’s not getting much help from the umpires, and as such, pitches that perhaps could be strikes are going against him. And, as Brim noted in his piece, Wood has ended up pitching behind in the count more often this year, so even when those marginal calls go against him in 0 or 1 strike counts, they still force him to pitch more to the middle of the plate than if he could have gotten the at-bat to two strikes, thus forcing the hitter to chase pitches off the plate in order to protect the zone.

So, in theory, just getting away from Pierzynski could potentially help Wood’s results improve, even if he keeps throwing with the same stuff and the same mechanics he used in Atlanta. And, because the Dodgers now employ Yasmani Grandal as their regular catcher, he’s likely to get not only a bump from leaving behind one of the game’s worst framing catchers, but he’s going to a team that now excels at getting pitches called at the bottom of the strike zone.

Per Statcorner, only 11.6% of the in-zone pitches received by Grandal this year have been balls, and 9.6% of the pitches received out of of the zone have been called strikes, which is why he ranks as the third-best pitch-framing catcher of 2015, per their metrics. Baseball Prospectus’ estimates are even more generous, rating him as the #1 framing catcher of this season, suggesting he’s earned an extra 109 strikes for his team on the season.

Grandal excels at turning pitches at the bottom of the zone into called strikes, so he would likely have a larger impact on a guy like Wood than he would with pitchers who regularly throw at the top of the strike zone. And perhaps not surprisingly, since being traded to Los Angeles, Wood’s strikeout rate has spiked back up to previous levels, as he’s whiffed 24.5% of the batters he’s faced in his first two starts with Los Angeles.

While you don’t want to draw any conclusions based on the results of two starts, here are his called-ball-in-the-zone and called-strike-out-of-the-zone rates from his time in Atlanta and his first two outings with the Dodgers; all data courtesy of StatCorner.

Again, two starts, and just 200 pitches, so it is way too early to suggest that the entirety of Wood’s missing strikeout problem was solved by switching catchers. But we have a good amount of data that suggests that Pierzynski is one of the worst framing catchers in baseball, and we have a good amount of data that suggests that Grandal is one of the best framing catchers in baseball, so it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to think that he’s going to get more strikeouts in LA than he did in Atlanta. And the early results are at least heading in that direction, even though it’s too early to draw any conclusions from the data.

The Dodgers bought low on Grandal last winter, valuing his pitch-framing skills enough to prefer him over slugging outfielder Matt Kemp, who was seen as clearly the more valuable player by traditional evaluations. That trade was probably the single best transaction any team made last off-season, and the Dodgers are now using Grandal’s value to take another shot at getting high-end performance out of a player not currently seen as a high-end acquisition. The overall results of Wood’s first two outings in LA haven’t been particularly great — he’s allowed seven runs in 11 1/3 innings — but his underlying peripherals have been more in line with his 2013/2014 performances, and not the reduced-strikeout 2015 numbers that got him shipped out of Atlanta in the first place.

There probably isn’t a lot of optimism surrounding the Dodgers right now, given that they just finished getting swept in Pittsburgh, especially since the Pirates beat up on Wood, Latos, and Johnson pretty well this weekend. With David Price dominating for the surging Blue Jays, it’s easy to look back and wonder if the Dodgers screwed up.

But if Grandal can help Wood get back to the pitcher he was the past two years, the Dodgers rotation will be just fine. The results haven’t been there yet, but there are reasons to believe that Alex Wood will still prove to be a pretty good acquisition.