Since June Phil Hughes has been recast from disappointing former top starting pitching prospect to shut down reliever. He started off as a sixth/seventh inning guy, but by mid-July had established himself as the 8th inning setup man to Mariano Rivera. His numbers are great 11.36 K/9, 2.52 BB/9, and a sparkling 1.26 ERA (1.77 FIP), but built, partially, on a lucky 0.274 BABIP and under 3% HR/FB.

This year Hughes added a cutter and got rid of his slider (this was also true of his early stint as a starter), and as a reliever has stopped using his change. So he is a three pitch guy: a four-seam fastball, a cutter and his big 12-6 breaking curve. As a reliever he throws about 65% fastballs, with the rest an equal split of curves and cutters to RHBs and almost all curves to LHBs.

In the pen everything has gotten much better, as expected. His fastball and cutter have gained speed (fastball from 91.8 to 94.5 mph and the cutter from 87 to 89 mph). Both the pitches are in the zone more often and gotten more whiffs. His fastball, as a reliever, has more rise and is higher up in the zone, making it more of an extreme whiff/flyball pitch. As a result it does not get as many ground balls, but induces more pop-ups.

It is important to remember these numbers are from just 70 innings (35 as a starter and 35 as a reliever). So there are serious small sample size issues. He is most likely performing above his true talent level as a reliever, even in indicators that are not luck based (K and BB rate, whiff rate, in zone rate). In addition as a reliever all his ‘luck’ indicators changed from unlucky to lucky. His BABIP went from .317 as a starter to .274 as a reliever, and his HR/FB from 12% to 2.9%. Pitchers have some control over these, and maybe as a reliever he can keep them lower, but some of his improvement from a starter to reliever has been luck and some, probably, over-performance of true talent.

Phil Hughes will be the Yankee’s 8th inning man for his year and the playoffs, but next year it will be interesting to see what they do. Using the FanGraphs WAR valuation an elite reliever is worth about the same as a just slightly above average starter (this year Joe Nathan is worth about as much as Tim Wakefield and Mariano Rivera is worth the same as Gil Meche). So the Yankees would have to think the difference in his performance as a starter and reliever is much larger than that of the average starter to justify keeping him in the pen next year.

Although I am not especially a Seattle Mariners fan, I am an unmitigated Ichiro Suzuki fan. Not only is he an incredible baseball player, he is also an amazing interviewee. Over the weekend he hit us with this.

I think there’s sexiness in infield hits because they require technique.

Ichiro provides offensive value with his above average OBP, fueled not by walks, but by limiting strikeouts and a sky-high BABIP. That is were the infield hits come in. Ichiro hits a high percentage of grounders, which have a higher BABIP than fly balls so right there we should expect him to have a high BABIP. But beyond that his BABIP on grounders in much higher than league average.

BABIP
+--------------+---------+---------+
|              |  Ichiro | Average |
+--------------+---------+---------+
| Ground Balls |   0.305 |   0.242 |
| Fly Balls    |   0.119 |   0.139 |
| Line Drives  |   0.705 |   0.720 | 
| Bunts        |   0.663 |   0.441 |
+--------------+---------+---------+

Ichiro maintains his very high BABIP by beating the league average on ground balls and bunts. He uses his speed and left-handedness (that much closer to first base) to beat out throw on balls on the ground. Beyond that Ichiro also hits more opposite field grounders than most lefties. In the histogram below 45 degrees corresponds to the first base line and -45 to the third base line.

These opposite field grounders are more likely to be infield hits because they are farther from first base. A good number of these opposite field grounders are on pitches away outside of the strike zone.

Combine that OBP-driven offensive value with great defense and almost never missing games, and you have one of the best outfielders of 2000s.

Cliff Lee has taken to the NL well. He is 4-0 in his first four starts:

+-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+
|       | IP |  H |  R | HR | BB |  K |
+-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+
| @ SFN |  9 |  4 |  1 |  0 |  2 |  6 |
|   COL |  7 |  6 |  1 |  0 |  1 |  9 |
| @ CHN |  8 |  6 |  1 |  0 |  3 |  8 |
|   ARI |  9 |  2 |  1 |  0 |  0 | 11 |
+-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+

Two complete games, a 34 to 6 K:BB ratio and no HRs. Cliff Lee has provided more than the Phillies could have hoped, and helped to keep them 5.5 games up in the NL East division.

Lee throws a fastball, cutter, curve, slider and changeup. Over those four games he threw his fastball 2/3 of time to lefties, but only half of the time to righties. He made up for it, for the most part, with more changeups and cutters to righties. Like many pitchers he goes up-and-in with the cutter and down-and-away with the change to opposite handed-batters. Over the past four games he executed that plan to a T, keeping both pitches out of the middle of the plate but still in the zone. Here are the location of the pitches with swinging strikes indicated.

Anytime a pitcher can get some many pitches along the edges of the zone, and induce swings that far out of the zone he is going to be successful.

Of course we do not expect Lee to preform as he has these past four games going forward. Our estimate of his true talent is only marginally changed after a four game span. Still he is a very good pitcher, and a great addition to the Phillies’s playoff push and potential playoff rotation.

The Colorado Rockies are leading the NL wild card race. They play in a surprisingly good NL West. Last year four NL Central teams and three NL East teams had better records than the NL West winner. This year the Dodgers are the class of the NL, and Colorado and San Francisco fight for the wild card. Colorado really has been a pleasant surprise and equally surprising is that they are doing it on the strength of one of the top pitching staffs in the game. We often let park effects influence how we think about teams (San Diego always has great pitching, if they could only get hitters), so it can be weird to think of Colorado having great pitching.

Looking at FIP, which does not correct for park or league, Colorado has the fifth best pitching in the game. At this point team tRA is not available here, but StatCorner’s tRA says Colorado’s pitching is 64 runs above average behind only by San Francsico (66), the White Sox (71) and Atlanta (77). Over at BtB JinAZ’s tERA has Colorado’s pitching as best in the game. I think it is fair to say they have one of the five best pitching staffs in baseball.

One of the big reasons is the health of their starting rotation. Ubaldo Jimenez, Jason Hammel, Jorge de la Rosa, Jason Marquis and Aaron Cook have started all but three games for the Rockies. Not having to dip into the sixth starter/minor league/replacement level pool for a number of starts really helps.

That is hardly a big name group, but they really get it done. Jimenez has always provided strikeouts and ground balls, and this year added the third leg of the stool cutting down on his walks. Hammel and De la Rosa have been surprisingly good. While Marquis and Cook provide solid, lots of ground balls with few walks or strikeouts, performance. Almost every game this season the Rockies have started a great to just below average pitcher, few teams can make such a claim.

In addition to health, another strength of Colorado’s pitching is ground balls. They are second in the league as a whole with 47% GBs per ball in play. Three fifths of their rotation, Cook, Marquis and Jimenez, get over 50%GBb/BIP. No accident I am sure, as ground balls are especially valuable relative to fly balls in Colorado.

Post season baseball has a good shot at returning to Colorado sooner than many expected.

Francisco Liriano had another tough start last night, lasting just two inning and giving up seven runs on seven hits and two walks. His ERA and WHIP look worse than he has pitched because of his unlucky BABIP (0.326) and HR/FB (0.122). Still his real performance has been below average. He has a tRA of 5.11 and league average is in the high fours. This is disappointing after the dizzying heights of his pre-injury 2006 and solid performance last year.

The big problem is his fastball, which has been worth a staggering -21 runs below average. It in about 3 mph slower than it was in 2006 as a starter. His two secondary pitches, a slider and a changeup, are both very good. He showed a similar pattern in 2006, an average fastball and an amazing slider and change. These pitch value numbers are not luck-corrected, if the BABIP or HR/FB values on his fastball are poor he is penalized. So I wanted to check out the numbers on his fastball more directly under his control:

Fastball
+--------+---------+---------+
|        | Liriano | Average |
+--------+---------+---------+
| Zswing |   0.590 |   0.612 |
| Oswing |   0.170 |   0.241 |
| Whiff  |   0.047 |   0.057 | 
| GB/BIP |   0.371 |   0.408 |
+--------+---------+---------+

There is way more than just bad luck at play here. Particularly bad is the lack of out of the zone swings, while having an almost league average in zone swing rate. A low number of out of zone swings relative to in zone swings results in batters making better contact, rarely swinging and missing, rarely swinging at balls, and rarely taking strikes.

Back when Liriano was throwing a 94mph fastball he could only muster an average fastball, so now that it is 3 mph slower it shouldn’t be a surprise that it is having such poor results. He is only 25, hopefully he gets some of the speed back on the fastball, and is better able to locate it, to get more whiffs, out of zone swings and ground balls.

Last night Mike Wuertz stuck out the side in the 8th as the A’s came from behind victory to beat the White Sox. Wuertz was hailed as a nice pick up over the offseason, and the he has worked out better than any one could have imagined. He is striking out 11.5 per 9 and walking only 2.5 (both far and away career bests).

You may have read that Wuertz’s slider is the hardest pitch to hit in the game, that is it has the highest whiff rate (misses per swings) of any pitch. Since the article came out the whiff rate on his slider has increased, so now both righties and lefties make contact with the pitch under 50% of the time they swing at it, which is incredible. Since batters swing at this slider over 50% of the time, this means over 25% of the time he throws a slider he gets a swinging strike. Wuertz takes full advantage throwing his slider 64% of the time to both lefties and righties.

He locates the pitch down-and-away to both lefties and righties, rarely leaving the pitch up or in.

The key to his success is those low sliders. Batters swing and miss at these pitches low in the zone and below the zone at a huge rate.

Over the past seven days the Yankees have played seven games and won six of them. Their hitting was good and there starting pitching very good, but I wanted to highlight the contribution of their bullpen. Seven games in seven days including two extra innings games can put a strain on a bullpen, they were no doubt aided by some fine starting pitching going deep into games, but the pen held up. Here is their line from the week.

23.2 IP, 22 K, 5 BB, 18 H, 3 R

Very good and they did it in some very high leverage innings:

August 7th–They give the ball to Phil Hughes in the middle 8th in a tied 0-0 game. The pen pitches 7.1 innings of scoreless ball and the Yankees win in the 15h.

August 9th–The Yankees have a one run lead going into the 8th when they turn the ball over to the pen. Phil Coke gives up two runs, but the offense gets him off the hook scoring 4 in the bottom of the eighth.

August 10th–The Yankees only loss of the week. After the 5th the Yankees are down by one and turn the ball over to Alfredo Aceves, who pitches 4 innings of shut out ball. The offense could not come up with anything over those 4 innings, but Aceves gave them a chance to win it.

August 11th–They go to the pen to start the 7th down up one. The offense scores 4 in the bottom of the 8th, so Mariano Rivera’s run in the 9th is harmless.

August 12th–The bullpen gives five scoreless innings in a tied game and the Yankees win it in the 11th.

In those 5 games the Yankees went 4-1, and based on the scores when they turned to the bullpen (two tied, two down by one, one up by one) that could very easily have been 2-3. So the pen played a huge roll in those wins. Over just those seven games the bullpen racked up +1.64 WPA, a reflection of their performance in those high leverage situtations. This was the week when the Yankees really pulled away in the AL East, and they did it with a big contribution from what has not been, at times this year, the most confidence inspiring bullpen.

Ok you probably didn’t need me to tell you that. And it probably could have been said weeks ago, but coming off his 10 strikeout, no walk, 13 GBs on 19 balls in play performance I thought it would be a good time to mention it.

Chris Carpenter effectively lost the last two years to injury, so coming into this year it was a question if he could stay healthy, and, if so, how effective he would be. Well yes he has stayed healthy and he has been very effective, with a K:BB ratio north of 5 and over 52% grounders per balls in play.

He throws a two-seam fastball, a slider and curve. All three are solidly above average, each worth about 2 runs per 100 pitches.

+----------+-------+-------+
|          |  vRHB |  vLHB |
+----------+-------+-------+
| Fastball |  0.44 |  0.48 | 
| Slider   |  0.35 |  0.23 |
| Curve    |  0.21 |  0.29 |
+----------+-------+-------+

Roughly speaking he throws the fastball half the time and the slider and curve each a quarter of the time. This is a relatively small fraction of fastballs, a testament to the strength of his breaking pitches. He throws his slider a little bit more to RHBs and his curve a little more to LHBs, as is to be expected. But the difference is small compared to most pitchers who rarely throw a slider to opposite handed batters.

His fastball has standard two-seam movement, lots of tail into RHBs and not as much ‘rise’ as a four-seam fastball. Because of this movement, and the fact that it is often low in the zone, 61% of balls in play off of it are grounders. He gets it in the pitchf/x strikezone over 60% of the time. It is the prototypical strike/grounder pitch.

His curve has huge vertical movement; its spin causing it to drop ten inches more than it would just due to gravity. It gets 32% misses per swing, not up there with the top curves, but solidly above average. It also induces a fair number of grounders (55% per ball in play).

The location of his slider to LHBs and RHBs is interesting.

First off, these pitch locations are very ‘tight’ compared to other pitchers, displaying Carpenter’s good command of the pitch. Against lefties he uses it to pound the inner half the zone, almost like Rivera does with his cutter. Nothing is outside, and a fair number are right along the inside edge, rather than out over the middle of the plate. I think it is this ability to locate the pitch so well that allows him to throw it more often than most righties throw their slider to LHBs.

Against righties, he throws more of them out of the zone down-and-away. These induce a very high percentage of out-of-zone swings, resulting in whiffs and weak contact.

St Louis’s rotation has really fallen into place. Carpenter has come back strong from injury, Adam Wainwright is pitching excellently as expected, Joel Pineiro has reinvented himself as a control/groundball specalist and Kyle Lohse provides a serviceable fourth starter in a potential playoff rotation.

Last week R.J. looked at David Price’s improving K/BB ratio. Another important part of the Price story I wanted to look at is ground balls. Coming up through the minors one of the things that made Price so exciting was his combination of strikeouts and ground balls. Below are his GB/BIP numbers by year and level. The major league numbers are Baseball Info Solutions data from here at FanGraphs. The minor league batted ball data was taken from StatCorner, which gets it from Major League Baseball Advanced Media.

n is number of balls in play
+------+-------+-----+--------+
| Year | Level |   n | GB/BIP |
+------+-------+-----+--------+
| 2008 |    A+ |  90 |   0.50 | 
| 2008 |    AA | 149 |   0.58 | 
| 2008 |   AAA |  56 |   0.54 | 
| 2008 |   MLB*|  40 |   0.50 | 
| 2009 |   AAA |  93 |   0.41 | 
| 2009 |   MLB | 219 |   0.36 | 
+------+-------+-----+--------+
* includes time as starter and reliever

At all levels in 2008 he had great ground ball numbers, even in his brief exposure to the Majors. But in 2009, in AAA and the majors, his ground ball rate has plummeted.

For the most part Price throws two pitches, a slider and a fastball (as a starter he also throws a changeup and very rarely a curveball, but over 90% of his pitches are fastballs or sliders). Here are the ground ball rates on those two pitches during his major league career. Pitch-by-pitch data is not available for the minor leagues.

+----------+------+--------+
| Pitch    | Year | GB/BIP |
+----------+------+--------+
| Slider   | 2008 |   0.62 | 
| Fastball | 2008 |   0.49 |
| Slider   | 2009 |   0.50 |
| Fastball | 2009 |   0.31 |
+----------+------+--------+

I am not 100% sure why we see the big drop in ground balls from both of his pitches. He is locating them roughly in the same part of the zone this year as last. One possible reason is that his fastball has about an inch and a half more ‘rise’ this year compared to last year (9.6 in versus 8 in). This could result in fewer grounders. He throws both pitches slower since he is starting this year, which could have something to do with it.

Another interesting aspect is that he throws both a four- and two-seam fastball. I think almost all of his fastballs out of the pen last year were four-seamers, although I am not 100% sure. This year he started off throwing mostly four-seam fastballs, over 90% of his fastballs were four-seamers. But recently he has been throwing the two-seam fastball more often. In his last two starts, last night and August 5th, about 30% of his fastballs were two-seamers.

Maybe the Rays have noticed the lack of ground balls and are looking for him to throw more two-seamers, which generally are more of a ground ball pitch than four-seamers. I am not sure what his breakdown was in the minors, although at Vanderbilt he said 80% of his fastballs were four-seamers.

It is an interesting trend to keep an eye on.

Chirs Young came into this season with big expectations. In 2008 he had a league average bat and played average defense in center field, all at the age of 24. That kind of performance, at a premium defensive position and such a young age, is usually a indicator of a very good to superstar level player in the future. That very good to superstar level player has not shown up in 2009. Young has played below replacement level and was optioned to Triple-A on Monday.

His performance at the plate is mostly responsible, as his wOBA has dropped below .300. R.J. looked at his K troubles, which have been caused by a big drop in contact percentage. His other plate discipline numbers have actually improved this year. He is swinging at more pitches in the zone and fewer out of the zone than ever before, so he is walking more.

The big problem comes when he makes contact. Young far and away leads the league in infield fly balls, with over 14% infield flies per ball in play. No other player has more than 10%, and Clint Barmes and Vernon Wells are the only other players above 7%. Young is a major outlier. Pop ups are the worst balls in play possible, as they are effectively automatic outs. The huge number of pop ups, and a lack of line drives, justify his horrid .254 BABIP. In addition his HR/FB has dropped in half to 5.6%, which I am sure is not unrelated to his huge number of pop ups.

Part of the problem is that Young cannot lay off the high-heat. Here I plot swing percentage against fastballs by pitch height. I normalized the pitch height with the linear transformation that takes the top of the zone to 1 and the bottom to 0.

Again the differences appear subtle, but I think have a big effect. These fastballs up in zone and above the zone are most likely to be whiffs and pop ups, and Young swings at them about 7.5% more often than average. I am not saying this is the sole reason for the problem, and I am sure there are hitters who can succeed swinging at high fastballs. I do think, though, that these swings up in the zone and above the zone are not helping.

Young is swinging at too many pitches up in the zone and, probably, there is something wrong with the path of his swing leading to the increase in pop ups and drop in HRs. I would love to hear the opinion of any swing analysts. He is still young. Hopefully, he can get his swing back, and get a promising career back on track.