Jake Arrieta’s multi-faceted single-grip slider is sweet, but he’s had that for a while. There has to be something he changed to get better this year. There is something he’s changed, actually. He’s completely flipped his fastball usage.
Six months ago, we were all idiots. We were all idiots because we figured the Yankees were idiots for letting Masahiro Tanaka pitch. It felt like elbow surgery was inevitable, UCL tears being things you don’t just play through, so it felt strange to see the Yankees in denial. Oh, we all thought we knew what was better. Turns out the Yankees might’ve been on to something. Turns out those doctors have more than just pieces of paper. Tommy John might still be an inevitability. Greg Holland pitched through something like this for a year. The elbow still got him. The elbow might still get Tanaka, but tonight he’s starting a playoff game. Tonight, he’s the guy, at least until Andrew Miller and Dellin Betances are the guys. It’s safe to say now it worked out.
Remain in the flashback, though. Go back six months to when Tanaka made his first start. There was so much attention on his fastball — on its usage, and on its velocity. Observers thought the fastball would be a dead giveaway. They thought the injury would make the fastball worse, and they thought Tanaka wouldn’t be able to cut it without a decent fastball. Just about everyone, after all, builds off the fastball. It’s the pitch at the center of the pitch-type solar system.
In the end, Tanaka’s fastball actually gained velocity this season. He started 24 times, with a mid-3s ERA, and his average fastball was up the better part of one mile per hour. In a sense, the fastball wasn’t a giveaway. But if you stare long enough, you see two things. One: overall, Tanaka was pretty good. Two: Tanaka’s fastball was pretty bad.
Individual performances tend to be magnified in the postseason, and that is especially true of pitchers. While 16-18 other players appear in the lineups and many others will have profound impacts on the outcomes of games over the next month, the starting pitcher will likely have more influence over the outcome of a single game than any other player. Everything is magnified in the playoffs from managerial decisions to clutch hits, errors, and great plays in the field, but starting pitching is perhaps most deserving of the increased scrutiny. By the end of the second inning, perhaps sometime into the third, the starting pitcher will have taken part in more plays than any position player during the entire game.
In a winner-take-all game like the Wild Card, deserving players might be pushed to the background ahead of the game in favor of the pitching, but the matchup between pitchers will likely be the difference between the team that keeps playing and the team whose season is over. For those watching the Cubs take on the Pirates, they will witness one of the very best pitching matchups the playoffs have ever seen.
In Jake Arrieta and Gerrit Cole, both teams will feature bona fide aces. Arrieta might have just had the best half-season of all time. Overall, he’s pitched 229 innings with an ERA of 1.77 and a FIP of 2.35, giving Arrieta a 45 ERA- and a 60 FIP- over the full season after league and park are taken into account. He’s in pretty rare company. Consider: since the end of World War II, these are the qualified pitchers with an ERA- below 50 and a FIP- below 65 over a full season.
| Name | Season | Team | IP | ERA | FIP | WAR | ERA- | FIP- |
| Pedro Martinez | 1999 | Red Sox | 213.1 | 2.07 | 1.39 | 11.6 | 42 | 31 |
| Roger Clemens | 1997 | Blue Jays | 264 | 2.05 | 2.25 | 10.7 | 45 | 50 |
| Pedro Martinez | 2000 | Red Sox | 217 | 1.74 | 2.17 | 9.4 | 35 | 48 |
| Ron Guidry | 1978 | Yankees | 273.2 | 1.74 | 2.19 | 9.1 | 47 | 58 |
| Dwight Gooden | 1985 | Mets | 276.2 | 1.53 | 2.13 | 8.9 | 44 | 58 |
| Bob Gibson | 1968 | Cardinals | 304.2 | 1.12 | 1.75 | 8.6 | 38 | 64 |
| Zack Greinke | 2009 | Royals | 229.1 | 2.16 | 2.33 | 8.6 | 48 | 54 |
| Pedro Martinez | 1997 | Expos | 241.1 | 1.9 | 2.39 | 8.5 | 45 | 57 |
| Roger Clemens | 1990 | Red Sox | 228.1 | 1.93 | 2.18 | 8.2 | 47 | 55 |
| Greg Maddux | 1995 | Braves | 209.2 | 1.63 | 2.26 | 7.9 | 39 | 52 |
| Greg Maddux | 1994 | Braves | 202 | 1.56 | 2.39 | 7.4 | 37 | 54 |
| Pedro Martinez | 2003 | Red Sox | 186.2 | 2.22 | 2.21 | 7.4 | 48 | 51 |
| Jake Arrieta | 2015 | Cubs | 229 | 1.77 | 2.35 | 7.3 | 45 | 60 |
| Pedro Martinez | 2002 | Red Sox | 199.1 | 2.26 | 2.24 | 7.3 | 50 | 54 |
| Randy Johnson | 1997 | Mariners | 213 | 2.28 | 2.82 | 7 | 50 | 62 |
The only pitcher with better context neutral numbers in both ERA and FIP and more innings was Dwight Gooden in his amazing 1985 season. It is easy to see why so much attention has been given to Jake Arrieta this season and in this matchup, but the Pittsburgh Pirates’s Gerrit Cole has had an excellent season of his own. Cole’s 5.4 WAR is fifth in the National and ninth in Major League Baseball. Pitchers don’t choose their opposition, leaving great matchups more to a question of chance than a complete reflection of their own skill, but the high level of both players heading into this game is something rarely seen in a game of this magnitude.
Their season ended Sunday, a week — if not a month — shorter than had been planned, and the Nationals jumped right into their off-season by firing reigning Manager of the Year Matt Williams. Williams has been a lightning rod for criticism since the Nationals started to falter in the middle of the year so it’s no surprise that he was relieved of his duties, especially since GM Mike Rizzo refused to say he’d keep Williams past the end of the season despite numerous opportunities to do so. Williams will go down as a bad manager and his tenure will be a negative on Rizzo’s resume. Still, from an outsider’s perspective, it’s difficult to know precisely how bad these situations have been.
It’s often said we like numbers here at FanGraphs — and that’s true, as far as it helps us understand the game better. But managers are one aspect of the game that have, to date, defied attempts at being quantified. Matt Williams put together a 179-145 record during his two seasons in Washington. That’s a winning percentage of .553, which comes out to a 90-win average. That’s pretty good! Matt Williams must be a good manager, then. The thing is, and you probably know this if you read FanGraphs, those are team stats, and ascribing them to one person, even if that person is ostensibly in charge of the team, is probably a mistake. There’s a lot more that goes into a winning team than the manager, a fact that was underlined today by the Nationals’ actions, and I suspect will be underlined again by Williams not being snatched up by another team any time soon.
Tonight, the Yankees take the field with their season on the line, as they host the Astros in the AL’s Wild Card game. CC Sabathia will not be with the team for the game, or any other game this postseason, because he checked into a rehab clinic for treatment related to alcohol abuse. The full statement that he released to the media.
“Today I am checking myself into an alcohol rehabilitation center to receive the professional care and assistance needed to treat my disease.
“I love baseball and I love my teammates like brothers, and I am also fully aware that I am leaving at a time when we should all be coming together for one last push toward the World Series. It hurts me deeply to do this now, but I owe it to myself and to my family to get myself right. I want to take control of my disease, and I want to be a better man, father and player.
“I want to thank the New York Yankees organization for their encouragement and understanding. Their support gives me great strength and has allowed me to move forward with this decision with a clear mind.
“As difficult as this decision is to share publicly, I don’t want to run and hide. But for now please respect my family’s need for privacy as we work through this challenge together.
“Being an adult means being accountable. Being a baseball player means that others look up to you. I want my kids — and others who may have become fans of mine over the years — to know that I am not too big of a man to ask for help. I want to hold my head up high, have a full heart and be the type of person again that I can be proud of. And that’s exactly what I am going to do.
“I am looking forward to being out on the field with my team next season playing the game that brings me so much happiness.”
For making this decision, Mr. Sabathia, I’m already proud of you.
The 2015 season has been chock-full of high-profile rookie debuts. From Kris Bryant to Corey Seager to Noah Syndergaard, I’ve certainly had no shortage of players to write about. But the most impressive rookie campaign — at least on a per-game basis — might very well belong to Carlos Correa, who’s developing into a superstar right before our eyes. Although he’s completed just his age-20 season, Correa’s been one of the best better hitters in the game since the Astros called him up on June 8th. His 133 wRC+ was the 28th best among hitters with at least 400 plate appearances this year, and second best among rookies, trailing only Kris Bryant. By the barometer of WAR per 150 games, Correa ranked 21st in baseball with mark of 5.2.
You probably didn’t need me to tell you that Carlos Correa’s been really good. This isn’t exactly news. So rather than dwelling on how good Correa is now, I want to consider what his impressive rookie campaign means for his short- and long-term future.
After the conclusion of yet another great regular season of baseball, we can now start in on the exciting year in review retrospectives. The stats are in, the playoffs are scheduled, and we can look back on the totality of 2015’s regular season with a full sample of what worked and what didn’t for players and teams. The first day after the end of the season can be disappointing for fans who don’t get to root for their favorite club during October, but it’s also our first chance to draw that all-important end line that frames this year along with all the others that have come before it.
The same goes for evaluating managers. We have an idea of the managers who have done a good job; many of them still have games to play. We also have an idea of those who haven’t done a good job — even up to the point of knowing who has a chance of being fired. The drawback, unfortunately, is that we still don’t have a great way of truly evaluating managers, and so we look to the small amount of data that we do have when we try to gauge their performance. Dave Cameron talked about this in the context of filling out his NL Manager of the Year ballot last year — here’s a paragraph from that piece relevant to what we’re discussing today:
“Evaluating player performance is tricky enough even with all the amount of information we have about their performance; with managers, we’re basically just guessing. We can speculate about things that we think matter, but we don’t really have much objective data to support these thoughts.”
Dave’s right — we have very little data, and the data that we do have isn’t terribly useful for evaluation. That being said, there is one newer area of data with respect to managers that I find interesting, and it lends itself to not only understanding an aspect of performance, but also — in this year’s case — serves as a window into the operating style of particular managers.
That data is the result of the fairly new system of manager replay review, and this season of baseball has produced some very interesting results. We already had a post earlier in the season on manager challenges, looking specifically at Kevin Cash, and his rather “unique” style of challenging (not waiting for any sort of video consultation from his coaches/advisors before popping out of the dugout to signal for an official review). That post theorized on a way to rank managers on their challenge ability; this post will go a step further in refining an attempt to do that.
The final day of the regular season saw the fulfillment of what was, for Ichiro, a career-long dream — he got to pitch in a game in the major leagues. Which is something that made Ichiro happy, and it made all the other players happy, and it made all the fans happy, and here we all are, delighted to no end that Ichiro got to stand on the rubber. Think about it hard enough and maybe you end up wondering why you feel so good that Ichiro finally got what he wanted, given that he’s made more than $150 million in the country on the other side of the ocean from the country in which he’s most popular, but then they’re all living gifted lives. And this is only in part about Ichiro anyway — it’s at least as much about us and our own curiosity. Ichiro always wanted to pitch, and we always wanted to see it.
It’s pretty easy to pinpoint the moment when people here wondered what Ichiro might look like on the mound. It goes back to that throw that’s part of the origin story of the Ichiro legend:
That was the first glimpse we had of his arm. That’s when we knew, but Ichiro had already known for years.
Talking about matchups in a one-game playoff is an almost futile enterprise. Batter versus pitcher numbers have proven to be mostly useless, and other than a perusal of the platoon situations, a discussion of roster decisions around the edges, and some tinkering with the order in which you throw your pitchers, previewing Tuesday’s American League Wild Card game seems like heavy-breathing about the pre-game coin toss in football.
There is one way you can classify pitchers and hitters that may be meaningful to this game in particular, however. Because of the way swings work, there are matchup problems for certain hitters against certain pitchers. Most of the research says that extreme ground ball pitchers have problems with fly ball hitters — one study found fly ball hitters had better outcomes against ground-ball pitchers than any other matchup of batted ball mixes, and another found that this type of matchup produces the most line drives in baseball. And it makes sense, because fly ball hitters usually have ‘uppercut’ type swings that can reach down and produce power on the low pitch.
Dallas Keuchel has the second-best ground-ball rate in baseball. The Yankees should have Chris Young bat leadoff.
An offseason ago, the Nationals made a commitment to Max Scherzer worth $210 million. Scherzer subsequently reduced his OPS allowed by an incredible 63 points. Now, in fairness, these are the five best OPS-allowed figures by qualified pitchers in the last 15 years:
The feeling is that Kershaw is about to finish a distant third for the Cy Young. That despite having one of the all-time best seasons, his third such season in a row. As so often happens, a post about a different pitcher being amazing has to carve out space to acknowledge that Clayton Kershaw is more amazing. It’s incredible that Kershaw presumably won’t win the Cy Young, but it’s only a little less incredible that Scherzer won’t get a single first-place vote. Or, I imagine, a single second-place vote. Scherzer just finished a year in which he was worth every penny, and it was a year that saw him throw a couple of no-hitters. That’s twice as many no-hitters as one no-hitter, and one no-hitter qualifies as a historic career achievement.
