Cristian Javier Is Back, but at What Cost?

The Astros are almost definitely going to make the playoffs again. They have a four-game lead in the AL West with 22 games to play, which puts them at roughly 2-to-1 odds in favor of winning the division and 9-to-1 odds in favor of taking part in the postseason in some fashion. That would make nine playoff appearances in a row and 10 in 11 years for the Astros, across multiple roster makeovers, three front office regimes, and three managers. Same as it ever was.

What’s a little unusual about this Astros team is that the pitching staff is a bit unsettled. Not unheard of, to be sure; I remember that 2017 team with a pitching staff that destabilized to total entropy after Justin Verlander and Dallas Keuchel. But manager Joe Espada is going to have to do a little tinkering here to make sure the pieces all fit.

How do I know this? Well, the Astros are 12th in the league in overall ERA-, and fifth among playoff teams. That’s not bad, but there are cracks beneath the surface. Actually, some of those cracks are on the surface. Like Lance McCullers Jr.’s 6.97 ERA. Or the presence of Craig Kimbrel, not only on the roster but in a middle relief role. Or the fact that Framber Valdez, the team’s co-ace and one of the top postseason starters out there, just had to clarify publicly, after a closed-door meeting, that he did not intentionally hit his catcher in the chest with a fastball.

Whether you believe Valdez or not, “I didn’t cross up my catcher on purpose” was the kind of thing the Astros could take for granted with Keuchel and Verlander. Good thing the Astros are getting reinforcements from off the injured list. Luis Garcia, bane of our player linker tool and Swiss Army knife from the pennant-winning Astros clubs of 2021 and 2022, just completed an arduous 28-month comeback from Tommy John surgery. He made his first start of the year on Monday, and couldn’t be coming back at a better time.

But the guy I’m most interested is Cristian Javier, who takes the mound against Carlos Rodón and the Yankees on Thursday evening in only his fifth major league start after Tommy John surgery.

I’m so interested in Javier because I’ve seen what he can do in the playoffs. In 2022, Javier made a brief middle relief outing in a topsy-turvy Game 1 of the AL Divsion Series against Seattle. (I’d refer to that as the Yordan Alvarez Game, but it’s not a specific enough descriptor.) Promoted to the no. 4 spot in the rotation for the best-of-seven ALCS and World Series, Javier held the Yankees to one hit in 5 1/3 innings in his first start. Then he threw two-thirds of a combined no-hitter in Game 4 of the World Series. (This was, to my bemusement, the only no-hitter I’ve ever seen in person at any level of baseball from Little League on up.)

Even though the Phillies had hit a record-tying five homers the night before, it wasn’t, like, outside the realm of possibility that they’d get no-hit. There was plenty of swing-and-miss, plenty of feast-or-famine in that lineup. The really shocking thing is that Javier shut them down for six innings, allowing no homers and just two walks, by throwing only two pitches.

Of Javier’s 97 pitches that night, 70 were four-seamers and 25 were sweepers. Only a pair of curveballs, both show-me pitches that were taken by left-handed hitters the second time through the order, spoiled the duopoly. In the ALCS, the story was much the same: 84 pitches, 60 fastballs, 22 sweepers, only two knuckle-curves to lefties, neither of which generated a swing.

In 2022 and 2023, across the regular season and playoffs, 28.9% of Javier’s pitches were not only fastballs, but four-seamers in the top four inches of the zone or higher. Some 240 pitchers threw at least 2,000 pitches over that two-year span; not one of them had a greater percentage of four-seamers up than Javier did. (Rodón, coincidentally, was third on that list, so if you’re watching Yankees-Astros tonight, you know where to direct your attention.)

Many trends in baseball are cyclical; what the chic fastball is cycles incredibly quickly. Javier’s rampage of destruction in the 2022 playoffs was the apotheosis of the four-seamer up in the zone. And even in the regular season, Baseball Savant rated it as the fourth-most valuable four-seamer in the league, almost identical on an aggregate and a per-pitch basis in value to Spencer Strider’s celebrated heater.

The funny thing about this pitch is that Javier’s fastball was pretty normal in most respects. Bang-average velocity, average arm-side movement. And there are no bonkers Bailey Ober-type release point shenanigans going on here; Javier is 6-foot-1 with an upright cross-body delivery that leaves him near the bottom of the extension leaderboard.

There’s one stat in which Javier’s four-seamer stood out in 2022: vertical movement. His four-seamer had three inches more rise than comparable four-seamers, the second-most among starters behind Nestor Cortes.

Three inches doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a little more than the maximum diameter of a baseball bat. And when a pitch comes in an inch or two higher than the hitter expects, a ball that’s supposed to be a line drive ends up as a popup. If you don’t appreciate how frustrating this is to a hitter, consider Bryson Stott’s reaction to popping out during the World Series no-hitter:

One inning later, Rhys Hoskins did the same thing, and gave it the full Arrested Development:

OK, but that was three years ago. Back then, guys like Javier and Strider were challenging the conventional wisdom that a starter needs more than two pitches to be successful. Even in that relatively short period of time, diversification has come back into style.

Javier learned that himself; in 2023, hitters started to catch on. His plus-20-run fastball was only two runs better than average in 2023, in a similar number of innings. Opponents hit .121 off Javier’s sweeper and .183 off his fastball in 2022; in 2023, those numbers rose to .209 and .236, respectively. Still quite good, but not dominant.

As early as 2024, Javier was throwing a changeup more often in the seven starts before his elbow gave out. This had always been a minor part of Javier’s repertoire, but it went from low-single-digit usage in 2022 and 2023 to 26.9% usage in 2024, with most of that coming from the fastball’s piece of the pie.

Post-TJ, Javier has continued to add to his repertoire. The thing about being (basically) a two-pitch pitcher is that when you start throwing something new, it’s incredibly obvious. In his first game back in the majors a few weeks ago, Javier threw 12 sinkers, which definitely caught people’s attention.

There were warning signs even before Javier reappeared in the majors. He made five rehab starts before his return to the Astros’ rotation, three of which came at venues that produce Statcast data. Here’s what he was throwing in 2022 and 2023, then pre-injury in 2024, and then in his rehab stint:

What the heck, man, so he’s basically just a normal five-pitch pitcher now?

Kind of, yeah. It’s only been four starts and 16 innings, after a year-plus on the shelf following a major arm injury, so I’m not going to draw ironclad conclusions about what he’s throwing in which situations based on so little information. But it looks like he’s staying fastball-sweeper (with the benefit of a sinker) to right-handed opponents, while going mostly fastball-changeup-curveball to lefties:

As sad as I am to see the old Javier go, this is a fun little trick he’s pulling off. Basically, he’s got the four-seamer, plus one pitch each with arm- and glove-side movement for hitters on each side of the plate. And against lefties, his secondary pitches have a little less velocity and a lot more drop than their equivalents for righties.

And now that Javier is throwing more changeups and/or sinkers, it looks like (again, 16 innings, still building up, no refunds if this doesn’t stick) he’s ever-so-slightly reshaped his four-seamer. It’s still got the wicked perceived vertical rise, but he’s cutting it a little. This pitch, as I said, never had wacky splitter-type arm-side movement to begin with. So now that he’s throwing an actual splitter, he’s running his four-seamer with three inches less arm-side movement than he was in 2022.

Now, this is the continuation of a trend that actually started in 2023, and again, it could be a mirage that’ll disappear once Javier gets back to full fitness. But strategically, it makes sense to separate his four-seamer from his sinker as much as possible, especially when they’re coming in at nearly the same velocity.

I suspect that Javier is better off taking this more conventional approach. He hasn’t actually lost anything that made him so unhittable in the 2022 playoffs, and given that hitters already seemed to be figuring him out before the injury, he would’ve been foolish not to adapt. Still, part of me regrets that such an unusual and dominant pitcher from the recent past is now too weird to thrive in 2025.