Edinson Volquez, Starting The Most Important Game Of The Year

Three years ago, Edinson Volquez was one of the worst pitchers in baseball. Two years ago, thanks in large part to calling Petco Park home for the first time, he was just okay, putting up a 1.1 WAR season that is still his second-best WAR year ever. One year ago, he was one of the worst pitchers in baseball, but even that requires some further detail, because the Padres took the exceptionally rare step of DFA’ing him less than a week before the September roster expansion when they didn’t even have a full 40-man roster. When the Dodgers picked him up for depth a few days later, he didn’t make the NLDS roster, then never threw a pitch when he was surprisingly added to the NLCS roster.

On Wednesday, Volquez is going to start for the Pirates in the one-game, no-tomorrow NL wild card game against the Giants. Oh, baseball. You’re so great and terrible and weird, all at the same time.

First, how we got here: Francisco Liriano started on Saturday, and the Pirates don’t seem to view him as a possibility on three days rest, perhaps not unreasonably, considering his history of arm injuries. (He’s done it just twice in his career, and one of those came back in 2005.) Gerrit Cole started in the regular season finale on Sunday, to no shortage of criticism; even if the Pirates had won that game to tie the Cardinals in the NL Central, they would have then needed Arizona to beat Adam Wainwright later in the day and then also beat the Cardinals in a tiebreaker on Monday to take the division. (Wainwright ended up not pitching, and the lifeless D-Backs still only managed two hits off Nick Greenwood and friends.)

Now, instead of Cole against Madison Bumgarner and the Giants, the Pirates are left with Volquez, who just ranked No. 40 in Jim Bowden’s (admittedly entirely unscientific) ranking of the top 50 playoff starters. This sounds terrifying. It probably is.

But what, really, is he? Volquez is a different pitcher now, except for all of the ways in which he isn’t. He’s been on four teams in the last four seasons, and tell me which of these things looks different to you:

Volquez’ xFIP has been basically constant for the last four years, and his FIP has been the same, basically, since 2012. But his actual runs allowed have been all over the map. Last year, he under-performed his FIP by 1.47 runs/game; this year, he’s out-performing it by 1.11. By FIP-WAR, his 0.3 last year and 0.7 are essentially the same. By RA9-WAR, he’s jumped from -2.4 to 3.0, a massive swing. This all goes back to the usual question of how much control a pitcher has over their run prevention, as opposed to ballpark, defense, luck, catcher-framing, and so on.

We’re not going to entirely rehash or solve that issue here. What we do know is that the Pirates are currently one of the best places for a troubled pitcher to land these days, thanks to the quality defense, advanced thinking shifts, and reliance on catcher framing. (Dig that .263 BABIP, a year after a .325 mark.) But while those metrics may not show it, Volquez really is a different pitcher now, because he’s allowing less of everything, both good and bad. Since 2011, look at the BB% drop: 13.3%, 13.1%, 9.9%, 8.8%. That’s good! Now look at the K% drop along with it: 21.3%, 21.7%, 18.3%, 17.3%. That’s… probably not as good. HF/FB, however, has gone from 20.7% (!) to 9.9% to 11.9% to 9.1%, which is definitely good.

Jeff Sullivan first looked at the Pittsburgh version of Volquez way back in April, after only a few starts, and came away with the idea that mechanical changes that pitching coach Ray Searage had implemented had allowed Volquez to improve his control. Not that Volquez was suddenly a pinpoint pitcher or anything, but the small fixes had seemed to change Volquez’ wildly out of the zone balls into close to the zone balls, ones that hitters might actually take a swing at. We’re not talking massive increases here, and it hasn’t changed his swing rates inside the zone, but the slight increase in O-Swing% has allowed him to get balls in play and work deep into counts less often.

As you can see from the chart below, which is tracking what count a plate appearance ends on, Volquez has managed to get his plate appearances to end on much more favorable amounts than he had in years past, if only by a small number.

Count	2014		Career through 2013		Difference
0-0	11.99%		8.66%		3.33%
0-1	10.51%		7.23%		3.28%
1-2	15.82%		14.24%		1.58%
0-2	9.64%		9.08%		0.56%
2-0	3.09%		2.75%		0.34%
1-1	8.53%		8.31%		0.22%
1-0	6.43%		6.80%		-0.38%
3-0	2.35%		3.44%		-1.09%
2-2	12.48%		13.64%		-1.15%
2-1	4.20%		5.77%		-1.57%
3-1	3.58%		5.69%		-2.11%
3-2	11.37%		14.38%		-3.00%

But if you really want to know why the Pirates feel okay about having Volquez start this game, it’s because of the feeling expressed in these two non-consecutive snippets from a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article from after his final start:

He hit his stride in the second half. In 76 innings spanning his past 12 starts, Volquez has a 1.78 ERA.

“He’s been lights-out down the stretch for us,” Snider said. “He’s been pitching, I think, his best baseball in a long time, and it’s good to see him [do it]. He’s having fun.”

And that’s true! ...sort of. It’s true that Volquez has allowed very few earned runs in the second half, tying with Liriano and Alex Wood for No. 14 in baseball, ahead of Bumgarner, Chris Sale, Stephen Strasburg, James Shields, Zack Greinke and Johnny Cueto, at least since that arbitrarily-defined July date that is well into the actual second half. Without a doubt, that’s impressive. But what has he actually changed?

Monthly	IP	ERA	FIP	BABIP	GB%	K%	BB%	AVG	OBP	SLG	wOBA
1st Half	111	3.65	4.36	.255	48.6%	15.8%	8.0%	0.232	0.307	0.376	0.302
2nd Half	81.2	2.20	3.87	.275	52.8%	19.3%	9.8%	0.226	0.327	0.336	0.301

If you look at the wOBA against, nothing. That’s a little more OBP and a little less SLG than in the first half, but it all comes out in the wash to be identical. He’s walked more than in the first half, though he’s increased his strikeouts to make up for it. His BABIP is a bit higher, if anything. So are his grounders, and we’ve talked a few times here about how all of the Pittsburgh pitchers have induced more grounders and benefited from better defense. Looking at just September, that BABIP dipped to .229, which seems more than a little unsustainable, even for the Pirates.

While the FIP is indeed down, the ERA doesn’t accurately reflect it because five of the last 15 runs he’s allowed have been unearned. (“But didn’t you just say the Pirates defense has been playing well,” one might reasonably ask. It has! Several of those runs came from two errors, one by Volquez himself, and one by Pedro Alvarez the night the Pirates decided they could no longer stomach him at third base, and those two things aren’t much of a reflection on the current Pirates defense.) While the results have been there, it’s hard to see how the process is all that different.

There’s also this, though, from that same P-G article linked above:

After the game, he made a gesture to the equipment bag behind him in his locker. Somewhere in there was the scouting report on the Braves, but he hadn’t read a word of it, instead placing his trust in catcher Russell Martin as he has at various times this season.

“I was like, give me the lineup and I’ll go for it,” he said.

Martin’s outstanding contributions have been captured a few times, most notably by Ben Lindbergh at Grantland earlier this month. Martin has been a big asset to the Pirates at the plate (140 wRC+), behind it, and, as Volquez notes, in game-calling. Unfortunately, we don’t know who is going to start at catcher on Wednesday, because Martin didn’t play this weekend — in games that, based on the decision to start Cole, were deemed extremely important — due to a sore hamstring. Backup Chris Stewart, also a respected pitch framer, injured his wrist on a Cueto backswing on Sunday, giving quotes that don’t fill Pirates fans with confidence:

The Pittsburgh catcher was knocked flat with intense pain after Cueto’s thrown bat caught him flush on his left wrist.

“It got all wrist, not too much padding,” Stewart said after X-rays had come back negative. “So it’s not broken, just feels really weak. When it happened, I couldn’t really move it around too much.”

Third-stringer Tony Sanchez, who finished off the game but otherwise hadn’t caught in the big leagues since May, might not only make the roster for the wild card game, it’s not out of the question that he starts it. Let’s stipulate here for the record that I absolutely don’t believe in Catcher’s ERA, because it’s completely unfair to compare two catchers when they aren’t necessarily catching the same pitchers. It’s slightly better when you’re looking at how different catchers do with the same pitcher, though sample size issues and possible park and opposition differences also present problems there. All that being said: Sanchez caught 99 Volquez plate appearances earlier this year. Martin was behind the plate for 584. Each watched Volquez allow six home runs. Even for me, it’s hard to dismiss that totally.

There’s real reasons to believe that Volquez has improved this year, thanks in large part to Searage and the system around him. There’s also considerable evidence to say that his outstanding run to end the season was more of a mirage than any real, tangible change. But this is a beauty of a one-game playoff, I suppose. Regression is coming for Volquez. You just don’t know when, and there’s no guarantee that it has to happen on Wednesday. If it doesn’t, and the Pirates get past the Giants, they’ll be set up well for the NLDS with Cole and Liriano ready to start the first two games against Washington.

If it does? Well, loyalty needs to go out the window. There’s absolutely no reason that Clint Hurdle should let Volquez get into more than the smallest amount of trouble. It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation, with something like the most undependable pitcher in baseball in the mound. I’m not even a Pirate fan, and the entire thought makes me queasy.