Eduardo Rodriguez Is Back and More Dominant Than Ever

His four-seam usage is down 11.3 percentage points and he is really leaning into his elite changeup, the gem of his arsenal now that he is not a flame-throwing 22-year-old. The pitch has garnered swinging strikes at a 16.8% clip, a monstrous figure given how often he throws it. It gives him a great tool to keep right-handed hitters at bay. Rodriguez, like most, favors the pitch less with the platoon advantage, where he is more egalitarian with his pitch selection. Not only have opposing hitters struggled to make contact with the changeup, but the pitch has allowed just a .262 wOBA in plate appearances where he finishes off the batters with it.

The fastball, his most used pitch against left-handers, is inducing swinging strikes at a 18.5% rate, almost double the league average for the pitch type. Rodriguez’s main two pitches have been excellent in getting hitters to swing and miss. All of the whiffs on his two main pitches are surely a vital factor in adding almost 25% to his strikeout rate. Interestingly he has struggled to see the same swinging strike gains with his other two pitches, the cutter and slider. The slider, which he only throws 9.0% of the time, has allowed just a .182 wOBA despite the lack of whiffs. Such a discrepancy is not likely to hold. The cutter has not been great in terms of either whiff rate or overall production mitigation. And the movement profile of all his pitches is stable across seasons, so the rise in strikeout rate cannot be attributed to deviations in the quality of his stuff. If you look across all counts, there does not seem to be much of a difference between how often Rodriguez gets batters to whiff:

He has been mildly more successful in two-strike counts. The same is true for more hitter-friendly counts. So what has contributed to large uptick in his swinging strike rate overall? The trick is that he is avoiding these hitter-friendly counts more than ever, bridging the start of plate appearances to two-strike counts more efficiently, which buoys his swinging strike rate on all pitches.

Rodriguez is facing more batters in 0-2, 1-2, and 2-2 counts (31.5% versus 25.2% in 2018-19). His first pitch strike rate is up a couple of percentage points. Batters are seeing ball three on only 5% of pitches against Rodriguez compared to 9.6% before. You cannot throw ball four without getting to ball three, so that fact that this has led to a minuscule walk rate is not surprising in the slightest.

Excising batter-friendly counts is the result of Rodriguez relentlessly attacking the strike zone. In 2018 and ’19 combined, he threw 47.4% of his pitches in the strike zone (49.8% in ’18 and just 45.8% in ’19). That figure has climbed all the way up to 56.9% in his four 2021 starts and is not unique to any count-based situation. He is filling up the zone in two strike counts to the tune of 53.7% compared to 39.5% in 2018-19 per data from Baseball Savant. When even or behind in the count, his zone rate is up to 58.3% from 49.6% in those previous couple of seasons.

He has come back and become a markedly more aggressive pitcher. So far the strategy has worked and helped him get to those precious two-strike counts, a vital step to posting a higher strikeout rate. And by living so often in the zone, hitters are forced to swing at Rodriguez’s offerings more often and rarely get into advantageous three ball counts. His swing rate against is almost six percentage points higher than in previous seasons, with the uptick in swinging strike percentage as a cherry on top. That is some tough sledding for opposing batters, if you ask me.

Eduardo Rodriguez entered 2021 with a completely revamped approach. He has made substantial adjustments to his pitch mix, throwing his signature changeup most often at the expense of his four-seamer, which is probably at least partially the result of a decline in velocity. Not only that, but the degree to which he is taking the initiative and filling up the zone is forcing hitters to swing more, often decreasing the chance they can draw the walk. All the while, he is inducing the highest swinging strike rates of his career.

If that were the end of the story, we would be excited to see what Rodriguez will do going forward, and with good reason. But we know there is much more to it than that. He has made these adjustments after missing the entire 2020 season due to complications from COVID-19. If anyone said they felt confident about what to expect from Rodriguez in 2021, they were lying. To see him back in action and as good as ever — better even — has been one of the most exciting developments of the 2021 season.