Even Yu Darvish Makes Adjustments

You get into a bubble sometimes. Even when that bubble doesn’t look like other bubbles, it’s there insulating you from seeing something you should see. I’m always looking for that new thing, that change, that great new pitcher, that guy overperforming his expectations. That’s the fun thing to look at! An ace, pitching like an ace again, with wipeout stuff? Huh. Somehow, that might be my blind spot.

But then again, sustained excellence can do that to you. We didn’t really write about Jon Lester this year, for example. Jon Lester was excellent, of course. But he was excellent in the way he’s usually excellent. It’s worked out for the Cubs, but there’s material there for analysis.

Corinne Landrey’s been the only one to write about Yu Darvish so far this year, even though he was the second-best starter by strikeout percentage in 2016 while also the author of the best walk rate of his career. We should regularly write about excellence, and here’s Darvish taking on the Blue Jays for Game Two. Here’s an opportunity to pop the Yu bubble.

The thing is, it looks like he hasn’t changed much since he was so excellent before his Tommy John surgery. It looks that way. I’m not sure that’s true.

Take his pitching mix. Seems virtually the same if you express it this way.

There’s not much difference in these two lines. His velocity is up a tick from 92.4 to 93.3. He’s throwing a few more fastballs. But mostly, he’s the same guy! How do we write the rest of this? How can we appreciate him further?

Let’s consider some nuance. See that “fastball” column? That’s actually just a blanket terms for all fastballs. Let’s break that one out.

Hey, there’s something. He’s throwing the cutter less. That’s weird because it has the biggest drop difference off the four-seam fastball in baseball and is getting tons of whiffs. It’s a good pitch:

For whatever reason, he’s throwing it less often.

He’s throwing the sinker more, especially on the first pitch. In 2014, he threw 52% four-seamers and 15% two-seamers on the first pitch. This year, that mix has changed to 39% four-seamers and 22% two-seamers. That may have led to fewer first-pitch strikes this year (the two-seamer has more movement) and it’s not giving him ground balls (that’s not really his game, anyway), so why is he throwing it?

I think it has to do with the four-seam. By starting the at-bat off with a two-seam, Darvish sets up hitters with a horizontal pitch. His most-used secondary pitch is the slider, and nobody has more horizontal movement on their slider than Darvish. They’re thinking sinker and slider, and looking in and out, because those are the areas of interest with horizontal pitches.

If you look back at that first column, at that four-seam increase, it seems modest, but there’s a moment where it’s up a lot. With two strikes, Darvish used the four-seam 27% of the time in 2014. That’s up to a whopping 42% this season.

So much of this has to do with health. With a healthy arm, Darvish’s fastball has its rise back. His vertical release point is up, allowing him to get behind the four-seam and get true ride and more velocity.

And that ride has increased the separation between his four-seam and his two-seam to the point that it’s among the league leaders. He didn’t make the cut when we talked about this regarding J.A. Happ, his opponent in Game Two, but if he had made the cut, he would have appeared among the top-10 pitchers by difference in vertical movement between four-seam and two-seam fastballs.

His 3.7-inch difference there is augmented by a difference in horizontal movement. He has nearly three inches less horizontal movement on his four-seam than average. Basically, after getting hitters more accustomed to horizontal movement on his sinker and slider, Darvish is going to the vertical, 94-mph fastball to finish them off this year. Rock ’em side to side and then finish ’em up and down.

And maybe that solves the last thing. The cutter is nice, but its movement is the closest in style to the four-seam. If he focuses on sinker, curve, and slider, the four-seam is more different.

That difference is key — not only for Yu Darvish’s effectiveness against batters, but for our ability to appreciate him more. Without that difference in his fastball mix, this post may have just been GIFs of his pitches with cuss words interspersed. What the heck, let’s do that anyway, to show this theory in action.

Pitch 1: Sinker, in

Pitch 2: Cutter, front-door

Pitch 3: Slider, out

Pitch 4: Four-Seam, up