Gerrit Cole, Minus His Fastball

It’s tough to get an athlete to say much of substance in a postgame press conference. Without the benefit of a personal, one-on-one setting, and without much time for the player to gather his thoughts and reflect on his personal performance, more often than not a reporter simply could pick the cliché responses they’re most likely to hear out of a hat and arrive at a close approximation of the real thing. I’ve found this to be especially true of a starting pitcher who’s just suffered a loss.

“[Insert pitcher name here], what was giving you trouble tonight?”

“Mostly fastball command. Just wasn’t locating my fastball.”

It’s a boring answer, one that a beat writer hears something like 100 times over the course of a typical season, but it’s also an answer with which it’s usually hard to argue after a starting pitcher struggles through a start. If you really had to boil down the art and science of pitching to a one, most important thing, you might pick fastball command. Pitchers throw their fastball more than any other pitch, by far, and without fastball command, a pitcher will almost always end his night with a high number in the walks or hits column of the box score.

If there’s something you know about Gerrit Cole, it’s that he’s one of the very best pitchers in baseball, largely because he has an amazing fastball. By average velocity, it’s the third-hardest heater in the league. By PITCHf/x run values, it was the second-most valuable fastball in the league. Cole complements that fastball with a great slider and a good changeup, but he largely lives, and subsequently dies, by the fastball.

In Wednesday’s 4-0 Wild Card loss to the Cubs, it was the latter.

Watching Cole’s start, on the day I published a post about Dallas Keuchel finding success by never throwing any pitches down the middle, something stuck out. Given the opposite nature of Cole’s results from Keuchel’s, you might be able to guess where this is going. Just to be sure, I’ve constructed a visual, courtesy BrooksBaseball, that shows every fastball thrown by Gerrit Cole last night, from the catcher’s vantage point:

You see plenty of pitches in the middle of the plate, and elevated. You see almost nothing in the lower-third strike zone. Granted, Cole likes to work up in the zone with his fastball, but not like this. Working up in the zone, effectively, means working around the edges. You also see a troubling number of pitches that wildly missed their target — essentially wasted offerings. This plot resembles a pitcher without command of his primary pitch.

In the Keuchel piece, we looked at his Heart%, or, the percentage of his pitches he throws down the middle of the plate. Keuchel, essentially, does this less than anybody. Cole, for the regular season, was around league average with his fastball, at 25% going over the heart. That’s fine when you throw as hard as he does. Cole, last night, was different. Cole, last night, threw nearly 40% of his fastballs over the heart of the plate. That felt unusually high, just as it appeared in real-time. I took to BaseballSavant to see how that stacked up against the other 32 starts he made this season.

The answer? Not well.

Last night, Cole piped a higher percentage of his fastballs right down the middle than he did in any other start all season. That season is now over.

Funny enough, the actual fastballs that ended up being down the middle aren’t what got him in trouble. But the alarming number of them helps illustrate the overarching point: that Cole just wasn’t hitting his spots.

From the second pitch of the game, we had our first clue:

After a first-pitch fastball to Dexter Fowler missed just off the plate to begin the game, Cole wanted to spot a fastball low and away here to get even in the count. Instead, he missed a foot high and fell behind, 2-0.

Two pitches later, Fowler singled, for the game’s first baserunner:

The idea was the same: fastball, low-and-away. Cole didn’t miss as drastically as he did in the first .gif, but he missed, elevated and inside.

The next batter, Kyle Schwarber, drove in Fowler with a single to give the Cubs a 1-0 lead before Cole had even recorded an out. That pitch, like the one to Fowler, was a fastball intended low-and-away that missed, high:

Sometimes, hitters hit well-located pitches. This could be viewed as an example of that, as Schwarber was able to flick this pitch the opposite way despite looking inside, but Cole still missed higher than he’d likely prefer.

Of the six hits Cole gave up, five came on the fastball. Maybe you view a couple of these missed locations as nitpicking, and that’s fine, because nobody is perfect, and certainly nobody should be expected to be. But on all five fastballs that went for hits, a common trend exists in catcher Francisco Cervelli moving his glove upwards as the pitch was struck.

On the Miguel Montero single in the fourth, where Cole again missed both up and in:

On the Fowler homer in the fifth, where Cole missed up and in, badly:

There’s also the matter of the number of fastballs thrown by Cole that were, as Jessica Mendoza concisely described in Tuesday’s Astros-Yankees game, “non-competitive pitches.” The ability to work outside the strike zone is important, but there’s an outer limit. When a pitch strays so far away from the plate that it would almost never generate a swing, it loses its purpose. Refer back up to the strike zone plot above, and you’ll find a number of these.

Consider this sequence, as Cole tries to put Kris Bryant away after getting ahead in the count, 1-2.

Gerrit Cole, usually, has one of baseball’s best fastballs. Relatively speaking, Cole’s fastball is a big reason the Pirates played a Wild Card game in the first place! In that Wild Card game, though, Cole didn’t have his typical heater. We saw him throw three consecutive two-strike fastballs to Kris Bryant that were nowhere near the strike zone. We saw him throw his fastball down the middle more often than he had all season. We saw him repeatedly miss with the fastball up-and-in, and maybe most importantly, we saw the Cubs hitters take advantage of nearly every mistake Cole made.

Without command of his fastball for an evening, we saw Gerrit Cole resemble a lesser version of himself. Which is really just to say, we saw him resemble someone a step below one of the greatest pitchers on the planet. Still not a bad place to be.