A Few Notes on Eduardo Rodriguez’s Velocity
Eduardo Rodriguez debuted yesterday for the Red Sox. There was instantly something remarkable about him.
My goodness. Did you see it? Probably not. How about now.
Yeah. That’s easy cheese. His fastball sat at exactly 95 mph by PITCHf/x, which puts him high up on this list of gaseous starters.
| Name | Age | FB% | FBv |
|---|---|---|---|
| Noah Syndergaard | 22 | 65.20% | 96.7 |
| Yordano Ventura | 24 | 60.10% | 95.9 |
| Joe Kelly | 27 | 70.10% | 95.9 |
| Nathan Eovaldi | 25 | 55.30% | 95.8 |
| Matt Harvey | 26 | 58.60% | 95.7 |
| Gerrit Cole | 24 | 68.80% | 95.6 |
| Danny Salazar | 25 | 62.20% | 95.5 |
| Carlos Frias | 25 | 55.40% | 95.5 |
| Garrett Richards | 27 | 63.70% | 95.4 |
| Andrew Cashner | 28 | 65.90% | 95.2 |
| Eduardo Rodriguez | 22 | 68.60% | 95.0 |
| Chris Archer | 26 | 54.20% | 94.8 |
| Stephen Strasburg | 26 | 63.70% | 94.8 |
| Mike Foltynewicz | 23 | 73.00% | 94.7 |
| Jacob deGrom | 27 | 63.20% | 94.5 |
| Carlos Martinez | 23 | 57.80% | 94.4 |
| Aaron Sanchez | 22 | 74.00% | 94.4 |
| Wily Peralta | 26 | 63.70% | 94.4 |
| Carlos Carrasco | 28 | 55.60% | 94.4 |
| Taijuan Walker | 22 | 66.10% | 94.4 |
But he’s a lefty! You might notice that list is full of righties. Lefties average a mph less than righties, on average. Look at the list, except now it’s only lefties.
| Name | Age | FB% | FBv |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eduardo Rodriguez | 22 | 68.60% | 95.0 |
| James Paxton | 26 | 72.10% | 94.0 |
| Chris Sale | 26 | 57.90% | 93.9 |
| Robbie Ray | 23 | 83.70% | 93.8 |
| David Price | 29 | 65.80% | 93.8 |
| Danny Duffy | 26 | 61.50% | 93.8 |
| Clayton Kershaw | 27 | 56.90% | 93.4 |
| Carlos Rodon | 22 | 68.70% | 93.3 |
| Jorge de la Rosa | 34 | 35.80% | 93.2 |
| Francisco Liriano | 31 | 46.60% | 92.4 |
Well, fine, he’s got the best lefty velocity among starters in the game. Whatever. But did he keep the velocity up all game?
Not quite, but he did hit 97 with his 91st pitch, so it’s not like he wilted as he went on, either. It’s more than what he had with Baltimore, but as Kiley McDaniel noted in his Top 200 list (where Rodriguez ranked 23rd), he’s been sitting 93-96 since slightly before he was traded to Boston. And both the guns on MLB.tv and the Brooks Baseball PITCHf/x game report match up more with a 95 mph average than the 93.4 currently on Rodriguez’s page (which would still be top-five velocity for a lefty starter).
With a really nice changeup and a decent breaking ball, and no obvious command issues, the speed above makes Eduardo Rodriguez immediately interesting.
This has been a few notes on Eduardo Rodriguez’s velocity.
With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
Kind of unfair to ask the reader a “Did you see it?” in a gif, where the thing you are referring to is not actually in the gif.
It’s a joke.
I’d agree with that comment.
My dad, who had never seen or read anything about Eduardo Rodriguez before, compared him to Lester by the end of the game. So Eduardo has officially passed the Dad test after one start which is impressive.
Couldn’t help but think that too. Hopefully he can live up to his standard eventually. But that might be too much.
This is why I, as an Orioles fan, was so god damned pissed about the Andrew Miller trade. You don’t trade a LHP prospect this good for 2.5 months of a reliever.
Even when the reliever is real damn good.
What goes around comes around. Does take a while sometimes though.
Fellas, let it go already.
which is the best Sox SP to own, Rodriguez or Clay?
I’d rather have Eduardo. You just never know what Buchholz is going to show up. Could be good or could be terrible.
He’s been mostly outstanding this year. Rather trusting a 22 year old with 1 game under his belt is just dumb.
Buchholz has the best K% of his career, the best BB% of his career, the best swing-and-miss rate of his career, the second-best GB/FB of his career. A career-average HR/FB%. The only reason his ERA isn’t pretty is because his BABIP is .045 below his career norm, and his LOB% is 5.3% below his career norm.
I don’t know anything about fantasy baseball, but he’s a buy-low if there ever was one.
His BABIP is .045 *above* his career norm. You know what I meant.
And before anyone goes arguing his BABIP has been due to solid contact, he also has the lowest hard contact % of his career.
There was also that terrible Yankee start
Ask any Red Sox fan if they trust Buchholz. I’ve watched him too much to trust him at all. But if he pitches well for a couple months, you can be pretty sure he’s about to get injured.
Complaining about something beyond the author’s control on post where the people who generated the graph are highly unlikely to see it accomplishes nothing.
and I replied to the wrong thread, sorry folks
I own Porcello.
*rimshot*
22 yr old Valencia Venezuela native, Eduardo Rodriguez, throws dazzling debut game. 19 yr old Valencia native, Felix Hernandez from 2005, waves “hello”.
That pitch speed vs pitch number graph is unsightly. When there is no data contained between points you don’t need to connect the points with lines. Doing so suggests there are pitch speeds happening between pitches…
Naked eye you wouldn’t be able to tell the pitch sequence without lines, so no one cares what you find unsightly.
This isn’t a post or a discussion about pitch sequence. This is about his fastball velocity. It would be clearer and more logical to just include dots. Or even a bar graph would be better.
I pulled it from Brooks. Criticism noted.
It would be more logical to just accept the graph used from a different site and not complain.
@Ryan – Blindly accepting the status quo strikes me as one of the least logical positions imaginable 🙂
Even if this was about sequencing, which it’s not, you can make the graph wider or mark each point as a sequential number or the like if you’re having trouble discerning the order.
The lines in the graph indicate there is data between the points, and there isn’t. In something like a graph of temperature there’s meaning in the half-way point between month X and month X+1, but there isn’t any meaning to the pitch speed between pitches X and X+1.
A scatterplot is a great option when trying to graph distinct points like this.
What’s worse, by not even marking the individual pitches on the graph things end up so cluttered that it actually harms the reader’s ability to see how many high velocity pitches there are, as it’s not clear when a steep segment has a pitch contained within it.
I think they do it so you can more easily see the sequence of pitches. But I agree, it is ugly and does more harm than good (sometimes hard to tell if there’s a data point between two others). I think it’d be much better to leave the dots unconnected and maybe give some idea of pitch type with different shaped or coloured symbols.
His delivery worries me! His front foot hits the ground way before his trunk rotates towards the plate. I could see back and/or oblique issues down the road for him. Conditioning can help to keep him limber but his frame says he will be adding some mass as he ages which will add more stress.
Are you comparing apples to apples on the velocity tables? Brooks models it back to 55 ft and tends to run higher than the pitch f/x velocity, which I believe is at ~50 feet(?) and tends to run 1-2mph slower.
The player page here for Rodriguez has his fastball velocity at 93.4 via pitch f/x. It seems like you are using pitch f/x for the other pitchers
This is a legit concern, but I used the PITCHfx tool on brooks, not the player page, which I believe is raw pfx, uncut. But because I wasn’t sure, I quoted the 93.4 figure so people could see he’d still be top ten by that number. I’ll bug Harry to find this out.
I’d be curious to see if pitchers generally experience a velocity boost their first game. It could make sense from a common sense perspective as they may have more adrenaline that game than others. Anyway, it will be interesting to see what average velocity he settles in at over the year.
Hilarious. How many other teams prospects do we do this for after one start? He throws hard. Congrats. Not exactly noteworthy in the year 2015.
I want you to know how tiresome this is. If a lefty came up and averaged 95 in a start for any team, I’d be interested. Hell, 93.4 would put him equal to Chris sale. You want me to not talk about him because he happens to be one of the five hardest throwing lefties in the Game but he plas for Boston? No.
C’mon, you have to be joking, right?
Your average LHP throws 90 mph vs. 93 mph for your average RHP, so 95 mph velocity on a LHPs amounts to plus-plus velocity. And since distance above mean velocity correlates to K/9, a pitcher with velocity that high above the mean is pretty likely to rack up Ks. Then throw in that LHPs enjoy an ERA a good half run below RHPs, and that makes for a pretty sexy pitching prospect regardless of who he plays for.
If all of that weren’t enough, he just shut down one of the hottest hitting teams in the game over the last month for 7.2 IP in his first ever big league start.
You comment on EVERY SINGLE Red Sox article. It’s as if you read this site strictly to see articles about the Red Sox. Why? It’s incredible. Do you just drunk troll every baseball website trying to find articles about the Red Sox?
You always throw in a remark about how theres so many Red Sox article, but can you imagine what you would do if fangraphs stopped writing about them? You would never visit this site. You would stop watching baseball. You have ZERO interest in reading about your favorite team, the Jays. You rarely, if ever, comment on Jays articles. If the Red Sox folded up tomorrow, you would never watch another baseball game. Ever.
Eh, I don’t think everdiso does comment on every Sox article.
I also doubt that this is everdiso, frankly. His Blue Jays homerism is usually couched in a surprisingly well-constructed critique.
I hate you so much.
I love these posts done by fanboys of a team. Let him pitch at least half a season, maybe he will be the next CC Sabathia, maybe he will be the next Aaron Sele. Who knows?
Aaron Sele was worth 25.1 RA9 career, so if that is his downside, he is definitely worth talking about.
Small sample size for sure. Impressive debut outing? Absolutely!! If he can pitch at even 70% of this level for the year I’ll take it. Serious heat like Kelly but seems more together than Kelly. He for sure is worth discussion. LHP chucking fire in the AL East! Could be a serious difference maker in the Sox season.
Any pitcher with a pulse could be a serious difference maker in the AL East.
Hnnnnnnng.
Love Eduardo but let me address a couple concerns.
He’s only got three pitches, the fastball, a slider, and a change.
Here’s his Brooks Baseball profile: http://www.brooksbaseball.net/velo.php?player=593958&time=month&startDate=03/30/2007&endDate=05/28/2015&s_type=2.
Notice we’ve got an average fastball around 95 mph (awesome), change around 88 mph, and slider around 87 mph.
That’s only 7-8 mph difference between his *average* fastball and secondary offerings.
What you gotta hope is that he can increase/vary that MPH differential by turning up the velo at times (which he can, Brooks shows him as high as 98mph and he hit 97 on the stadium gun a few times) or turning down the change/slider.
That all said, there’s pitchers like Lance Lynn that have shown a plus fastball can be your bread and butter, and it looks like Eduardo has that. Having a plus fastball as a LHP? Even better.
Eduardo was also varying his arm slot in his debut, which might also trick batters.
Overall a lot to be excited about.
Thanks for the quality article, Eno.
when was watching the game i was shocked the radar gun was only saying 93-96, thing looked like 99