Marlins Reward Consistency, Sign Junichi Tazawa
The first few leaderboard sorts don’t produce many revelations about Junichi Tazawa, but if you finagle the filters and the cutoffs, you start to see why he might be attractive to a club. It’s more about consistency and volume than anything, and that’s a rare quality for a reliever — sufficiently rare, it seems, to earn him a two-year deal worth $12 million, the terms he reached late yesterday afternoon with the Miami Marlins.
Since 2012, Tazawa is 96th among 256 qualified relievers in ERA. He’s 38th in FIP. He’s given up a few homers, though, so let’s check strikeouts minus walks — weird, he’s 38th. So he’s okay.
He’s not particularly impressive by movement and velocity. At just under 93 mph, his typical fastball actually features below-average velocity for a reliever these days. His curve has a couple inches more drop than usual (good) but is a few ticks slower than average (bad). His slider has great drop, but it’s also pretty slow, around 80 mph. His splitter is his best pitch, and it has good movement and gets whiffs once out every five times. Here it is at its best:
By outcomes, his pitches are less elite pitches and more just good across the board. His fastball gets a decent amount of whiffs for it’s average-ish spin, movement, and velocity. His slider gets average whiffs. His split gets the most whiffs in baseball among forks and splits (minimum 100 thrown) and top 10 among all changeups, and he definitely hangs it sometimes. His curve rarely gets whiffs but also rarely gets swung at (25% of the time vs 40% league average), so it’s good for called strikes more than a third of the time. The pitches all have their strengths and weaknesses.
That volume of okayness is actually Tazawa’s best feature when it comes to overall stats, too. Go back to those leaderboards and sort again. It gets better by Wins Above Replacement — he’s 29th there. Now let’s mess with the innings filter. Tazawa has 309 innings since 2012, so let’s see who’s managed 250 innings since then. Now he’s 23rd in WAR. He’s 17th in strikeouts minus walks.
More importantly, there are only 62 relievers who have even managed 250 innings over that time. Tazawa has been been better than two-thirds of them. He hasn’t been a picture of health over the last two years, but he’s managed more than 108 innings just the same. That’s what the Marlins are banking on — consistently pitching decently and consistently pitching volume.
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.
I’m surprised that a contender didn’t sign him because I think he’s a value at this price. He was victimized by bad luck on BABIP in 2015 and on HR/FB% in 2016.