JABO: Surviving With Jered Weaver’s Velocity
Pitching in the major leagues is almost incomprehensibly difficult. It’s easy to pick up on that fact by watching the revolving door of pitchers who simply don’t have the talent, health, or stuff to make it. There is no leeway in pitching, no slack, no grace period to ease into: major league baseball is a wood chipper that pitchers are fed into with the hope that they’ll emerge on the other side with a manageable amount of damage.
This is the main reason why pitchers live and die by velocity. With increased velocity, a pitcher’s margin of error grows, and they can get away with making more mistakes. With lower velocity, a pitcher has to rely on guile, movement, and strategy to be successful. Then, of course, there is the extreme low end of the velocity spectrum, which is what we’ll be look at today: the seldom-seen outlier, heir apparent to Jamie Moyer. These are the rare pitchers who have either figured out a way to get by with diminished stuff, or are simply (and cruelly) not long for starting duties.
The particular pitcher we’re talking about is Jered Weaver, whose fastball velocity dropped five miles per hour between the 2014 and 2015 seasons. With his fastball clocking in at just above 88 mph in September of 2014, Weaver was another veteran pitcher in the midst of a lucrative five-year, $85 million contract; a year later, after a month-long stint on the disabled list for hip inflammation, he was throwing at an average of 83-84 mph and had entered the rare territory of soft-throwing starters who are still offered a full workload. Here’s a good visual from Brooks Baseball that tells the story of what happened to his fastball velocity:
The main question today is this: what does Weaver need to do to be able to survive at this unique velocity level, and what might we learn about it from those who came before him?
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Owen Watson writes for FanGraphs and The Hardball Times. Follow him on Twitter @ohwatson.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Chris Young, who might be Weaver’s closest . The other path to success as a soft-throwing righty is 1) be a giant (Weaver is 6’7″ to Young’s 6’10”) and 2) get all of the popups and give up mostly soft fly balls, leading to a very low babip and HR/FB rate. Both of them have been doing this long enough now that I think we can say it’s a legitimate skill, although probably only accessible to people who could play small forward in the NBA. I think Weaver’s fine if he can regain a tick or two: we’ve been predicting his demise for years now.
*closest comp
Weaver, unlike Young, also has an excellent changeup (though less so this year cuz of the decreasing velocity gap), which makes his situation as a righty starter less precarious. He has virtually no platoon splits for his career, and that didn’t seem to change in 2015.