Jake Arrieta: King of Weak Contact
Ever since Voros McCracken revealed his DIPS theory, stating that pitchers had little control over the outcomes of batted balls, people have been looking for exceptions to the rules. The first ones identified were knuckleballers, who consistently and relisably post some of the lowest BABIPs of any pitchers during their careers. From there, it was found that flyball pitchers, especially ones who generate a lot of pop-ups, can also run relatively low BABIPs over long periods of time. And then there are guys like Bronson Arroyo, who don’t easily fit into a bucket of pitcher-types, but managed to suppress outs on balls in play for over a few thousand innings, showing that he had some ability to induce weak contact.
Often times, the guys who fit the mold of a FIP-beater are guys who wouldn’t be in the big leagues if they hadn’t figured out how to exploit this advantage. The list of guys that we have to write the “FIP is wrong about them” disclaimer currently includes the likes of Chris Young, Marco Estrada, Jered Weaver, Tyler Clippard, and Darren O’Day. You’ll notice that these guys all throw in the 80s, and in Weaver and Young’s case, the low-80s. The guys who don’t conform to the normal range of BABIP variance use their ability to generate weak contact to offset their lack of stuff. They can’t dominate the strike zone — O’Day is the exception to that point — so they get batters out by allowing the kinds of contact that their fielders can get to. I’m sure they’d rather just strike everyone out, but since they can’t do that, they’ve learned to succeed in another way.
But while Weaver and Estrada are still chugging along, soaking up innings and keeping their teams in the ballgame, there’s a new king of weak contact in Major League Baseball. And to make life unfair, he also happens to throw 95.
Of course, we’re talking about Jake Arrieta, who threw another no-hitter last night, this one coming just 14 starts after his first no-hitter, back on August 30th of last year. That one was more traditionally dominant, as he struck out 12 of the 29 batters he faced, and only asked the defense to contribute 17 outs to the cause. Last night, Arrieta struck out just six of the 29 batters he faced, and he issued four walks as well, making it more about hit avoidance than just overwhelming dominance of the strike zone. But in many ways, that’s a fitting way for Arrieta to get a no-hitter, because he’s somehow managed to combine elite control of the strike zone with best-in-class ability to generate weak contact.
Tony Blengino wrote about Arrieta’s batted ball profile last October, naming him the “NL Contact Manager of the Year”, so I’ll just quote the most relevant paragraph here.
How does Arrieta’s raw velocity allowed on each BIP type measure up with his NL peers? His average fly ball velocity allowed was 86.8 mph, over two standard deviations below the NL average, and second lowest among ERA qualifiers to Clayton Kershaw. His average liner velocity allowed was 89.6 mph, over two standard deviations below the NL average, and second lowest among ERA qualifiers to Francisco Liriano. His average grounder velocity allowed was 82.4 mph, over two standard deviations below the NL average, and lowest among ERA qualifiers. His overall BIP velocity allowed was 84.9 mph, over two standard deviations below the NL average, and tied for lowest among ERA qualifiers with Kershaw. Arrieta was the only 2015 ERA qualifier in either league to allow average velocities over two standard deviations below average across the board, in all BIP categories.
Arrieta doesn’t generate outs on balls in play in the manner of most other guys who beat FIP. He’s a groundball pitcher who doesn’t generate many infield flies. He throws hard, and doesn’t really feature a change-up, one of the pitches that most low-BABIP guys tend to have as one of their best offerings. Instead, he just doesn’t get barreled up on pretty much any type of batted ball. He generates weak grounders, weak liners, and weak fly balls, and thus, everything put in play against him is just easier to catch than a normal ball in play. And that’s why Arrieta just doesn’t give up hits.
| # | Name | IP | BB% | K% | GB% | HR/FB | LOB% | BABIP | ERA- | FIP- | xFIP- |
| 1 | Jake Arrieta | 416.2 | 6% | 27% | 54% | 7% | 79% | 0.251 | 52 | 61 | 70 |
| 2 | Johnny Cueto | 484.0 | 6% | 23% | 44% | 10% | 78% | 0.263 | 73 | 86 | 91 |
| 3 | R.A. Dickey | 450.2 | 8% | 17% | 42% | 10% | 72% | 0.265 | 99 | 110 | 112 |
| 4 | Sonny Gray | 446.1 | 8% | 20% | 55% | 9% | 76% | 0.267 | 76 | 90 | 92 |
| 5 | Felix Hernandez | 455.2 | 6% | 25% | 57% | 12% | 78% | 0.270 | 72 | 81 | 75 |
Among the pitchers who have thrown at least 400 innings since the start of 2014, no one is even remotely close to Arrieta in BABIP allowed. If we lowered the bar to 300 innings, we’d find Young (.233) and Estrada (.241) above him, but those guys are advantaged by their decreased workloads; they get to pitch to a larger percentage of batters they’ve only faced once or twice per game. Since 2014, Arrieta has faced 445 batters hitting against him the third time through the order, compared to just 320 for Estrada and 264 for Young. By pitching deep into games, Arrieta is actually hiding some of his weak-contact skills. Again, since the start of 2014.
| Arrieta | BABIP |
| 1st PA | 0.217 |
| 2nd PA | 0.266 |
| 3rd PA | 0.288 |
At the beginning of a game, Arrieta is basically unhittable. His .217 BABIP allowed the first time through the order is best in baseball by a good margin; Shelby Miller is second at .228, Jered Weaver third at .235, and Estrada comes in fourth at .241. Because he goes deep enough in games to let batters adjust to him — as much as they can, anyway — he won’t always end up as the guy with the lowest BABIP allowed in baseball, but realistically, no other starter is generating weak contact like Arrieta right now.
That he also runs excellent strikeout rates and doesn’t walk anyone makes Arrieta an unquestioned ace. With all due respect to my friend colleague Jeff Sullivan, if we’re going to wonder if there’s a pitcher challenging Clayton Kershaw for the title of best pitcher alive, it’s the guy who just threw another no-hitter last night. Arrieta has somehow mixed the strike zone dominance of a traditional ace with the weak-contact skills of a knuckleballer, and when you put those two traits into one pitcher, I have no idea what opposing hitters are supposed to do.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
Oops, wrong website.
I mean, we just gotta figure out how to include this kind of stuff in WAR eventually, don’t we?
I believe WAR is results-based so it should be accounted for. What we need to account for are the projections.
Not fWAR. It uses FIP.
Though it’s worth noting that IFFB% is factored into fWAR in some capacity.
But pitcher WAR is based on FIP, which doesn’t account for the weak contact guys.
I already use an ra9/fipwar split myself but there has to be a better way.
Maybe we could start by using a siera-war.
All true it depends which WAR I guess.
Brad Ziegler is another guy whose ERA beats FIP handily over his career – 2.44 to 3.40. It’s funny seeing a projected ERA of 3.40 for him when he has only been that high once in his career (and barely at that – 3.49). Funny thing though: if you look at Tony Blengino’s recent post on contact management, Ziegler doesn’t really stand out as exceptional at weak contact. At least not compared to other top relievers.
Except as Blengino noted, Ziegler is the only reliever on the list with one half to one STD below average K% and leads the other NL leaders in GB%.
Super high GB% trumps a lot of the other stuff on Tony’s list.
It isn’t just a lot of grounders, his career line drive % is 17.3%, that’s absolutely outstanding.
So is figuring out how to properly include exit velocity in a stat the next big thing? Since Something that can figure out a compromise between ERA (which assumes pitchers have full control over balls in play) and FIP (which assumes pitchers have zero)?
So, how to properly hook up Speed Kit including index up? Something that is a compromise between the periods (which assumes that the wall can control all the eggs in the game) and Austin Caccia (which assumes that the walls have a zero)?
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, their arms wide.
Kadir beneath Mo Moteh!
(If you’re going to post in Tamarian, at least get it right.)
Shaka, when the walls fell.
In times past, loyalty to the cause of the populace was to be found everywhere. The will of the Group of Seventeen was the will of everyone.
But how, and is it sustainable?
As you said, Dave, it doesn’t appear Arrieta has many comps, so why should we believe he has the magic repertoire to induce all this weak contact (while not being a knuckleballer, extreme FB guy, etc.) and guys with insane stuff like Kershaw and Thor do not? So Kershaw and Thor can strike guys out at much better rates than Arrieta with their insane stuff and control but can’t induce weak contact at the same rates?
Just asking if you have a theory on what about Arrieta’s repertoire is allowing him to be this super pitcher?
At least in 2015, Kershaw and Arrieta were tied for average exit velocity, with Thor just behind them. This year Arrieta and Kershaw are tied again, with Thor quite a bit ahead of both of them (albeit in a very small sample size). So they are pretty much inducing weak contact at the same rates, but Arrieta’s groundball tendency allows him to get a bit of separation on BABIP.
.83 e.r.a in his last 24 starts, absolutely amazing with how deep in games he goes.
Since 2010 the pitcher with 300 ip and the lowest era-fip is also the pitcher with the lowest ld%+hard%, guess who that is?
It’s been shown here that line drive % is strongly correlated with babip while hard % isn’t (although it us correlated with power-related stats). Although arrieta’s hard% is very low, his ld% since 2014 is 21.3%, which is average (46th of 92 pitchers with 300 ip). If you’re going to claim that his low babip is skill-related, you’re going to have to either talk about something other than exit velocity or demonstrate that there is a general correlation between babip and exit velocity.
Here’s a reason why there might be a correlation for one and not the other:
A hitter’s BABIP is impacted mostly by the combination of exit velocity and launch angle, both lateral (to make them more shift-resistant) and vertical. Dee Gordon, for example, tends to be at the bottom of the EV leaderboards, but he gets a high BABIP largely from spreading ground balls around and hitting soft fliners that drop in between the infield and outfield. Other players with huge EV often hit line drives or fly balls, the former leading to higher BABIP and the latter to more homers.
In each case though, the batter “selects” a combination that works for him. If Gordon was not able to hit the ball at angles that result in hits, he would have been out of the league long ago, since he can’t just hit the ball harder. If Mark Teixeira didn’t have the power to get the ball over the fence, he would be hitting .200 and be out of the league, given his batted ball profile.
These hitters have to face all types of pitchers, bad and good. They will execute their approach better against some pitchers than others, but overall they are generally successful at it.
So, that is the thing to consider, exit velocity doesn’t correlate to effectiveness in hitters because there is an confounding factor between their EV and their effectiveness, that being their approach, which is not an independent variable to their EV, for reasons mentioned above.
Now, for a pitcher, approach is not a factor, at least not in the same way. If Arrieta can consistently get weaker contact, batters are not able to change their approach on the fly to deal with it. If Arrieta suppresses Teixeira’s EV to Dee Gordon’s level, Tex cannot decide to have Dee Gordon’s batted ball approach for that day. In actuality, reducing his EV could be fatal. Even Gordon, a low EV guy, might find that his hits can’t even make it over the infield when he’s facing Arrieta. The relationship between EV and effectiveness does not have that confounding factor in play, since all pitchers will face a wide mix of batted-ball approaches.
The last thing to consider, too, is that low EV generally means less margin for error for a hitter. If a hitter has very high EV, he is almost certainly a good hitter, assuming he makes contact enough. If a guy has low EV, he needs to do very specific things to make it work, and it’s simply due to selection bias that all the guys in the league with low EV happen to do so. However, take a guy used to crushing it and remove his EV, and suddenly he’s not prepared for that lower margin for error.
Good points, but this is purely hypothetical. Woodrum’s study is CLEAR EVIDENCE that there is not a general correlation between Hard% and BABIP for batters. In the absence of a study parallel to Woodrum’s with regard to pitchers, the null hypothesis has to be that there no general correlation there either. If someone does a study and there turns out to be a correlation, then this is a different story, but at this point you are doing nothing more than making up a hypothesis to explain why the situation would be different for pitching but with NO EVIDENCE to support it. Frankly, before I read Woodrum’s article, my expectation was that there would be a correlation between Hard% and BABIP for batters as well, and for that matter between Hard% and LD%, but since then we’ve learned that that isn’t the case (at least not in a simple way, as you point out), and it’s safe to assume this was the case for many readers. So before we simply assume that this correlation exists for pitchers, we should see actually evidence before assuming that it’s true because it seems reasonable.
Whoa there. I don’t know what you thought I was saying but this is all I’m saying:
johnforthegiants wrote
This question presents a false equivalency. Though of course I haven’t shown how much EV matters for pitchers, I have given a clear reason we should not assume the correlation for hitters and pitchers is the same, or even related.
See the messages i wrote below. I checked to see if being in the top 10 in ev and hard% is correlated with low babip for pitchers and it doesn’t seem to be. You can check for yourself if you want.
Yeah, but that’s hardly a comprehensive study, is it?
This is a load of crap f.y.I. hard hit percentage has nothing to do with exit velocity. Look up hard hit% in the index and it explicity says raw exit velocity isn’t taken in to account. I know you have an anticub bias so I understand you jumping on an article praising arietta.
Can you give a reference for that and then we can discuss it instead of you just giving your general idea of what is says? If Hard% and EV aren’t based on the same thing, what exactly you you think Hard % is based on? How loud the sound of the bat hitting the ball his? Maybe they measure the ball to see if it’s been dented? And for your information, the Giants’ Johnny Cueto is in exactly the same situation as Arrieta in terms of very low Hard%/EV and very low BABIP (but very good fielding (rPM)), so if I’m saying something bad about Arrieta I’m also saying something bad about Cueto which wouldn’t make any sense if my conclusions are based on liking some teams and not others. I’m not saying anything bad about either of them, I’m saying that the more significant factor about both of them regarding BABIP is their fielding, not their EV/Hard%. I came to this conclusion about Cueto some time ago, and Arrieta looks the same. EV/Hard% is very important (see the Woodrum article) but not to BABIP.
The reference is on the index of this very site. Hard hit% can show soft line drives as hard contact and hard grounders as medium contact. Google what is hard hit % baseball, I would assume the fangraphs index is the first definition. Its just a guess, the statcast data is much better.
Gotcha. But since I wrote the last message, I calculated the data from the top 10 pitchers in EV in 2015 who qualified, and aside from Arrieta (#3/78) the average BABIP rating was #41 out of 78, also just average. Either way, Hard%/EV just doesn’t seem to be a factor in BABIP. Believe me, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out why Cueto’s BABIP has been so low in his career considering that his LD% isn’t that good, and after initially thinking that hard%/EV must be related, I came to the conclusion that that isn’t it.
The top 10 pitchers in hard hit% from 2014-2015 all have a babip below .287 cueto and arrietta included. Only 2 are above .280 which is the bottom end of average. So while not perfect there is certainly a correlation. There will always be outliers but it’s pretty clear limiting the hard contact leads to lower babips, the thing with exit velocity is a couple balls hit at 120 mph can skew it, while the hard hit% is just out of total batted balls.
Okay but 40% of the pitchers have babips of .287 or less, it isn’t that impressive. Being elite in hard% is associated with being above average in babip, but not with being elite in babip, whereas this article is suggesting that arrieta’s elite babip is the result of ev which is generally similar to hard%. My point is that if this were the case, we should expect to find a tendency for elite babip pitchers to have excellent hard%/ev, and this simply isn’t the case. If you were trying to demonstrate that arrieta’s elite hard% explains him being above average in termsof babip, fine, but that isn’t the point of this article. There has to be something else going on in his case.
Both of them are also top 10 in soft%, so basically a lot of soft contact and less hard contact means a good babip. And using one yr samples isn’t a good way of looking at the data, just as hitters have babip luck so do pitchers, 2 yr minimum I would think works best,
I am not at all sure that a lot of soft contact means a lower BABIP. I think that probably most infield hits are soft contact and also bloop singles. Do you know about data on this?
Here’s a thought. It may be that strength in hardness of contact/exit velocity may ‘protect’ pitchers with lousy defenses behind them from having bad BABIPs because it means that their fielders will have less difficult plays to make so the bad defense won’t hurt them so much. This would explain why pitchers with elite hard%/ev rankings are never in the bottom half of the babip ratings but don’t show a particular tendency to be elite in babip.
For example see bradley woodrum’s article last august in the hardball times about the lack of correlation between how hard a batter hits the ball and his babip. If there’s no correlation for batters, why should arrieta’s exit velocity explain his low babip? Either it’s something else or it’s luck.
LOL I wrote a long comment above that was supposed to be a direct reply to this one, but I think it’s relevant to both.
A much more obvious explanation for Arrieta’s low BABIP has nothing to do with EV but is simply about fielding. The Cubs are 2nd in baseball in Def since 2014, and Arrieta himself is a great fielder, #3 in rPM of all major league pitchers. Also, if Hard% is really generally an explanation for low BABIP, this should be generally true, but it simply isn’t–if you count the 9 pitchers other than Arrieta with the lowest BABIP, the average rank in Hard% is actually below average, #50 out of 92 qualifying pitchers, actually worse than average. On the other hand, the average LD% ranking for the best 10 BABIP pitchers was #21 (Arrieta’s #48 was the lowest) and their average rPM was #27. Elite status for BABIP is correlated with LD% and rPM but not with Hard%, Arrieta is elite for rPM but average for LD%, so it follows that of these factors, it is rPM which is significant to BABIP. Of course there are likely other factors involved, but there is no evidence that lack of hard contact is one of them.
For whatever reason, both LD% and the Soft/Med/Hard classifications on this site have not seemed useful at all to me. I don’t see any correlations in those things, but you seem to assume that means they actually don’t really matter, whereas I’ve assumed those stats are too blunt and/or too prone to measurement error to be useful. I don’t know if either of us is more justified in our assumptions.
Ld% is clearly useful for babip. Pitchers with low babip have some combination of low ld%, high iffb%, and high rpm. Low hard% is associated with lower era than would be expected from fip (but not with low babip). I don’t see a particular difference between hard/soft/medium and ev in terms of general correlation with things like era-fip.
I didn’t say that they don’t matter. I said that hard% and ev don’t matter specifically for babip.
A much more obvious explanation for Arrieta’s low BABIP has nothing to do with EV but is simply about fielding. The Cubs are 2nd in baseball in Def since 2014, and Arrieta himself is a great fielder, #3 in rPM of all major league pitchers.
Also, there are three other pitchers like Arrieta in terms of being elite in Hard% (top 12–no one else is in the top 35) and BABIP, Cueto, Dickey, and Grey, and they all have some other reason for being elite in BABIP–Cueto like Arrieta has a very good rPM (#6), Gray has a very good LD% (#4), and Dickey has a very good IFFB% (#2). In no case does Hard% in itself seem to be significant.
This article is basically just showing how one guy had a low BABIP for two seasons. It’s not a very large sample. His career ERA is higher than his FIP and xFIP.
His years with Baltimore shouldn’t be included in any sample of his. Notice since joining the cubs his fastball usage has dropped 10%-15% to include more cutter/sliders.
@Kenny and JediHoyer – you both may be totally right. I remember last year trying to dig into Kyle Lohse’s ability to get such low BABIPs, and by the time I gave up on that analysis he was well on his way to a crappy BABIP for 2015. So random variation in batted-ball luck is always a possibility, even over a few seasons.
But there could be a lot to Arrieta’s increased usage of sliders and especially cutters. If he has 2 or 3 pitches that look the same except for late lateral movement, hitters will be more likely than normal to make contact off the end of the bat or closer to the hands, which would reduce the exit velocity of any batted ball type. This, along with a high GB%, could be a sustainable formula for managing quality of contact.
There is no evidence or even reason to believe that high GB% is associated with low BABIP except in that it implies low LD%. Arrieta has high GB% but average LD%–the large number of grounders is at the cost of fly balls, and if anything that can be associated with HIGH BABIP because it can mean few infield flies.
The increased cutter usages could well be associated with lower exit velocity and better statistics in terms of HR%, SLG, etc., but see my posts above for evidence that this doesn’t imply anything about BABIP%.
2015 MLB BABIP – All batted-ball types: .299
2015 MLB BABIP – Groundballs only: .236
I’m not about to do the math, but I think this is evidence of some correlation between GB% and BABIP.
I think you are hung up on line drive%. No one stat is going to explain a pitchers whole profile. Its encompassing all the stats in combination with stuff and location that will tell you If a babip is sustainable. Same with a hitters profile, Miguel Cabrera runs high babips despite being slow, but he hardly makes soft contact, sprays the ball and hits at all kinds of launch angles, whereas Chris Davis is a little quicker, hits the ball hard but hits flyballs to the extreme, so it’s harder to run a higher babip when all the balls leave the yard or hang enough to get caught.
Just look at the numbers in 2015–grounders .236, fly balls .230, line drives .685. Grounders vs. flies doesn’t matter, so it doesn’t matter if arrieta is high in gb/fl. Ld vs gb+fb matters and arrieta is average with this. I am not claiming that ld% is the only relevant statistic to babip. Number of infield flies is important to babip but arrieta is below average at that. Fielding is important to babip, both team and the pitcher himself, and both of these have been excellent for Arrieta since 2014. It follows that these the important factors.
Look at the pictures in 2015, landing. 236 f sheds. 230, a line of toys? 659. earth against fruit flies have nothing to do, no matter whether rich GB / LD trying Go + FB vs Arrieta and Arrieta problem than this. I will not pretend that the LD% is suitable only for statistics babip. Number of flies in the area, it is important babip, but Arrieta is below average. Fielding is babip, which, like the dawn, and how are perfect for Arrieta from 2014. The following are important factors.