Johnny Cueto and Betting on Soft Contact

Johnny Cueto didn’t want the Jordan Zimmermann deal with an extra year attached, or so the rumors go. That’s interesting, because the two 29-year-old righties are comparable players:

Johnny Cueto vs Jordan Zimmermann, Since 2011

Name	IP	K%	BB%	xFIP	FIP	ERA
Cueto	889.1	20.7%	6.3%	3.58	3.41	2.71
Zimmermann	971.2	19.8%	4.6%	3.58	3.30	3.14

At least by strikeouts and walks, these two are in the same class. Zimmermann’s strikeout minus walk rate is a little better than Cueto’s, even if the dreadlocked one has a better strikeout rate.

These guys look very similar, until you look at the batted ball stats. Over the last five years, 26.5% of Cueto’s balls in play have been hits, while 29% of Zimmermann’s have been. That’s led to a 2.71 ERA for one and a 3.14 ERA for the other.

Over five years, that’s almost 3,000 balls in play. Cueto has been elite at enticing soft contact (21.3%, or eighth-best since 2011) while Zimmermann has been decent (18.7%, or 60th-best since 2011). That soft contact has been great to Cueto, but why does he get it, and can his next team bet on him to continue getting it?

We were once taught that pitchers could do nothing to manipulate the ball in play, but we’ve been shaving at the sideburns of that bombshell for a while now. Eric Seidman and Matt Swartz showed in their SIERA research that elite ground-ball pitchers had better batting average on balls in play outcomes, at least.

We’ve begun tracking things like soft-hit rate on this website, and testing the year to year stickiness. Turns out, it’s not great. Alex Chamberlain found a .25 year-to-year correlation on soft-hit rate for pitchers, and Rob Arthur found that hitters affected exit velocity five times more strongly than pitchers.

Still, there is some stickiness, even if it’s on the level of home run per fly ball suppression, or just a little better than BABIP. Pitchers do affect the exit velocity, even if they do so much less than the hitter.

Are there other skills that lead to soft contact? After running the soft-hit rate of 179 qualified pitchers against various PITCHf/x and outcome metrics, almost nothing stuck. The only one that was actually close to being significant was reach rate (p value = .017, r-squared = .0322). And that makes theoretical sense — nothing seems as likely to get a weakly hit ground ball as a swing on a pitch outside the strike zone.

As tiny as that finding sounds, it does line up a little bit with what Arthur found — exit velocity is naturally suppressed in two-strike counts and on the edges of the strike zone. Theoretically, at least, a pitcher who could get batters to reach should be able to entice this soft contact.

Unfortunately, we’re probably talking about command here, which is a tricky subject. After talking to major leaguers and running the best numbers I could for The Hardball Times Annual, I don’t know how much closer I am to understanding how to best measure command.

But does Cueto show the hallmarks of a pitcher who can continue to entice soft contact? Maybe.

Since 2011, he has the eighth-best reach rate of any starter with more than 700 innings. In his average season since 2010, Cueto has avoided the heart of the zone (as defined by Bill Petti) better than 234 of the 278 other qualified pitchers. He has gotten to two-strike counts on 30% of the batters he’s faced since 2011, good for 27th among starting pitchers in that statistic. And, even if changeup differential didn’t appear significant in my look, he does show up as a league leader in that stat, too.

We can’t put a number on command yet, and so we can’t put it on an aging curve. We do know that walk rate ages well, especially when put up against more athletic stats like velocity. That isn’t to say that athleticism isn’t part of command — repeating your delivery is an athletic feat — just that, maybe, just maybe, it ages well because it doesn’t depend on strength in the same way.

When you put that maybe up against the fact that soft-hit rate traditionally is not a sticky stat, you’d be tempted to avoid Johnny Cueto. One one side you have Defense Independent Pitching and the unavoidable excellence of the strikeout. On the other side, you have a stat that isn’t very sticky from year to year, and a few peripherals that could be indicators of one of the least-captured pitcher skills in baseball (command).

Most of the time, you pick the meat of the thing, at the cost of maybe missing on the fringes. But Cueto has been elite at suppressing hard contact for a while now, and shows the hallmarks of a pitcher capable of doing so. Maybe he can continue to stymy some of our first ideas about balls in play. Maybe the fringes will reward the team that believes in his hard-to-capture skill.