Johnny Cueto Is Also a Giants Ace

The appeal of lists and rankings, whatever its cause, is very real. That thing you like? Sure, it’s good, but is it better than this other thing?! We’ve seen this carry over into baseball presumably since the sport began. Williams or DiMaggio? Aaron or Mays? Garciaparra or Jeter or Rodriguez? We’ve even clung to “Trout or Harper?” for as long as we possibly can. Whether this urge to create a clear hierarchy is good, that’s not for me to say, but it’s a tendency into which I’ve found myself constantly falling when thinking about one particular playoff team: the San Francisco Giants.

It goes without saying that the Giants are not in an enviable position. They’re down two games to none to the Cubs in the Division Series and their opponent is widely regarded as the best team in baseball on paper. But the Giants have been in a similar position before and come out alright, so it would be disingenuous to say they’re hopeless. Perhaps the biggest reason to maintain even a shred of hope that the Giants will fight back in the series is related to this fact: by at least one metric, the two best games pitched by a starter so far this postseason have been by Giants pitchers Madison Bumgarner and Johnny Cueto.

Having two elite starting pitchers doesn’t guarantee postseason success for any team – one only needs look at the Texas Rangers for confirmation of that fact – but it’s also unequivocally beneficial. It may or may not be enough to help the Giants claw their way back in this series, especially considering Bumgarner and Cueto can only start two of the remaining three wins the Giants need. But it’s a situation that lends itself to an intriguing debate that I personally am incapable of avoiding — namely, the question of who’s better, Bumgarner or Cueto?

In one corner, we have a 6-foot-4, 26-year-old left-hander from rural North Carolina and, in the other, a 5-foot-11, 30-year-old righty from the Dominican Republic. The simple fact that he’s younger and bigger is probably enough to get you to place bets on Bumgarner being the better bet long-term, but it’s irrelevant when talking about who’s better right now. Johnny Cueto just produced what is arguably the best season of his career – a fact highlighted by August Fagerstrom before the All-Star break. Madison Bumgarner, meanwhile, posted the lowest ERA and highest strikeout totals of his career — and, as Eno Sarris recently noted, is now working with a refined and improved curveball.

Both pitchers are at the top of their respective games and it’s not as though there’s a wrong answer here. In fact, the simple act of choosing, in and of itself, may be the wrong answer. The Giants have two great ones and if I were wiser, I’d leave it at that and move on. After all, look at how comparably productive they’ve been this season:

2016 Bumgarner and Cueto
Pitcher IP CG WHIP ERA FIP xFIP
Madison Bumgarner 226.2 4 1.02 2.74 3.24 3.54
Johnny Cueto 219.2 5 1.09 2.79 2.96 3.42

But where’s the fun in that? So let’s take a look at what separates the two pitchers beyond the obvious considerations of size, handedness, and hometowns:

2016 Bumgarner and Cueto
Pitcher IP K% BB% Contact% GB% FB% HR/9 BABIP
Madison Bumgarner 226.2 27.5% 5.9% 75.9% 39.6% 41.5% 1.03 .265
Johnny Cueto 219.2 22.5% 5.1% 80.3% 50.2% 29.0% 0.61 .293

Therein lies the fundamental differences in the way these two pitchers have succeeded this season. Bumgarner induces whiffs and racks up above-average strikeout totals. Cueto induces contact that keeps the ball in the yard. Bumgarner’s strikeout- and walk-rate differential (K-BB%) was the fifth best in the majors while Cueto’s HR/9 trailed only Noah Syndergaard’s mark. Naturally, it doesn’t always work out this way. In the Wild Card Game, Bumgarner threw a complete game shutout during which he struck out just six (or 18.8%) batters faced. In Game 1 of the NLDS, meanwhile, Cueto pitched eight innings and struck out 10 (or, 37.0%), but was felled by one long ball off the bat of Javier Baez.

So how do you pick? Do you want the strikeout guy or the homer-avoidance guy? Does it even matter when the possibility exists that they will swap M.O.s in a given game?

Again, I don’t think there’s a right answer here, but I do have a personal preference. For me, the best pitcher on the Giants this year — the true No. 1 — is the guy who carved up the Cubs on Friday night, Johnny Cueto. One finds two events occurring at record-level highs in baseball right now: strikeouts and home runs. Bumgarner’s strikeout rate is really good, but what he’s doing is an exaggerated form of what nearly every pitcher is doing right now. Instead, I’d take the guy with a slightly above-average strikeout rate who’s also demonstrating an ability to negate one of the biggest strength hitters have right now: homers. Keeping the ball in the park has always been a part of Cueto’s game and now that he’s moved to the worst park in the league for home runs, that tendency has only been exaggerated. But if you want the choose the guy who somehow seems to turn into a pitcher each October that makes Cy Young, Bob Gibson, and Pedro Martinez all look bad in comparison instead, well, I’m not going to call you an idiot.

The Giants face an uphill battle — one that our odds only give them a 9.3% chance of accomplishing — but with Bumgarner and Cueto in the mix it’s at least possible to envision what a winning path forward could look like. Whether they lose tonight or win all the way through and further cement Even Year Bullshit in our baseball lexicon, they currently have both of these pitchers under contract for the next four seasons and, for now, that’s a great thing. To me, Cueto was the better pitcher this year, but he’ll continue to age and his fastball is already declining. Bumgarner may ride his relative youth and refined curveball forward and leave Cueto in the dust. If that happens and 2016 was the true apex of Bumgarner-Cueto co-aces, it was a blast while it lasted. But if it wasn’t, then 2017 could be another fun year in the Bay Area.





Corinne Landrey writes for FanGraphs and MLB.com's Cut4 site. Follow her on Twitter @crashlandrey.

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Timbooya
7 years ago

“…then 2017 could be another fun year in the Bay Area.”

Cueto’s skill set shouldn’t have such an abrupt decline because a) he’s still got the ability to reach back 94+ mph on his fastball and b) unlike recent swift declines, his style of pitching doesn’t necessitate velocity – he relies on finesse pitches and deception, which both should age gracefully (barring any injury).