Luis Medina Is Dealing

Here’s a true statement: Luis Medina has not been very good this year. You can say that just by looking at his numbers: a 5.35 ERA and a 4.83 FIP. He’s running a so-so 22.8% strikeout rate and walking a worrisome 10.8% of batters. If you looked up replacement level in the dictionary… well, you probably wouldn’t find anything, because that’s not the kind of thing that dictionaries define. But Medina’s performance has been almost exactly replacement level this year.

Here’s another true statement: Medina is great right now. That’s kind of confusing, what with all the bad statistics I just hit you with in the last paragraph, but I was cheating. Those are Medina’s full-season numbers, but he’s been an absolute beast in the last month. I’m not talking about some small-sample ERA mirage, either, though his ERA is a tidy 2.86. He’s running a 2.23 FIP, and he’s doing it by striking out 30% of opposing batters and walking only 5.6%. In other words, he’s an ace — or at least, he was one in July. Sounds like it’s time for an investigation.

First things first: Medina is a right-handed pitcher who plies his trade for the Athletics. You probably knew that, but hey, better safe than sorry; there are a lot of baseball players in the world, and some of them even play for the A’s. Calling them an anonymous team might undersell it. They’ve climbed out of the truly abysmal pace they were on early in the season, but this isn’t even close to a good team; we’re projecting them to finish the season with 109 losses.

Medina came over to the A’s in the trade that sent Frankie Montas to the Yankees, but he wasn’t the headliner of Oakland’s return. We projected him as a reliever coming into the year; his command was downright terrible at the end of last year, and he was walking a ludicrous 23.1% of opposing hitters in Triple-A this year when he got called up. His stuff? It’s as nasty as you can possibly imagine, but guys like that generally end up in the bullpen.

A few GIFs of that stuff will open your eyes to why the A’s were willing to take a chance on Medina in the majors anyway. First, there are his drool-worthy fastballs. His calling card is a four-seamer, and that looks basically how you’d expect it to. It’s explosive and generally demoralizing for opposing hitters:

Despite the velocity and the action, his fastball doesn’t miss as many bats as you’d expect. He’s up to a 9.3% swinging-strike rate on the pitch in July, but that’s not even that high. Amusingly, it’s roughly the same rate at which he missed bats with his sinker last month. He started the year throwing almost exclusively four-seamers, but he’s mixed in a sinker more and more as the year has worn on. He threw it nearly as much as his four-seamer in July, and it also looks like a keeper. Here’s a cherry-picked one that induced an ugly swing:

He also throws a gyro slider in the mid-80s. It’s not really my favorite pitch, but you can think of it as an offset to his two fastballs. If you’re looking for one of those, this will tie you in knots:

The tour continues with a 12–6 curve that Medina struggles to locate. When he’s getting it near the plate, it’s lethal:

He also sprinkles in the occasional changeup, but he’s been moving away from both it and the curve in his recent hot stretch. He doesn’t need them; he’s just overpowering hitters with a fastball/slider combination. That accounts for 85% of his pitches in the past month, as compared to only about 75% before then. In other words, he’s adopting a reliever-ish approach to pitch mix.

You might wonder whether that means Medina is bound for a five-and-dive career. In my professional opinion: maybe! A lot of pitchers live in that general realm today. Here’s a counterpoint to that, though: the A’s are at least letting him try to get through the order a third time. In his four appearances in July (three starts and a six-inning outing behind an opener), he faced 26, 21, 20, and 23 batters. He’s only failed to complete two turns through the order once this year, when he got absolutely shellacked (six hits, four walks) in two innings of work against the Marlins. Everyone’s throwing fewer innings, but Medina doesn’t look disproportionately affected.

The main reason I’m writing about him now isn’t his pitch mix, though. It’s not his innings workload or his changing fastball preference. It’s his command. Across two outings on June 25 and June 30, Medina faced 49 batters and walked 12. That’s a walk rate approaching 25%, not exactly major league playable. Out of the 90 batters he faced in July, he walked five. Yeah, something seems to have changed.

What’s new? In a word: execution. He’s been leaning more and more into throwing a first-pitch fastball in the strike zone, a fairly obvious fix for a pitcher with below-average command. Oakland catchers set up right down the middle to start off nearly hitter Medina faces, but he hasn’t always hit that target. In July, he’s not wasting many first pitches, which was a big problem for him earlier on. And when he does end up behind, his sinker gives him an additional weapon to get back into counts.

In fact, his sinker is the key to the whole operation. Look at it next to his four-seamer, and you’ll wonder why it took him so long to learn this pitch:

Here’s the way I think about this change: being wild doesn’t only hurt because of walks. It hurts because you end up behind in the count more frequently, and that used to be a big problem for Medina. His four-seamer, which is the pitch he commands best, isn’t something you want to be living in the strike zone with. Opposing batters have done some damage when they’ve put it in play. He ended up in a bind: throw a four-seamer and invite hard contact, or try to dance around it with his secondaries and end up walking someone.

For now, he’s solved that problem. A grounder-inducing fastball is exactly what the doctor ordered for a pitcher who struggles with command. He can throw it in there when he’s behind, no questions asked. The way the A’s are dealing with his command — set up middle-middle and let the movement and wildness go to work — turns out a lot better when you’re not throwing a four-seamer down the heart of the plate. Having a fastball that fears contact less matters a lot when you need your fastball to bail you out frequently. Stuff models think that the sinker is comfortably the better of his two fastballs, to boot; it’s not just a pitch of convenience, in other words.

I’m not ready to declare Medina an ace, obviously. We’re talking about four outings, a fairly short month of work. But I am ready to say that he’s tapped into something we hadn’t previously seen from him. The sinker is a great weapon for when at-bats aren’t going the way he wants, but he’s also finishing more frequently when he gets ahead. His slider has been a vicious two-strike weapon:

He’s finding corners and edges with the pitch far more often of late. When he was ahead in the count in July, he threw 33 sliders and hit the shadow zone with a third of them. That’s not a massive rate, but it’s 10 percentage points higher than what he was managing earlier in the year. He also mothballed his curveball when ahead in the count, throwing only 13 such curves in July after 35 in June. Given his struggles with curveball command, that’s probably for the best; it’s nice as an occasional show-me pitch, but he was bouncing it so often that he was frittering away valuable counts.

It might sound like I’m trying to paint Medina as a nascent ace, a guy who solved his pesky command problem and suddenly became lethal. I don’t feel that strongly, to be honest with you. I think he’s pretty good, though — better than I gave him credit for when the A’s acquired him last year. His fastball/slider combination really plays. His slider is the sharp type that doesn’t leave him helpless against lefties. He has an electric arm, no doubt about that; his changeup looks promising, though he definitely struggles to command it.

I’ll settle for a moderate take: I think Medina is an above-average starter right now. His command is going to come and go, there’s no way around that. He’s going to have games where he can’t find the zone; I can’t find any obvious thing he’s changed that will suddenly erase his previous wildness. But by dialing up a different fastball and just executing the pitches he does throw better, he’s made it abundantly clear that he has the stuff to succeed in the big leagues. For an Oakland team absolutely desperate for silver linings, he’s just what was needed.