Masahiro Tanaka Abandons the Fastball

A few years ago, Brandon McCarthy threw out a question that baseball Twitter scrambled to research: how often do Opening Day starting pitchers throw a first-pitch non-fastball? Suggested is that first-pitch fastballs, here, are extremely common and extremely predictable, and the results fell in line. It wasn’t clear there had been any first-pitch non-fastballs, and if there had been, there hadn’t been more than one or two, excepting, of course, the occasional knuckler. Baseball season has started. How does baseball season usually start for every team? With a fastball. It’s almost like a ceremonial first pitch, after the ceremonial first pitch, and before the actual baseball stuff.

Monday afternoon, baseball season started for the Yankees and the Blue Jays. In the top of the first, Masahiro Tanaka opened things by pitching to Jose Reyes. That season-opening pitch of 2015: a low slider, for a called strike, at 81 miles per hour. No mystery — it was a certain first-pitch breaking ball. The next pitch was a splitter. The following pitch was also a splitter. Reyes went down on three strikes, and Tanaka was off to the best of all starts.

He didn’t end up with the best of all starts. He didn’t even get to throw a pitch in the fifth. Every single Tanaka start is going to be under the microscope, given the condition of his UCL, and so this might well be our first post of many. Tanaka threw 82 pitches over four innings before getting pulled from a 5-0 game. Based on the score and the low innings total, Tanaka comes away looking bad. Based on the six strikeouts and the 12 whiffs, Tanaka comes away looking fine. Welcome to the world of uncertainty in which Tanaka continues to exist.

What we already knew, from last year, was that Tanaka would try to pitch through a partially-torn UCL. We already knew this usually doesn’t work; we already knew it had been recommended to Tanaka that he try to pitch through this without surgery. The newer information is that Tanaka says he’s looking to change his approach. Several reports from the spring say Tanaka is planning to throw more two-seamers instead of four-seamers, and that he probably won’t have his old velocity. Tanaka says he wants to be more controlled in his delivery, maybe not always throwing 100%. Everyone has wanted to know what Tanaka would look like in a meaningful game. Now we’ve got our answers.

By my unofficial tally, of Tanaka’s 82 pitches against Toronto, 28 were fastballs, and one was a cutter. This would give him a “hard-pitch percentage” of 35%, below last year’s 47%. Right there, you can see an implied lack of trust in the heat. We can take this deeper, though. The Jays put up all five runs against Tanaka in the third. The first hit was on a fastball. The following walk was on mostly close fastballs. An error on a would-be sac bunt got Tanaka in hotter water, and then he gave up a single on a fastball. Then he gave up a dinger on a fastball. Use that as an arbitrary dividing point.

Through the home run, Tanaka had thrown 23 hard pitches out of 49. Or, 47%. After the home run, Tanaka threw six hard pitches out of 33, or, 18%. Tanaka didn’t completely shelve the heater, but it became a tertiary pitch. Tanaka most resembled a junk-baller, and since that isn’t considered a flattering term, there’s concern. There’s been concern for a long time, but now there’s also a new game to support it.

One thing I do think is important to understand: Tanaka did not at all shy away from his splitter. Overall, he threw almost equal amounts of fastballs, sliders, and splitters, and the splitter was good. Nine times, it missed a bat. Three splitters were put in play, for two grounders and a bunt. Here’s how that leadoff Reyes at-bat finished, after the first-pitch slider:

Tanaka’s splitter was a weapon. Tanaka’s splitter has always been a weapon, and it hasn’t left him. His velocity seems like it was a little bit down, but not dramatically, and the splitter movement was still intact.

With Tanaka, given what he’s going through, I think there’s a certain air of inevitability. Many people figure he’s going to break, so that’s the lens through which observations and interpretations will be made. Any issue will be a sign of imminent doom. Any adjustment will reflect an attempt to avoid imminent doom. And for the most part, I get it, and this is fine, because the math is heavily against Tanaka’s chances. Yet because he is still pitching, and because surgeons have agreed with this plan, it’s worth trying not to be so certain.

Tanaka, on Monday, looked a lot like a junk-baller. He looked like more of a junk-baller than he did the season before. However, the season before, Tanaka was still very much a junk-baller, relative to the league norms. At 47% hard pitches, he was more than a dozen percentage points below the average, so it’s not like the fastball has at any point been his bread-and-butter. For Tanaka, it’s mostly been about setting up sliders and splitters.

Can a pitcher succeed like this? You could consider Alex Cobb. No regular starter has thrown as few as 35% hard pitches since Freddy Garcia in 2010, but last year Cobb threw 42% fastballs, and 58% junk. That’s basically what he did in 2013, as well. Cobb’s the same kind of junk-baller, but another way of saying that is just that Cobb pitches backwards, and the connotations there aren’t as derogatory. Tanaka doesn’t have to throw a bunch of fastballs. It’s not what the Yankees are paying him for.

It’s worth noting, also, that Tanaka just pitched against the very much highly dangerous Blue Jays lineup. It’s a lineup you might not want to throw many fastballs. More will be learned when Tanaka has a greater number of starts under his belt. Last June 17, Tanaka turned in a strong start against the Blue Jays in New York. He threw 36% hard pitches.

And then, let’s think about Tanaka saying he’s changing his approach. The natural assumption is that Tanaka is trying to protect his own arm, and that’s sensible enough. Maybe he’s just trying to power down a little bit so as to reduce the stress on his elbow. But, alternatively, maybe Tanaka is just trying to be a little better? Dozens or hundreds of pitchers make adjustments in between seasons. When there aren’t injury questions, we consider them based on performance. Tanaka says his four-seamer was getting hit too much, so he doesn’t want to use it as often. It’s simple, and there doesn’t need to be a second motive. As an example of another Japanese starter who made a big change after Year 1, Yu Darvish dramatically reduced his hard-pitch rate. Pitches make changes. Even great ones. With Tanaka, it doesn’t have to be about protecting the self.

But no matter what, it’ll be impossible to think about Tanaka, at least for a while, without thinking about the state of his elbow. That’s just the nature of things when you have a pitcher who’s trying to do what almost every single prior pitcher has been unable to pull off. In this new and developing era, Tommy John surgery feels almost inevitable even for the healthy guys. Tanaka’s got a ding, and that can’t be un-learned. It’s going to color everything about him, until he either finally comes apart, or until he throws…I don’t know. 200 innings? 400 innings? I don’t know when we’d accept that the elbow’s all right. It’ll take more than four only half-decent innings.

In Tanaka, the Yankees have an ace starting pitcher trying to accomplish the unlikely. In Tanaka, the Yankees have a player on whom their playoff odds might most depend. In the first real test of 2015, Tanaka couldn’t work into the fifth. And yet, in the first real test of 2015, Tanaka was removed for simple baseball reasons. There’s something here for everybody.