Michael Fulmer, Changeups, and Managing Contact

No matter how you look at Michael Fulmer, you’ll probably come away impressed. Today’s Tigers starter is making good on his sophomore season and currently has the 10th-best ERA among qualified starters. But if you look at strikeouts and walks, traditionally thought of as the outcomes over which a pitcher exerts the most control, Fulmer is 43rd best among that game group. Which ranking is more indicative of his true talent? His changeup might have the answer.

It’s not that Fulmer’s awesome changeup supports his top-10 ERA, without caveats. The pitch does have three inches more drop, two inches more fade, and 30% more whiffs than the average righty changeup, so it’s awesome. But the link between changeup swinging-strike rate and overall strikeout rate is weaker than it is for other pitches.

There are problems with this analysis, so don’t take it and run screaming about how breaking balls are better and screw changeups. By having a high minimum, I did look at only often-thrown pitches, but within each pitcher there’s a weighting problem.

That’s fine. What I think this table does tell us is something more general: breaking balls are used for whiffs more often, and changeups are used for whiffs, as well, but also for ground balls. Lots of ground balls.

There’s another way to show this. Look at the average launch angle and exit velocities by pitch type, and the changeup stands out from the group.

Changeups elicit the lowest (non-sinker) launch angles, and the lowest overall exit velocities. So when we see that Fulmer has the 11th-best ground-ball rate and this excellent changeup and the low batting average on balls in play — it all makes sense, right? He’s suppressing balls in play because the pitch looks like this!

Sort of. Consider: among the 44 changeups that have been put in play 50 times so far this year, Fulmer has actually concedes the seventh-highest exit velocity with his. He’s not a master of soft contact — not with that pitch, at least.

He is, however, a master of using the changeup to get a ground ball. His changeup has the 15th-best ground-ball rate among the 152 changeups that have been thrown 100 times this year. His changeup also gives up the eighth-best launch angle at 2.6 degrees — above the changeups thrown by Zack Greinke and below those thrown by Alex Wood.

Go back to that correlation list, and you’ll notice the brilliance of the changeup. Yes, it has the weakest link to overall strikeout rate, and that might be why Fulmer doesn’t appear among the league leaders by that measure. But that correlation for strikeouts on the change doesn’t lag that far behind the corresponding figure for breaking balls — and changeups possess the strongest tie to overall ground-ball rate.

Imagine a two-strike count in today’s game, where so many hitters are using the fastball approach and eschewing a contact-based strategy. The old Michael Fulmer could have thrown a slider for a whiff, which is great. The new Michael Fulmer can throw a changeup that may get a whiff, but will probably at least get a grounder. And absolutely zero home runs were hit this year with a launch angle of 10 degrees or less.

So that should have some impact on how we evaluate Fulmer! His go-to pitch can get him a ground ball or a whiff when he needs it, and some of that home-run and batted-ball suppression seems real because of the changeup usage. While evaluating the ability for a pitcher to manage contact is in its infancy, and isn’t as robust as that same effort for hitters, it has some meaning.

Is Michael Fulmer a top-10 pitcher, or top 40? It’s hard to know these things to the decimal point. But when he starts today, you know the answer lies in the changeup. Watch the changeup, and appreciate it.