Noah Syndergaard Is an Elite Contact Pitcher, Too
One of the first things taught in any newswriting class is how to craft a compelling lede. You learn about the inverted pyramid, writing concisely, and the importance of employing strong verbs. No professor of mine ever said anything about .gifs, but hey, what’s more compelling than watching Noah Syndergaard pitch? If that doesn’t grab and hold your interest, you’re probably here on accident anyway.
These are the final pitches of the first three batters Syndergaard faced against the Brewers in New York on Sunday, his most recent start of the season:
1
2
3
Ignore the result of batter No. 2. That one is on David Wright. Just focus on what Syndergaard did. He got a ground ball, a ground ball, and then another ground ball. That’s three ground balls.
You know about Noah Syndergaard because of the 100 mph fastball and all the strikeouts. Or at least those would be among the most likely immediate reactions if presented with a silhouette of Syndergaard’s head while being administered a Rorschach inkblot test. And those responses would be justified. It’s less likely that “ground balls” would spring to mind, unless, that is, you’d been paying close attention to Syndergaard’s development as a pitcher, or had recently read this article.
Starting pitchers, this year and last. Largest improvement in ground-ball rate:
- Hector Santiago, +11.0%
- Noah Syndergaard, +9.8%
- Corey Kluber, +9.8%
Another way of framing that is: last year, Syndergaard was a strikeout pitcher with a league-average ground-ball rate. This year, Syndergaard is an improved strikeout pitcher with a top-10 ground-ball rate. Sure, it’s still technically early in the season. But we’re well past the stabilization point for ground balls, there’s adjustments Syndergaard’s made in the way he’s pitched that help explain the change, and the fact of the matter is, nobody else is doing quite what he’s doing when it comes to strikeouts and grounders:
Hopefully it’s obvious which dot represents Syndergaard’s place on this plot. The dot closest to Syndergaard’s represents Clayton Kershaw. The dot on the far bottom-left is Jered Weaver. Pitchers want to be where Syndergaard is.
It’s great for a pitcher to be an elite ground-ball getter. It’s great to be a strikeout artist. It’s otherworldly to be both. I really don’t mean to perpetuate and extend this comparison too far, because Kershaw is truly on another plane of existence right now and there’s plenty more to his greatness than just strikeouts and grounders, but that particular combination of abilities is a big reason why he’s separated himself from literally every other pitcher on the planet in recent years, and Syndergaard is forging ahead down that same path.
So, why? That’s the only one of the Five Ws I didn’t address in my lede. Why is this happening?
The easy, boring explanation is this:
Syndergaard’s simply swapped his four-seamers for sinkers. It’s not like the sinker doesn’t still go 98, and it’s not like Syndergaard will be hurting for whiffs without as much of the four-seam, so it’s a sensible trade to make in order to acquire more ground balls.
But it’s not just the sinker. If you were paying close attention to the video clips at the beginning of this post, you might’ve noticed something about how Syndergaard went about getting those ground balls. The first came on the aforementioned sinker, spotted low-and-away at 99. The second came on an outside four-seamer, caught off the end of the bat at 99. The third came on a breaking ball, again spotted low-and-away, this one at 84. Three ground balls on three different pitches. Somehow, that’s not out of the ordinary for Syndergaard:
| Player | Team | Pitch1 | Pitch2 | Pitch3 | Pitch4 |
| Noah Syndergaard | NYM | Sinker | Four-seam | Slider | Changeup |
| Cole Hamels | TEX | Cutter | Changeup | Sinker | Curveball |
| Corey Kluber | CLE | Four-seam | Cutter | Slider | Changeup |
| Aaron Sanchez | TOR | Sinker | Four-seam | Curveball | – |
| Chris Bassitt | OAK | Sinker | Four-seam | Curveball | – |
| Clayton Kershaw | LAD | Four-seam | Slider | Curveball | – |
| Danny Salazar | CLE | Four-seam | Sinker | Splitter | – |
| James Shields | SD | Four-seam | Changeup | Curveball | – |
| Tanner Roark | WAS | Sinker | Slider | Curveball | – |
-Min. 100 fastballs thrown
-Min. 50 offspeed/breaking pitches thrown
Syndergaard’s sinker, four-seam, slider and changeup have all been above-average this year at getting whiffs. His sinker, four-seam, slider and changeup have also all been above-average at getting grounders. Only eight other pitchers have at least three offerings with such characteristics. Only Corey Kluber and Cole Hamels match the depth of Syndergaard’s repertoire with four. The only pitch in Syndergaard’s arsenal that’s generated a below-average rate of grounders is the curve, of which he’s cut the usage in half since last season. What’s the point in throwing it when he’s got the rest of what he’s got? One single flaw in a pitch is enough for it to be outranked and kicked to the curb in Noah Syndergaard’s repertoire.
And as if excelling at strikeouts and ground balls like no one else wasn’t enough, Syndergaard’s quality of contact on fly balls is nearly unmatched as well. In the rare instance a batter has put the ball in the air against Syndergaard this year, it’s come off the bat at an average of 87 mph, the fourth-lowest figure in baseball.
I think that, from the first time we all saw Noah Syndergaard pitch, we understood that he had the stuff to be an elite strikeout pitcher. What he’s become is far greater than that. We originally knew him for the fastball, which has since been swapped with an even-better sinker and now simply mingles with one of the deepest repertoires in the game. He’s combining strikeouts and grounders at a Kershaw-ian level, and gives batters a false sense of hope when they’re lucky enough to get it in the air. You hear about “throwers becoming pitchers.” Well, Syndergaard skipped that step and went straight to a freak. There truly isn’t a flaw to be found. He’s the quarterback, the lead in the school play, and the president of the math club all at once. With great hair.
August used to cover the Indians for MLB and ohio.com, but now he's here and thinks writing these in the third person is weird. So you can reach me on Twitter @AugustFG_ or e-mail at august.fagerstrom@fangraphs.com.
As a Mets fan I’ve really enjoyed watching him. He’s an amazing pitcher and I hope he keeps it up. Also I’ve finally been able to heal the scars from the crippling Dodgers envy borne of never getting to watch Kershaw games.
Now if only Harvey can right his ship so we can harness the full rotational power. Just think, if he were 6-3 instead of 3-6, the Mets’ record would be up there with the Cubs’.
as a jays fan, this is somewhat heartbreaking, should’ve been a core of thor, sanchez, stroman, osuna for the next 5 years in toronto
Not a Mets fan, but love watching this guy pitch. There’s been a couple of forearms scares that I pray never turn into anything more. A healthy Thor career could be amazing!
Once again, masturbating to Noah Syndergaard by August Fagerstrom
Are you saying that like it’s a good thing or a bad thing? I need to know so I know whether to upvote you or downvote you.
I thought we agreed that the adjectival form was “Kershavian.”
It seems like the best contact managers are really just the best pitchers with the best stuff. Sometimes it’s that simple. Guys like Kershaw, Sale, Arrieta, and Syndergaard who throw gas, locate well, and have crazy movement–the three basic things that pitchers can do to mess with batters–are just hard to hit, and so batters don’t hit them as well.
Actually if you’d bother to check actusl data you’d see that none of these pitchers are much better than average in terms of iffb% or ld% and kershaw isn’t particularly good in terms of hard%.
I’m not bothering to look at that data because it’s so blunt as to be almost impossible to interpret. There’s a reason people are so interested in Statcast. What we had before simply wasn’t that useful.
Here’s an undeniable fact: The best pitchers in baseball, like the ones I listed, are also on top of the lowest exit velocity leader-boards. You can’t fake that. That means something. We just don’t know exactly what yet.
Does EV correlate perfectly to effectiveness? No.
Does EV correlate perfectly to BABIP? No.
I am aware of all this.
If you mean ev, fine, say ev. But you said ‘contact’. That’s a much more general term, including a lot of things other than ev. Same thing for fagerstrom. He wrote ‘contact’ but what he meant was gb%. It’s just inaccurate.
I actually don’t disagree that just saying “contact” is pretty vague, and that GB% is not enough, alone, to call a guy an elite contact pitcher, but we don’t have a lot of precedent for a guy being elite as far as both EV and GB% go and somehow failing at the other aspects of contact management. That’s part of why predictive stats that use only GB% or FB% and no other contact measurements still can be pretty good.
It isnt a question of failing, it’s a question of not being elite. You can’t just discard ld% and iffb% as being irrelevant to contact management. Ld% avg is like 400 pts higher than gb% and fb%, iffb% avg is like zero. The angle at which a ball is hit is clearly relevant. The problem is that fagerstrom in particular has a tendency to choose titles which are completely misleading for his articles, either because he’s trying to get attention or he cant think clearly, and this leads to confusion.
Syndergaard has one of the five best average exit velocities allowed in baseball this year (all batted balls), is top-five in air ball exit velocity allowed (the most important contact to manage), and also has a top-10 ground ball rate. I chose my title just fine, thank you.
Well then you’re defining ‘contact’ as it suits you, including things that you want to include and excluding things that you want to exclude (ld% and iffb% for example), and you aren’t even explaining that this is what you’re doing. Scientific progress is only possible if people agree on definitions and use words in ways that everyone can understand. If everyone just uses technical terms in whatever way is convenient for them at the moment, the result is confusion and no progress towards understanding. That’s what articles like this lead to.
The same thing happened a few weeks ago when you put ‘disciplined’ in the title of an article in which the only data you referred to was number of walks. This is Humpty Dumpty science (‘I use words with the meaning I want them to have’).
This really takes some kind of a prize for needlessly and self-defeatingly belligerent presentation of a completely reasonable point.
I tried presenting it reasonably above and in the discussion of the other article a few times and it didn’t work. Check it out if you don’t believe me. If fagerstrom had said ‘yes that’s a reasonable point’ earlier, i wouldn’t have been belligerent. But he actually defends his position.
The article is about ground ball rate and he’s just over one standard deviation better than the average qualified starter this season by that metric. Is that elite? Maybe but not by consensus. The article seems like a stretch.
Also, BP found that Citi Field is one of the most negatively biased parks for exit velocity. And exit velocity isn’t meaningful when used in a straight average way. Batting production isn’t linearly related to EV.
Just read the first line of the article. Fagerstrom openly says that he wants to write something strong to get people’s attention. If it”s completely inaccurate and misleading, well that’s part of how he views journalism.
But just out of curiosity, how is a ballpark supposed to be biased regarding exit velocity? Does a westward wind affect speed so quickly as to slow the ball down by the time its speed is measured?
The velocity is measured almost immediately after contact. The bias is a function of how the system is set up and calibrated and perhaps environmental conditions that affect how how it picks up the ball. The dimensions of where each radar needs to be placed are very precise but ballparks are different so it is be hard to get perfect. It’s unreasonable to expect perfection in any such system and for that reason MLB should be adjusting the readings slightly to account for park before releasing to public.
Strikeouts+groundballs+low walks=success
Trying to nitpick anything else is just skewing an argument. The difference between a “hard” groundball and a “hard” flyball is pretty significant in terms of expected slugging.
So exit velocity is irrelevant? Line drive% is irrelevant? Infield fly % is irrelevant? Hard% is irrelevant? HR% is irrelevant? Are you kidding?
Did I say that? I am saying the sum of those parts is more important than omg he only has an average ld rate! And to answer your question yes some of those stats 9 starts in are irrelevant. It’s like you expect a pitcher to lead every single metric and that is the only way to be elite.
You said, and i quote, ‘strikeouts+groundouts+low walks=success. Trying to nitpick anything else is just skewing an argument.’ so yes, to did say anything else is irrelevant, or ‘nitpicking’ as you put it. On the contrary, i think that pitchers can be elite in a variety of ways.
My original response was to you handpicking the 1 or 2 metrics in which they were only above average hence the nitpicking verbage. Like if I said Mike trout doesn’t lead the league in homers how can he be elite?
There are some implied aspects of the formula mentioned in the post. Namely that “groundballs” very often includes “low home run rates” … as pitchers that utilize more sinkers or 2-seamers often have lower HR/9 rates.
So, he’s basically saying “strikeouts + low home runs + low walks = success”. Really, he just said “FIP”.
In order for a pitcher to be “elite”, I would say that they need to be elite in 2 of the 3 (K’s, HRs, BBs).
So it’s probably a good thing that Syndergaard is elite in all three of those categories!
His hard% is quite good, #13 out of 103 starters, but his ld% is only #33 and his infield fly % is one of the lowest. He’s only even close to elite in contact if you focus entirely on hard% and forget the other data.
I don’t know why you are discarding exit velocity (as you have done in other threads) in favor of literally the same thing (hard%) except much more arbitrary. The fact is neither you nor anyone else knows exactly what to do with EV yet, but that doesn’t make Hard% all of a sudden super useful.
You say Kershaw isn’t particularly good in terms of Hard% above. Doesn’t that indict your usage of hard%, and not Kershaw? Don’t we all know that Kershaw is one of the best contact managers in baseball?
I’m not discarding exit velocity at all. Of course it’s important. Im just saying if you mean exit velocity, say exit velocity, dont say ‘contact”. Obviously kershaw is a great pitcher, the best i would say, but his ld% and iffp simply aren’t particularly good, that’ s just a fact, and these are part of contact and you can’t discount them.
?
I just pulled a simple search on the fangraphs leader boards, set the dates to 2011-2016, and limited the sample to starting pitchers, and out of 187 results, Kershaw has
10th lowest Hard%
25th highest IFFB%
55th lowest LD%
So elite at best and above average at worst. Elite doesn’t mean being elite at literally everything. Kershaw is an elite pitcher despite not having an elite ground ball rate. But, looking just at the contact measures you have cited, the whole picture here says “elite.”
The only players in the same sample that are about as good or better by the combination of these measures are Halladay, Verlander, Keuchel, Dickey, and maybe Jered Weaver. So, even though I don’t fully buy into the stats you are using, I am not convinced you are assessing them correctly, to the extent they can be used.
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I was looking at Kershaw’s Hard% for 2016, which isn’t so good (#35/104), but you’re right, that’s a small sample he’s generally been a lot better than that in terms of Hard%. And Kershaw is certainly among the leaders in those categories (combined) for that time period (but Sale and Arrieta are a level below). My point was just that ‘contact’ is much more complicated that something which can be reduced to EV, although I don’t have a clear idea of exactly how to weigh the various statistics.
You can hardly say that Keuchel, Dickey, and Weaver ‘throw gas’ (as you did at the start of this discussion about the best contact managers). It’s much more complicated than this.
If looking at this has suggested anything, it’s that these stats can vary a lot in small samples and probably need heavy regression. Looking at just 2016, I saw some absurdly low LD% and absurdly high IFFB% by some guys, when compared to the multi-year sample. That strongly suggests these extreme values are not sustainable, and that looking them for portions of one year is not a good method of evaluation–that they are what we should be regressing and not using as our predictors, or meaningful performance metrics.
Yup. That’s also why so far I prefer Hard% to EV (which you’ve complained about), because we have only 1.3 seasons of data on EV.
The main reason I generally refer to Hard% rather than EV is that we only have like 1.3 years of data on EV and I’m hesitant to draw conclusions on the basis of so little data.
And the statement that ‘Don’t we all KNOW that Kershaw is one of the best contact managers in baseball?’–c’mon, be serious. So you’re defining ‘being a great contact manager’ in terms of ‘being like Clayton Kershaw’? This is supposed to be the basis for a statistical analysis? Don’t get me wrong, I would say that Kershaw is clearly the best pitcher in baseball, but you can’t base a statistical category on the performance of a particular player–or do you think we should have a category of ‘Kershawness’ and evaluate players according to how similar they are to Clayton Kershaw?
I am serious. We know Kershaw is one of the best contact managers in baseball, not because I am defining him to be so, but because we have a huge sample of data saying so.
Ultimately contact management has to be defined as what leads to results, even if it requires a large sample in order to do so. What are the results? Obviously not strikeouts and walks in this case, but measures like BABIP, production on balls in play, and probably home run rate to an extent (though they are not BIP, they are obviously related to contact.)
If your small-sample contact indicators don’t, in the large sample, correlate extremely well with results, then you have chosen the wrong contact indicators, just like if xFIP didn’t ultimately correlate with runs allowed, it would fail in its purpose.
Kershaw has had immense success over his career, in well over 1000 innings, in suppressing BABIP, suppressing home runs on fly balls, and limiting production on balls in play. He is arguably the most successful pitcher in baseball by those measures. Therefore, a contact management measure that thinks he is anything but elite is not a good measure, either because it is not stable enough or because it is plain wrong.
I agree. And it looks to me like if predicting these things is the main goal, we need to include a combination of factors. Since 2011, the lowest BABIP guys (min 600 IP) are (in order) Estrada, Weaver, Arrieta, Kershaw, Cueto, Cain, Dickey, Collmenter, Gonzalez, Hellickson. As you can see, this is hardly a list of pitchers who throw gas. Unfortunately we don’t have EV before 2015 so we can’t use that. If we use Hard%–the closest thing we do have data for farther back–we see that of these Estrada is way below average, almost the worst, even though he has by far the lowest BABIP, while Hellickson and Gonzales are also below average and Collmenter is a little above average. On the other hand, five of them–Dickey, Arrieta, Kershaw, Cueto, and Weaver–are in the top 10 in Hard%. Turning to LD%, none of the ten best BABIP pitchers are bad (there is no equivalent of Estrada), but Collmenter and Gonzalez are below average and Hellickson is average, but of the top ten in LD%, only two, Estrada and Dickey, are in the top ten in BABIP–Estrada is by far the lowest in LD%, and this is presumably how he can be so low in BABIP even though this Hard% is so high. Regarding IFFB%, Collmenter, Weaver, Estrada, and Dickey are in the top ten and all ten of the best BABIP pitchers are above average (although Arrieta is barely so). GB%–focused on in this this article–seems to be if anything NEGATIVELY related to BABIP
–only three of the top ten in BABIP (Arrieta, Kershaw, and Cueto) are even above average in GB%, and Weaver, Estrada, and Collmenter are among the ten LOWEST in GB%. Taking all this together, it looks like a combination of Hard% (and I guess eventually EV when we have a lot of data on that), LD%, and IFFB% will give a good measure of contact management as measured by BABIP, with some pitchers (Arrieta, Kershaw, Cueto) being good at Hard% but not the other two, Collmenter being good at only IFFB%, Weaver being good at Hard% and IFFB%, Estrada being good at LD% and IFFB% (but terrible at Hard%), and Dickey being good at all three. Cain, Gonzalez, and Hellickson, on the other hand, are a bit mysterious, because they are not particularly good at any of these. And Dallas Keuchel is really a mystery, because he is #1 in Hard% and #4 in LD%, and above average in IFFB% but actually worse than average in terms of BABIP.
What’s most interesting is that in the table for Starters with Three or More Plus Pitches, there are 4 pitchers with first names that start with ‘C’, as well as 4 pitcher’s whose last name starts with ‘S’ – however, there are no pitchers with a first name that starts with ‘C’ and a last name that starts with ‘S’.
Yeah, that’s definitely “most interesting”.
He pitched against the giants 3 weeks ago and there was one glaring flaw to be found. They stole bases and started runners against him at will, got 4 runs in 5.2 innings. He takes so long to deliver it’s easy to steal against him and the increased number of grounders means the hit and run is all the more effective.
You’re not wrong. He’s shown troubles holding runners and managing men on base. They’ve paired him with catcher Rene Rivera lately because he has a strong throwing arm behind the plate, but that’s a stopgap at best. It’s something Syndergaard has been working on but there’s still a lot of work to go.
Still, if his only major weakness is that you can only score runs on him by playing small ball, that’s not so bad. And when he’s on his strikeout game he’s shown that he can use that as a weapon to make runners irrelevant.
For sure, I agree, he’s a great pitcher even with this problem. I was commenting on Fagerstrom’s statement that ‘There truly isn’t a flaw to be found’, which seems to be patently false. I think the flaw was particularly glaring against the Giants because they strike out so rarely and have quite a few hitters who aren’t particularly bothered by pitches in the high 90s, plus they don’t have much team speed so it’s pretty weird for them to run wild against anyone–they even started Posey against him. But from what I saw, pairing him with a catcher with a strong arm wouldn’t even address the problem, they were stealing bases practically standing up. And given the Mets’ not-particularly-stellar infield defense and the increased number of gbs, I could easily see a Dee Gordon-type player beating the ball into the ground for and infield hit and then easily stealing 2nd and 3rd. That’s going to make a serious dent in anyone’s ERA.
At the time I heard that someone on the Mets coaching staff said that Syndergaard was tipping whether he would throw to first and this was something which could easily be fixed. I was skeptical because it looked to me like he was simply taking a huge amount of time to go to the plate and couldn’t pitch any other way. Any idea what’s happened with this since then?
The Giants and the Reds both ran on Syndergaard, and it seemed to work for them, but it hasn’t been happening much since. The Padres made three attempts and succeeded on two of them, but in three starts since then (Dodgers, Nationals, Brewers), there has been only one stolen base attempt against Syndergaard (so far as I can remember), and Ben Revere got thrown out at second for his effort. Syndergaard has been throwing over to first more often. It’s not a good throw, it won’t pick anyone off without some luck, but if he was tipping it before he must not be now because that plus Rivera’s arm seems to be holding runners on.
Well, that and Syndergaard just isn’t allowing a lot of people on base. In his last three starts (22.0 IP) he’s allowed 17 hits and 1 walk, which will help anyone keep their steal attempts down. In that same time period, with few people getting on base and few people trying to steal, the only earned runs he gave up were a pair of solo home runs to the Dodgers.
But Rivera behind the plate isn’t a long term solution. Both d’Arnaud and Plawecki, the usual catcher options for the Mets, don’t seem to be terribly good at throwing out base stealers (d’Arnaud has 23% success against attempted steals for his career, Plawecki has 27%). Rivera has a career success rate of 38%, which plays for sure, but I don’t know what the long term fix is. I’d be hesitant to mess with his delivery, since the results on the pitching side are clearly there. If you’re the Mets, maybe you just take your sub-2.00 ERA and your 43 FIP- and live with it.
If that’s the case then it sounds like either there was a glaring giveaway that syndergaard fixed so that the situation isn’t nearly as bad or else only the reds and giants knew about it, because the game against the giants really was ridiculous, especially because it was raining hard and the field was so muddy it was hard to get traction, and the giants normally aren’t aggressive stealers at all. I did have the feeling that pence’s homer against him may have been related to the fact that they had just stayed out of a double play by starting posey from 1st with belt batting, which was a pretty arrogant thing to do considering how slow posey is and how often belt strikes out, and that may have seriously flustered syndergaard.
If that’s the case then it sounds like either there was a glaring giveaway that syndergaard fixed so that the situation isn’t nearly as bad or else only the reds and giants knew about it, because the game against the giants really was ridiculous, especially because it was raining hard and the field was so muddy it was hard to get traction, and the giants normally aren’t aggressive stealers at all. I did have the feeling that pence’s homer against him may have been related to the fact that they had just stayed out of a double play by starting posey from 1st with belt batting, which was a pretty arrogant thing to do considering how slow posey is and how often belt strikes out, and that may have seriously flustered syndergaard.