FanGraphs Baseball

It should be pretty well understood that there isn’t one “right” way to pitch. Some pitchers succeed by throwing curveballs, others with changeups. One may get by with grounders, while another flourishes with fly balls. Corey Kluber works out of the zone for whiffs, and Bartolo Colon bombards it for balls in play. Every pitcher is different. It’s important to find what fits one’s unique style, and stick to it.

Dallas Keuchel has found what works for him. And he’d never looked less like himself in Tuesday’s superb Wild Card start than on his final pitch of the evening:
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Just as we all anticipated, Kris Bryant put together an extremely impressive rookie campaign. After he spent the season’s first two weeks in the minors, the Cubs set free their 23-year-old top prospect, and he proceeded to rake.  Bryant put up a .275/.369/.488 batting line on the strength of 26 long balls and a 12% walk rate, which yielded a 136 wRC+. Throw in that he graded out as a plus defender at third base, and the end result was a remarkable 6.5 WAR — easily tops among rookies, and was the 10th-highest figure of any hitter period. The Cubs seem to have a very special player on their hands.

We all knew Bryant had star potential long before he was called up. That’s why he got so much love on pre-season prospect lists, and also why KATOH liked him more than almost any other prospect. But now that he’s a year further along on that trajectory, we can be a bit more certain of what his career might look like. So, using this new data, let’s see what Bryant’s rookie campaign might tell us about what lies ahead. As I did yesterday in my piece on Carlos Correa, I performed a some weighted Mahalanobis distance calculations to generate a list of players whose seasons were most similar to Bryant’s. For more details on my methodology, see yesterday’s Correa post.

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Jake Arrieta’s multi-faceted single-grip slider is sweet, but he’s had that for a while. There has to be something he changed to get better this year. There is something he’s changed, actually. He’s completely flipped his fastball usage.

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As a rule, life is characterized predominantly both by crippling doubt and also other kinds of doubt. Less susceptible to that sort of doubt is Houston outfielder Carlos Gomez, depicted here recording a home run against Masahiro Tanaka — with regard to which home run Gomez exhibits something much closer to unambiguous certainty.

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Six months ago, we were all idiots. We were all idiots because we figured the Yankees were idiots for letting Masahiro Tanaka pitch. It felt like elbow surgery was inevitable, UCL tears being things you don’t just play through, so it felt strange to see the Yankees in denial. Oh, we all thought we knew what was better. Turns out the Yankees might’ve been on to something. Turns out those doctors have more than just pieces of paper. Tommy John might still be an inevitability. Greg Holland pitched through something like this for a year. The elbow still got him. The elbow might still get Tanaka, but tonight he’s starting a playoff game. Tonight, he’s the guy, at least until Andrew Miller and Dellin Betances are the guys. It’s safe to say now it worked out.

Remain in the flashback, though. Go back six months to when Tanaka made his first start. There was so much attention on his fastball — on its usage, and on its velocity. Observers thought the fastball would be a dead giveaway. They thought the injury would make the fastball worse, and they thought Tanaka wouldn’t be able to cut it without a decent fastball. Just about everyone, after all, builds off the fastball. It’s the pitch at the center of the pitch-type solar system.

In the end, Tanaka’s fastball actually gained velocity this season. He started 24 times, with a mid-3s ERA, and his average fastball was up the better part of one mile per hour. In a sense, the fastball wasn’t a giveaway. But if you stare long enough, you see two things. One: overall, Tanaka was pretty good. Two: Tanaka’s fastball was pretty bad.

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The Astros and Yankees are set to meet tonight in the first postseason game of 2015, with the winner advancing to play the Royals in the division series. While both teams are likely to do everything they can to win tonight’s game, there is one potentially significant variable they won’t be able to control; the called strike zone. So that’s preview what we might look for from the home plate umpire tonight.

17 year veteran Eric Cooper is going to be behind the plate for the Wild Card game. Per Baseball Heat Maps, here’s Cooper’s called strike zone compared to the league average (warmer colors indicate more calls in that area).

RH hitters

LH hitters.

The first thing that stands out is that Cooper has a very tall strike zone, calling far more pitches than the average umpire at both the top and bottom of the rulebook zone. He’s especially generous at the very top sliver of the zone with a right-handed batter at the plate, which is also a very tough area for hitters to make contact on. He offsets the height of his zone to some degree by having a fairly narrow strike zone compared to the average umpire, calling fewer pitches away against both lefties and righties, but the effect isn’t as large as his large vertical zone.

As you can see at the charts available over at Baseball Savant, Cooper calls an above average pitches out of the zone as strikes, and has one of the lowest rates of calling pitches in the zone balls. Overall, he’s a pitcher friendly umpire, and hitters are going to need to protect the plate more often than they normally would, especially on high and low pitches.

Interestingly, neither Keuchel nor Tanaka attack the top of the strike zone that regularly, as both are primarily trying to keep the ball down, so there’s not a clear advantage to either side based on the umpire tendency with regards to the starting pitcher. But both teams are likely to use an army of relievers, and Cooper’s zone could work out pretty well for a pitcher like Houston’s Josh Fields, who likes to pitch up with his fastball.

Ben and Sam give an update on ongoing competitions, draft playoff teams, and answer emails about play-in games, Clayton Kershaw, a Tigers scoring mystery, and more.

Individual performances tend to be magnified in the postseason, and that is especially true of pitchers. While 16-18 other players appear in the lineups and many others will have profound impacts on the outcomes of games over the next month, the starting pitcher will likely have more influence over the outcome of a single game than any other player. Everything is magnified in the playoffs from managerial decisions to clutch hits, errors, and great plays in the field, but starting pitching is perhaps most deserving of the increased scrutiny. By the end of the second inning, perhaps sometime into the third, the starting pitcher will have taken part in more plays than any position player during the entire game.

In a winner-take-all game like the Wild Card, deserving players might be pushed to the background ahead of the game in favor of the pitching, but the matchup between pitchers will likely be the difference between the team that keeps playing and the team whose season is over. For those watching the Cubs take on the Pirates, they will witness one of the very best pitching matchups the playoffs have ever seen.

In Jake Arrieta and Gerrit Cole, both teams will feature bona fide aces. Arrieta might have just had the best half-season of all time. Overall, he’s pitched 229 innings with an ERA of 1.77 and a FIP of 2.35, giving Arrieta a 45 ERA- and a 60 FIP- over the full season after league and park are taken into account. He’s in pretty rare company. Consider: since the end of World War II, these are the qualified pitchers with an ERA- below 50 and a FIP- below 65 over a full season.

Greatest Combination of FIP and ERA in History

Name	Season	Team	IP	ERA	FIP	WAR	ERA-	FIP-
Pedro Martinez	1999	Red Sox	213.1	2.07	1.39	11.6	42	31
Roger Clemens	1997	Blue Jays	264	2.05	2.25	10.7	45	50
Pedro Martinez	2000	Red Sox	217	1.74	2.17	9.4	35	48
Ron Guidry	1978	Yankees	273.2	1.74	2.19	9.1	47	58
Dwight Gooden	1985	Mets	276.2	1.53	2.13	8.9	44	58
Bob Gibson	1968	Cardinals	304.2	1.12	1.75	8.6	38	64
Zack Greinke	2009	Royals	229.1	2.16	2.33	8.6	48	54
Pedro Martinez	1997	Expos	241.1	1.9	2.39	8.5	45	57
Roger Clemens	1990	Red Sox	228.1	1.93	2.18	8.2	47	55
Greg Maddux	1995	Braves	209.2	1.63	2.26	7.9	39	52
Greg Maddux	1994	Braves	202	1.56	2.39	7.4	37	54
Pedro Martinez	2003	Red Sox	186.2	2.22	2.21	7.4	48	51
Jake Arrieta	2015	Cubs	229	1.77	2.35	7.3	45	60
Pedro Martinez	2002	Red Sox	199.1	2.26	2.24	7.3	50	54
Randy Johnson	1997	Mariners	213	2.28	2.82	7	50	62

The only pitcher with better context neutral numbers in both ERA and FIP and more innings was Dwight Gooden in his amazing 1985 season. It is easy to see why so much attention has been given to Jake Arrieta this season and in this matchup, but the Pittsburgh Pirates’s Gerrit Cole has had an excellent season of his own. Cole’s 5.4 WAR is fifth in the National and ninth in Major League Baseball. Pitchers don’t choose their opposition, leaving great matchups more to a question of chance than a complete reflection of their own skill, but the high level of both players heading into this game is something rarely seen in a game of this magnitude.

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Their season ended Sunday, a week — if not a month — shorter than had been planned, and the Nationals jumped right into their off-season by firing reigning Manager of the Year Matt Williams. Williams has been a lightning rod for criticism since the Nationals started to falter in the middle of the year so it’s no surprise that he was relieved of his duties, especially since GM Mike Rizzo refused to say he’d keep Williams past the end of the season despite numerous opportunities to do so. Williams will go down as a bad manager and his tenure will be a negative on Rizzo’s resume. Still, from an outsider’s perspective, it’s difficult to know precisely how bad these situations have been.

It’s often said we like numbers here at FanGraphs — and that’s true, as far as it helps us understand the game better. But managers are one aspect of the game that have, to date, defied attempts at being quantified. Matt Williams put together a 179-145 record during his two seasons in Washington. That’s a winning percentage of .553, which comes out to a 90-win average. That’s pretty good! Matt Williams must be a good manager, then. The thing is, and you probably know this if you read FanGraphs, those are team stats, and ascribing them to one person, even if that person is ostensibly in charge of the team, is probably a mistake. There’s a lot more that goes into a winning team than the manager, a fact that was underlined today by the Nationals’ actions, and I suspect will be underlined again by Williams not being snatched up by another team any time soon.

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