R.A. Dickey’s Unique Stuff and Conventional Problems

There are things that are different about R.A. Dickey, of course. No one pitch was thrown as often as the 2,840 regular season knuckleballs that Dickey threw this year. No other qualified pitcher threw any knuckle balls this year by PITCHf/x. The starter who threw the fewest fastballs other than Dickey threw three times as many. No pitch gets equal swinging strike results in and out of the zone like the knuckleball. Dickey can throw with injuries that would fell other pitchers, mostly because he throws at about 75% effort. He has no Ulnar Collateral Ligament.

And yet, despite the fact that Dickey is a one-pitch pitcher who throws a unique pitch that people seemingly can’t figure out no matter where he throws it, there are also conventional aspects to his craft. And to a certain extent, they’ve come to the fore this year.

Take velocity for instance. After I noticed that velocity was important to the pitcher’s success, and that he was throwing a harder knuckleball more often in his best season, the pitcher admitted that the harder knuckler was important because it shortened reaction times on an unpredictable pitch. And then later, when his back was acting up, he admitted that even though he’d probably be on the disabled list if he were a conventional pitcher, his back injury was robbing him of that important velocity.

That was June 2013, and when his knuckler velocity didn’t return most of that year, or most of the next, it was fair for us to wonder if it was coming back. In Dickey’s resurgence this year, though, we find the return of conventional hero: his velocity is back.

It’s not quite back to where it was in his best year, but it’s back up to 2011 numbers, and it’s well above where he sat early this year. If he continues to average over 77 this month, it’ll be the first four-month string in which he has managed that feat since that 2012 season.

But we can’t just point to the radar gun and say the job’s done. Dickey’s whiff rate on the knuckleball in the first half was 10.2%. In the second half, it was 10.1%. If ramping the velocity up helped him, it did so in a different way. Like, for example, the .171 isolated slugging percentage that he gave up on the pitch in the first half — that was down to .134 in the second half.

If velocity does that for fastballs — and yes, home runs per fastball go down at the extremes, while whiffs go up — then maybe that is enough for us. On the other hand, the monthly splits for isolated slugging allowed on the pitch did not move in a linear fashion. In other words, despite a fast knuckleball in August, he allowed a .188 ISO that month on the pitch.

Was there something different happening in September and Octorber, when his ISO dropped precipitously, and he showed the best results of the last two years? Perhaps another conventional thing. Take a look at where his knucklers were crossing the plate in the first two months of the season (left) and where they crossed the plate in September and October (right). Notice anything?

There’s still a lot of zone in there, and even high in the zone, but you see the bottom of the zone? Dickey hit that spot more often in September than he did in any other month. To compare these two by the numbers, he put 38% in the bottom third of the zone or below in April, and he put 45% of his knucklers there in September and October.

Of course, we have to return to one thing that is decisively different about the knuckler: when it comes to whiffs per swing, it gets equal results in the zone as it does outside the zone. So it behooves Dickey to throw the ball in the zone. His heat map shows you he’s aiming for the zone, too. And generally, batters swing more up in the zone, and miss more, so he’s right to float the butterfly up in the zone, hard or soft.

But it’s also true that he gets more ground balls when he throws lower in the zone, just like most pitchers. September was his second-best month of the year when judged by ground balls per fly ball.

In the end, it looks like Dickey is getting some benefit from two more conventional differences this fall: he’s throwing his knuckleballs harder, and he’s mixing up his vertical location better. Throw them low and throw them hard, you might tell him, and you’d sound like most pitching coaches, ever, talking to most pitchers, ever.