Still on the Board (for Now): Ian Kennedy

It’s mid-January, a time when the baseball calendar is usually dominated by the arbitration process and the lead-up thereto, the excitement of the exchanging of figures, pre-hearing settlements, etc. Not in 2016. Material free agents remain unsigned, from Justin Upton, Yoenis Cespedes, Dexter Fowler and friends on the position player side to Yovani Gallardo and Ian Kennedy among pitchers.

Recently, we discussed the respective statuses of Gallardo and new Marlin Wei-Yin Chen in this space. Today, it’s Kennedy’s turn in the barrel. Only very recently has even a hint of a whisper of the recent Padre’s name been uttered in the rumor mill. As we speak, the Royals appear to be homing in on Kennedy. What is his appropriate market value, and is Kansas City a destination where he can thrive?

Kennedy’s draft year of 2006 marked my first as Assistant Scouting Director for the Brewers. We were slated to pick 16th in the first round, and our scouting reports on Kennedy — along with his incredible numbers up to that point in time — marked him as one of must-see college players in that year’s crop. Back then, there was no uniform Division I baseball starting date, so I found myself in southern California on Super Bowl weekend to see Kennedy and USC take on Long Beach State.

Now, scouting early season college baseball is kind of an art form. Some guys will jump up out of nowhere with big-time performances and tool displays. You put them on your list, keep your scouts in the loop, but realize there is a long way to go, and there are lots of players to see. With the high-profile guys like Kennedy, you don’t want to get too excited about a command performance, or too down about a dud. Still, when you’re going to see a player who might be a key consideration for your first-round pick, you want to see something on which you might eventually be able to hang your hat.

Kennedy pitched fine, but didn’t give me anything by which to truly remember him. There was no wow factor. This brought back one of the earliest lessons learned the year before, when I laid eyes on Jered Weaver working out in the pre-season with an independent-league club while weighing whether to re-enter the 2005 draft. His college numbers were even gaudier than Kennedy’s, but his stuff was arguably even more ordinary. Looking at previous video of Weaver, and watching him face some live independent-league hitters, it was clear that his pitches were very difficult to see, and he showed the aptitude to get outs with his fastball up in the zone. This would work in the big leagues.

Did Kennedy possess a similar characteristic that would set him apart against big league hitters? His command was impeccable against college hitters, but would he need to work off of the plate more to keep more advanced hitters honest? He commanded his average to slightly above-average fastball well, but none of his secondary pitches stood out. He was a big leaguer, to be sure, but was he an upper-rotation big leaguer?

At the end of the day, there were more highly ranked players on our board at #16, and Jeremy Jeffress, who has taken a circuitous route back to Milwaukee, where he might be their closer this season, became our guy. Kennedy went five picks later to the Yankees.

The minor leagues presented very little resistance for the USC righthander. Each season, I compile my own ordered list of minor league starting pitcher prospects, based on performance and age relative to league and level. Kennedy ranked 20th and 29th on my list in his two qualifying minor league seasons (2007-08), marking him as a fairly sure thing to stick in a big league rotation, with some degree of upside.

His raw minor league numbers were stellar: 19-6, 1.95, with a 273/77 strikeout-to-walk ratio (K/BB) in 248.2 innings. The Yankees were still a veteran-laden, luxury-tax payroll World Series participant as Kennedy made his way up the ranks, and he was sidelined by an aneurysm in his right armpit in early 2009, about the exact time that he could have been of use to them at the major league level.

He proved his health in the Arizona Fall League, and not long thereafter, was a key part of a massive three-way trade among the Yankees, Tigers and Diamondbacks. Curtis Granderson headed to the Bronx; Max Scherzer, Austin Jackson, Phil Coke and Daniel Schlereth headed to Detroit; and Kennedy and Edwin Jackson went to Arizona. The Diamondbacks clearly thought very highly of Kennedy, moving a player who would before long command $30 million per year in exchange for him.

What many might not remember is that it was Kennedy, not Scherzer, who first provided a massive breakthrough season, going 21-4, 2.88, in 2011 and finishing fourth in the NL Cy Young voting. Unfortunately for the Diamondbacks, Kennedy never came close to duplicating that form, and he was sent on to the Padres at the 2013 trading deadline for Matt Stites and Joe Thatcher.

What Kennedy has done since first sticking in a big league rotation in 2010 is stay healthy; he’s taken the ball every fifth day without fail. What he hasn’t done is accumulate significant value above replacement level outside of that 2011 campaign; he racked up 4.8 WAR in 2011, but only 9.3 WAR total in the other five seasons combined.

So what is Ian Kennedy? What can the Royals, or someone else, expect from him going forward? Let’s utilize granular batted-ball data to examine his plate appearance outcome frequencies and production allowed by ball-in-play (BIP) type in order to get a better feel. First, the frequency data:

Plate Appearance Outcome Frequencies, 2015
Metric % REL PCT
K 24.4% 121 77
BB 7.3% 98 53
POP 3.0% 104 60
FLY 35.7% 119 85
LD 22.8% 108 82
GB 38.5% 84 15

First off, Kennedy’s greatest strength is his above-average strikeout rate. He posted a 24.4% K rate last season, fractionally below his career-high 2014 mark. That ranked in the 77th percentile last season; as the league K rate has surged in recent years, Kennedy has kept up. In his six years as a full-time starter, his K rate percentile rank has fluctuated within a rather narrow band between the 66th and 87th percentiles. This gives Kennedy some margin for error with regard to contact management, which as you shall see, he needs.

Though his raw college numbers suggested Maddux-like precision, my early concerns about his ability to control the entire plate against big league hitters were well-founded. Kennedy’s BB rate was basically league average, in the 53rd percentile, last season. This was the fourth time in six years that his walk rate was on the wrong side of league average, though it has trended in the right direction since 2013.

Kennedy is a clear fly-ball pitcher, posting a fly-ball rate percentile rank of 85 in 2015. This is not a new development, as his fly-ball percentile rank has been 76 or higher in five of his six qualifying seasons. On the plus side, a fly-ball tendency usually carries with it some free outs in the form of pop ups. For the sixth straight season, he had a higher-than-average pop-up rate, with a 60 percentile rank. That, unfortunately, was the lowest of his career.

Single season line-drive rates are notoriously unreliable, as they fluctuate much more than those of other BIP types. From that perspective, one shouldn’t get too worked up about Kennedy’s 2015 liner-rate percentile rank of 82. Unfortunately, this marked his fourth time in five seasons at 62 or higher in this category, and the third straight at 71 or above. There are some pitchers who have a tendency to allow squared-up contact, and Kennedy is one of them.

So, Kennedy gets strikeouts and some pop ups, but allows a bunch of liners, which is never good, and fly balls, which can be only if BIP authority is stifled to a significant extent. About that BIP authority… let’s look at the production allowed by BIP type data, which serves as a solid proxy for authority measurement:

Relative Production Allowed by BIP Type, 2015
Metric AVG OBP SLG REL PRD ADJ PRD ACT ERA CALC ERA FIP TRU ERA
FLY 0.264 0.923 256 109
LD 0.654 1.235 122 110
FLY + LD 0.498 1.110 153 114
GB 0.233 0.270 86 103
ALL BIP 0.346 0.667 143 121
ALL PA 0.254 0.309 0.489 115 99 4.28 4.57 4.51 3.93

The actual production allowed on each BIP type is indicated in the batting average (AVG) and slugging (SLG) columns, and is converted to run values and compared to MLB average in the REL PRD (or Unadjusted Contact Score) column. That figure is then adjusted for context, such as home park, team defense, luck, etc., in the ADJ PRD (or Adjusted Contact Score) column. For the purposes of this exercise, sacrifice hits (SH) and flies (SF) are included as outs and hit by pitchers (HBP) are excluded from the on-base percentage (OBP) calculation. One quick note here: I have presented this type of analysis many times, but only recently have I begun to show fly ball and line drive line items both separately and combined.

For those of you that have read some of my previous contact management-oriented pieces, Kennedy’s Unadjusted and Adjusted Contact Score figures are downright astronomical. With the exception of his unadjusted grounder contact score of 86, all of his numbers are over 100, or worse than league average.

Kennedy allowed massive production on fly balls, conceding a .264 AVG and .923 SLG, for an unsightly 256 Unadjusted Contact Score. Now, the Statcast system only considers the highest of fly balls to be “fly balls,” categorizing as line drives many of the other batted balls classified as fly balls by the previous SportVision system. (Hence, the reason for the combination of FLY + LD.) Even when fly balls are combined with liners, Kennedy allowed a 153 unadjusted contact score. Even after adjustment for the Padres’ ghastly outfield defense, his Adjusted FLY + LD contact score is 114, seventh-worst among the 38 NL ERA qualifiers.

This is no one-year phenomenon, either. His fly ball and line drive Adjusted Contact Scores in 2014 and 2013, respectively, were 115 and 157, and 106 and 102. Ian Kennedy allows loud contact in the air, period.

Add all of the BIP types together, and Kennedy’s 2015 Adjusted Contact Score was 121, dead last in the NL. A subpar BIP mix, marked by a high liner rate coupled with a low grounder rate, coupled with harder-than-average authority all bring about this result. Once again, this is not a new development: his 2014 and 2013 Adjusted Contact Scores of 116 and 117 were both NL worsts. In fact, Kennedy’s career Unadjusted Contact Score of 110.3 is one of the worst of all time for a six-time ERA qualifier.

Thanks to his better-than-average K rates, he fares better once the Ks and BBs are added back into the equation, making him a fractionally better-than-average pitcher, with a 3.93 “tru” ERA; that mark is much better than his actual ERA (4.28) and FIP (4.51).

At this point, let me re-introduce the concept of the K/BB Contact Score Multiplier. Basically, based on a pitcher’s K and BB rates relative to the league, a multiplier is assigned and applied to a pitcher’s Contact Score to estimate his “tru”, or true-talent ERA. In both 2014 and 2015, Kennedy’s K rate was over one-half standard deviation above league average, while his BB rate was in the league average range. Based on actual results going back to 2009, Kennedy’s multiplier is 92.1.

With a 92.1 multiplier, Kennedy needs to post an Adjusted Contact Score around 110 to post a league average “tru” ERA. If he could even be a league average contact manager, he would be a reasonably well above-average starting pitcher. Trouble is, he hasn’t even posted an above average Unadjusted Contact Score since 2011.

The other nagging question is this: how much longer will Kennedy be able to post an above-average K rate? Once the solid foundation provided by that K rate gets shaky, he could be in real, immediate trouble. His one potential path to future improvement is to cut his BB rate, which could at least blunt future deterioration in his K/BB Multiplier. A K rate in the league-average range coupled with a BB rate over one-half STD better than league average means a 96.9 multiplier, which keeps him viable.

So moving forward, what do we have? A guy who has been extremely healthy, a pretty safe bet to qualify for ERA titles over the next three seasons, the likely term of his impending contract. A guy whose decent K/BB profile allows him to survive BIP frequency and authority profiles that would kill anyone this side of Colby Lewis. The team that signs him needs to have a ballpark that turns homers into playable fly balls, and a team defense that turns them into outs at a high rate.

Enter the Kansas City Royals, who play in one of the most spacious parks around, and deploy the best set of fly-catchers out there. Lorenzo Cain is as good as they get, Alex Gordon is unexpectedly back, and Jarrod Dyson is likely to log more time than ever in 2016. Kennedy’s pulled fly-ball percentage was actually in the bottom third of ERA qualifiers last season, so it stands to reason that he’ll be able to pitch to the large part of the park more often than most going forward. Imagine the effect on Kennedy’s tension level when he allows a well-struck fly ball or line drive, and realizes that Matt Kemp isn’t there to play it into a triple.

Ian Kennedy is not going to be a star. That ship sailed almost a decade ago. In the right park, with the right club, a deal in the three year, $36 million neighborhood could work. Of the teams he has been connected to of late, the Royals — and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the Nationals — would seem to fit the bill, much more so than other rumored teams, such as the Astros (short porches down both lines) and the Rockies (don’t get me started, despite his small sample success there).





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eph_unitmember
8 years ago

Kennedy will either be forced to wait until midseason to sign, or re-sign with the Pads for like 2 yrs 10 mil.