Archive for Barry Zito

Navigate to Ron Wolforth’s website and you’ll immediately see this.

Normally I’m hesitant to engage with places that approach me like I’m watching the pitching equivalent of QVC at 4 a.m., but Ron Wolforth has the track record to make bold statements: he’s worked with Trevor Bauer since the first round pick was 14 years old, and most recently he took Scott Kazmir from out of baseball to pumping mid-90’s gas for Cleveland in the span of a year. That second achievement is what we’re going to pay attention to today, because the news came down this past week that the Oakland Athletics signed Barry Zito to a minor league deal with an invitation to spring training. Why is this of specific interest to us, you may ask? Because Zito has been working with Wolforth for the past four months to completely revamp his delivery and regain his lost velocity. The most recent reports say Zito is throwing in the high-80’s after the training, with Wolforth guaranteeing 90 MPH by “April or May”.

Ron Wolforth is more scientist than scout – the type of outsider that the baseball establishment views with a sideways look. His reputation improved with Bauer getting drafted in the first round in 2011 (he even secured an invitation to spring training with Cleveland in 2013 after Bauer was traded from the Diamondbacks), but the feeling you get is that he’s still not completely trusted – that his methods are out of keeping with the entrenched mentality of the game’s established coaches. The same resistance to intellectual approaches that kept sabermetrics out of the game (and still does in some circles) is part of what is keeping Wolforth out of it.

That’s where Barry Zito comes in. There are differences in Kazmir and Zito’s cases: there is the age difference — which is nearly five years — and the fact that Kazmir is a power pitcher while Zito is known more for relying on secondary offerings. The fact remains, however, that both have one major thing in common: they were out of baseball, struggling with an almost total loss of fastball velocity, and turned to Ron Wolforth for help. Kazmir was written off; he regained almost ten MPH and made it back. Can Zito follow the same path? Read the rest of this entry »

When I say “the Barry Zito contract”, what feeling immediately rises up in you? Is it disgust? Shock? A little schadenfreude? It’s still amazing to think how could a pitcher with such bad trends – xFIPs of 5.04, 4.61, 5.64 each season before signing with San Francisco – would ever get paid “ace” money, and that over seven years? How does a GM do that and still have a job? But I digress.

After pitching terribly for the Giants the past two seasons, Zito has put together a pretty solid season this year. No, he hasn’t had an $18.5 million dollar season, but a team could do worse for their 4th starter. Look at his three year trends:

(Pardon my use of MS Paint, WordPress is giving me formatting fits w/ making a table).

Looking at his peripherals, it’s easy to pinpoint the “why” for his improvement. Zito’s increased his strikeout rate by a batter per nine innings, while also cutting down his walks. His stuff appears to be new and improved compared to previous seasons with the Giants. Here’s a scouting report of Zito from just last April from the ever-resourceful site 60 Feet, 6 Inches:

Barry Zito is a nice guy. He does yoga and gives money to injured veterans. Unfortunately his fastball is slow and his changeup looks like a little league pitch. In his prime, he pumped in a 92mph fastball and was tough to hit. Always known for his curveball, the pitch has become a lob that is hard to throw for a strike. A couple years ago he added a tighter breaking ball that he uses like a slider to LHs.

Zito threw 92 MPH in his prime? Maybe that was true back in ’00-‘01, but for his Cy Young season in 2002 – the season we begin to have velocity data here at FanGraphs, Zito was averaging 87 MPH on his fastball. That’s consistent with his seasons in Oakland from ’02 through –’05. It wasn’t until 2006 that Zito was throwing his pedestrian 85 MPH fastball. This season, his velocity is up a tick. –

Last night against Cincy, Zito topped out at 89(!). Slight bump in velo aside, Zito’s started to get away from throwing that little league change-up so often. The past two seasons he’s thrown it 20% of the time, this year he is doing that with a slider, a pitch he previously has not thrown a whole lot of.

That lob of a curve has also been tightened back up to form. According to pitch-type values, Zito’s curve has been worth 11.3 runs, good for 6th on the leaderboards. Looking at pitch f/x, the pitch has gained about 2 and ½ inches of horizontal and vertical movement on average in comparison to last year’s slop ball. Zito isn’t about to revert to his former dominance, but at least he’s proving to be an above average starter at the moment. His ZiPS update forecasts that Zito will finish with a 4.13 FIP over 195 innings, good for nearly 3 WAR. Giant fans will gladly take it at this point.

Normally, I like to start my posts off with some history of either the player being evaluated or the study being conducted. Tonight, I’m going to break from that mold given that every baseball fan knows that Barry Zito signed an albatross of a contract with the Giants following the 2006 season and has in no way lived up to the win values meriting such a contract. He also does not add to the team from an extra-curricular standpoint the way Manny Ramirez adds butts in the seats and sells merchandise.

Early in the 2009 season, however, Zito has actually looked pretty darn good and one has to wonder if he is going to revert to some semblance of his past form. Sure, he has only appeared in five games, but let’s keep the small sample size comments to a minimum here… after all, do you really think those of us at this site, who harp on the positives and negatives of samples all the time honestly don’t know that we are dealing with small samplels? Short rant over, back to the action.

There have been a few studies conducted linking Zito’s success in Oakland not only with the quality defenses backing him up but also an ability to consistently induce popups. While a popup might seem more random than skill-based, Zito consistently finished amongst the league leaders in this area, ultimately suggesting that some facet of his performance, be it velocity, movement, location, or some combination of the three, allowed him to record a higher than usual percentage of these weakly hit high pops.

During his first two seasons in San Francisco, Zito not only saw his velocity completely drop off the map, but his percentage of popups practically halved. From 2002-06, he ranged from around 15-17%. In 2007 and 2008, he induced popups under nine percent of the time. That could be chalked up as a direct result of the velocity issues or perhaps lesser foul area in San Francisco in which popups could remain in play.

This season, however, Zito’s rate of popups currently sits at 18.8%, higher than any previous season. He is not very likely to sustain a popup rate that but given that Zito has proven himself capable of above average marks in this department, he could very well stick around the 14-17% for the season. Not surprisingly, his velocity is also up to a tad below 87 mph, which only seems significant based on his gradual dropoff into Moyer-territory over the last two seasons.

Zito is not an ace and he probably will never pitch anywhere near as well as he did during the early days in Oakland, but if he can build on this early 2009 success and continue to get popups, all the while sustaining the improved velocity, there is no reason he could not be one of the best fourth starters in baseball. An improved Zito would certainly look much better than most of the other back end of the rotation pitchers consistently garnering opportunities. If the popup rate regresses towards the levels of the last two seasons, though, do not expect this success to continue.

Following my post last week about Carl Pavano‘s contract a lively discussion ensued in which it was argued that Barry Zito’s was much worse. The reasoning for this being that Pavano’s absence didn’t necessarily hurt the Yankees whereas Zito would actually be hurting the Giants with his poor pitching each start. Yes, it bordered on the absurd to offer him a 7-yr/126 million dollar deal following the 2006 season, but, in looking at his numbers I found that his 2006 seasonal line and current numbers in 2008 shared a similarity.

In 2006 he produced a 4.89 FIP; so far this year he is at 4.98. In 2006, however, his ERA ended up 3.83, a number much lower than the current 5.80. Essentially, both of these seasons resulted in very similar metrics of controllable skills yet one involved an ERA a full point lower and the other is featuring an ERA almost an entire point higher. What’s the difference?

For starters, he has allowed a ton of baserunners this year, posting a 1.80 WHIP following his poor performance last night. He always walked plenty of hitters but this year his walk rate is higher and his BABIP, which hasn’t ever been higher than .300 in his career, is currently .332. On top of that, his strand rate isf 65.2%, meaning that he is allowing baserunners at an insanely alarming clip and allowing them to score at a rate well below the average. In 2006, his strand rate was well above average at 78.5%.

In 2006 he walked 4.03 batters per nine innings while fanning 6.15 per nine. This year, the strikeout rate is similar, coming in at 5.88 K/9, but the BB/9 has risen to 5.63. Despite the vast increase in walks, his home run rate is down, which has allowed the FIPs in each of these seasons to be within .09 of one another. Using the in-season Marcel projector, Zito is expected to produce this over the remaining two months:

2008 Remainder Marcel: 12 GS, 60 IP, 64 H, 30 BB, 44 K, 1.57 WHIP, 4.55 FIP

Compare then his overall line with this projection to his 2006 season:

2008: 33 GS, 169.0 IP, 192 H, 98 BB, 115 K, 1.72 WHIP, 4.82 FIP
2006: 34 GS, 221.0 IP, 211 H, 99 BB, 151 K, 1.40 WHIP, 4.89 FIP

Dan Szymborski, creator of the ZiPS projection system, was kind enough to send me his in-season projector this weekend and so what happens when we plug Zito into that?

2008 Remainder ZiPS: 12 GS, 68 IP, 67 H, 34 BB, 49 K, 1.54 WHIP, 4.55 FIP

Substitute ZiPS for Marcel in the 2006 vs. 2008 comparison to get the following:

2008: 33 GS, 176.2 IP, 195 H, 102 BB, 120 K, 1.70 WHIP, 4.82 FIP
2006: 34 GS, 221.0 IP, 211 H, 99 BB, 151 K, 1.40 WHIP, 4.89 FIP

And, in comparing the two projections for Zito over the remainder we see virtually the same results: He is not as bad as his numbers thus far would suggest but he isn’t necessarily good either:

Marcel: 12 GS, 60 IP, 64 H, 30 BB, 44 K, 1.57 WHIP, 4.55 FIP
ZiPS: 12 GS, 68 IP, 67 H, 34 BB, 49 K, 1.52 WHIP, 4.55 FIP

It seems that Zito was not as good as some of his 2006 numbers would suggest nor is he as bad as some of his 2008 numbers suggest. He’s not a very effective pitcher anymore but he is a very expensive and handsomely paid one. If we didn’t know his name and just heard about a pitcher with his numbers coupled with an 84-85 mph fastball and a lack of control, I would tend to think we would all question how he is a major league pitcher. We may not be at that point completely yet with Zito, but that corner may be turned quite soon.

Following a disastrous 0-6 start that saw him allow 56 baserunners in 28.2 innings, the Giants demoted Barry Zito to the bullpen. How bad was his start to the season? His average game score, which measures the in-depth quality of a start, comes in at 34; with game scores, 50 is the starting point for quality. He struck out just 11 batters while walking 15 and surrendering four home runs. Though his FIP of 5.81 suggested a 7.53 ERA may have been too harsh, 5.81 is not going to help a manager sleep at night.

Prior to a game against the Phillies, cameras spotted Zito getting advice from the venerable Jamie Moyer. I guess since Zito is already pitching like a 70-year old lefty he might as well learn how to be effective as one. Or maybe they were talking about Moyer’s favorite episode of Dharma and Greg.

Either way, Zito’s demotion did not last long as he made no relief appearances and was given the ball to start last night. Perhaps the demotion served its purpose as a wakeup call or one of those trips to the disabled list with a phantom injury.

As the title of this post suggests, though, Zito actually pitched pretty well. Generally a fastball, curveball, changeup pitcher, Zito had been struggling with velocity; if his fastball lacked speed there would not be enough of a separation between that and the changeup. Additionally, if hitters knew he had a weak fastball, he could not utilize it to keep them off guard; therefore, his curveball would look like hanging junk instead of the devastating out pitch it used to be.

In his previous start, April 27th against the Reds, Zito got clocked with a fastball ranging from 80-82 mph. In fact, some of his fastballs were so slow that the classification algorithm mistook them for changeups. Last night, however, against the Pirates, the Pitch F/X data says that the vast majority of Zito’s heaters came in the 84-86 mph range.

He threw a first pitch strike to just 7 of the 18 batters that did not put it in play on the first pitch. Despite this, he only walked two batters, and recorded a season high five strikeouts. Of these strikeouts, he did not follow a pattern in using a specific out-pitch but he did use his curveball as a major device. If he didn’t strike a batter out with the curve he would use it to set up the following pitch. All five of these strikeouts came from either a curveball or a sequence set up by the curveball.

His changeup was quite effective last night, however two poor ones resulted in the only two runs he surrendered; essentially, these hanging changeups handed him a seventh loss. Throwing it exclusively to righties, here is a location chart:

The circled pitches are the two hits that cost him: a single and a home run in the fourth inning given up to Jason Bay and Xavier Nady respectively. The home run came on the pitch with the larger circle.

Here is a look at Zito’s movement last night:

Though a few of his curveballs lacked efficient movement the larger majority moved quite a bit. Very interesting is his fastball movement. Last night it averaged around five horizontal inches and twelve vertical inches. Here is his movement from the 4/27 start:

Here his fastball averaged about three horizontal inches and eleven vertical inches. Not only has his fastball lacked velocity but apparently it has also lacked sufficient movement to garner some positive results. His changeup was much more consistent last night as well.

Hopefully, for the sake of Giants fans, Zito can build on this in his next start. While he is still on pace to at least tie the all-time losses record (29), this particular loss must have been pretty uplifting for his confidence.