Taijuan Walker’s Command, Then and Now
Command is a funny thing. It’s not easy to spot in the numbers. You have to watch a game and see the pitcher consistently miss his spots before you start to understand that even a guy with great walk rates may not have great command. Taijuan Walker does not have good command. He also walked 9.5% of the batters he faced in the minor leagues, a number that isn’t as far off the American League average this year (7.6%) as you might expect.
Pretty sure the catcher wanted this fastball low and away.
Over the last four starts, Walker has walked three batters in 29 innings. If you have an opinion regarding Walker’s command, you probably won’t change it over four starts. But Walker is still young enough, and not yet fully formed — perhaps there’s something else he’s done that can help us better understand why command is so hard to quantify. And also how likely it is that Walker can keep up this production.
The easiest thing is to just look for the thing that has changed the most over his last four starts. Let’s see if he’s simply filling up the zone. You’d think that putting balls in the zone would be a good proxy for command.
| Date | O-Swing% | Z-Swing% | Swing% | O-Contact% | Z-Contact% | Contact% | Zone% | F-Strike% | SwStr% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Last Four | 36.6% | 65.3% | 50.9% | 72.2% | 88.3% | 82.5% | 49.9% | 67.3% | 8.8% |
| First Nine | 25.4% | 67.4% | 45.5% | 71.6% | 84.3% | 80.6% | 47.9% | 57.5% | 8.7% |
Two percentage points! Two points. He’s thrown 400 pitches in the last four games. Unless he had the good fortune of those eight pitches all coming on three-ball counts, those eight more pitches in the zone are not the difference between Walker’s expected walk total (ten) and actual (three) over the last four games.
This isn’t to say that Walker hasn’t changed anything. This might actually be a more significant change. Take a look at his pitching mix before and after our arbitrary but results-based cutoff.
| Date | FB% | FBv | CT% | CTv | CB% | CBv | CH% | CHv |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Last Four | 72.0% | 94.3 | 2.8% | 89.0 | 4.5% | 75.4 | 20.8% | 89.0 |
| First Nine | 66.1% | 94.4 | 11.4% | 89.8 | 5.5% | 74.4 | 16.9% | 88.8 |
He’s pretty much stopped throwing the cutter. This isn’t just a PITCHf/x thing, Brooks Baseball agrees. By that site, he threw 50 cutters over the first four games, and only ten over the last four.
Given the shape and velocity of the pitch, Walker’s cutter is a true cut fastball, not some sort of baby slider masquerading as a fastball. Fastballs are usually your command pitch, so it might seem strange at first that Walker stopped throwing a fastball and suddenly had a lurch forward in walk rate. Well, the cutter is a little different from his four-seam fastball.
| Type | Count | Ball | Strike | Swing | Foul | Whiffs | GB% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Four-Seam | 1440 | 31.8% | 30.8% | 46.2% | 19.2% | 9.6% | 38.7% |
| Cutter | 223 | 44.4% | 21.5% | 42.6% | 17.9% | 9.0% | 37.1% |
First, you might notice the ball rate. There’s an easy line to be drawn from his decreased use of the cutter to disappearance of the walks. But let’s take the sanity check again. By replacing most of his cutters with fastballs, he should be getting more strike counts. But he didn’t replace all of his cutters with fastballs, only some.
In fact, if you take the ball rates of the different pitch mixes before and after the pitch mix change, there isn’t a huge change. His combined ball rate before the mix change was 35.4%. After the change? 34.5%. That’s not even four balls difference, overall. Not the reason he’s walking fewer.
Go back to the comparison of the cutter and the four-seam, though, and you’ll notice that there are other ways in which the four-seam is superior to the cutter. In fact, the four-seam is superior in all of the ways. It gets more ground balls, fewer walks, more whiffs, and more strikes. So kudos for making the switch.
Return to the first table, and you’ll see that there are two places where Walker really took a leap forward, even more than zone percentage.
His first-pitch strike rate went up, and maybe it’s been easier to get first-pitch strikes with that four-seamer. We know that first-pitch strike rate is the best walk rate peripheral, because it’s just so important to start off 0-1 instead of 1-0. Roughly 80% of the time over the last four starts, Walker has thrown that four-seamer, and nearly 70% of the time, he’s gotten a first-pitch strike. Going from 58% to 67% in that category brings Walker from around 90th among qualified starters to the top ten. That’s probably the biggest source of Walker’s improvement.
But there’s a little more to this, because command is not so simple. Walker’s out-of-zone swing rate (O-Swing%) went from 25% to 36%, a change that would bring Walker from the bottom five among qualified starters to the top ten. That’s even more impressive than his first-pitch strike improvement, and it’s also probably linked to the pitching mix change, since Walker’s four-seam has gotten reaches outside the zone 29% of the time compared to his cutter’s 23%.
So Walker probably didn’t change his ability to direct the ball over the last month. But he did improve his walk rate by focusing on two very simple things: getting strike one, and then making them reach. It’s really the best you can do if you don’t have great natural command.
With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
One should also argue that the first improvement implies the second. As being ahead in the count (as pitcher) leads to more chasing (by hitters).
Eno, you might want to ask Taijuan a question next time you have an opportunity. Does throwing the cutter effect his feel four his four-seam fastball?
Go to Brooksbaseball and pull up his zone profile for his fastball location pre and post May 29. You’ll see a dramatic change. Pre he had so many fastballs up and to the arm side. Post its almost exclusively low in the zone and he does a little better job going glove side low against lefties.
This has all happened, as you mentioned, while he basically scrapped the cutter (it might have just been because he faced so many lefties over the stretch)
This is really interesting. Allen Webster told me he threw his bad four seamer because it helps him command other pitches. So there is some interaction, command wise, between pitches.
While being obviously better, I feel this way about Chris Archer and his slider.
Command and control are different things, not to disagree with the thrust of your post in so many words. Taijuan Walker has not had, and does not especially have, good control. He can’t and shouldn’t nibble, and at this point in the career he can’t aim for and hit the corner’s black. When he throws with good rhythm, though, he does command the fastball to the part of the zone he is looking for most of the time; that is, if he’s throwing low, he’ll get the FB in the zone down. Not miss low, not center of the plate, but in the zone down. Same for up. Part of Walker’s improvement in recent games, to me watching him, is that the Mariners have accepted that he shouldn’t aim for the corners but should pitch to ‘thirds’ of the zone. Get it down, get it up, get it off the plate but near, get it on the inside part of the plate. Then, let his natural sink and deceptive velocity on the four-seamer just eat up the hitters. Walker has responded very well to this ‘just go after them’ approach. We hear all the time about “not being to fine” and that is the difference. Taijuan has commanded his FB to the part of the zone, and let the pitch quality get him his outs. He doesn’t need pinpoint control when hitters routinely swing right through his plus FB.
In particular, Walker’s four-seamer seems to have a reliable wrinkle of sink to it; not a big break but a wrinkle, and it’s led to a huge jump in his GB rate when pitching down in the zone. This increase in GBs has been more salient in his turnaround than anything except the drop in walks. Walker still does pitch with the FB up in the zone, but there’s a change there too. He was pitching mostly up with the FB. Now, the team’s pitching plan will move him from one part of the zone to another over several innings. Walker also gets most of his FB Ks up in the zone. So while the majority of his four-seamers are down, he’s routinely throwing with good effect up, just not continuously all game long.
The reduction in Walker’s cutter is a good idea for now. It’s velocity is too near his FB to be used often, 88 compared to sitting 94 (touching 97); there’s no separation. The cutter also has mostly a vertical break now with not much lateral tilt. He was working on a slower slider with more tilt in ST, but clearly it hasn’t firmed up as a pitch. The team wasn’t letting him use his cutter in the zone much, and understandably he wasn’t getting strikes with it, so he ended up in bad counts using it routinely in his repertoire. Furthermore, Walkers split-change-palmball is frequently a plus pitch, starting under the letters and diving at the plate. It unzips righthand batters thrown inside to them, but routinely snakes lefthand batters thrown off the plate against them. It’s just much better than the cutter.
Walker’s changing the grip on his CB, again; as we heard in comments from him over at Rotographs within the last week. he should really be using the CB more, but it’s not up to snuff. Walker is throwing 75-80% FBs at this point, which is very high, but it’s working. In the long run, we’ll want to see the frequency and sequencing of his breaking pitches increase, but frankly he doesn’t need them now, as long as he moves the FB around over the course of a game, and doesn’t always go to the same place when he needs an out.
The main thing is that the team simplified Walker’s pitching plan. Hit the zone area with the FB; get ahead; use the split-change to shift eye level or tease a whiff; go after the GB with the fastball with men on base. He’ll go down fir the FB for a GB or up for a K, so you can’t just sit on one or the other. The Mariners have also gotten Walker into an up-tempo rhythm on the mound which has done wonders for him commanding his pitches and maintaining focus. Walker will pitch a comparatively big game tomorrow against Houston after dominating them five days ago in Texas. It will be interesting to see how he goes about it, and how Houston adjusts. We’ll have a pretty good idea if two pitches and solid ‘command’ are good enough without any plus breaking pitches or especially great ‘control.’