The Astros Might Be the Perfect Team for Gerrit Cole
After a couple false starts earlier in the week, the Houston Astros finally acquired right-hander Gerrit Cole from the Pittsburgh Pirates last night. As Travis Sawchik notes, the deal makes sense for both teams: the re-tooling Pirates get a collection of useful players, all within close proximity to the majors; the Astros, meanwhile, receive two years of a pitcher with a great arm and history of success. It’s mutually beneficial.
There’s a third party that might benefit from the deal, however, and that’s Cole himself. He might be worth more in Houston than anywhere else.
As a major leaguer, Cole has been either good or really good in each of his five seasons. There’s always this sense, however, that the former No. 1 pick could be great. Earlier this week, Travis Sawchik proposed one way that Cole could perhaps unlock the remaining upside in his 27-year-old arm –namely, by throwing his fastball less. In this way, his move to the Astros represent an opportunity: not only is Cole’s secondary stuff ready for more action, but his new team is uniquely suited to help this adjustment along.
Sawchik rightly pointed out that Cole’s fastball is hard but also straight. If you stack his pitches up against the rest of the league, this pattern holds true for the hard stuff. But look at how his bendy pitches rank.
| Pitch | Spin | Horizontal | Vertical | Velocity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Four-Seam | 27 | 33 | 96 | |
| Curve | 74 | 79 | 37 | 76 |
| Sinker | 80 | 56 | 97 | |
| Slider | 42 | 55 | 87 | |
| Change | 38 | 60 | 46 |
Velocity is clearly a strength for Cole, who ranks in the top 10 for sinker velocity and averages over 96 on both fastballs. But you can see that his four-seam doesn’t have the ride or spin associated with the best four-seamers in the league.
Cole threw only one curve out of every 10 pitches in 2017, but that looks like a standout pitch by movement and velocity. High-spin curveballs do well by contact rate usually, so it’s weird to see that Cole’s curve had below average whiffs (9% against a league-average 12%) — especially since, with 140 pairings, he was third in baseball in pairing the four-seam with the curve last year. A high-spin curve after a low-spin fastball should produce the best outcomes, according to this preliminary investigation by Jeff Zimmerman.
| Situation | Called-Strike Rate | Swinging-Strike Rate |
|---|---|---|
| High Spin CB after High Spin FA | 10.0% | 12.5% |
| Low Spin CB after High Spin FA | 12.7% | 13.3% |
| High Spin CB after Low Spin FA | 11.3% | 16.1% |
| Low Spin CB after Low Spin FA | 12.8% | 14.0% |
Maybe by throwing more curveballs, Cole can reap the benefits produced by similar curve and fastball combos around the league. This is a nice looking pitch, after all.
The slider looks good based on above-average drop, especially for a pitch with that much giddyup. Cole, incidentally perhaps, threw that slider most often in his best season. The change looks like it could be average, but it used to have more drop when it got average whiffs in the past.
The most likely change for Cole is to throw fewer four-seamers, more sinkers, and more breaking balls. That would go with his strengths — by spin, movement, and velocity — and away from his weaknesses.
Conveniently, the Astros are all about this sort of change. Only four teams have thrown fewer four-seamers in the history of PITCHf/x technology, for example. This is a team that took Collin McHugh from the Rockies based on a high-spin curve and then encouraged him to throw more cutters than straight fastballs. They repeated the trick with Charlie Morton, at least by encouraging more curves than he’d ever thrown before.
The next breakout for Gerrit Cole might arrive by throwing more sinkers and high-spin breaking balls. The good news is, he’s now headed to a team that’s all about that sort of change. The defending champs just got better.
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.
Good Stuff.
Not good stuff. The trade has been obvious for months, Eno (typically) provides no new facts.
Douche.
I’m interested in this spin rate tunneling thing, have you seen other people writing about this?
Terrible deal for Pittsburgh.
I agree. The Pirates seem to have made a few negotiating mistakes in this ordeal. If the Astros think they could get more out of Cole than he has shown in PIT, then PIT should have been able to get a significantly better package for him from HOU than what other teams (NYY) were offering for this reason. And if it’s also true that PIT likes Colin Moran more than most other teams, they should have been able to use the fact that he was on the table and they like him a lot to get NYY to improve their offer. AND why were only two teams seriously in on Cole? He would be a potential fit for contenders like LAD, STL, COL, SF and MIN, and for rebuilding teams on the come up like ATL, MIL, and PHI. Why wasn’t there more of a bidding more for Cole? I refuse to believe that only two teams would have been seriously interested in Cole at the price of two young MLB relievers and two decent but not-Top 100 prospects.
Note that Cole wasn’t on the trade value list last year, due to two straight years that weren’t up to his prior peak, and due to having only two more controllable years. Compare that to Chris Sale who was at 21 last year and 15 the year before. And Dombrowski may be uniquely willing to give up big prospects. My point is, it’s easy to think of Cole as being really valuable, but all things considered, at this point he is closer to pretty valuable.
I’m not sure about the others, but the Dodgers are trying to cut payroll this year, and their rotation is pretty steady on top for now. I think they’re looking for more of a Wilmer Font type they can bet on.
That’s not how trades, or M&A, happen. The seller does not know the buyer’s internal value of the asset being acquired or their future plans for that asset.
What is known by all parties is historical performance which is primarily relied on to model future performance. Pittsburgh can’t sell Cole as a future 5 WAR player because the performance doesn’t suggest that.
The only way for the sellers to inflate the assets price is to get more buyers involved, at which you would find out who has the largest internal value projected for Cole, because they would be willing to pay up to that price.
In my negotiation experience, competition often makes bidders more emotional. People or negotiation teams enter a negotiation with a dispassionate value assessment, the bidding process makes them think what happens if I don’t get this deal…which can trigger emotional responses. Good negotiators keep that to a miminum and stick to their value based Zone of Potential Aggreemnt (ZOPA).
There’s lots with which I disagree here.
Regarding the return, it doesn’t match the facts to pin down Musgrove as a “reliever”. He’s made 25 major league starts over the past two seasons and was a starter all through the minors. He’s conceivably a decent starting pitcher with 5 years of remaining team control who needs to get his ERA and FIP as a starter down to his xFIP through some combination of simple regression and leaving Minute Maid.
As for other potential trade partners, who knows if any of those teams would offer more for Cole? When a player is very clearly mentioned for several weeks as being available in trade, it’s a good default assumption to think that any competent major league GM is doing his job and gotten a good sense of a player’s market by talking with multiple interested teams.
Going through some of these names, it’s dubious that any of ATL, MIL, or PHI see themselves in a spot where it makes sense to give up promising players with full (or nearly full) years of team control in exchange for two years of Cole. I don’t know that the Giants could put together a package this good for Cole, with a pretty poorly-ranked minor league system even before the trades for Longoria and McCutchen. Given that the Pirates almost simultaneously traded McCutchen to the Giants, I’d say that there’s a virtually 100% chance that the Pirates also had a very good sense of who the Giants would trade for Cole. Colorado is always going to be something of a wild card in paying up for starting pitchers because they need to think about how a pitcher will translate to Coors, both in terms of stuff and psychology.
I agree that the Dodgers and Cardinals are both on a logical short-list of teams that could have the interest and trade assets to acquire Cole, but I go back to the point of assuming that the Pirates’ front office people are reasonably competent and at least checking in on interest from any logical trade partner.
Many have noted Cole last year already threw less fastballs but more changeups. How does that factor into things? Does he already have the right idea but he’s throwing the wrong secondary pitch? Or is it that his fastball is so straight he needs to throw it even less?
The changeup doesn’t rank very well against other changeups. I think the fastball mix, and more breakers in general, would be the ticket.
If Astros get two great years out of Cole along with what Morton did in 2017, what does this do to the Legend of Searage?
Maybe prove that no pitching coach is the best fit for every pitcher.
Searage’s approach, from what I know, focused on sinkers and pitching inside. This may be an organizational philosophy and not just him too. So yeah, it might make sense that, depending on a pitcher’s arsenal, such an approach might work well for some and not others.
Right now, he’s thinking about what Musgrave and Feliz can do, not what Cole can do.
Looking at Brooks Baseball, his fastball looks the same as in 2015 when it wasn’t hit that well, but looking at his heat maps here I notice he’s throwing it lower in 2017 than 2015. Looks like it is harder to hit up. Heard that the flyball revolution allows better contact on lower pitches and the upper cut may be susceptible to higher FBs. He may need only to change the location of his fastballs. Added effect may be that higher fastballs hide his curveballs better.
Ya his exit velocity against on the lower quadrants of the plate was quite troubling last year. However with a low spin fastball he would need to be careful about peppering it on the upper part of the plate too since it doesn’t rise. Though with his velocity, it may not matter much.
Reading this just made me think how crazy good the Astros are right now. With them, the Dodgers, the Nationals, and Cleveland we really are in the era of the superteam. And that doesn’t even count if the Yankees get their infield settled, or the Cubs get their rotation straightened out.
One of the consequences of parity is that a lot of teams can convince themselves to do things without looking at the long term. A couple years later, a lot of the teams that tried to win are now rebuilding leading to a few super teams emerging. It isn’t surprising that a lot of the super teams are big market teams.
Or the Red Sox add J.D. Martinez.
I love the pitch percentiles table in the article. Very useful and insightful, presented in an easy-to-digest way. Is that a one-off put together just for this, or is this information easily available here on FG for all pitchers?
I run those a lot, but just for pieces. It might be an interesting addition to the player pages, though, huh?
Yes! Yes! A thousand times, YES!