The Blue Jays’ Version of Wade Davis

Often times there is a fine line between framing a piece of information as analysis and framing it as a “fun fact.” If I were to point out, for example, that Clayton Kershaw’s ages 24-26 seasons rank 12th all time in WAR and that names like Cy Young, Pedro Martinez, Johan Santana, and Roy Halladay are in the same range, you could construe that as analysis. I am putting a player’s performance in historical context and implying that he’s on his way to a plaque in Cooperstown.

I could even point out that Tim Lincecum appears slightly below Kershaw on the list to warn the reader that this information about Kershaw is not a guarantee about his future. All of that is useful analytical information.

If, on the other hand, I pointed out that control-pitchers Adam Wainwright and Rick Porcello were in the top 12 in intentional walks in 2014, I’m just calling attention to something that is interesting rather than particularly useful. If we’re being precise, there’s probably no such thing as meaningless data, but there’s a big gap between something like comparing Kershaw’s same age seasons to others in history and calling out a tidbit of information that we might find noteworthy.

It’s a trade-off we deal with a lot when discussing the game on Twitter because there’s no room for context or tone in 140 characters. I might want to share a fun fact, but it’s sometimes difficult to convey that I, as the author, know the fact doesn’t carry real meaning. This post started as a fun fact, but might actually wind up offering some useful information for the analytically minded baseball fan.

There are three pitchers who threw at least 50 innings in both 2013 and 2014 who decreased their PITCHf/x contact rate by double digits. The biggest decline (or gain, if you prefer) is going to make all kinds of sense. It’s Wade Davis. Davis had an ERA of 1.00 and was worth 3.1 WAR in 72 innings after being something between unremarkable and bad in 135 innings of work in multiple roles in 2013.

Everyone knows Davis had an amazing season after moving back to the bullpen, so it lines up with our expectations that he prevented contact at a much better rate in 2014. The other two names, however, are where this teeters on the edge of fun fact/meaningful.

Player	2013 Contact%	2014 Contact%	Difference
Wade Davis	82.8	69.1	13.7
Brett Cecil	72.9	62.1	10.8
Randall Delgado	81.3	70.6	10.7

Delgado’s contact rate gains play along with the Wade Davis, better as a reliever narrative we often weave together. It’s not odd to observe pitchers who are asked to shift from long outings to short sprints augment their game in a way that makes them more difficult to hit. Delgado underwent a nearly identical contact rate transformation as Davis, but he failed to find any BABIP fortune and had the small problem of walking four batters per nine innings.

But Delgado went to the bullpen full-time and became more difficult to hit. He isn’t Wade Davis, but it’s an outcome that tracks with what we expect to happen. He threw more fastballs and he threw them harder. The kinds of pitchers who might have big drops in contact rate are guys with some raw ability who get sent to the pen, so this is a nice and tidy story so far.

And then there’s Brett Cecil, whose 2013 to 2014 changes present us with one heck of a puzzle.

Here’s what we can say about Cecil’s year to year shifts. He pitched exclusively out of the pen for the same team in both seasons. He shaved one tenth of a run off his ERA and about half a run off his FIP and xFIP. Factor in seven fewer innings and you’re looking at something around one win above replacement for each season. Looking only at the outcomes, he was a little better a little less often.

Yet the internal components that produced those outcomes stop you in your tracks. Let’s review. Cecil increased his strikeout rate by 4.5% and his walk rate by 2.3%. He cut his home run rate, but his BABIP skyrocketed from .267 to .344, perhaps due to a 4.6% jump in line drive rate (classification caveats apply).

Cecil’s intriguing on two fronts. First of all, he’s allowing much less contact, but it seems like the contact he is allowing is sharper. Opponents are hitting more line drives and reaching base more often on balls in play, although when you’re talking about 53 innings there’s only so much you can read into either number. Less contact, but harder contact. Or so it seems from our vantage point if we had to guess.

In fact, among pitchers who threw at least 30 innings in 2014, only Aroldis Chapman had a better contact rate than Cecil. While there is a relationship between contact rate and BABIP, pitchers like Kenley Jansen, Will Smith, and Jake Diekman all had .350 BABIPs or higher with a contact rate under 70%, so it’s not as if this is an unbelievable combination.

The other intriguing piece of this is that Cecil generated this contact rate drop without the benefit of the starter to reliever transition. Maybe we can explain the BABIP thing away with sample size, but how did Cecil wind up slicing 10.8% off his already impressive 72.9% contact rate in 2013? That’s the really interesting part about this for me and it’s what will determine if we’ve landed on a fun fact or something meaningful.

Immediately, scanning his player page on the site offers one seemingly important finding. His contact rate decline is almost exclusively regarding pitches outside the strike zone.

Year	O-Swing%	Z-Swing%	O-Contact%	Z-Contact%
2013	28.2	59.0	49.6	83.8
2014	35.6	55.8	36.1	81.1

Cecil is getting batters to swing much more frequently at pitches outside the strike zone and they are making contact much less often when they do. This leads us to search for an explanation and that search turns up two related items.

First, this is really about Brett Cecil against right-handed batters given that his wOBA against lefties was worse in 2014 than in 2013 and his strikeout rate against lefties decreased as well (using Baseball-Savant vs RHH now, so very slight differences in data):

Year vs RHH	TBF	K%	wOBA	O-Contact%	Z-Contact%	Contact%
2013	127	27.6	0.322	54.8	85.0	71.4
2014	143	35.7	0.255	42.4	79.1	59.2

Cecil is very good against lefties but he found a way to get righties to miss in 2014, perhaps because he featured his curveball much more often, against everyone and against righties:

There’s no telling exactly how much of his contact rate decline was simply random variation and how much was a direct result of his new approach against right-handed hitters, but it certainly appears as if that has to be a major factor in this and probably means we’re beyond fun fact territory.

Cecil might be one of the game’s most under-appreciated relief pitchers thanks to his mediocre record as a starter and his lack of closing credentials, but his 2014 was also really interesting because he found a way to chop a huge amount off his contact rate without the starter-to-reliever bump.

Pitching is complicated and how hitters react to changes in a pitcher’s game is also complicated, so we can’t say that Cecil’s new curveballing efforts are going to sustain him as one of the game’s best dozen relievers, but we can feel pretty confident that his place among the contact rate gainers was legitimate (one standard deviation of contact rate change is 3.5% in this sample).

Cecil didn’t have a Wade Davis year, but if you put as much stock in contact rate as a lot of leading analysts do, you have to be bullish about the 28 year old southpaw. Even with some expected regression toward the mean, you’re looking at a left-handed reliever who seems to have developed a way to limited right-handed contact.

Plenty of people are talking about the Blue Jays’ search for bullpen upgrades after their otherwise impressive offseason, but if they are looking to construct a relief corps for 2015 in the image of last year’s Royals, they might already have a reasonable Wade Davis approximation.