The Eventual End of Jered Weaver

Let’s play a game. I’ll show you brief excerpts from Baseball Prospectus annual Jamie Moyer summaries, and you match them with the year. This is nothing against BP, of course. Everybody was always saying the same stuff. BP just happens to put everything in one convenient place, on Jamie Moyer’s player page. Off we go.

• “There may be no coming back from this.”
• “The end is near.”
• “He lives and dies with his control, and I expect him to be on life support by the end of his contract.”
• “As long as he keeps his control, he could pitch another three or four years at this level.”

The years, scrambled:

• 2000
• 2005
• 2001
• 1999

Go nuts! And then, when you’re finished, we can have a conversation about Jered Weaver.

Weaver just opened the season Monday, following a spring training in which he grew tired of answering questions about velocity. Which is entirely understandable — these questions have followed Weaver for years, and while it’s technically part of his job to deal with the media, that doesn’t mean he can’t occasionally voice his exasperation. Weaver has said time and time again that velocity isn’t important to him. For him, it’s all about mixing and location. He’s telling the truth and the numbers have mostly supported him. But I think it’s safe to say there are going to be more questions. These are fastballs. The word “fastballs” has “fast” in it.

Those images are kind of small. Let’s blow them up, shall we?

Monday afternoon, those weren’t unusual fastballs. Those were normal fastballs. According to the raw PITCHf/x data, Weaver threw but a single pitch north of 86 miles per hour. His heat mostly hovered around that line dividing the low-80s from the mid-80s, which qualifies it as heat that you’ve left out for a couple of hours. If Weaver’s fastball were actually that low, that would be a pretty significant drop.

At Brooks Baseball, on the other hand, calculations suggest that Weaver’s fastball was intact. By applying some corrections, those numbers indicate Weaver might not have really lost anything, but then, these calculations are also tricky so early in the year. There’s a chance the raw numbers aren’t being adjusted properly, which means it’s 2015 and we don’t know quite how hard Jered Weaver was actually throwing. Seemed particularly slow. Maybe wasn’t. We can still move forward.

Weaver’s defense is always that there’s more to pitching than throwing hard. And indeed, while his velocity has already been in decline, it’s not like it’s made a dramatic difference with regard to his contact rates:

Weaver’s best season is obvious, but it’s also something of an outlier. In 2010, Weaver struck out 26% of all batters. In no other year has he reached 22%. Nor has he ever fallen below 17%. So parts of his game have been mostly stable, yet we’re only describing the past. It stands to reason that, at some point, sinking velocity is no longer playable. Maybe Weaver can make it work at 87. Maybe he can make it work at 86, or 85. He’d be toast at, I don’t know, 50. And 60. And presumably 70. As the theory goes, diminishing velocity means a diminishing margin of error. When might Jered Weaver fall too far?

It’s helpful to try to find some precedent. Some other right-handed starting pitchers who’ve worked with particularly unremarkable fastballs. We’ll eliminate knuckleballers, of course. I went back to 2002 and decided to set an upper limit of 85mph for an average fastball. Weaver hasn’t officially dropped to this level yet, but there are warning signs, and he’s at least very close.

Obviously, there’s a small group of pitchers. Brian Lawrence is one of them, if you remember him. I see a lot of Livan Hernandez seasons, and some late-career John Burkett. Seeing the name “John Stephens” brought up some memories. The elephant in the sample: Greg Maddux. We have seven years of Maddux pitch data, over which his fastball averaged 84.7 miles per hour. He also rattled off more than 24 WAR. A righty starter can be quite good with a pedestrian fastball — he just needs to mix and locate like Greg Maddux. What’s the problem?

Weaver himself hinted at something, something simple but also informative:

“I’ve got to do a better job,” Weaver said. “A lot of pitches were up. I fell behind in counts. I had to pretty much battle the whole game.”

There’s more to the Jered Weaver story than his velocity. His fastball isn’t the only thing trending in the wrong direction. Following, Weaver’s rates of pitches thrown while ahead in the count, and, in parentheses, his MLB rank:

• 2010: 40.8% (5)
• 2011: 39.5% (11)
• 2012: 36.8% (54)
• 2013: 36.4% (73)
• 2014: 34.8% (99)
• [2015: 26.7%]

Weaver, at his peak, was always working ahead. Which was good for Weaver, as it’s good for any pitcher — hitters are more on the defensive, and more likely to swing at pitches in pitcher-friendly spots. As Weaver hasn’t worked ahead as often, the balance of power has shifted, and while the year-to-year shifts have been slight, taken together there are worrisome patterns. Weaver’s velocity is dropping, and he isn’t working ahead as much. Some of the latter might be due to the former, but it wouldn’t be a full explanation.

Simplified: Weaver’s margin of error is shrinking. When that happens for a pitcher, the key to compensating is by getting better about location. If anything, Weaver’s location is also getting a little worse. It was suggested in spring that Weaver was fighting his own mechanics a bit, since they’re unusually complicated. Maybe that was all nothing, but either his mechanics were off again Monday, or he was just really missing up and over the plate. There is a good version of Jered Weaver with a slow fastball, but we haven’t seen it in this brand-new regular season. And this fastball might well be slower than ever.

There’s no such thing as a soft-tosser who looks good in the highlights of a game like Monday’s. Weaver did just complete a spring with four walks and 23 strikeouts. And he’s definitely earned some benefit of the doubt. His fastball, though, might’ve lost another tick. And his command doesn’t seem to be taking strides forward. To quote another Moyer line that’s stuck with me for some reason for more than a decade:

As long as Jamie can hold it together, he’ll be outstanding, but the drop should be a hell of a toboggan ride.