The Guardians Have Yet Another Big League Starter in Gavin Williams

Among all 30 big league franchises, the Guardians have one of the richest recent histories of developing pitchers. Dating back to the days of CC Sabathia and Cliff Lee, Cleveland always seems to be churning out young pitching from a stockpile of talent acquired through the draft, international free agency, and the trade market. Coming into the 2023 season, the team’s rotation already featured four former Guardians draft picks — Shane Bieber, Aaron Civale, Zach Plesac, and Triston McKenzie — and the onslaught doesn’t show signs of stopping.

In April, the Guardians promoted a pair of top-100 prospects to their starting rotation in Logan Allen (No. 63 on The Board at the beginning of 2023) and Tanner Bibee (No. 74). In June, Gavin Williams (No. 76) made his big league debut. With Bieber, McKenzie, and Cal Quantrill missing time to injury and Civale traded to Tampa Bay at the deadline, a full 47 starts have gone to this trio of 24-year-old rookies – plus another 17 to less-highly touted prospects Peyton Battenfield, Hunter Gaddis, and Xzavion Curry:

Now, August hasn’t been too kind to the Guardians. The 2023 club’s playoff chances are dwindling from a recent peak of 32.2% on July 30 to just 8.1% today. They’re 5-9 on the month, thanks in part to a pair of back-to-back walk-off losses against the Rays last weekend. And the offense looks like the embodiment of nine tumbleweeds blowing through a dusty desert. The team has just six home runs this month; Josh Bell, who they dealt to Miami at the deadline, has five home runs on his own in August. The Guardians didn’t sell particularly aggressively at the deadline, but the reality is that this next month and a half is in large part about evaluating what they have in their clubhouse and what they need to add for 2024.

The bad news is that their offense is going to need some serious reinforcement. The good news is that with the addition of Allen, Bibee, and now Williams, the 2024 rotation could be among the deepest in baseball. Allen, whose strange changeup freaked Michael Baumann out – no, not that Michael Baumann – earlier this summer, has made 18 starts, posting a 3.33 ERA and 3.99 FIP in just under 100 innings. His Statcast percentile rankings have him right around average in terms of his batted ball profile. He’s had highs and lows to his debut season, but mostly he’s looked like a pretty league-average starter – not bad for a 24-year-old rookie left-hander.

Bibee’s introduction to the big leagues (in just his second pro season) has been even more impressive. Among the 88 pitchers with at least 100 innings, he ranks seventh with a 2.90 ERA and 19th with a 3.62 FIP. His 4.35 xFIP raises some red flags about a heavy fly ball rate, but he’s been able to miss barrels enough to keep those fly balls in the park to this point, and his ability to limit hard contact with an effective four-seamer/slider mix has yielded success thus far.

The 6-foot-6 Williams, who is scheduled to start tonight against the Tigers, was the latest of the three to reach the majors, debuting on June 21 in his second season in pro ball. After struggling a bit in two of his first three outings, he’s yet to allow more than two earned runs in any of his six starts since the All-Star break, posting a 1.80 ERA and 2.73 FIP, and allowing just one home run in 30 innings. Five of those six outings have come against teams that currently hold a playoff spot, including his last two: a 12-strikeout performance over seven scoreless innings vs. Toronto on August 7 and a 10-strikeout, one run outing last Saturday against the Rays at the Trop. His biggest challenge has been limiting walks, and he’s had serious trouble in this regard – his 9.9% walk rate has him in the 28th percentile – but the Guardians can hope that his 24-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio in his last two starts means he’s headed in the right direction there:

Ultimately, Williams has looked a lot like his fellow right-hander Bibee through his first 10 starts. Like Bibee, he attacks hitters with a hard four-seamer – at 95.7 mph on average, Williams’ is half a tick faster than Bibee’s, and runs another five inches as well. He also leans on it more heavily – while Bibee throws his heater just under half the time, Williams’ 58.7% fastball rate is the sixth-highest among starters who have thrown as many as 750 pitches. Both righties feature a slider as their main secondary offering – Bibee’s sweeping more than Williams’ – with a curveball and changeup rounding out their arsenals. Williams’ fastball is particularly appreciated by the PitchingBot and Stuff+ pitching models – PitchingBot grades it as the 11th-best fastball among starters this season at 64, while Stuff+ has it at 19th with a 114 grade:

About that four-seamer – with Williams’ large frame, he’s joined an elite class of pitchers with baseball’s longest average extensions. Williams releases his fastball an average of 7 feet and 6 inches from the rubber, over 12% of the way to the plate. Among pitchers who have thrown as many as 300 fastballs this season, the only pitchers matching that average extension are Alexis Díaz, Devin Williams, Tyler Glasnow, and Logan Gilbert. Decent fastball-throwing company, to be sure.

The result is that his four-seamer, which comes out of his hand at an average of 95.7 mph but has a shorter distance to travel to the plate than almost any other pitcher’s, requires hitters to react as if it were a 97.8 mph pitch, a 2.1 mph increase in perceived velocity. This is the fifth-biggest positive difference between perceived velocity and release speed, after Díaz, Williams, Gilbert, and Glasnow. (Devan Fink wrote about this relationship between extension and added velocity back in 2021.)

Williams’ and Bibee’s similar toolkits have produced similar results to this point. Among pitchers with as many as 50 innings as a starter, Williams’ 2.80 ERA ranks eighth, while his 3.61 FIP is 29th and his 4.16 xFIP is just above average. He too has been more reliant on fly balls than xFIP would like him to be, but keeping the contact soft on those fly balls has been one of the keys to outperforming his xFIP, a pattern that’s persisted at each level of his pro career, short as some of those stints have been.

Across the majors this season, balls hit with a launch angle between 30 and 50 degrees have a .568 SLG and .301 wOBA. Williams’ pitches hit in this range have yielded just a .379 slugging and a .205 wOBA. And that’s not because he’s coming in under his expected outcomes in that range – based on the quality of contact, the .379 SLG is actually quite a bit higher than his .335 xSLG, while the .205 wOBA is dead on. He’s getting hit in the air a lot, but he’s not getting hit hard in the air.

He’s been able to keep the hard contact – which he limits well in the first place – on the ground, where it will do less damage. While his overall fly ball rate is north of 40%, just 12 of his 49 hard-hit balls (24.5%) have been fly balls. His fastball has been particularly effective in this regard – just five of 31 (16.1%) fastballs hit at 95 mph or greater have been in fly ball range.

Now, this is an early look, and it’s always risky to put too much stock in how any particular 10 games have gone. As Eric Longenhagen pointed out in his writeup on Williams earlier this year, the big righty has a history with injury, including some concerning back issues dating back to his time at ECU, and that history could rear its ugly head at any point. But while the walks and fly balls are a bit worrying, there’s plenty to like from this first stretch. He’s getting healthy swing-and-miss rates north of 28% from three of his four pitches (all but the changeup), and his average exit velocity, hard-hit percentage, and barrel percentage are all at or above the 74th percentile. If he’s able to stay healthy, he should have a decent big league career ahead of him. If he can continue to fool hitters this effectively, it could be that much better.

Since the All-Star break, Guardians starters – without Bieber, McKenzie, or Quantrill – lead baseball by over half a run in ERA and rank third in opponent average and slugging, fifth in wOBA, ninth in FIP, and an amazing 26th in xFIP. Part of that disparity may be the offensive vacuum that Progressive Field has become – it’s 2023 park factor is the lowest in the league – but part of it seems to be the limited damage the rotation has seen on fly balls as a group. In that time, they’ve had the third-highest fly ball rate in baseball and the lowest HR/FB ratio. There’s an element of luck in that – a high-flying starting pitching group is a bit of a trapeze act – but there’s also something to be said for their collective ability to limit quality contact in the air. As a group, they’ve also had the lowest barrel rate and second-lowest hard-hit rate on fly balls.

The fact that Allen, Bibee, and Williams have managed as well as they have through a season wrought with pitching injuries should make Cleveland fans feel pretty comfortable with the rotation options they’ll have going into 2024. A single 24-year-old top-100 pitching prospect flying through the minors and having this level of success at the big league level would make any team excited for their future. These Guardians have three.