The New and Improved Corbin Burnes, Now With More Pitches per Start!

This Wednesday, Corbin Burnes had a forgettable start. In six innings, he allowed four runs and struck out five while walking none. The scoring came courtesy of two home runs, a three-run shot by Austin Riley and a solo homer by Marcell Ozuna. Burnes lasted six innings, and while the Brewers ended up winning the game 7-6 in extras, it wasn’t exactly the kind of start you expect from the defending NL Cy Young winner.

Last year, Burnes was downright electric en route to winning the award. He led the NL in ERA at 2.43, and his ERA was significantly higher than his 1.63 FIP. He struck out 35.6% of the batters he faced while walking only 5.2%. He did it in only 28 starts and 167 innings, which raised questions about the trade-off between transcendent pitching and bulk innings.

If you only looked at his first and most recent starts of 2022, you might think the same thing was happening again. You’ve already heard about the most recent one; in his first start, he went five innings against the Cubs, allowed three earned runs, and struck out only four while walking three. Sure, the runs were uncharacteristic, but five and six inning starts? We’ve seen that before.

Even with those two clunkers comprising 25% of his starts, Burnes has been great. He sports a 2.26 ERA, ninth-lowest in the majors. He’s been homer-prone – his 17.8% HR/FB rate is nearly triple last year’s rate – but that’s about the only blemish on his rate statistics. He’s striking out more than 30% of his opponents again, and his walk rate has actually declined, to a minuscule 4.1%. By various advanced ERA estimators, his underlying performance has been spectacular; he has the fourth-lowest xFIP and second-lowest SIERA in the majors. Even xERA, which looks at raw batted ball results and thus assigns him plenty of blame for his home runs, thinks he’s 20th-best in baseball.

We get it, we get it. Burnes is one of the best pitchers in baseball on a per-batter basis. He has a strong argument to being the best, period. Since the start of 2020, he has a 2.33 ERA, far ahead of second place Walker Buehler (Jacob deGrom hasn’t pitched enough innings to make the list, or he’d be ahead of Burnes). His FIP (2.05) is nearly three quarters of a run better than Kevin Gausman’s. It’s not a fluky home run rate thing, either; he has a 2.50 xFIP, the only starter in baseball below 3.00 over that span. The same is true of his SIERA (2.69). His 35.1% strikeout rate is the best among starters by 2.6 percentage points. His 6% walk rate is 11th in baseball, and he’s improving there; his 4.9% rate since the start of 2021 trails only Nathan Eovaldi.

So are we setting up for another year of tired arguments about bulk innings versus pure excellence? Not so fast, my friend. Guess who leads baseball in innings pitched this year?

Hilarious! Burnes has now added durability to his long list of incredible talents. He’s pitched into the seventh inning in five of his eight starts, the most starts of more than six innings in the majors, one ahead of a pile of guys (Justin Verlander, Miles Mikolas, the aforementioned Gausman, Gerrit Cole) you probably think of as workhorses.

Only Verlander, Mikolas, and Gausman have thrown more pitches from the start of the seventh inning onwards. Only Robbie Ray has thrown more pitches his third time through the order. Burnes is already 40% of the way to last year’s total of pitches thrown in the seventh or later – again, in a season where he won the Cy Young! – and he’s only made eight starts.

The tale of the tape between the two years is fascinating:

Burnes is facing an extra batter per start and throwing an extra six pitches. He’s turning that into an extra half-inning, largely because he’s allowing fewer hits, making for more efficient innings. Maybe that will continue, but likely not – I doubt hitters will post a .235 BABIP against him all year. But more importantly, he’s working deeper into games in a year where starters in general are throwing fewer innings than ever. He’s in a four-way tie for most starts of 100 pitches or more – that’s three this year after only six all of last year.

I’m not sure that Burnes is doing anything specific to try to get more juice out of his outings. He’s not suddenly attacking the zone when he gets to an 0-2 count, or even a 1-2 count; his zone rate is down from last year in both counts. He’s throwing fastballs at the same rate he did last year when he gets ahead, not that it matters that much for him; his primary fastball, a soul-stealing cutter, still misses bats like most pitchers’ secondary offerings.

Still, facing an extra batter and averaging six more pitches per start is no joke. That 98.5 pitches? It leads baseball in pitches per start. Everyone is throwing fewer pitches this year – with an abbreviated spring training, no one was up to speed to start the season, and we’re still only in May. But even if we compare it to a regular season, 98.5 pitches per start would have been good enough for fifth in baseball last year.

If Burnes follows last year’s pattern, the number will go up from here; he was only averaging 86.3 pitches per start at this point last year. Some of that was because he missed two starts after testing positive for COVID-19 and needed time to ramp up, but even if we look at his first half overall, he averaged only 91 pitches per start before kicking it up to 95 in the second half.

In other words, it looks like Burnes might be taking the next step in his ace-dom: extending his absolute dominance across longer outings. I’m hesitant to say that the Brewers will push him any further – so far this year, his cutter is down roughly half a tick from pitch 90 of an outing onwards, which suggests he might be tiring in general by then – but who knows, maybe he’ll just get stronger as the year goes on the same way he did last year.

In fact, the only thing that stops Burnes from topping every leaderboard imaginable so far this year is the home runs he’s surrendered. Could that pesky high home run rate derail Burnes’s third straight ludicrous year? I don’t think so, at least not entirely.

As I recently covered, pitchers don’t have a ton of control over the rate at which they surrender barrels. Burnes did phenomenally well there last year – he had the lowest barrel rate in all of baseball. This year, he’s in the 26th percentile. Neither of those represents his true skill; that’s just not how pitcher barrel rates work.

On the other hand, one way you can give up louder contact is by allowing more balls in the air, and Burnes has done that this year, with the lowest GB/FB ratio of his career. He still gets more grounders than average — not throwing a four-seam fastball helps with that — but nonetheless, opponents are elevating more consistently against him so far in 2022. That’s mostly to the good – it’s easier to run a low BABIP in this year of low home run rates if you force your opponents to put the ball in the air – but so far Brewers opponents have managed to get those balls out of the park.

Aside from the fact that he really has surrendered those homers, though, there’s nothing in the underlying data that makes me worry Burnes will be homer-prone going forward. In 2019, when he had a gruesome HR/FB rate of 38.6%, he kept leaving flat fastballs right down the middle, but that’s not the case this year. He’s clipping the corners just as frequently as he did last year and avoiding the heart of the plate just as adroitly. His curveball has changed shape slightly – it’s harder and has less dip – but given that he hasn’t given up any home runs on curveballs, that’s probably not what’s ailing him.

More likely, it’s just the vagaries of the fact that the season has barely been going for a month. I don’t think Burnes is going to have a historically great home run suppression season again, but I assume he’s pretty close to average in that department. And if that’s the case, then basically everything I said before will hold: Burnes will be one of the best few starters in baseball per inning pitched, perhaps the best. And now, that’s coming with more innings. Sounds like a pretty good combination to me.