The Unusually Compelling Kyle Gibson: Just a Tweak Away?

Kyle Gibson?”

That was the first comment from my piece, yesterday, on Francisco Liriano, who embodies a league-wide trend of pitchers subtly altering their approach and hitters seemingly failing to adjust. You see, Gibson’s name was twice invoked in a group of unique pitchers, and, given the context of the groups, Gibson stuck out as something of a stranger in the room.

The first group looked like this:

OK, then.

The second group looked like this:

The second group is less illustrious than the first, but Gibson finds himself surrounded by some impressive company regardless. The first group, the distinguished group, is made up of the pitchers who most often got batters to chase pitches out of the zone in 2015. The second group is made up of the pitchers who worked out of the zone most often in 2015.

So, you’ve got Kyle Gibson, here, in both these groups, throwing pitches outside the strike zone all day long and getting batters to chase at them like Carrasco, and deGrom, and Kluber, and Scherzer. And you’ve got Kyle Gibson, here, who had one of the lower strikeout rates in baseball last year, and has K’ed fewer than six batters per nine innings over the course of his career, while his chase-inducing contemporaries like Carrasco, and deGrom, and Kluber, and Scherzer are striking out 10 batters per nine and overpowering lineups across the major league.

What gives? Where are all of Kyle Gibson’s whiffs? He already turned himself into a solid pitcher, a three-win pitcher, last season, racking up nearly 200 innings with an ERA, FIP, and xFIP all under 4.00. He’s proven himself as a quality arm. Take a quality arm and add some extra strikeouts, and you’ve got a dominant arm. And it seems like he should be getting those extra strikeouts. Yet, here we are.

The first piece of the puzzle is this: Gibson actually does get his whiffs. He got a swinging strike on nearly one of every 10 pitches last year (9.8%), which is slightly better than the league average (9.3%). Swinging-strike rate is strongly correlated with actual strikeouts, with whiffs explaining about 85% of a pitcher’s strikeout rate. Gibson got his whiffs, they just didn’t result in strikeouts.

Part of the gap could be explained by random variance; maybe Gibson got an unusual amount of his swinging strikes in non-two strike counts, and just struggled to put hitters away for whatever reason, whether it be his two-strike approach or just random sequencing. The other reason for the gap, perhaps the more substantial reason, is that Gibson threw more than two-thirds of his starts to catcher Kurt Suzuki, who has graded as one of the worst pitch framers in the game, last year being no exception. The effect that has on Gibson, with regard to his strikeouts, is that Gibson had one of the lowest called strikeout rates among all qualified starters last year. Maybe Gibson was doing his part, and the gap between his above-average whiffs and his below-average strikeouts has more to do with Gibson’s catcher than Gibson himself? The Twins picked up JR Murphy in the offseason, who should cut into Suzuki’s playing time, and while Murphy hasn’t graded as a plus receiver, he’s been just slightly below average — decidedly an upgrade over Suzuki, at least in the receiving department.

Could be that Gibson stands to be the beneficiary of more called strikeouts, moving forward. Could be that it’s got something to do with Gibson’s arsenal, too. Gibson’s probably still something of an unknown commodity to the general public, so let’s make use of some player comps to better understand who he is as a pitcher.

What brought our attention to Gibson was his approach, namely his tendencies to work out of the zone and get batters to chase. Using z-scores, I aimed to find qualified starters within a standard deviation of Gibson’s approach in these two categories (Zone% and O-Swing%). Turns out, unsurprisingly, that Gibson is extremely unique in this regard. There are only two real comps to Gibson through this lens:

Kyle Gibson’s Zone% and Chase% Comps
Name O-Swing% Zone%
Kyle Gibson 36.5% 39.8%
Francisco Liriano 33.3% 39.2%
Dallas Keuchel 32.4% 40.1%
SOURCE: PITCHf/x

Liriano’s appearance comes as no surprise, since he’s who led us down this rabbit hole in the first place, and the other comp is highly encouraging for Gibson, given that whole Cy Young Award thing. But a key difference that separates Gibson from his top two approach-comps becomes very apparent when you consider what happens on those pitches that batters chase outside the zone:

Kyle Gibson Comps, Pt. 2
Name O-Swing% Zone% O-Contact%
Kyle Gibson 36.5% 39.8% 65.2%
Francisco Liriano 33.3% 39.2% 46.9%
Dallas Keuchel 32.4% 40.1% 59.3%
SOURCE: PITCHf/x

Gibson may get batters to expand the zone, but he’s getting way too much contact when they do. What do we make of this? Could have something to do with Liriano and Keuchel each being lefties, and Gibson being a righty. Could have something to do with Gibson being unusually tall for a pitcher — 6-foot-6 — and maybe for that reason, or any other number of reasons, Gibson simply lacks the deception necessary to be truly above-average in generating whiffs and strikeouts.

One last thing to consider: the pitches themselves. The slider certainly isn’t the problem. The slider had one of the best whiff rates by a starter in baseball last year, right there with Keuchel and Gerrit Cole, and compares favorably in velocity and shape to Masahiro Tanaka’s. The slider is nasty:

The sinker and the changeup, then? I’m going to steal Jeff Sullivan’s pitch comp idea from last offseason and apply it to Gibson’s two other primary offerings:

Kyle Gibson’s Sinker Comps
Player Velo H Mov V Mov Swing% Whiff% GB% Foul%
Kyle Gibson 92.3 8.1 6.5 46% 10% 62% 41%
Johnny Cueto 93.0 8.5 6.8 51% 13% 58% 41%
Chase Anderson 92.3 7.8 7.3 49% 9% 49% 42%
Anthony DeSclafani 93.0 8.5 6.1 50% 9% 54% 43%
Jesse Chavez 92.1 7.8 7.4 35% 8% 53% 38%
AVERAGE 92.5 8.1 6.8 46% 10% 55% 41%
SOURCE: PITCHf/x

Gibson’s got four significant comps on the sinker, the closest of which is promising, in Cueto. Cueto’s tough, though, as he’s one of those pitchers whose whole is greater than the sum of his parts; Cueto’s success is derived from pitchability moreso than stuff. Gibson’s whiff rate on the sinker is a standard deviation worse than league average, and so is the group — and the group’s numbers are perhaps propped up by Cueto.

How about the change?

Kyle Gibson’s Changeup Comps
Player Velo H Mov V Mov Swing% Whiff% GB% Foul%
Kyle Gibson 84.3 8.3 3.3 58% 32% 63% 36%
Jerome Williams 84.2 7.8 3.5 57% 34% 49% 31%
Adam Warren 84.9 8.5 3.7 50% 26% 47% 34%
Jesse Chavez 85.2 8.4 3.7 52% 25% 57% 27%
AVERAGE 84.6 8.3 3.5 54% 29% 54% 32%
SOURCE: PITCHf/x

Again, it’s not a particularly encouraging group, and this one doesn’t have a Cueto. And, again, it’s not a group that gets many whiffs — they’re below average, as a whole.

These comps reveal a few things. For one, in terms of just velocity and shape, Gibson doesn’t appear to have a strikeout arsenal. The slider is a solid out pitch, but it’s not backed up by much. Secondly, Gibson gets a ton of ground balls. He does pitch for the Twins, and maybe it all just comes down to approach. The third thing that stuck out to me, and maybe this doesn’t matter, but Gibson’s changeup had a top-five foul-ball rate last year. Perhaps foul balls indicate that Gibson is almost getting batters to whiff, and that a little extra movement or a little better command is the missing key? I’m just spitballing at this point.

Kyle Gibson is entirely more fascinating than I’d previously thought. He’s good, already. But he seems tantalizingly close to being more than that. He gets batters to chase like some of the best pitchers in the game. He’s got an above-average whiff rate, just without the strikeouts. He pitches exactly like the right-handed version of Francisco Liriano and Dallas Keuchel, just without the results. He’s got a nasty slider, just without the other pitches to back it up. Seems like he’s probably just a durable ground baller, the kind of innings-eater with a high floor, but not enough stuff to add strikeouts to the mix and reach the ceiling of a true front-line starter. Then again, that’s what we thought about Keuchel a couple years ago.





August used to cover the Indians for MLB and ohio.com, but now he's here and thinks writing these in the third person is weird. So you can reach me on Twitter @AugustFG_ or e-mail at august.fagerstrom@fangraphs.com.

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brat0029
8 years ago

From watching a lot of his games last year, I thought two things – he struggled early in the season in cold weather and he had tough outings when the ump wouldn’t give him the low strike call.

I wonder if his pitch sequencing has something to do with this. He seemed to get a lot of two strike counts and then throw a soft sinker that the batter would pound into the ground for an easy out. Did one pitch get more ground balls than others (probably the sinker) and did he throw that pitch more with two strikes than he did the slider?