There Are Better Things to Be Than Interesting

Last week, I published in rapid succession articles exploring the fascinating seasons of Spencer Strider (sort of) and Blake Snell. Both pitchers then went out and had outlier performances in their respective ensuing starts; Strider recorded 12 of his first 15 outs by strikeout, and Snell walked seven in just five innings but allowed merely a single run. So I joked on Twitter (I’m not using the new name, it’s silly) that if anyone wanted a pitcher to become newsworthy, pass along a name and I’d write about him.

The best kind of joke is the kind that lets you outsource coming up with ideas for posts, and sure enough, I encountered a reply that caught my attention.

Someone may have done it already, but Bailey Ober is pretty interesting in how uninteresting he is. Pretty much a lock for a quality start every time he pitches; nothing more, nothing less

— charlie (@stupidtwinsfan) July 20, 2023

You’re selling yourself short with your handle there, Charlie. You bring up a fascinating point.

I tried to express this sentiment in terms of quality starts, but while Bailey Ober is in double digits with 11, he’s a ways off of the league lead. Besides, a quality start encompass exceptionally good starts as well, which we don’t want.

What defines Ober is his ability to pitch far into starts without pitching too far. By which I mean that in 20 of his past 21 starts, dating back almost 14 months, he’s faced no fewer than 19 batters but no more than 24. He’s faced exactly 24 batters seven times so far this season, which is three off the all-time record with two months to go. You can do it, Bailey, I believe in you!

But the best way I found to express Ober’s consistency is through a Stathead search worthy of Cespedes Family BBQ’s hall of overly specific and/or arbitrary stats. The Twins righty is on a run of 17 consecutive starts, dating back to his last outing of 2022, in which he has thrown at least five innings but no more than seven, with no more than eight strikeouts and no more than four runs allowed. (And he was hard done by on that four runs allowed count, as he has allowed four runs in just two of those 17 starts, and one of those instances involved an unearned run that scored after he left the game.)

Anyway, Ober is on a run of 17 such starts right now. Nobody else in major league history has strung together more than eight. That’s a truly risible margin. But wait, there’s more. The outing before this streak started, Ober struck out 10 in 7 1/3 innings. So really, if he had been a little bit worse, every start he’s made dating back to last June 1 would’ve fit the bill.

If Bailey Ober is the Babe Ruth of throwing five or more innings but not more than seven while allowing no more than four runs and striking out no more than eight, Jon Lester and Tim Redding are his Gavvy Cravath and Roger Connor.

Leaving aside the idea that something or someone can be remarkable for being sufficiently unremarkable, Ober is, in fact, exceptional in a few areas. Those attributes — 99th percentile extension, 93rd percentile walk rate, a plus-10 run value on his changeup — just aren’t as attention-grabbing as triple-digit fastball velo or a strikeout rate in the mid-30s. (Ober even went to College of Charleston, the most normal of the four colleges on the South Carolina coast that sponsor Division I baseball.)

I can feel you yawning. People love racing cars. They’re fast, they look cool, they make an exciting noise. But our society is built on diesels, the big, slow, reliable engines in trucks and trains. Ober is a diesel, and he’s been just as foundational to the Twins. He’s also big: 6-foot-9, 260 pounds, which explains the outlier extension. That late release helps his otherwise unremarkable fastball velocity play up a little, and I also suspect it allows him to do something truly fascinating.

I think Ober is secretly a wizard. Let me explain.

Ober doesn’t have anything like huge swing-and-miss stuff — the disappearing slider, the knee-locking curve, the changeup with concrete stockings. Okay, that’s not entirely fair; Ober’s changeup is pretty nasty.

But on the whole, his whiff rate is just a tick above league average. Apart from above-average lateral movement on both his slider and changeup, there isn’t much to suggest a dominant starter in terms of stuff. More than that, Ober doesn’t throw many strikes; less than half his pitches are in the zone. But he doesn’t walk anyone, because hitters don’t care if a pitch is out of the zone when Ober throws it; they swing at it anyway.

And he doesn’t even get that many whiffs when hitters do chase pitches. The best pitchers in the game at turning balls into swinging strikes — Strider, Snell, Shohei Ohtani — have an O-Contact rate about two-thirds what Ober is running. And while hitters tend to make weak contact out of the zone against him, they don’t make especially weak contact. His opponent wOBA on swings outside the zone is 110th out of 180 pitchers with at least 50 PA meeting those criteria. On contact outside the zone, his wOBA is 59th-best out of 82 pitchers with at least 50 PA meeting those criteria. Nevertheless, even if he’s doing about 10 points of wOBA worse than average, he’s still faring better than he would be if opponents weren’t chasing those pitches.

Let’s get reductive as possible for a minute. In baseball, the pitcher puts the ball in one of two places — inside the strike zone or out — and the hitter chooses what to do with it: swing or take. Hitters have to figure out where the ball is and do as much damage as they can when they guess right — pitchers, the opposite.

Here’s that last paragraph, in table form:

(The vestigial league-wide wOBA on pitches taken within the strike zone is the result of a couple hundred blown ball-strike calls that resulted in walks.)

Because hitters apparently think the strike zone changes location when Ober takes the mound, he’s got more pitches in the bottom left quadrant and fewer in the bottom right (both good for him) than the league in general. He’s throwing more pitches in the top left quadrant — swings on pitches within the zone — but that’s the one region among these four in which he’s outperforming the league by a significant margin.

This is not how I would’ve written about a more spectacular pitcher, all full of GIFs and breathless figurative language. But consider that fun fact about Ober’s streak of being pretty solid through the following lens: This is an era of 13-man pitching staffs that are really more like 20-man pitching staffs when you think about the constant churn of injuries and quad-A guys who get shuffled in and out of the bullpen to clean up excess innings like a catfish at the bottom of a tank. This is an era of swings and misses, not just at the plate but in player development; today’s no. 2 starter is tomorrow’s DFA.

What would it be worth to a team, then, to have a starting pitcher who went more than a full calendar year without having a bad start? Without even having a particularly short start, even? Quite a lot, I suspect. There are, it seems, better things to be than interesting.