Trevor May Be Worth Watching

We continue to find ourselves very much within the “it’s too early to care about this statistic” period of the 2016 Major League Baseball season. Does your favorite player have a good WAR? How’s that young starter’s ERA? These are some examples of questions you probably shouldn’t be asking after 25 days. The data isn’t really more or less relevant than any other 20-game stretch; it’s just awfully hard to find meaningful patterns within any set of 20 games.

This is especially true for relief pitchers who have generally thrown seven to 10 innings at this point in the season. Unless a guy’s stuff is noticeably different or they appear injured, you’re simply not going to be able to use this early-season data to update your player evaluations in a significant way. What you can do during the early days of a new season is look for harbingers of change. Basically, is a player trying something new? A few weeks is enough to notice things, even if it isn’t enough time to speak forcefully about their likely impact.

With the appropriate amount of skepticism attached, let’s notice a thing about Minnesota Twins pitcher Trevor May.

Before diving into the thing we’re going to notice, a quick summary of his basic statistics, from 2014 through what little has been played of the 2016 season.

The big thing you’ll notice is the strikeout spike, from a previous high of 22.4% to 36.0% in 2016. He’s faced just 50 batters, so this isn’t exactly definitive, but it does catch your attention. Of course, May started 2015 in the rotation and moved to the bullpen in July, so it might be worth comparing his 2015 numbers as a relief pitcher to his 2016 numbers:

He certainly performed better as a reliever than as a starter in 2015, but there’s still a big difference in his strikeout rate even after you cut out his time in the rotation. Again, this is merely about raising an eyebrow. The increased strikeout rate isn’t terribly compelling on its own, but it does push you to look a little deeper. And if you do so, you find this.

May is allowing contact at a much lower rate in 2016 than he has in previous years, and that’s true if you look at his full season in 2015 or if you look at his season from July 6 forward, after which he made just one start. Batters are having a more difficult time putting the bat on the ball against May this year. If you combine that with the high strikeout rate and good results, it’s easy to build a narrative of May’s emergence into a powerhouse reliever.

But it’s probably even too early to tell this story using contact rate. After all, May has thrown just over 200 pitches this season and no right-thinking person would dream of developing an opinion of a player based on such a limited amount of information. It’s way too early for ERA and FIP. It’s too early for K%. It’s even a little too early to bank on something like contact rate. This isn’t about the results, even the granular ones. The thing worth noticing relates to his process.

Before we get to it, it’s worth noting that May has pushed his release point toward third base and dropped his arm slot this season. It’s subtle to the point at which it might not even be intentional, but it’s there.

More importantly, May has joined the ranks of pitchers attacking the top of the zone with fastballs. If you draw an imaginary line 2.85 feet off the ground (i.e., the top third of the zone and above), May has throw 43.3% of his 2016 pitches at or above that line. In 2015, it was 31.1%.

Among those high pitches, 74% were fastballs in 2015 and 87% have been fastballs this year. He’s throwing slightly more fastballs in general this year, so that increase might not be terribly relevant, but it’s hard to ignore the number of pitches he’s elevating so far.

May’s elevating more pitches, allowing less contact, gathering more strikeouts and allowing fewer runs. Those facts fit together very nicely with what we think we know about pitching, but it’s still just 50 batters across 10 appearances. Other than velocity, there aren’t many statistics I would wholeheartedly embrace over 11.1 innings of relief work, but the small sample size results are consistent with an apparent change in approach.

Has his early-season success been a product of moving to the bullpen, or could his new approach yield similar results while in the rotation? May didn’t employ this strategy when he was a starter, so we couldn’t really be sure even with a sufficient sample size.

Will he continue to employ this new approach and will it continue to work? I don’t know, but the Twins are in a position to find out. While they’ve evened out after losing their first nine games, the odds for them of making the postseason this year are quite slim. With a group of compelling young players at or near the majors, the Twins should explore how this new approach plays in both contexts and take 2016 to find out what Trevor May may be.