What’s Wrong With Matt Harvey?
Yes. What is wrong with Matt Harvey? Because if you watch him pitch, it seems like everything is wrong, and yet nothing at all. At least, it’s hard to put your finger on it. You run down the list of things that could explain why he has an ERA near five and the worst ERA estimators of his career, and you find little things here or there. But do you find a smoking gun?
Velocity
Here’s the first place your eye will drift, and even Bryce Harper said the Mets righty was 91-93 mph last night, so everyone’s watching the velocity. The radar gun is such a simple arbiter, and Harvey’s been a league leader in fastball velocity since he’s been in the league. All things being equal — we’re not sure they are, but we’re going to start here — more velocity is better.
And yes! He is down in velocity, but maybe not as much as Harper was reporting. Down more than a mile per hour (94.0 from 95.2), and a little bit further down in yesterday’s disasterpiece against the Nationals (93.5). We’ve got it. High fives all around. Velocity loss!
Except. He’s had four games this year that were within a half mile per hour of last year’s pace, and his game against the Padres on May 8th featured a 94.9 mph velocity that was nearly flush with 2015’s numbers.
Except. His loss in velocity is not too far off the normal loss a starter would see from the ages of 26-27 years old. After yesterday’s game, he’s probably two-tenths or three-tenths worse than average, and it seems crazy to blame all of this on that much velocity loss.
Except. Mike Fast once told us how much a tick on the gun is worth! A loss of a mile per hour on the gun should be worth about 0.26 runs allowed per nine innings. For his career, even including this year, Harvey has allowed 2.91 runs per nine innings. This year, he’s allowing 5.12 runs per nine innings.
We’ve got another two runs per nine innings to explain.
Pitching Mix
What if dude started throwing a crappier pitch more, or a better pitch less? Couldn’t that explain things? Yeah, alright, he’s throwing his slider more often this year, by any system. His slider? it gets nearly 19% whiffs, against a league average of 14%.
Huh.
Oh wait, it is giving up a .297 isolated slugging percentage this year, after never having been worse than .088 before.
Except. He’s allowed only 29 of those things to be put in play, and it’s otherwise getting the whiffs it normally does, and yesterday his ISO on the pitch went down from .324 to .297, so that number can change quickly.
Movement
Okay, so what if the slider is no good. It is… different. It’s actually very much like his slider when he broke into the league back in 2012, by a few key metrics.
| Years | Velocity | Velocity Differential | Vertical Move | Horizontal Move | Whiff% | GB% | Swing | Foul% | Strike% |
| 2012 | 89.1 | 6.7 | 4.0 | 1.2 | 16.5% | 53.9% | 53.4% | 17.3% | 21.8% |
| 2013-2015 | 90.6 | 6.1 | 4.0 | 0.9 | 17.8% | 56.2% | 48.0% | 13.3% | 29.0% |
| 2016 | 88.7 | 6.3 | 4.4 | 1.2 | 18.6% | 44.9% | 61.2% | 18.6% | 26.4% |
Harvey throws the slider that was taught to him by his pitching coach, Dan Warthen. That slider is supposed to be close to the fastball in velocity and not feature a ton of movement. He learned that pitch some time in his rookie season, he says. He seems to have unlearned it, to an extent. And batters are swinging at the pitch more than ever, and lifting it.
Except. The movement and velocity differences here are minute. Is a third of an inch and a half a mile per hour on the slider really leading to spankage like this?
Maybe? Against Washington, his slider had the worst drop it’s had all year, and though it got two whiffs in 11 tries, four of them were in the dirt, and two were hit hard.
Location
Command is almost impossible to quantify, and most pitchers tell me that it’s a relative thing. They can hit a general space one one side of the plate or other, and if they’re lucky and/or elite, they can hit a general location on both sides of the plate.
But when it comes to breaking balls, there was some consensus when I wrote about command for The Hardball Times Annual this year: most of the time, you want to bury it. Sometimes, you want to throw it in the strike zone for a called strike, but most of the time you want to bury it.
Looks like Harvey is actually having some trouble putting the slider exactly where he wants to. Look at his slider location last year (left) and this year (right). He’s either hitting the middle of the zone or the dirt — remember he hit the dirt twice last night — and he’s not hitting the bonus zone on the corner there. A slider on that corner could be a called strike or a swinging strike. He’s not throwing that slider this year.
So, we’ve checked our checklist and we’ve found a couple things for Harvey. His velocity is down a little more than you’d expect, and his slider movement, velocity, and command is off a tad. It might not be so scary if he wasn’t self-reporting so much confusion, and if he hadn’t been so dominant in the past.
And maybe it’s actually not so scary. D.J. Short of Rotoworld had a good point:
Stephen Strasburg had a 6.55 ERA through his first 10 starts last season. Feels like an eternity ago.
— D.J. Short (@djshort) May 20, 2016
To compare them even more precisely, since Harvey has nine starts so far this year:
| Pitcher | Fastball Velocity Y-t-Y | K% | BB% | ERA | FIP | xFIP |
| Stephen Strasburg | 0 | 21.2% | 6.1% | 6.50 | 3.65 | 3.75 |
| Matt Harvey | -1.2 | 19.6% | 6.8% | 5.77 | 3.66 | 3.88 |
They’d be almost exactly the same if not for that first column.
Considering the fact that their pitching coach is a slider guru, maybe we can believe that Harvey will right ship on the slider shortly. Considering the fact that all pitchers lose velocity, maybe we can shrug at the velocity loss and say, we can still get a 27 year old version of Harvey back. It’s just a *little* worse than you’d expect, right?
So buck up, Matt Harvey, it’s probably not all that big a deal. Work on the slider some in the bullpen, get your body as right as it can be, and you can get this thing back on track.
With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
Can we expect “What’s wrong with Jacob deGrom” next ?
Jake is battling through his diminished velocity quite well. Very different situations. If Jake can settle in at around 94 that’s not much different than his velocity in 2014.
His K% has gone from 27.3% to 15.7%, his velocity is down 2.5 MPH, and his xFIP is ~4—I’d say that’s not good and more concerning than anything Harvey’s doing. The main difference between the two is BABIP and ERA (.385 vs .289 and 5.77 vs 2.50). ERA is a powerful force…
Yeah, but DeGrom’s exit velocity on batted balls isn’t trending wrong direction like we see with Harvey. Guys are making more and harder contact on Harvey than in the past…..that indicates that BABIP may not be so inflated….but instead reflecting the higher BABIP on balls hit hard.
DeGrom’s Hard% has gone from 26.3% to 34.5%, while Harvey’s has gone from 26.7% to 29.8%, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Assuming what you said is true, though, there’s luck involved in how hard batters hit the ball too—Harvey could be getting unlucky in that batters are hitting the ball harder than we’d expect based on his pitches, and they’re falling for hits more often then we’d expect based on exit velocity. We wouldn’t expect batters to keep hitting to ball so hard as to maintain a .385 BABIP.
May be true I, I was looking at exit velocities since the start of 2016 from Baseball Savant…..different stat, different range
He’s prob. talking about actual exit velocity, not the arbitrary “Hard” hit classifications you refer to. MLBSavant is your friend.
No it does not. Harvey’s career BABIP is .288. This year it’s .385. The highest single season BABIP in the last 3 years is 2015 Gio Gonzalez at .341. Under no circumstance would you expect his BABIP to increase by anywhere near that magnitude.
Right so… like I said… his velocity is not much different than his velocity in 2014. It was 93.5 in 2014, it is 92.7 in 2016, and it was higher before his most recent start.
His FIP is 3.36. The xFIP is higher but deGrom hasn’t ever given up a lot of home runs. He’s a smart pitcher and I am willing to believe he’s doing a better job of pitching and managing contact than Harvey.
His SwStr rate is still consistent with what he did his rookie year and should be on the rise when he gets more comfortable. the low K-rate is inconsistent with the SwStr rate so even if it doesn’t go up, his K/9 surely will. Hold him.
Good stuff as always Eno. In the tradition of…..asking questions. Would you trade Arrieta and Semien for Harvey and Lindor? Should I ask for more than my Arrieta?
This isn’t Rotographs. You should phrase your question as “Assume MLB was a 12 team league that redrafted every season and the only stats that mattered were W, SV, K, ERA, WHIP and R, HR, RBI, SB, and AVG. Would a GM be wise to trade…” Then Eno will be obligated to answer your question.
You all gave me (and drewcorb) negative hits because this is the wrong side of the column to ask the question? Shame on all of you. And if Eno didn’t answer the question for the same reason….same!!!
Quick! Quick! Quick! Everybody, there’s an article about Ben Zobrist by Eno on the Fangraphs side. Someone had the audacity to write something about their fantasy auction in the comments. Quick, quick! Go give him negative hits.
Was very nice of those Mets fans to boo the crap out of him…
Let me ask this: If say, St Louis fans went to the game and watched Wainright get lit up against the Cubs to push his ERA for the year to around 5, what would their reaction be? Or Dodger fans attending a game where Kershaw’s ERA went to 5 as he got beat up by the rival Giants, how would they react?
I doubt Cards fans would boo… not their style.
If they had a great pitcher who had googly eyes for the Cubs and made it know he was bolting there when free agency comes, then comes in camp much worse shape then he has ever been in and has extremely poor results you don’t think a decent portion of fans in the park would boo? Yea okay
Dodger fans wouldn’t boo. Only classless fans would do that.
Lol just like they would never boo Puig while he’s slumping.
I’m a dodger fan, but I know fanbases are too large a sample of people to be uniformly classy or classless.
“Dodger fans” cracked a man’s skull, disabling him for life. Probably best not to paint with that broad a brush, eh?
Jesse Spector was talking about it on twitter yesterday and I think I agree with him. Not all boos are the same. There’s the “we don’t like you” boo that, say, Chase Utley gets. There’s the “get on with it” boo that a pitcher gets for throwing to first twice on the road. Then there’s a “this sucks and we’re frustrated” boo, which is what Harvey got, and what Cespedes got in that 0-4 game against the Phillies in April. Is it nice of the fans? No. But it doesn’t mean Mets fans have turned on him at all, just that they were pissed off being on the short end of a 9-1 game against the biggest rivals.
Yeah, I agree unreservedly with this. I myself think it’s shitty to boo your team under almost any circumstances but a lot of my fellow Mets fans these days just boo to express disappointment, nothing more. I’m sure lot of the people booing yesterday were the same people who (like me) went hoarse chanting HAR-VEY HAR-VEY every start last fall. They’re booing the results, not the player.
The mets are competitive in general so why so so butt hurt to boo anyone, especially a guy who is trying hard to get out of his struggles?
Also Mets fans booed at Scherzer when he threw a no hitter AFTER the mets had already locked up the division. That’s nuts, your team had nothing hurting them and you get to see an unreal performance and you boo it?
okay your just stupid, I explained Harvey earlier bit now your criticizing a fan base booing their biggest rivals top SP? Are you a philly, nat, or yankee fan?
That’s fine as long as the people booing understand that their behavior means they are not fans of the team, they are spectators who expect to be entertained. People boo bad movies because they have no allegiance to that movie. People who pay to go to ballgames have every right to act like spectators instead of fans, but they need to then realize that relationships are reciprocal and the players have no allegiance to the people that boo. Spectators shouldn’t expect players to take hometown discounts when contracts come up or expect players to spend extra time signing autographs, etc.
Okay well then you need to understand right after met fans fell in love with Harvey he was the one who made the first shot across the bow saying how he grew up a huge yankee fan, wanted to be drafted by the yankees, and made it pretty clear over the years he would end up a yankee after free agency.
Hence why if this was degrom, thor, matz struggling they would not have had the same reaction.
BTW do you know the term fan is short for fanatic? If anything they are more likely to boo then just the casual fan lol
Love how people judge and make statements when they don’t understand the situation. Harvey brought this on himself. If this was degrom, Thor, matz etc I do not believe Met fans would have booed at all. I love harvey personally and would no have been booing him but completely understand why my fellow met fans did.
First off Harvey screwed up after coming up in 2012 and getting us fans more excited then a pig in S**T. He chose to let all of us not only know that he grew up a big yankee fan he then proceeded over the years to let us know he has an eye for the yankees and will most likely be going there in free agency as soon as he can. That is dumb. Then last year the guy yells and screams about 6 man rotation or being skipped in the rotation but right before playoffs basically talks about shutting it down???? WTF. Not to mention this year he is not in the same physical shape of the past or even last year. Maybe that has nothing to do with his pitching but doesn’t help from the average baseball fan perspective.
Now take the other pitchers. They have done nothing but say they love being a met. The day thor was traded for dickey he was tweeting about how happy he was to be a met. Matz is a long island kid who grew up a met fan, etc. heck wheeler even called the GM begging not to be traded last july. Degrom and others love being part of a roation that they want to be legendary and apart of it. Harvey on the other hand gives off the vibe he would rather be on an average rotation and standout so all eyes are on him. Add all this in with the fact as the author says Harvey has not only publicly said he is confused he no longer has the bulldog body language on the mound that he had as late as game 5 of the world series. That was the thing us met fans loved most about him. He was a fighter, wanted the ball, competitor, and us met fans are not happy now the first time things get rough he is looking defeated.
Yeah, but didn’t Strasburg have to go on the DL a few times last year between nagging injuries and that growth that was messing him up? He didn’t get to be lights out until he got that DL trip.
His velocity seems to be highly variable with 5 good velocity starts around 95 and 4 around 93. The 4 starts at 93 (his 3rd, 6th, 8th, and 9th) he has allowed 19ER.
You will note that Strasburg went on the DL last year after those very same 10 starts.
After a month off he came back pitching much better. But it wasn’t just magic.
He’s packed on a few pounds in the last couple years (one of my Phillies fan friends now only calls him Fat Harvey). Is his conditioning maybe an issue? The extra weight impacting his mechanics?
Fatt Harvey…
His friends call him Fatty though.
He looks more trim than last year.
It can only help.Join the discussion
I wonder if Harvey is fat to your friend then what does he call Colon?
I keep thinking the increased workload affected both be and deGrom. Lots of extra playoff stress.
Can’t help but think this is the extremely lazy narrative that is inevitable but wrong.
As evidenced by their starts. Wait…
http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=11713&position=P
His BABIP this season is .385, which is like .100 higher than usual. This looks like a lot of bad luck to me, and nothing to panic about.
That’s partly because he’s letting up line drives almost 30% of the time with a career-high Hard-hit%. Both his line drive rate and BABIP should still regress a fair amount, but it’s not all bad luck, hitters are squaring him up pretty well this year.
There’s still a sizable luck component in there.
Matt Harvey will be fine, Honestly he needs to sit for a week or so and rest. His arm is tired. DL trip and he is golden
Matt Harvey Looks Like Cody Anderson
While I get your points on velocity, pitch f/x shows him sitting at 96.5 last season, down to 95.5 in April and now 94.5 in May. And that shouldn’t be such a big deal, except that his fastball was a major weapon for him last year.
Last season, Harvey pitch value on the fastball was 16.3, good for #11 among SPs, and batters sported a .243 AVG against his fastball, whereas in 2016 his FA pitch value is -2.6 and AVG is .314. Zone Contact% is from 82% to 87%, Contact is up from 78% to 85%, and SwStr% is down from 10.8% to 8.0%.
So it could be velo, could be location, could be spin rate (do we have that data from last season?), but it definitely seems to be the fastball. And if the fastball is the problem, you’ve got to lay a little more blame on velo.
In Spring Training they call this a “dead arm” but in NYC in May they call it the apocalypse. Let the guy skip a turn or two and he’ll be back in the pink.
I don’t know, but maybe, you know, maybe they should have heeded Boras advice and their original IP limit and kept his IP down last year. Severino had a 44% IP jump last year and ineffective. Its not rocket science sometimes. Some pitchers can handle it, other can’t. Payback. Young arms broken by greedy abuse of their corporate masters
If a player is represented by Scott Boras, then why should a team do anything besides try to extract the maximum possible value of the player that they can get while they have him, given that Boras has already maximized the price they had to pay?
No loyalty up, no loyalty down. That’s how it works.
You may be right that last year’s workload could be causing this, but how can any athlete, at the top of his craft with all the drive and dedication that that entails, sit down and watch while his team is in the playoffs, the World Series? While capable of performing? I would be questioning his heart if he allowed that. The Mets handled him well, he barely pitched in September, and when the playoffs came, he pitched.
Funny how so many people fall for boras.
First off there was no agreed IP limit. Boras did not have one with the mets because he did not believe the mets had any chance at making the playoffs.
Second during the middle of the year the mets tried to back off and have a 6 man rotationa nd skip Harvey starts. But Harvey yelled and screamed he wanted to pitch. Which is fine……but
Third Boras then saw they were going to make the playoffs and the innings harvey already chucked so then came out with shutting him down BS. Which he lied about agreed limit. Because if he did his job proper and they did agree then the mets would have put there foot down and harvey wouldn’t have fought it during the year and they would have limitied his innings so he had innings for playoff time.
This was all boras and harveys fault. If at the start of the year boras and harvey told the mets we are only throwing 185 innings then the mets would have started him less during the year and saved innings for the playoffs. Harvey was bull headed (which is one of his best qualities) and boras did not do his job. So when boras realized he F’d up he tried to twist the situation and pressure the mets publicly. I just thank Alderson for having a backbone and standing up to boras.
I love you buddy, but “except” is not a sentence.
would you take sonny gray for matt harvey?
I would love to get an in-depth piece on how his mechanics have played into his early season struggles. He admits to mechanical issues, and as far as I can see, they are visible. Looking at 2016 Harvey, his delivery is seemingly different pitch by pitch. It is oftentimes fluid (more frequently on his fastball/changeup and during the windup), but just as often jerky and seemingly out of sorts (more frequently on his breaking pitches and from the stretch). I’ve noticed more velocity the more fluid his delivery. Of note: looking back, he did in fact utilize this less fluid delivery more often in his college days, 2012, and with increasing frequency as the season reached september and october in 2015.
Again, Harvey himself has admitted to not feeling comfortable on the mound. However, any analysis I have seen given this far – and admittedly, that extends to this particular piece and various Metsblog posts – has not married Harvey’s comments with any sort of visual evidence. To actually provide an idea of what I am talking about, see these clips:
Fluid:
http://m.mlb.com/video/v613005083/nymatl-smith-smacks-an-rbi-double-to-left-field/?game_pk=447110
Jerky:
http://m.mlb.com/video/v714209483/wshnym-murphy-belts-a-tworun-big-fly-off-harvey/?game_pk=447485
http://m.mlb.com/video/v594169183/nymcle-gomes-lines-an-rbi-single-to-right/?game_pk=447032
http://m.mlb.com/video/v714301783/wshnym-revere-comes-home-on-cabreras-error/?game_pk=447485
Fastballs/Changeups as fluid, sliders/curves as jerky: http://m.mlb.com/video/v674310783/nymsd-harvey-deals-10-strikeouts-in-six-innings/?game_pk=447332
There are only 2 things wrong: .385 BABIP, and small-sample-size.
MLB Network did a segment on Harvey last week, they explained Harvey’s disaster season this year as mainly a result of his inability to get high velo and spin rate on his fastball up. They speculated his velocity loss on the fastball could still be a result of his TJ a couple years ago, or a mental wall stemming from last years WS Game 5. Hasn’t been the same since, that’s for sure.
He was egotistical and selfish in Game 5 and he likely cost his team the WS. That had to have a harrowing psychological impact. Regardless, it’s a new season: time to get over it and move on.
Johnston you are narcissistic and retarded. You think you know everything but know nothing.
Harvey pitched a hell of a game and though he could get the final outs. Nice to play monday morning QB there killer….but if you do want to play that game the blame does not go to the pitcher but rather the manager idiot. And even if they won would still be down 3 games to 2 idiot..so to say they would have won as a sure thing is beyond moronic.
Also love how someone so stupid, without knowing the person or a single person who knows the person can now play arm chair psychologist?? Why are you on this site and why are you commenting?
Thanks, Eno. How about a close look at Jon Gray and Junior Guerra? Desperately need your high quality analysis
Good analysis, but then our era of over-analysis may be somewhat to blame. I suspect the beginning of the year was mostly bad luck. A spell of bloops and dribblers. But then that puts him under the microscope, and then the player himself gets in on the scrutiny. Changes are made when they don’t need to be. Now his performance is actually different, and he enters into a legitimate slump. This is where a trip to the Bahamas could help, but that’s rarely the prescribed advice. It’s not until the player gets fed up with the ineffectiveness of the tinkering that he learns to put it aside and listen to the softer voices in his head that got him where he is.