1. Work fast
2. Change speeds
3. Location, location, location

He struggles with #1 when he gets shook up; he bombed on #2 in Tuesday’s game and has in other games, particularly in early innings; #3 appears to be a problem only with the fastball (though it got better last year when he came up).

So, if his fastball location needs some work (which several of us have agreed will get better with age and practice in the majors), then he’s got to focus on his offspeed location, changing his speeds regularly and working fast both when he’s doing well and a bit shook up.

Paul/60: good job. It’s a rare combination to have a guy give up lots of HR and lots of GB! Note that the batting average on groundballs is higher than on flyballs (though the SLG average is higher on FB). So, getting a low DER for a severe GB pitcher is not unheard of. But it is extremely weird to have such a low DER with the quality of fielders he has at SS and 3B.

What would be interesting is to track Felix’s balls in play, and see how many are “close”, or if the fielders simply didn’t have a chance.

Tom

It seems to me Felix hasn’t had many games this year where he’s had command of both his fastball and breaking pitches at the same time.

For another perspective on Felix’s struggles, I turned to the Hardball Times pitching stats.

What I found there was that, for all his struggles this year, he still ranks fifth best, among 54 qualifying AL pitchers, in THT’s “ultimate stat” of xFIP– that is, Fielding-Independent Pitching, adjusted according to the Ron Shandler hypothesis that (home runs / fly balls) may tend to even out over time. (The top 10 in the category are Bonderman, Kazmir, Santana, Halladay, Felix, Haren, Escobar, Schilling, Mussina, and Westbrook– not a bad group to be associated with.)

Now, the xFIP number is based on three key inputs: K/9, BB/9, and GB%. Of those, Felix is (even with his struggles this year) one of the best in K/9 (#3/54) and in GB% (#5/54). He’s a little worse than average in BB/9 (#35/54), but not enough to drag him down much.

But in the HR/Fly category, Felix’s 25.9% ranks dead last in the league, about double the normal figure. (He does have company, however; Pineiro’s 21.8% ranks as #52/54, with only Radke in between them among AL qualifiers.)

When we turn to the DER stat– what percentage of his batted balls turn into outs, more or less– we again find Felix on the bottom of the stack, at .635. (His LD%, or Line Drive Percentage, is also a bit worse than average, at 20.3%.)

What is this telling us, then? Are Felix’s current struggles just bad luck? Maybe partly so. But I’m not yet concluding that that’s the entire explanation. I tend to suspect that the Shandler Hypothesis (and maybe even the Voros) is more valid in describing “good luck” cases than “bad luck.” If a pitcher has .850 of his batted balls turning into outs, or with 98.5% of his fly balls staying in the yard, then I would hesitate to attribute that to skill– if that were the case, it would be a skill previously unseen in the major league game. But if forty percent of his balls in play become hits, or if thirty percent of his flies leave the yard, then yes, it’s relatively easy to imagine a natural explanation for it: The pitcher is just making too many mistakes, for whatever reason.

So I think that Felix’s difficulties this year are real– but that they should be solvable.

56 – I didn’t say command was unimportant, I was saying that pitching better leads to being ahead in the count, not the other way around.

And he has been dominating, even without fantasic control. I agree it’s important, but i don’t see it as the big difference between the Felix we’re seeing and the Felix we’ve seen.

Having said that, I want to see him dominate again like he did last year! Man, was that fun to watch!

….and No, it is not a “circular arguement”, its one of the most basic elements of successful pitching. You must be able to command your pitches, especially/primarily your fastball to be successfull in the majors.