Game 82, Orioles at Mariners
Hisashi Iwakuma vs. Jason Hammel, 7:10pm
Iwakuma makes his first MLB start tonight after injuries and ineffectiveness have pushed aside his competition. As Dave points out, Iwakuma’s been very consistent by xFIP; what’s varied considerably has been his success on balls in play and his HR rate. Now, it’s quite clear that HR rate is much more variable than what’s measured in xFIP (essentially, walks and strikeouts with a league average HR rate), but it’s also not yet clear that league average is the mean we should regress Iwakuma’s HR rate to. In the absence of any alternative that we could support with data, looking at him through the xFIP prism is the sensible option.
And yet…Iwakuma’s shown that he’s got a legitimate MLB-caliber weapon in his split-finger fastball. His two-seam fastball/sinker is also a solid pitch – we don’t have a lot of data, of course, but he’s able to rack up ground balls at an impressive clip. The problem’s his four-seam fastball. He’s thrown it a bit more than 1/3 of the time, but you’d be hard pressed to say why. It doesn’t get grounders and it doesn’t miss bats. Given we know so little about Iwakuma, I’m open to an argument that throwing this pitch makes his other pitches more effective – that he needs a four-seam or rising fastball to maximize the impact of his split-finger pitch. But as it stands, he’s got two decent pitches and what seems like an irrational attachment to a third, minor-league one. Right now, he’s getting Steve Delabar-like results, though again, he simply hasn’t faced enough batters to know if he’s going to be homer prone long term.
Still, while he’s facing the O’s in a park that’s seriously suppressed home runs, the Orioles have hit the 4th most HRs in baseball thanks to a number of high-K, high-HR hitters. Iwakuma’s splitter isn’t as effective against righties, but he’s got a slider that’s a lot more advanced than Delabar’s, so he’s got options.
Jason Hammel came over from Colorado in exchange for Jeremy Guthrie in what’s looking like an incredibly lop-sided trade. Hammel’s swing-and-miss stuff, which was AWOL last year, is back in a big way. He’s running a career high K rate, which then drives a career low FIP. He’s been excellent all year, with the exception of his last start, in which he gave up 8 runs in 3 1/3 innings against the Angels. One big reason for his transformation is the development of a two-seam fastball that he didn’t have in Colorado. His velocity’s up around 1 MPH, but that wouldn’t explain the fact that his *four*-seam fastball’s generating twice as many whiffs as it did last year, despite moving to the league with the DH. The Orioles will take it, I assume.
Smoak and Montero get the day off in light of their recent struggles, and Munenori Kawasaki gets the start because he was in top form last night.
1: Ichiro
2: Wells (CF)
3: Jaso (DH)
4: Seager
5: Olivo (C)
6: Ackley (1B)
7: Figgins (LF)
8: Kawasaki (2B)
9: Ryan
SP: Iwakuma
Today’s the big July 2nd signing deadline for international free agents – meaning the 16 year old Dominican and Venezuelan ball players. Just like the amateur draft, this is the first year that a yearly bonus cap’s been imposed on the July 2nd signings – another product of the recent CBA. The M’s haven’t signed any of Baseball America’s Top 20 international free agents, but we’ll see if that changes over the next few hours/days.
Hisashi Iwakuma’s Arm Strength
Hisashi Iwakuma makes his first start of the season tonight, filling in for the once-again-hurting Kevin Millwood. When Iwakuma pitches well (and that’s more likely than not, given that the game is taking place in Safeco and the Orioles aren’t very good at hitting right-handers), you’re going to hear people talk about how Iwakuma has “built up arm strength” and vastly improved over what he was earlier in the season. You’re going to be fed lines about how Eric Wedge’s usage pattern with Iwakuma has finally helped create a guy who is ready to pitch in the big leagues. You’re going to be told that Iwakuma needed three months of rest to get ready to get big league hitters out.
Don’t buy into any of it. It’s all BS. Here’s Hisashi Iwakuma’s velocity chart, tracking his average fastball speed over the course of the season.
Or, if you prefer numbers, here’s Iwakuma’s average fastball velocity by month:
April: 90.5 MPH
May: 90.8 MPH
June: 90.1 MPH
That’s right, the guy who has been building up his arm strength is actually throwing slightly less hard in June than he did in April. Of course, that’s essentially a function of the fact that he was asked to pitch back-to-back a few times in June, when he had longer layovers between outings in April, but the reality remains is that even well rested Iwakuma isn’t throwing any harder in June than he was in the first month of the season.
As for performance, that’s fairly consistent too.
April: 10% BB%, 20% K%, 50% GB%, 4.11 xFIP
May: 9% BB%, 20% K%, 45% GB%, 3.92 xFIP
June: 14.5% BB%, 16.5% K%, 67% GB%, 4.30 xFIP
Iwakuma has been basically the same pitcher all year long, getting a good amount of groundballs and an acceptable amount of strikeouts while issuing too many walks and giving up too many home runs. Whether the command problems (which were never a problem in Japan) are a result of his marginal stuff not playing that well in the US or inconsistent usage is impossible to know, but the fact is that he’s shown enough movement and velocity to get Major League hitters out when he’s throwing strikes with consistency.
Iwakuma’s probably not a great MLB pitcher. He doesn’t have a devastating out pitch, and his skillset works best when he can pound the zone, which he hasn’t done regularly enough. But he’s probably a decent Major League pitcher, a guy who can get a bunch of grounders and mix his pitches well enough to get strikeouts when needed. And the truth is that Iwakuma’s been that guy from day one.
His results were bad in spring training because of an inflated BABIP, but there was never any reason to relegate him to the mop-up role that he ended up stuck with. Wedge’s refusal to use him was always foolish and a waste of a decent pitcher. That Iwakuma is only now getting a shot at the rotation is the result of poor decision making by the organization, and at this point, the best the team can hope for is that Iwakuma proves that they’ve had a viable #4 or #5 starter hanging out in the bullpen all along. Given the team’s struggles to find quality back-end starters this year, having Iwakuma step forward and grab one of those spots would be a nice boost for the club, and give them another potentially interesting piece to evaluate in the second half.
It’s just too bad that it took until July for it to happen. Don’t let the revisionists try to sell you a load of crap about Iwakuma not being ready for this job in April. The reality is that he’s the same guy now he was then, and his future success is simply going to be more evidence that the Mariners got it wrong coming out of spring training.