Game 34, Royals at Mariners
Hisashi Iwakuma vs. Danny Duffy, 7:10pm
Danny Duffy was arguably the most heralded member of the Royals vaunted 2010 prospect class. A lefty with a plus fastball, a curve and a change, Duffy made the bigs in 2011. Since then, he’s teased Royals fans with flashes of brilliance (a 96 mph fastball will do that) and frustrated them with command problems and injuries. He’s come back from TJ surgery, but his elbow is still problematic. He had a UCL sprain in the minors, had his elbow surgery in 2012, and made another elbow-related DL trip late last year.
His FB is Paxtonesque in velocity and movement – he gets a lot of vertical ‘rise’ which means it tends to be hit in the air. He hasn’t paid for it in home runs, probably due to the elite velocity, but his arsenal does produce platoon splits. Against righties, and he faces an inordinate number of them, he’s had pretty serious control issues.
1: Saunders, CF
2: Romero, RF
3: Cano, 2B
4: Hart, DH
5: Smoak, 1B
6: Seager, 3B
7: Gillespie, LF
8: Miller, SS
9: Zunino, C
SP: Iwakuma
Speaking of Paxton, he’ll throw a bullpen session tomorrow. And Taijuan Walker will throw on Sunday.
I mentioned that the Clinton Lumberkings came back from a 12-4 deficit a week or so ago. Last night, they outdid themselves with a truly historic comeback. Down 16-1 in the fifth, Clinton rallied to tie it up. The game went to extras, and they scored three more runs and won 20-17. Their 2B earned a save in the game, reminding me of the time Scott Savastano hit a walk-off HR for Tacoma, making himself the winning pitcher. Well done, Lumberkings. They had to do it without OF Austin Wilson, who I think is nursing an injury.
Gmae 33, Mariners at Athletics: the Nightcap
Erasmo Ramirez vs. Drew Pomeranz, 7:05
Happy, uh, Felix Day, right? I’ve waited to mention that until AFTER the M’s won today’s first game, 6-4. The hesitation’s due to Felix’s decidedly un-Felix performance. He wasn’t terrible, but this was the first time since August of 2008 that he failed to strike anyone out. It’s Felix’s third K-free game, behind that 5-IP game against the White Sox and his terrifying 4/18/2007 game against Minnesota in which he left with an injured shoulder. We’ve seen it before, so I’m not sure why I’m always surprised by it, but Felix is incredibly streaky. Think back to the run he was on in 2012 – the run that encompassed his perfect game. Over 14 starts, he had a 1.40 ERA with a K:BB ratio near 6. He followed that with six awful starts in September: 53 hits in 35 innings and an RA around 7. He had a great stretch in the middle of last year, before another bad September. This happens to all pitchers, of course, but because Felix is so *good*, his highs are just higher than nearly anyone else’s. And his lows are easier to spot and over-analyze. His velocity didn’t appear to be concerning; it was lower than his seasonal average, but it matched his last game in Oakland a month ago, which leads me to assume the system in the coliseum’s a bit cold.
Game 2 features a scrambled rotation thanks to this quickly-arranged double header. The M’s go for the DH and series sweep behind Erasmo Ramirez, just recalled for this start. Ramirez got some work in, and had a solid start for Tacoma against a good Las Vegas club, but his 3 HRs in 11 2/3 innings show that his HR problems weren’t solved over night. He’s playing in a ball park that’ll help that problem, but Erasmo looked lost in the early part of the year. Here’s hoping he’s improved his approach, particularly with runners on – his 69% strand rate needs to come up if he’s going to stick in the rotation.
Speaking of strand rate, the A’s starter, Drew Pomeranz, wins the Chris Young award for April. The righty, and former #5 overall draft pick in 2010, put up a 4.72 FIP in relief for Oakland but a sparkly 1.98 ERA. How does a guy with control problems (lifetime BB/9 of 4.55) AND HR problems (lifetime HR/9 of 1.20) put up a nice ERA, even over a miniscule sample? A strand rate of 98.6% is a good place to start. The big lefty is essentially a two pitch pitcher with a 92mph rising FB and a big curve ball. He gets a lot of vertical movement on the FB which, together with the phrase “Ex-Colorade Rockie,” explains the HR rate. The curve’s been an effective pitch for him overall, but his lack of a change-up or cutter means he’s been hurt by right-handed bats. He’s seen over 3X as many righties as lefties in his career, and that percentage stands to increase unless he can bring his .222/.378 career wOBA splits down a bit. Sure, you need to regress that, but unless the RHB number comes down (as opposed to the lefty wOBA increasing as their .217 BABIP rises), he’ll continue to be a replacement-level pitcher.
And there’s some evidence that the A’s are already changing him. For one, his FB’s suddenly getting more ground balls. I’d chalk that up to noise if it wasn’t for the fact that I *just* mentioned the same thing regarding Scott Kazmir, and while I didn’t mention it, I *could’ve* about Jesse Chavez too. Not sure what’s going on there, but with the A’s, the default assumption is that it’s intentional.
1: Saunders, CF
2: Romero, RF
3: Cano, DH
4: Smoak, 1B
5: Gillespie, LF
6: Seager, 3B
7: Bloomquist, 2B
8: Buck, C
9: Miller, SS
SP: Ramirez
Given Pomeranz’s splits, this line-up is pretty sub-optimal. I completely understand if the M’s don’t think Hart’s up to playing twice in one day, but Hart’s the perfect match-up here.
Trevor Miller, Chance Ruffin and Jose Flores in the minors tonight.
Game 31, Mariners at Athletics
Roenis Elias vs. Jesse Chavez, 7:05pm
More on last night’s prospect showdown later. Tonight, it’s a meeting between two of the least likely effective starters. Chavez has been a so-so to worse reliever for years, and Elias has been a so-so starter in the minor leagues – a guy whose path to the big leagues depended on a rash of injuries to starters, their back-ups, and the depth behind those guys.
Elias “succeeded” somehow with a 15:11 K:BB ratio by limiting hard contact and home runs. In his last two starts, though, his K:BB ratio’s up to 16:5. It’s impossible to know what to make of Elias or his seeming transformation in the past ten-fifteen days: he’s a tabula rasa, and apparently most of the data we had on him wasn’t all that predictive. He’s learning on the job, and while he’ll stumble every now and then, he looks capable of infinitely more than I would’ve thought back in February. I say “infinitely” advisedly, as I tried to look up his ZiPS projection from this spring. There wasn’t one. You can only project so many players, and Anthony Fernandez was on the 40-man and all… I checked the Steamer projections, but he had all of one inning.
Chavez DID have projections, and they were awful. 0.2 WAR by ZiPS, 0.3 by Steamer. He’d previously been a control-challenged fastball/slider guy, but a shift to the cutter seemed to help him harness his stuff a bit better in 2013. Still, you wouldn’t have pegged Chavez to be the A’s best pitcher through a month plus, even with Sonny Gray’s emergence. Damn it.
1: Saunders, RF
2: Jones, CF
3: Cano, 2B
4: Hart, DH
5: Smoak, 1B
6: Seager, 3B
7: Ackley, LF
8: Zunino, C
9: Miller, SS
SP: Elias
Mariano Rivera’s book apparently had some less-than-flattering comments about Robbie Cano. First his hitting coach, then the team’s HOF closer…we’ll see what Jeter says about is erstwhile DP partner after he retires. Clearly, people didn’t care for certain aspects of Cano’s preparation/hustle/whatever, though I’m still struggling to figure out how it cost them runs/games.
Game 30, Mariners at A’s
Chris Young vs. Scott Kazmir, 7:05pm
This game’s as important as any early-May contest, I suppose, but I think a lot of northwest fans might be interested to note that top prospect Noah Syndergaard’s starting tonight against the Rainiers in Tacoma. Catch Chris Taylor face actual MLB-level pitching, and plus velocity from the right side. The M’s couldn’t really find a spot for Nick Franklin, who started off the 2014 season on a hot streak, but Chris Taylor is making things even more complicated.
Ok, ok, back to the big league game for a bit. Scott Kazmir was famously difficult to forecast this off-season. He was a lackluster member of the Sugar Land Skeeters recently, and the fact that he’d made the Indians roster came as a shock to most. He looked OK, but had mediocre results in the first half, like teammate and fellow comeback story Ubaldo Jimenez. In the second half, he was an effective #3. So: forecasting him going forward, or forecasting what he’d make on the free agent market, how do you weight his performance record? What do you DO with the fact that his career was *over* 18 months ago? It was a slightly more extreme version of the questions regarding the top of the free agent pitching market, namely Ervin Santana (who was abysmal in 2012) and Jimenez (who was replacement level in 2012 too). It’s tough to tease out how much the ambiguous nature of their recent performances played into their contracts, and how much of it was due to the draft pick compensation attached to signing Jimenez/Santana. Santana’s been absolutely brilliant and stands to make more money next year while Jimenez looks pretty much exactly like he did in 2012 again. Meanwhile, Kazmir’s been among the best bargains of the off-season.
He had fairly neutral GB/FB ratios and he’d had home run problems off and on since 2008, so he looked like a good candidate to pitch well in Oakland. But since joining the A’s, his GB% is up dramatically, from the low 40s to the mid 50s. Small sample weirdness? Maybe, but a pitcher’s ground ball rate stabilizes early on; Russell Carleton found it stabilized (r=.7) at around 150 batters faced. Kazmir’s faced 151 thus far. An updated version of Carleton’s work by Derek Carty, using a slightly different methodology, found that GB rate stabilize after 105 balls in play. Kazmir looks to be around 106.
There’s nothing that stands out as an explanation for this change in the pitch fx data. He’s not using a different pitch, or targeting a different part of the zone. He’s still the same sinker/slider/change that he was last year, and he’s throwing just as hard. He always showed fairly dramatic platoon splits for grounders – with lefties pounding the ball into the ground while righties elevated it. But he’s faced four times as many righties this year as he has lefties, so that’s not it. The other dramatic difference in his stat line is his walk rate, which is under 5% for the first time in his career. Even when he was at his best, from 2005-07, he had so-so command, and a walk rate over those three years near 10%.
Chris Young is having perhaps his most Chris Young season, which is saying something. Coming into the year, he was known for being 1) tall, 2) an extreme fly-ball guy but who could 3) generate lower BABIPs due to all of those fly outs without 4) giving up tons of HRs somehow, no one really knows why, but it all adds up to 5) a guy with actual runs allowed coming in lower than the fielding-independent metrics would assume. So far, he remains exceedingly tall; his GB rate is just 24%, below his own absurd career average of 27%; his BABIP is .211, below his own absurd career average of .253; he’s given up HRs on 6.7% of fly balls, below his low-but-not-absurd average of 8%; and he’s got an ERA of 3.04 and a FIP of 5.46 and a whatever’s-beyond-absurd xFIP of 6.27. I know allusions to animated series are the lifeblood of baseball blogging, so to put it in old internet meme terms:
Phase 1: Throw 85mph fast straightballs up in the zone.
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit.*
Line-up:
1: Saunders, CF
2: Romero, RF
3: Cano, 2B
4: Hart, DH
5: Seager, 3B
6: Gillespie, LF
7: Smoak, 1B
8: Miller, SS
9: Zunino, C
SP: Young
As you’ve no doubt heard, the M’s have sent down CF Abraham Almonte and recalled CF James Jones. Jones was off to a solid start in Tacoma, but so’s just about everyone. He’s fast, he’s got a howitzer of an arm, but he’s a lefty. In theory, Almonte’s switch hitting helped balance the line-up against lefties like Kazmir. In practice, of course, Almonte just didn’t hit. Defensively, I don’t know that I’m qualified to say if this is an upgrade or not. I thought Almonte was a solid to plus fielding CORNER OF, but I think his range was better than I’d predicted in the big leagues. On the other hand, whether it was concentration lapses or positioning, he made more unforced errors too. When I’ve seen Jones, it’s mostly been in the corners too – the R’s have Endy Chavez and Xavier Avery to rotate through the OF positions – and he’s looked solid. He had some nice starts in the spring as well, but it’s tough to know how it all adds up. Best of luck to Jones, who obviously was up for a brief call-up earlier. That he’s made it this far shows some solid work by the M’s much-maligned player development system, considering nearly everyone saw Jones as a pitcher coming out of LIU.
I’ll be in Tacoma to check out the Syndergaard, one of the Mets top prospects, and one of the top righties in the minors. Andrew Carraway gets the start for Tacoma. Jake Zokan, Jimmy Gillheeney and Eddie Campbell start in the minors as well. OF Austin Wilson, the M’s 2013 draft pick, was named the Midwest League Player of the Week last week, collecting six XBHs and nine total hits in seven games.
* The M’s are only 2-2 in his starts, despite the lack of runs allowed, and they lost in his only relief appearance. None of this is Young’s fault, of course, but that’s a pretty fielding-independent way of looking at things for a guy who famously cannot be evaluated by fielding independent means.
Podcast: The Mariners “Swept” the Yankees?
Monday morning podcast(s) continues/begins.
We are sorry for needlessly arguing about the semantics of a sweep. We are sorry for offering you the chance to listen to that. We are sorry for everything. Sorry.
Podcast with Jeff and Matthew: Direct link! || iTunes link! || RSS/XML link!
Thanks again to those that helped support the show and/or StatCorner work in general last week, and in the past, and hopefully in the future. It’s truly appreciated.
Sorry.
Game 29, Mariners at Astros
Brandon Maurer vs. Collin McHugh, 11:10am
At least this series has been interesting. The back-to-back bullpen collapses yesterday turned a pitchers duel into a laugher into a nail-biting save situation, but all’s well that ends in archery practice.
Collin McHugh made his Astros debut 10 days ago, during the M’s long losing streak. A journeyman who’d knocked around the minors, racking up the miles on his old Toyota Corolla, he’d signed with the Astros and pitched terribly in Spring Training. So he headed to Oklahoma City and pitched unremarkably there. There’s a reason no one anticipated McHugh: he looked like the very definition of a replacement level player. Beyond the generic repertoire, he’d been knocked around a bit by a few of the M’s in that game’s line-up. Last April, McHugh started for Las Vegas, the Mets AAA affiliate, against Tacoma. He faced Michael Saunders and Mike Zunino that day in 2013 – Saunders led off with a booming triple, and Zunino singled and walked (!). So of course McHugh went out and dominated, striking out 12 in 6 2/3 IP. He then backed it up by shutting down the A’s – nearly managing a shutout, but giving up a run in the 9th on a HBP, catcher’s indifference, and a single. He’s pitched back to back games with game scores of 80, a mark Felix hasn’t touched this year.
It’s a great story, and the fact that McHugh managed a second great start separates him a bit from the legions of Doug Waechters who can only do it once, and only against the M’s. It’s a small sample and while it’s changed his projections *some* it hasn’t completely overwritten them. It’s not like he was struggling in the minors years ago…it was last month. No one saw this coming, probably not even McHugh (I’m looking forward to the blog post he’ll write about it). It’s the sort of thing that defies probabilities, and thus much of sabermetrics. It defies scouting, too. If the Astros saw that he’d changed something or picked up an unhittable new pitch, it probably wouldn’t have taken an injury to bring him up. We think of genius as an attribute, like brown eyes or right-handedness. It can be honed and developed or it can be ignored and make a sudden appearance later, maybe on accident. But McHugh’s a case story in another kind of genius – genius as free-floating, itinerant wanderer, alighting on people seemingly at random. Sometimes it stays for years, sometimes its gone within hours. I don’t want to go too far with this, as it’s not like McHugh had no talent or anything. His MLB debut was excellent, after all. But this run is one of the more unlikely, unforecastable things I’ve seen in a while, maybe since Danny Farquhar turned into a hard-throwing, excellent reliever. There’s basically nothing in the pitch fx data to pick out (though Mark Simon notes he’s leading batters off with breaking balls/change-ups much more than he used to), and, as I’ve noted, nothing in his minor league record. Nothing’s different except the results, only that implies luck or something. McHugh just turned really, really good. How long he stays awesome is impossible to know.
Brandon Maurer could use some of that random, unaligned, unaffiliated genius.
1: Saunders, CF
2: Bloomquist, SS
3: Cano, 2B
4: Hart, DH
5: Seager, 3B
6: Smoak, 1B
7: Romero, RF
8: Ackley, LF
9: Buck, C
SP: Maurer
Ooookay.
Tacoma’s got a double-header today after last night’s torrential rains. Mark Rogers starts game 1 and Andrew Carraway gets the call for the nightcap. Lefty Tyler Olson makes his first start in AA thanks to some injuries.
The MiLB game of the day yesterday was the slugfest in Appleton, WI, where the M’s current MWL affiliate beat their ex-affiliate (the host Timber Rattlers) 16-13. After a bullpen meltdown, the Lumberkings trailed 12-4, before scoring 11 runs in the final three innings.
I was curious to check out hittracker’s estimate of the distance on Justin Smoak’s absolute bomb off of Raul Valdes yesterday. As it turns out, it was only 403 feet, though it certainly felt much further because it was pulled down the line in a park without much depth beyond the left field wall, and because it was hit so high. So while it wasn’t the longest HR of the day, or of Smoak’s career, it was one of the highest. That’s…well, that’s much less cool, but it’s something.
Game 28, Mariners at Astros
Hisashi Iwakuma (!) vs. Dallas Keuchel, 1:10pm
Great to see Iwakuma return to the big club; the M’s got very solid starting pitching from the fill-ins while Iwakuma (and then James Paxton) was out, but this offense needs some help if they’re going to contend. The M’s aren’t going to slug their way to 81 wins unless something changes fairly dramatically. Adding an elite pitcher is still going to help their chances, though. Iwakuma wasn’t throwing any splitters in his simulated game, and apparently used it very sparingly in his rehab start with Tacoma, but it’s obviously an important pitch for him. I think that’s the most important thing to look for today: is he able to get the same sharp break on it, or will the pressure it puts on his finger noticeably alter the pitch?
Dallas Keuchel. I’ve said before that his name sounds like some sort of regional dessert, so now we need to figure out what a “Dallas Keuchel” should be. A blueberry danish, battered and deep fried, then drizzled with honey.
Keuchel’s had a solid year, and Adam Lewis hints at one reason why: he dropped his big slow curve and picked up a slider (Lewis calls it a slurve) that’s on a similar plane as his change-up. The curve ball was apparently easy for batters to identify, as they hit .370 off of it and posted a better-than-.600 slugging percentage. He’ll use the slider against righties and lefties alike, so the fact that he’s had better results with it isn’t just a platoon advantage artifact. Keuchel’s K rate is up a bit this year, but fundamentally, he’s a ground-ball guy with a good sinker and a sinking change-up. The change is an important pitch for him – he only throws it to righties, but it gets swinging strikes and ground balls. Keuchel’s struggled against righties in his career, as you might expect from a sinker/slider pitcher throwing 90mph, so developing the change-up – and disguising it with his slurve – has been critical to Keuchel’s improvement.
1: Saunders, CF
2: Romero, RF
3: Cano, 2B
4: Hart, DH
5: Seager, 3B
6: Smoak, 1B
7: Gillespie, LF
8: Miller, SS
9: Zunino, C
SP: Iwakuma
The story of the game last night was the bullpen usage, as McClendon went to Yoervis Medina in the 8th, up a run, instead of turning to Danny Farquhar (who eventually did pitch the 9th and 10th). I mentioned it on twitter last night, but in terms of leverage index – who pitches the most important innings – Farquhar’s clearly the 5th righty in the pen, and essentially the #7 guy overall. The bullpen has 7 pitchers. With Luetge’s demotion (to make room for Iwakuma), Farquhar’s got the lowest leverage index upon entering the game (gmLI) on the team. And it’s not even close – Medina and especially Wilhelmsen are the righty set-up men, with Furbush also getting important innings. Dom Leone’s a step behind those two righties, and Rodney’s obviously the closer. That means Farquhar’s pitched some garbage time innings. He got some important innings last night, but it’s not just hindsight that makes the M’s usage look odd.
The Angels are in some tough negotiations with the city of Anaheim over the lease on Angels stadium. To get some leverage, or just to explore all of their options, the Angels have approached other cities in Orange County to talk about a new development. The A’s are famous for trying to get out of their mixed-use facility and into Fremont; it’s kind of odd to see the Angels -the team with an owner willing to spend lavishly and refurbished baseball-only park – thinking about a similar move.
Game 27, Mariners at Astros
King Felix vs. Brad Peacock, 5:10pm
Happy Felix Day! For the first time in a while, M’s fans are probably capable of happiness coming into a Felix start. We’re not stuck in a long losing streak, and nothing puts a spring in your step like beating the Yankees. If anything DID, it would probably be a rookie pitcher striking out 10 in 7 effective innings.
Brad Peacock’s the spot-starter the Astros got from Oakland as part of the Jed Lowrie deal – a deal that looked balanced at the time, but has turned out to be something of a steal for Oakland. Peacock was lousy in the PCL for Oakland in 2012, then lousy in 80-odd innings for Houston last year, and he’s been differently lousy so far this year. Peacock throws a 93mph fastball with 10″ of rise and gets a fair number of whiffs on it, but that also generates a lot of loud contact and free baseballs for fans sitting in outfield bleachers. This year, he’s only made two starts and a handful of relief appearances – his HR rate is down, whatever that means, but it looks like it’s down because he’s been scared right out of the zone. His zone% cratered, and he’s now walking nearly 8 men per 9 innings.
He’s also got a slider/change and his primary breaking ball, a slow curve. Interestingly, these pitches actually can generate ground-ball outs, and the slider in particular looks like it could be a good pitch for him. He didn’t throw one when he came up (briefly) with the Nats, and he didn’t throw that many in 2013, but it’s now his go-to pitch against righties. That said, it’s not righties he has to worry about. Last year, lefties posted nearly a .400 wOBA off of him, and his career wOBA allowed isn’t much prettier. The M’s have seven lefties in tonight line-up, so this won’t be easy for Peacock. Of course, there were seven lefties in the M’s line-up the last time he faced Seattle, in September of last year, and he threw 6 innings of 3H, 1R ball and walked away with his second win of the year against them.
Felix’s last two games haven’t been up to the ridiculous standard of his first four, but Felix’s 2014 numbers are still pretty breathtaking. Fangraphs’ daily odds show this game as the biggest statistical miss-match of the day, with the M’s given nearly 2/3 chance of winning.
1: Saunders, RF
2: Miller, SS
3: Cano, 2B
4: Hart, DH
5: Seager, 3B
6: Smoak, 1B
7: Ackley, LF
8: Zunino, C
9: Almonte, CF
SP: Felix.
You may have seen this, and I enjoyed this piece of Dave’s at the Hardball Times on baseball economics.
And hey, if I’m going to link to the boss, I may as well get a few more in. This article at Fangraphs on run differentials is awesome. Essentially, this is a better way of looking at luck/true-talent than comparing actual won/loss records to pythagorean formulas. By stripping out sequencing, you’re left with a better overall estimate of a team’s real ability to score runs. I understand many believe certain teams are just inherently better at hitting with RISP, for example, but the change in the Cardinals fortunes from 2013 to 2014 may be instructive. Same with the Orioles incredible bullpen of 2012 that somehow wasn’t able to apply their real and totally-not-made-up skill in sequencing and strand rate the following year. Dave’s work shows that the M’s have been pretty fortunate to have amassed 101 runs already, which makes sense given their low team OBP or the performance of their ex-leadoff hitter. That said, the pitching staff looks pretty good for a team that hasn’t started two of their best pitchers at all yet. On the other hand, the M’s divisional opponents, especially the A’s, look incredible by this measure. We said before the season started that the M’s needed to stay close through April and not get buried while they waited for Iwakuma/Walker and then Paxton to heal. They’ve largely done that, and that’s great. But the M’s still need to keep their eye on a couple of specific teams if they want to be relevant later in the summer, and this measure shows that they’ve got their work cut out for them. So does that old-fashioned measure called the division standings, of course.
Erasmo Ramirez makes his first start for Tacoma tonight as they welcome Las Vegas to town. Lars Huijer starts for Clinton. Top-10 prospect Tyler Pike starts for High Desert in Adelanto against Visalia. Pike’s avoided HR trouble (one on the year so far), and he’s been tough to hit, but it’s odd to see him with 16 walks and 14 Ks on the year. His walk rate was a bit higher than it should’ve been last year in Clinton, though he didn’t really pay for it in runs allowed. That’s been the case thus far, but it’s something to keep an eye on. Frankly, it’s such an odd environment to pitch in that I’d give him a lot of latitude with it, but it’s something to watch, particularly if it persisted into AA. He’s got some stability in coaching, at least, as his pitching coach this year – ex-M’s/Rainiers pitcher Andrew Lorraine – was also his PC in Clinton last season.
Game 26, Mariners at Yankees
Roenis Elias vs. Hiroki Kuroda, 4:05pm
After yesterday’s rain-out (and you know you’re a baseball blogger when you kind of look forward to talking about David Phelps), the Yankees reshuffled their rotation, so the M’s face righty Hiroki Kuroda. Before Tanaka, before Iwakuma, before Uehara turned unhittable, there was Hiroki Kuroda. He’s by no means the first pitcher to feature a splitter, and he’s not even the first Japanese pitcher to find success in MLB in part thanks to his split-finger. But Kuroda’s success and, importantly, his evolution in the majors probably contributed to the bidding war around Tanaka.
To review, Kuroda signed with the Dodgers before the 2008 season, and spent four solid, almost insanely consistent seasons in LA. He moved to New York in 2012 and continued to post FIPs in the mid-3s despite the small park. Kuroda’s been one of the best free agent acquisitions in a long time for an organization known mostly for free agent acquisitions. His splitter’s helped him against lefties, and it’s helped avoid serious home run issued in hitter-friendly new Yankee stadium. What’s interesting, though, is that he wasn’t always a fastball/splitter pitcher. Only in his last season in LA did Kuroda throw appreciably more splitters than sliders…to left-handed hitters. To righties, he’s still a fastball/slider guy.
It’s worth noting that the splitters that Kuroda/Iwakuma/Tanaka/Alex Cobb throw are quite a bit different from the pitch that Dan Haren and Ubaldo Jimenez call a splitter. You can read Dan Haren describe his pitch to Eno Sarris here, but from a movement perspective, it’s more similar to a change-up, with arm-side run compared to the four-seam and moderate sink. It’s also slower – it’s around 8-10mph slower than the FB. Kuroda/Iwakuma/Tanaka/Cobb throw a pitch that’s maybe 4-6mph slower than a four-seam (Kuroda’s is 87, Iwakuma’s is 86), with no more arm-side run than the four-seam and a more pronounced downward dive. That means they can use it in different ways – whereas Dan Haren talks about being able to use it within the strike zone, and get *called* strikes with it, Kuroda/Iwakuma essentially avoid the strikezone completely, but rack up swinging strikes anyway.
So does Kuroda have Iwakuma’s reverse splits? No, he doesn’t – they’re completely normal. I do wonder, though, what they’d look like if he wasn’t so enamored with his slider, especially early on. In his career, lefties have hit five times as many HRs on Kuroda’s slider as his split, despite the fact that he’s thrown them about the same number of each. Technically, Iwakuma’s given up more HRs to lefties with HIS slider too, despite the fact that he rarely throws it to them.
Still, Kuroda’s nearing in on 40, and he’s not been as sharp this year. He’s been worse against lefties, but significantly worse against righties, though it’s obviously too soon to know if that means anything. The M’s have something of a re-jiggered line-up as they try to take this series and keep themselves on the periphery of the chase.
1: Saunders, CF
2: Romero, RF
3: Cano, 2B
4: Hart, DH
5: Seager, 3B
6: Smoak, 1B
7: Ackley, LF
8: Zunino, C
9: Miller, SS
SP: Elias
Chance Ruffin, Jochi Ogando, Jake Zokan, Carlos Misell and Matt Anderson start tonight for the M’s affiliates.