Game 18, Dodgers at Mariners
Marco Gonzales vs. Julio Urias, 1:10pm
Last night’s win was genuinely impressive – the easy choice as the best game of the season. They did it by jumping on their opponent’s starter, not something we’ve seen a lot of, and they held on through great bullpen performance and strategy. Dustin May was dealing, as we saw from all of the strikeouts, but when they got pitches to hit, they hit them very hard. There were a few times I thought Justus Sheffield was wobbling, but he came through it, and then, when he got in a jam and had to come out, the bullpen put out the fire. It wasn’t about pouncing on some reliever who didn’t have it that night, it wasn’t a weird, improbable late-game collection of hits. They just outplayed the Dodgers. It was amazing.
Now, they get the opportunity to do so again. Marco Gonzales hopes to take what he learned in Baltimore and apply it in this much more difficult setting. Marco’s a difficult guy to pin down, I feel. There’s always something people like me point to when he’s going well, but then he’ll change that thing, and still pitch pretty much like Marco Gonzales. Part of it is that it’s so difficult to pin down what “command” really is, and part of it is the reality that very, very few pitchers have the kind of consistency/stability that we attribute to them after the fact by looking at seasonal stats. Lucas Giolito was dominant early this year, and got knocked out in the first is last game out. Baseball’s volatile, and pitching is the most volatile component.
In 2018, I thought Gonzales was great despite pedestrian stuff because he simply didn’t have a pattern. All of his pitches were, in essence, equally likely. Fastball 25%, curve 25%, change 25%, cutter 25%. He was more confusing, harder to guess about, than other pitchers. Got it. Only now, he doesn’t pitch like that anymore. He didn’t in 2020, and that worked just fine. I used to think he needed to align the release points for his fastball and change, but he didn’t, and it didn’t matter. Marco was simply amazing at generating weak contact despite refusing to be chased out of the strikezone in the midst of the home run era. All of that is awesome, but it makes it harder to pinpoint things to fix now that all of the contact he’s generating is scalded.
Fangraphs has a post today on Dodger starter Julio Urias’ changing curveball shape. It’s been more of a 12-6, vertical pitch in the past, but is now has extreme horizontal sweep. It’s done well, but not especially so thus far. The key to Urias’ game is his change-up, and how he uses it to neutralize righties. In his career, he’s got fairly prominent reverse splits, and this is generally borne from his ability to get weaker contact from righties. The big thing that jumps out isn’t K rate, it’s that he’s able to limit righty home runs despite not being any kind of ground ball pitcher.
Normally, that would scream “fluke,” but I’m not sure it is. Change-ups are the one pitch that can *reliably* get swings even when thrown out of the zone. Sliders do too, sure, but mostly on two-strike pitches when batters have to protect and expand the zone. As I said for years, this was the key to Hisashi Iwakuma’s success – getting a ton of swings on his splitter (a type of change-up) even though everyone in the entire stadium knew that it would come in below the zone. Some years, Urias holds batters to an extremely low batting average on cambios, and some years he doesn’t. It actually doesn’t matter all that much, because they’re essentially all singles. He’s given up 38 singles in his career off of change-ups, but only 8 extra-base hits. By keeping them down and away to righties, it’s quite hard to elevate it.
But all of that’s good against righties. While reverse splits are weird/cool, they can be an indication that you can’t reliably get out same-handed bats. And that’s probably why Urias has been working so much on his curve. In his career, it’s been his worst pitch. Another actually effective pitch against lefties and righties would really make him a complete starter.
1: Haniger, RF
2: Lewis, CF
3: Seager, 3B
4: White, 1B
5: Murphy, C
6: Torrens, DH
7: Trammell, LF
8: Moore, 2B
9: Crawford, SS
SP: Gonzales
Welcome back, Kyle Lewis! The M’s activated Lewis off of the IL, sending Braden Bishop to the alternate site. As is so often the case in baseball, the great news that Lewis is back is balanced by the fact that Ty France is not. France took a fastball off of his right forearm last night, and later had to come out when he tried throwing, only to find that he couldn’t.
Evan White at clean-up: I’m still not a fan of it. White’s K rate has plummeted this year, and that’s impressive and worth noting. Unfortunately, it’s come at the expense of all traces of power. The one hopeful sign amidst last year’s disaster was that when he DID make contact, he hit the ball quite hard. More contact, more hard contact, good results. But somewhere in the process of cutting his K% in half, he lost the hard contact part, as his average exit velocity is in the 4th percentile in MLB. He’s a completely different hitter this year, but it all leads to the same overall result. His wOBA last year was .261, and it’s .277 this year. Neither are anywhere close to OK for a 1B, or a clean-up hitter.