Game 58, Mariners at Angels
Justus Sheffield vs. Griffin Canning, 7:10pm
After a rough loss yesterday, the M’s head out on the road to face the Angels. The Angels seem mired in yet another aimless season, this time due to injuries to stars like Anthony Rendon. But the main problem remains an enduring lack of production from their pitching staff. A really odd inability to develop pitchers has been the primary reason Mike Trout’s not sniffed the postseason in years, and it’s doomed multiple front offices, including Jerry Dipoto’s run as GM. Yes, yes, he battled with Mike Scioscia, but there’d be less battling if more of the starters they drafted clicked.
But before we get to today’s starter, the Angels’ latest potential home-grown savior, I want to talk about spin rate. It was all over Twitter today, as Gerrit Cole registered his lowest four-seam rate and by far the lowest spin rate/MPH (Bauer Units) measure of the year. Coupled with a Jon Heyman tweet about the league getting ready to crack down on sticky substances pitchers are using (and seriously, read this Travis Sawchick article about how he measured his own spin rate with and without various powders, goos, and glops), and people made the leap that maybe Cole was pitching au naturel, and his stuff was suffering for it. The experts tried to get people to downplay it, pointing out he’s had games like this in previous years, and small-sample hawkeye data can be pretty unreliable, but given that Cole was a guy who used to get a special sticky substance from the Angels’ own disgraced former clubbie, those calls for calm didn’t stop the speculation.
But this gets to something I’ve been stewing on for years, and wrote an article at BP about. Why is spin rate so important to pitchers? In Sawchick’s article, he says, “More spin means more Magnus effect, which is the invisible force governing most pitch movement.” But this isn’t quite right: active spin can lead to movement, but you can boost your spin rate by cutting the ball, which is how Garrett Richards can have one of the spinniest fastballs in the game, but well *below* average movement. If the idea is that spin is the raw material for Magnus-based movement, why not just measure – and stay with me here – Magnus-based movement? Given its correlation with velocity (more velo, more spin), it’s even harder to isolate the value that it can add absent a whole bunch of caveats.
This is why Marcus Stroman can be effective despite a sinker with above-average spin but below-average spin efficiency, for example. I looked at Kendall Graveman’s spin rate, partially out of curiosity and partly to see if his turbo-sinker was as high-spin as it looks. The answer: no, it’s not. Graveman’s sinker gets only average spin, and thus below-average Bauer units given its high velocity. And what’s more, that spin rate has gone *down* – and markedly – in recent years. I went and looked at perhaps the most famous turbo-sinker in the game, Blake Treinen’s, and the same pattern held: he had pretty good spin rates in his 2018 Oakland peak, but it’s dropped off in each year since, and is now in a statistical dead heat with Marco Gonzales’ non-turbo-sinker. In spin efficiency and Bauer units, Gonzales “beats” both Treinen and Graveman’s pitches handily. But, and I know this is a stat-focused blog, just *watch the pitches.*
Some of this has to do with the seam-shifted wake, the fact that another force can cause a pitch to move than just the Magnus effect. This seems particularly true for Stroman, for example, and may also be at play with Justus Sheffield, the M’s starter tonight. But whatever the reason, it’s not simply the case that spin leads directly to movement, and it’s not the case that spin (in and of itself) leads to effectiveness. Corbin Burnes and Brandon Woodruff, or Bauer himself and Yu Darvish, have been very successful and create tons of spin. But they all throw really, really hard. Bauer gets a ton of movement, while Woodruff doesn’t. And pitchers like Jack Flaherty, Shane Bieber, and Blake Treinen can be successful despite average fastball spin.
Still, tell that to the pitchers. This season’s seen a ton of talk about cracking down on foreign substances. Mike Schildt’s press convo after his pitcher had his hat confiscated was the most famous example, but there’s constant chatter about the league taking balls to sample. Today’s word that they may begin, uh, doing something with all the evidence they presumably have plays into it. It seems that pitchers have seen what’s happened to Bauer and Cole’s spin rates over the years, and are trying new things to increase their grip on the ball. If a non-athlete reporter like Sawchick could add 400 rpms by using something, hey, what could they add? I’m sure a lot of pitchers are using stuff, but I keep thinking that if some of these new substances were that transformative, we’d see it in league-wide spin rates and movement patterns in a magnitude that would jump off the page. We DO see spin rate inching up, but then, so is velo. Movement’s up too, but as Rob Arthur mentioned, much of that could be due to the baseball being lighter.
Anyway, Griffin Canning’s a 25-year old righty with a high-ish spin four-seam fastball at 94, a hard slider at 88, and an even-harder change-up at 90 (I love the Felix-style hard change). He misses bats with all three, and generates a lot of fly balls, which should theoretically reduce his BABIP. That hasn’t actually happened yet, which is odd. What *has* happened – especially in 2021 – is that a bunch of those fly balls became home runs. He’s given up 10 in 8 starts thus far, over 2 per 9 innings. That’s not going to play, and thus he enters tonight with an ERA well over 5 and sits at replacement level by FIP despite a decent strikeout rate.
Is his HR/FB going to come down eventually? Yes, it pretty much has to. But it’s been high-ish in his first two years, and the fact that his walk rate’s up too suggests that he needs more than dinger regression to really become an effective starter.
Justus Sheffield has one of the lowest spin rates around, which was part of the reason he embraced the sinker last year. It’s not a great pitch at this point, but it allows him to get to his slider. One problem this year for him has been BABIP, the same thing that’s helped teammate Justin Dunn so much. Sheffield’s just not going to miss bats with his raw stuff, so to give up hits like it’s 1981 instead of 2021 is a problem. Why isn’t T-Mobile park’s freakish anti-BABIP power helping him? Well, it is. At home this year, he’s got a BABIP of .274. On the road, though…it’s .403.
While HRs aren’t a part of BABIP, I wanted to link to this Devan Fink article about HR rates by park, as it shows the magnitude of the drop-off in many parks, including Seattle’s. Fink tried to isolate the park by only looking at balls in play at 95+ mph and in specific angle ranges (as a previous article showed that these balls in play seemed the most impacted by the changes to the baseball). In Seattle, almost 60% of these balls in play were homers in 2019, but this year, just 43% have gone over the wall. A 16+ percentage point drop! And that’s less than the effect seen in Oakland, LA, and St. Louis! As we’ve talked about, Seattle’s OF is quite small, so a reduction in HRs doesn’t mean an increase in doubles and triples. Since moving the walls in, Seattle is *death* to 2B/3B. So, fewer HRs means more outs in play.
I keep thinking that the combined effect of the humidor and the new ball are having unpredictable or outsized impacts on balls in play. Seattle and the Mets’ Citi Field both showed dramatic drops from 2019-2021, but then, Fenway and Chase Field didn’t (Chase even saw *more* HRs this year), so I’m not sure. I just think MLB has made a number of changes simultaneously, making it both more likely that different parks will play radically differently from year to year and also making it harder to determine which change is doing what.
1: Crawford, SS
2: Haniger, RF
3: Seager, 3B
4: France, 1B
5: Kelenic, CF
6: Godoy, C
7: Trammell, LF
8: Fraley, DH
9: Walton, 2B
SP: Sheffield
Justus Sheffield’s got one of the lowest spin rates in the game, so now that his brother is in the big leagues, how do they compare? Well, Jordan Sheffield has one of the absolute highest rates in the game, ahead of Corbin Burnes and Garrett Richards.
Tacoma’s back home to host the Salt Lake Bees tonight. It’s another bullpen day, with Ryan Dull getting the start. Cal Raleigh’s got a 14-game hitting streak going. After a weird 2019 where he didn’t hit for much power in AAA (despite the two-HR game that got rained out in Tacoma) and then and awful 2020 MLB debut, Jo Adell of the Bees is going nuts, leading the PCL with 12 HRs already.
Arkansas beat Wichita 5-2 behind a stellar relief outing from Leon Hunter, who K’d 5 in 2 1/3 scoreless. Hunter was acquired in trade (for cash considerations) from Texas in late April. Tonight, Ian McKinney tries to keep his eye-opening season going; he’ll start for the Travs.
Everett lost to Hillsboro 6-2. The offense is struggling a bit without Julio Rodriguez, who’s busy in Olympic qualifying (and hitting 2 dingers in a recent game vs. Nicaragua). Emerson Hancock starts for the AquaSox tonight.
Modesto beat up on San Jose 10-5, as Noelvi Marte hit his sixth home run – this one an inside-the-park job. Cade Marlowe went 2-4 with 4 runs scored. No word on tonight’s starter.
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