Rates & Barrels - A Closer Look at the Location of Pitcher Whiffs

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

Eno and DVR discuss the local of pitcher whiffs and whether it matters if swings and misses are generated inside the strike zone, outside the strike zone, or if a truly elite pitcher needs to do both.  Rundown 2:36 Are High O-Swing% & Low Z-Contact% Pitchers Elite? 5:52 Getting In-Zone Whiffs with Fastballs 10:54 Bailey Ober's Surprising Placement in Both Categories 13:07 Whiffs In the Heart of the Strike Zone 17:45 High O-Swing% & High Z-Contact% = Great Command? 25:53 What is Justin Steele? 29:33 Low O-Swing%, Low Z-Contact% 42:03 Expecting A Unique Role for Kyle Harrison 44:37 Is There Anything Supporting Brady Singer's Recent Surge? 48:23 Making Sense of Luis Severino's 2023 Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Subscribe to The Athletic at $2/month for the first year: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Subscribe to the Rates & Barrels YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RatesBarrels Get 20% OFF with our code RATES at calderalab.com/RATES to unlock your youthful glow with Caldera + Lab! #teamcaldera Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Raids and Barrels, it's Monday, August 21st, Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris, a rare afternoon pod, right? You think of day baseball, we have morning pods usually this is an afternoon recording so everything looks different if you're watching us on youtube actually nothing looks different maybe maybe the lighting in my office because of the windows is actually different you know looks exactly the same you know how's everything going for you on this monday good we're scrambling because uh we're putting this this in between coming back from Yosemite, where we had one of those staff development days, three-day weekends at school.

So we took advantage of that. That's a little hack for anybody listening who wants to go to Yosemite. If you can go after school starts and before the winter, do it. Although, what I gather is we were a little bit lucky this year. The extra rain in the spring meant that we were still able to enjoy the river, enjoy the waterfalls. Usually this close to fall, those things start tapering out because of the water. But you could use this hack also maybe in may uh on the on the front end uh so uh it just

becomes kind of untenable where they're talking about three to four hour waits in your car to get into the park uh during the summer during the peak summer hours uh we had nothing like that we found parking spaces hiked had a great time and we're fitting that in this in between coming back from that and finding out from the x-rays if my older son broke his arm yeah hopefully good news coming on that front but uh might be a few weeks before he's back swinging the bat again yeah either way even if it's just a bad sprain or a hairline or something it doesn't look like a full sort of tibia not tibia is the leg right so no tibia is the arm right I think the tibia and the fibula are in the leg

it's not like a full forearm fracture if it is it's something smaller but sometimes that can be just as bad so we're just we're going to find out this afternoon he's not, you know, rolling around in pain or anything. He's got it splinted and, you know, you're getting some Advil and he's doing okay.

Hanging in there. All right. Well, let's get things going for this episode. We've got a couple of things on the rundown that are kind of like the pitching spinoffs of an episode we did last week. Last week, we were talking about,

you know know hitters chasing outside the zone and maybe collectively or at least in my case being quick to penalize hitters who are too aggressive in their approach we explained why that might be problematic thinking so we're going to take a look at pitchers and look at what they do as far as getting whiffs inside and outside the strike zone so in this case we're talking about oh swing percentage for pitchers and zone contact percentages just as the case was for hitters. You can look at the Baseball Info Solutions version or the StatCast version when you're looking at fan graphs. These are the StatCast numbers that I pulled for the rundown. Use whatever set you want, but just

if you hear a discrepancy, that's probably where it came from. And what I wanted to talk about first is, you know, if you make an assumption that a pitcher who gets chases outside the zone and also does well inside the zone, so they have a high swing percentage and a low zone contact percentage, can you make an assumption that those are the most dominant pitchers in the game? Because they can beat you in the zone and they can beat you outside of the zone they throw pitches that are so nasty you're swinging even if it's not in the zone right that's a great combination of things to have is there any problematic thinking in wanting to put that combination of skills into a dominant sort of bucket i don't think so i mean getting uh getting whiffs in the zone is uh i think traditionally thought of as high stuff you know that's i mean what if you're getting whiffs in

the zone then they can't take it and when they swing and they're missing you know so i don't know that it's not i i think of that as high stuff i think of getting chases as more command that's you know making people think it's a strike and and kind of nibbling or being close in that nice shadow uh area around the there's a a definition of zones at savant where one is shadow which is kind of a little bit inside the zone, a little bit outside the zone, a little band around it. And the shadow zone, that's where the command artists live. And I think, you know, whiffs in zone is where the high stuff guys live. Yeah, I think that's a good way of kind of relating it back to the ways we usually talk about pitchers.

I was surprised looking at the starters, looking for guys that do both of these things. It's not surprising to see Spencer Strider up there. 37% O-swing percentage, 75.2% zone contact percentage. Just phenomenal. Joe Ryan, not that far behind, actually has a better O-swing percentage than Strider. 38.2%. Slightly higher zone contact percentage at 78.8%.

Joe Ryan is the mystery wrapped in a riddle because some of the other names that popped on the list, Uri Perez, Shane McClanahan, Tyler Glassnow, they all made sense to me. Those were names I expected to see there. But two twins, Joe Ryan and Bailey Ober, were both surprises to me relative to my expectations for how those guys work and just how good their stuff actually is. Yeah, well, Spencer Strider and Joe Ryan have the first and second most raw whiffs in the zone on the fastball. And so that's, I think, a big part of why they're so good. You know, just looking at this list of in-zone whiffs on the

fastball there's a lot of names that you would expect garrett cole is here freddie peralta is here you know zach weather is here those are all really good fastballs there's some interesting uh names though also lance lynn is here george kirby is here and we're thinking if in zone contact rates are you know such a great proxy for stuff why is george kirby here it's not that he has bad stuff it's just that most people think of him as command forward lance lynn being here he's mostly command forward luis castillo is third in raw whiffs on the fastball in the zone um i guess you could think of him as a high stuff guy but i i think of him sort of as a hybrid guy so you know you know a lot of this also has to do with you know how much they throw it deception i think joe ryan is here more out of deception spencer strider is here out of

release point plus movement plus velo you know what we kind of consider as stuff so um yeah but it's definitely some interesting names. If you can get whiffs on the fastball in the zone, you're a good pitcher. The only pitchers that I'm looking at here that are at all iffy are Christian Javier with the 7th most in-zone forcing

fastball whiffs. Lance Lynn, I guess, at 4th. And Joe Ryan, of course, is struggling a little bit. Yeah, before his IELTS stint really hit a bumpy patch in his season kind of going back to June or so Ober didn't pop on that fastball list did he I don't think I heard his name when you were going through that group I mean how is he doing this it's a higher zone contact percentage than the other players in the group but it's the O swing getting guys to chase outside the zone with a pretty good, better than average zone contact percentage, that's the part that surprised me. I'm surprised he does both of those things well.

Over his 28th, he's pitched a little bit less than some other guys. Let me see if I can limit it to pitch type so I can see. Yeah, so I have pitch percentage in here but the thing that you're doing on savant you have to change total pitch parameters that if you're doing a query on savant there's a box that says change total pitch parameters that is your denominator if you're doing pitch percentage so if I

want to know how many whiffs they're getting on four seamers in the zone, I have to put pitch type and game day zones in the pitch parameters to put them at the bottom. The denominator is swings and misses divided by fastballs in the zone. When I do that, Spencer Strider has a 19% swing and miss on his fastball in the zone. That's really good. That is sexy. I imagine that's reliever-esque, right? I mean, I would assume that some of your top relievers are in that range. Yeah. Okay. So I have to up the minimum results so that I'm not just looking at these guys. Ryan Ryder has one pitch in the zone and one whiff. He's amazing. But if I change the number of results,

let's see how I do here. Oh, I did it too high. There's only five guys. Hold on. Spencer Triter, again, number one. Here we go. I did it. Minimum number 25.

So Kendall Grave graveman 39.7 wow i guess what i guess what we're seeing here is that he doesn't throw the forcing that much still and when he does he gets whiffs so he must be a you know must be that people aren't looking for that that's isn't that amazing that he's number one in percentage of swing and miss on forcing fastballs in the zone? Yeah, you could have given me a hundred guesses and I wouldn't have even considered Kendall Graven for the last one. You know, around him

are David Bednar and Sir Anthony Dominguez and Aroldis Chapman and Felix Bautista. You know, like, okay, duh. Number one starter is by percentage, it might surprise you you he's on the mariners kirby woo brian woo nice uh i'm surprised by that number two is luis castillo uh sandy alcantara is up there he see that that's the Kendall Graven effect, right?

These pitches all still fit together. It's really hard to pull pitching apart like this. You know what I mean? It's like, why does Sandy Alcantara have such a high whiff rate on four-seamers in the zone? It's because he uses the four-seam four whiffs. You know what I mean? I'm trying to find Ober here.

It's a 91.3 mile per hour four seamer from Bailey over. It's just so unspectacular by Velo, but he's tall, right? It's 7'4 extension. That's part of it. He's pretty good. He's pretty good by percentage. It's 16%. He has the same in-zone whiff rate on four seam fastballs as Zach Wheeler.

Yeah, I wouldn't have expected it just by Velo alone. So there's so much more going on in Bailey Ober in this case. Again, the extension would probably be the biggest reason why that's happening. It's all at the top of the zone. You know, one thing I do notice when I watch Bailey Ober pitch is he's really good at commanding the ball at the top of the zone. And I think you'll find that even while we're trying to sort of be like, oh, is this a proxy for stuff? We'll find that some of these guys are on here for command.

Bailey Ober, I think, is just a guy who can keep the ball from being a ball and also place the ball in that sort of top bit of the zone that is just really hard to hit i mean career 4.9 percent walk rate it fits i know command and control are not the same thing but they're often related you see guys with good command usually run pretty low walk rates ober does that does get into some home run trouble on occasion we've seen that in multiple seasons now from in the big leagues so that could be a legitimate downside to what he does, but it's a good overall package of skills that overbrings the table. The relievers you mentioned before, Felix Bautista, I think, has made the case to be the first reliever off the board by just pure stuff, right? He's

absolutely filthy. You can't hit him in the zone. You can't hit him outside the zone. You really can't hit Felix Bautista's stuff anywhere. If you're starting to think about relievers for the future, you're trying to trade for the best reliever available in your league, is it safe to say Felix Bautista has

become that guy? Because the results are just ridiculous. Totally. I think so. I'm all over him the only i mean there's those knees i guess uh but you know when you're talking about that sort of stuff i mean everybody's got something i tried to do something where i focused even tighter in so let's say you know isn't it sort of compelling to say that if i can get a whiff on in the heart of the zone then that's got to be stuff right yeah uh aroldis chapman number one in uh whiffs on fastballs heart of the zone rafael montero too it's interesting david bednar carlos estevez brian woo ryan stanek luis castillo pa Paul Seawald, Sandy Alcantara, Joe Jimenez,

Pablo Lopez, Craig Kimbrell, Tanner Scott. Yeah. This is a stuff list. Yeah. Gavin Williams, number one in the number three or four starting pitchers, Gavin Williams. So this, I think, is a little bit closer to just stuff. This, I think, is a little bit closer to just stuff. I guess the only thought I have on that for now would be that if you are getting whips in the heart of the zone,

you probably don't throw pitches in the heart of the zone very often. So could that be very risky or very noisy? Set up by other things? Yeah, I just wonder if that might be a noisy thing to consider or does it mean you have bad command too i mean there's a role as chapman has bad command bednar is not great stanek has bad command like there are definitely some bad command guys here craig kimbrough has bad command well yeah it's it's your stuff is so good that your command doesn't even matter because guys are still swinging through it yeah and then you know

so the opposite side so you always want to look at the opposite side of the list and be like okay did i do this right you know jesus lizardo has the worst has the highest contact rate on forcing fastballs in the zone now actually i think you could make the argument that his stuff on his fastball is not that great. It's not great shape. But then number two is Blake Snell. And number three is Kevin Gossman. And number six is Zach Gallin. This is the entire zone, not the heart of the zone right now?

This is heart. Okay, this is the heart. People do damage against Logan Gilbert and Hunter Brown in the heart of the zone right now this is hard okay this is a hard okay the people do damage against logan gilbert and hunter brown in the heart of the zone see but that's where i think my original question kind of came from it's like hey look i think you could be a good pitcher and if you're in the heart of the zone bad stuff's gonna happen to you in most circumstances you have to be throwing one of the absolute filthiest pitches in the league to get away with pitching there. And sometimes you just get lucky because hitter guess is wrong.

Whatever it might be, you can get away with it. But this seems like a very slippery slope skills-wise. Yeah. The number one guy in terms of number of pitches in the heart of the zone is Spencer Strider. 478 fastballs in the middle zone. That's because he only throws two pitches. He still does well there. Kevin Gossman, it's really interesting. Spencer Strider is number one in total fastballs in the center of the zone, and he still gets 17.6% whiff rate on those pitches. Kevin Gossman is number two with 448 forcing fastballs in the middle of the zone.

And he gets half the swing and miss that Spencer Strider does. I wonder how much of the damage, the occasional damage that does happen to Strider, how much of it happens on those pitches? Yes. Yes. I'm going to do some included stats and just do slugging percentage because if i do this and oh i can't get slugging percentage too because i have swing and miss well anyway i i think that you know the fact that spencer streyer kevin gossman are up here and joe ryan in terms of total pitches in the middle of zone mackenzie gore is up here and Joe Ryan in terms of total pitches in the middle of the zone. Mackenzie Gore is up here.

Ryan Nelson is up here. Michael Kopech. Christian Javier is here. It's going to sound dumb, but you do want to avoid the middle of the zone. I was not questioning that at any point during the process of building out this episode.

I didn't have the absolute galaxy brain moment where I said, maybe it's okay to be in the middle of the zone. No, it's not. You don't want to be in there. But it's worse. It's worse for some guys than it is for others. Yeah, it's worse for Zach Gallen than it is for Garrett Cole and Spencer Strider. But that's stuff. That's a difference in stuff.

The other core group of players that got the wheels spinning for me today, when you look at the leaderboard, just the overall war leaderboard for starting pitchers for this year, Gallin is number two over at Fangraphs. Sonny Gray, Pablo Lopez are five and sixth. Kirby is seventh. In what? In war. five and six Kirby is seventh. Is that in, in war?

Uh, Zach Eflin is ninth. This is a different group of pictures that are, it's popping this year. I realized war is not necessarily fantasy value, but it's just, these are mostly guys, almost entirely guys.

They're going to go earlier in drafts next year than they did this year, or they're much more expensive to trade for in a late season trade. If you're trying to get pitching because they've been so good so far this year, and they all kind of fall into this group where they're good at getting chases, but they do get hit a lot more when they're in the zone. So kind of balancing this out.

If you, if you have excellent command, which I think would be reflected by either low walk rate or low home run rate or both, and or a lot of grounders, if you have some other related metrics that kind of connect to this, are you okay buying into sustained growth or at least maintaining this level in the future for this group of guys that will go again, much, much earlier in drafts. I, Justin steals up there too. And war this year,

he's, he's been a tricky pitcher for us all year. It goes back to the second half of last season. Does this actually work getting those chases outside the zone, but being more hittable than you'd expect inside the zone? I mean, my research from stuff and and and location suggests that like you know those guys are an if you're bet but i did for the purposes of this

podcast look back at an old piece from bill petty now this is this was done in 2012 it's possible things have changed a little bit since then but i was surprised to find that o contact and o swing have the same year-to-year stickiness or not exactly the same or just below k percentage so k percentage has a 0.82 correlation year-to-year for pitchers and that's why we focus on it it's one of the best if you eliminate pitch type metrics like you know curveball percentage or whatever the only thing better than k percentage is ground ball percentage so those two things are super highly correlated year to year now right below k percentage of swing strike rate and that's why i looked this up because i wanted to be like hey is swing strike

rate just capturing all that we're talking about here and doing it better and stickier year to year and becomes a reliable faster is therefore just a you know superior. Let's put that aside because I'm surprised to find that swing strike rate 0.81, O swing 0.79, and O contact 0.77. So it looks like the ability to get batters to chase is a somewhat, is a pretty sticky year-to-year ability. And so if that's the case, what is a pretty sticky year-to-year ability. And so if that's the case, then it's

the type of pitchers that do get those chases, you know, whether it's tunneling or command, they seem like maybe they're a better bet than I expected. It's a tricky group. I mean, Aaron Nola's in here, Joe Musgrove's in here, Garrett Whitlock also

in there as a smaller inning sample sort of guy with that high O-swing and high zone contact. Logan Webb, that makes sense to me as the prototype because Logan Webb gets a ton of ground balls. So if you're a ground ball pitcher, you're going to have higher zone contact percentage. That's just part of how you work. And I started thinking about this over the weekend.

A lot of what happens in player development is about making your stuff better, missing bats, trying to strike guys out. That's the best outcome. No contact, nothing bad happens, right? But it might not be the best thing for injury, as we've talked about on this show for years, because your pitch count can go up higher, and you're not as efficient as you could be.

Some of the pitches that you throw four whiffs might also be higher stress on your elbow. Right, so there could be an approach to pitching that is, some people are going to say, this is what it was like in the 70s and 80s. Maybe. Maybe some of the old stuff with the new stuff is actually the right way to go

where you make pitchers more efficient. You find ways to say, I'm in the zone, or even these group of guys that people might be skeptical of for a variety of reasons. Maybe this is actually a more sustainable approach in general to pitching because it's less about racking up whiffs and more about being efficient with your pitches, getting through through your start getting through six innings without throwing 110 pitches just getting it done right because i like this group overall and yet other than like aaron nola's peak season i'm not sure i look at any of those guys and say definitely sp1 stuff for these guys even though they're getting sp1 type results yeah i mean it's i i feel better about the group that combines great z contact with uh great chase rates yeah oh yeah that's like that that's always like that's in my head that's that's the ideal but that group but nolan eflin are

similar they're right next to each other when i change when i just look at qualified starters and i do it by oh swing percentage nolan eflin are right next to each other and they're right next to each other when i change when i just look at qualified starters and i do it by oh swing percentage nolan efflin are right next to each other and they're both guys that also have you know 86 87 88 percent zone contact um so you know and then but but then there's merrill kelly right there with them and do i want to bet on the merrill Kelly profile year in and year out? We talked about him maybe two months ago, and it's a really deep mix of pitches, which is something you generally like. It's improvement pretty late in his career,

so that's a little surprising. But yeah, 33.1% O-swing percentage, that's pretty good. 83.1% for the zone contact percentage, not that bad. That actually, that's more like the first group in the second group. Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.

Okay. Let me, I'm going to go high zone contact. So I'm, I'm, I'm doing it by zone contact. Who are the pitchers I like here? I don't like Kyle Freeland.

I don't like Jordan Lyles. I don't like Brady singer. I don't like Patrick Corbin. I, I skipped a name already. I don't like Jordan Lyles. I don't like Brady Singer. I don't like Patrick Corbin. I skipped a name already. I don't. Okay, so now we got Logan Webb is fourth. Alex Cobb is sixth. Tywon Walker is seventh.

You know, they don't necessarily get a lot of chases other than Logan Webb. So there's still a way to be an okay pitcher in the zone. It is to be a ground ball pitcher right and that's that's not a not a big surprise right if you're going to where bryce elder is look at that there's got to be some threshold where if you're going to get hit in the zone this much you have to get a certain number of ground balls or a certain ground ball rate for it to all work out. Right. And is Bryce Elders 52% there? Because Logan Webb's at 61% ground balls. He's 61.

Marcus Strom is 58. Fromber usually runs pretty high. I think when we talked about Fromber last, his ground ball rate, yeah, it was more normal than 53.5%. That's very normal, but his typical marks are in the 60s. He was 66.5% last year for the ground ball rate, over 200 innings. So that to me, like Frambois and Logan Webb are very similar. Different handedness, but similar in that they can actually get a decent number of strikeouts and really do a good job of limiting damaging contact with their approaches and their pitch mix. do a good job of limiting damaging contact with their approaches and their pitch mix yeah but what is justin steel justin steel has an 89 zone contact and a 35.8 uh chase rate according this is uh we're using slightly different numbers that's my fault but um so uh he is justin steel is a high chase high contact guy with a with an okay ground ball right

do you believe in justin steel i'm starting to i i think the the general sort of rule i have is that you don't have to do both of these things well you just have to do at least one of them well and then how your stuff interacts and your command and the other factors are the things that we need to be looking at before we make a decision on a pitcher. I'm not willing to dismiss a pitcher because of

failure in one of these areas. Steele is really tough to project. How about somebody who fails in most of these areas? Kyle Bradish. Is he bad in all of them? He's average at chase. He's the 19th worst zone contact among qualified pitchers, and he has a 48% ground ball rate.

That's a rough combination. I mean, we had a question about Brad ish too, while I'm, while I'm thinking through my answer, Brad ish is fastball stuff. Plus has been better over the past month. And the question was basically like, how,

how does that happen in season? Does it mean anything? You know, the one 15 fastball stuff plus over the last month, is that a thing that you can reasonably look at and say there's some adjustments and this is real and this is sustainable or is it just sort of a normal fluctuation you could have because i think in the past you mentioned bradish has just kind of a an average or worse fastball and part of what makes him effective is that he doesn't throw it that often yeah i mean uh

there's an actual pretty simple answer here uh is he's throwing the fastball harder than he has for most of the season that works so if you especially if you break it by month it's pretty obvious to see uh he went from 94.3 in the first month of the season to 94.8 now by game there's a little bit of up and down with the pitch but it's generally getting harder and it's generally getting more horizontal movement so at the beginning of the season it was kind of uh we talked about this a fair amount where we talk about it. Like he hadn't found his horizontal movement on that fastball. Um, and he had a,

basically a zero horizontal movement and he's added two and a half inches of horizontal movement since then. Um, so it's still a little inconsistent movement wise, but, uh, it's inconsistent in the better direction, like more and more movement.

Um, and, uh, there it's inconsistent in the better direction, like more and more movement. And it's possible he hasn't found the ideal movement for this pitch yet. So I guess it's possible that he could stick around at 110 if he kind of solidifies the gains he's made with this pitch. he's made with his pitch. I'd like to see improvement in one of these areas before being excited about Bradish at a much increased price for next year. So he's probably, for now, an early avoid if we're looking ahead to next season, even though it's been a great season for him so far

and what he's doing is obviously very valuable to the Orioles to this point. What about this group? The low O-swing percentage, but the low zone contact percentage group. Shohei Otani, 25.8% O-swing percentage, very low, 82% zone contact rate. It's very good. Blake Snell's in this group too. Michael Kopech kind of fits the same sort of description. Nestor Cortez, not all the same by stuff. But Otani and Snell, I almost wonder if guys don't chase against them because they're so filthy. They're just looking for something.

They're looking for something closer to the heart of the zone. They're not looking for something on the edges of the zone. And Snell's reputation as a guy that issues a lot of walks would lead you as a hitter to go up to the plate thinking, if it's close, I'm not swinging, right? I'm letting stuff that's on the edges go. And maybe the approach shapes it. The game plan. I mean, the game plan, Shohei Otani, all the things are great about him, except maybe his command.

It's not his greatest feature. And Blake Snell, it's really obvious that command is not his greatest his greatest feature and blake snell it's very really obvious that it's not command is not his best feature um and dylan cease is on this high uh low zone contact contact um you know middling or bad chase rate he's on this list kodai senga is on this list so there are definitely some pitchers here that have poor command and you say kikuchi is on this list. So there are definitely some pitchers here that have poor command. You say Kikuchi is on this list. They have poor command and you know what the game plan is. What the hitters are trying to do is make him throw you a strike. And when these pitchers do it because they have good enough stuff,

they can get whiffs. But they just, I think it's a little bit about how poor their command is and what the game plan is against them. Yeah, I figured that was likely part of how some of these numbers take shape. You have a reputation, it's in the game plan. Teams go ahead and make some adjustments. I wondered what would happen if you're bad at both of these things. You don't get swings and misses outside the zone,

and you hit a lot in the zone those are your worst pitchers generally but a few names that that actually pop that were bad in both the worst in both is adam wainwright at this stage of his career 20.3 percent oh swing percentage 92.7 zone contact percentage it just doesn't work one year too many probably is the the best explanation for that but i've seen younger guys like matt manning on on that part of the the leaderboard is a great singer once again here jake irvin yeah jake irvin matthew libra tour big hit for lodum in its early days matthew libra tour uh mitch keller was still bad in both even this year which was a little surprising to me i would

have figured something had changed i would have thought actually the zone contact percentage was better for mitch keller because i've watched them a few times this year and stuff has looked pretty good but a 24.6 percent oh swing percentage and 86 percent zone contact percentage for keller which is just baffling i think the first number is poor command. This is something we knew about Mitch Keller, right? We knew he had poor command. The second number surprises me because I've sorted it in my head as someone who has good stuff and poor command. It's better. It's better than it was. 85.6% is the best zone contact percentage of Mitch Keller's career. Yeah. And what's also surprising to me is that as someone who i think of his high stuff and low command he's found this relative success by throwing many more types of pitches

and you would have thought if he's high stuff then isn't he going to be more like spencer strider where he just throws a ton of his best pitches at the middle of the zone and doesn't get chases but gets whiffs, but he's not that guy either. This is the best version of Keller and I like him. I thought this could happen, but I'm not sure there's another level. That's probably fine if there's not. I guess the question is, you look at his last 14 starts now, cut his season in half, go back to the start of June. It's a 5-11

ERA since then. Home run rate's up a little bit, 1.3 homers per nine, over three walks per nine. The underlying skills are not that bad. He should have a better result than this. This doesn't add up. It still seems like through all of it, and this includes a stretch for the first couple months where we had conversations and Mitch Keller figured it out. It's all

happening. This is the guy. This is the guy we wanted to begin his season. His first 12 starts, 11 Ks per nine. It was a 93-17 strikeout to walk in 74 and two-thirds innings. 325 325 era it was deserved right he was keeping the ball in the park everything was working so the thing people are going to wonder about is can he take that and the way he got there can he do something like that

over a full season or is this the adjustment phase where he had a new game plan and the league adjusted to it and the second half results are closer to his new baseline now the league has seen it for a little while i don't have the the answer today but i think that's what people are going to start thinking about as they try and figure out what to do with him going the next season if i am going to convince myself he has another level i'm going to convince myself that some of the new pitches he's added over the course of the last two years just need more time and that he will be able to command them a little bit better going forward so in the last year he's added the sweeper the cutter and the sinker that's three

pitch types that do improve the breadth of his arsenal and and you know honestly the sweeper is his best pitch uh and the cutter is maybe his second second best pitch and and you know honestly the sweepers is best pitch uh and the cutters is maybe his second second best pitch so uh you know the fact that he's added these in the last few years uh might give you a little bit of hope uh you know i'm looking at his stuff plus since june 1 and he still uh you know scores very highly on the slider, cutters above 100, the fastballs at 99, stuff plus, curveballs 92, sinkers 90.

This is totally an arsenal that can work. It's just, I think he's lacking a little bit in just kind of feel stuff. Right, consistency, execution, command, right? It's all kind of lumped together, but I could see myself ending up with more Mitch Keller than I would have thought

just because there was improvement and the final results still were disappointing in the face of how good the start of his season was. That could be a player I end up going after if he's the fourth or fifth starting pitcher. Recessy bias could also set people next year to be like,

man, he really stunk at the end of the season. They might just sort of remember that part. I get the sense that Mitch Keller's name will be on a factor fluke panel at first pitch Arizona. He's putting together the resume that will almost certainly make him part of those conversations, which, hey, by the way, I'll be there in Arizona this year, which is nice to get back. i even got the shirt on from the last time i went the 2019 edition it's got a cactus on it you can't really sit a little ambiguous like what was on the shirt it's a cactus

but yeah you should check it out baseballhq.com for all the details the most fun you can have after baseball season ends spoiler, baseball season never really ends. Does it around here anyway. But I, you know, I do think, you know, back to sort of an original thing that we were talking about with,

you know, O swing and zone swing and how good they are. Some of the stuff just doesn't. So if you're talking about swinging strike rate, you know, swinging strike rate, you know there's a there's a concept of reliability that you know once it passes a threshold for reliability you can believe that stat more and the better stats kind of you know get close to you know 100% reliability and swing strike rate becomes uh pretty meaningful there's more signal than noise it's you know something you would look at uh pretty quickly we're talking about 500

pitches swing strike rate tells you something and that's quicker than call strike rate so even though i love csw if you look at swing strike rate before you look at full called strike plus swing strike rates swing strike rates will become meaningful faster so you could you can get a lot out of swing strike rates early in the season so that's good uh and swing strike rate we've just told you is one of the most powerful in terms of staying sticky season of season when you look at pitches outside the zone, so you want to look at swing rates outside the zone, it takes 1,000 pitches to become stable, and then it doesn't really give you more information past that. It's one of those curves where it gets to stability at a thousand pitches and then you get a little bit more information between a thousand and 1600, but you don't.

Don't really get that much more information. So it's like kind of this weird thing where you kind of have to wait around a fair amount, like a thousand pitches in, you're talking about 10 starts. So after 10 starts, are you going to look at the pitcher's oh swing right you know what i mean especially if it's not going to give you much more information it's not going to get better that oh swing right it's not going to give you more information going forward so you kind of have to wait around a decent amount of time and then yes season season had surprising amount of stickiness but it has less stickiness than swing strike rate. So I'm making my case that I think swing strike rate is just a better stat than these.

Yeah, and maybe that's part of this too, is that you're saying you don't have to go all the way down to this level. We have it. It's helpful if you want to do the deeper dive, but it's not necessarily the thing that has to go on your dashboard as you're trying to build your rankings and trying to figure out. It may not matter where you get whiffs as long as you can get them, right? If you consistently get a high number of whiffs, it's part of your approach.

Yeah, so we strike rate captures the guys that get chases on switches outside the zone and get chases inside, you know, and get swings and misses inside the zone. So, like, what are you going to get from, like, teasing those things apart? You have to wait longer you know maybe when you're trying to identify maybe what we what we're doing here is maybe helping identify some sleepers that next year could they improve one side of that throw fewer pitches inside the zone you know if they're bad at contact inside the zone or you know i mean like it's a little more process related i'd be tempted after the 10 starts to say oh the o-swing percentage is down compared to the previous career norms okay is

something with a particular pitch or location strategy not working the same way and is that fixable if it's fixable it's a buy low it's a player i'm trading for a player i'm picking up if we don't think it's fixable then it's not a player that I'm going to go after and try and add to my roster. There's just the real question of if command is fixable. I tend to gravitate towards some of these guys.

Shintaro Fujinami as a reliever has been interesting. He's been okay. There's been some hiccups. I was thinking about somebody else that just kyle harrison oh yeah 91 location plus on the fastball in the minor leagues 16 percent walk rate he's now a major leaguer the stuff i think you know the stuff stuff plus whatever you know it's it's been on the leaderboard for the minor leagues since we've been updating that.

So he's obviously up there. But who is the guy we're disagreeing about? Joe Boyle. Is he Joe Boyle? Who is he on these lists? He's obviously going to be a guy that does not get a lot of chase swings. Because they're going to step in the box and be like i know about you you got to throw me a strike the kyle harrison usage should be pretty interesting too a lot of his appearances are shorter right it fits into that follower

bulk arm sort of build that the giants like to use how they're going to use them he has one one outing this season. In every game I believe he's pitched has been a start this year. One where he's gone five innings. He's got four where he's gone between four or less than five and everything else under four.

Even going into this one, it's four in the last start but 3.1, 2, 2, 3.0, 3.2, 2.1. You have to go back to June 15th to get to a 5. So I don't know if they're managing innings or preparing him for this role. He just turned 22 and if you look at the past workloads

and think about how they might be working with that, I think last season was the career high. That was a 113 between high A and double A, and he's at 67 and two thirds. So they can let him just go as much as he is able to go the rest of the season. And my understanding of how the Giants minor league system works is that, you know, they're more conservative lower in the uh in the minors uh when you're talking about 16 17 year olds they're just you know trying to produce good major leaguers trying to develop them to the best of their abilities and then a way more aggressive with strategy in the high minors um and so what you've seen is a bunch of relievers come out of the high minors throwing like 60

percent sliders where they're like hey you know we're not even sure you're a major leaguer so let's your your slider is your best pitch let's you know see what happens when you throw them 60 percent of the time you know and it you know maurice gilvera came up and did that and i guess they didn't think he was good enough and they dropped him but the Red Sox picked him up. What I see out of this is they're not sure Kyle Harrison is a top of the rotation guy and they're preparing him for life on the actual San Francisco Giants which means you might get three innings. Yep. This is Sean Minaya. He is your locker buddy.

He is going to tell you all about life as a member of the san francisco giants and how it's different than being on other pitching staffs yeah very different pitchers uh very different people i think too but uh but in the same boat perhaps could be a fun sitcom paris and mania just hanging out with those two guys we had a couple other questions that rolled in we We'll save a couple for Wednesday, but there was one about Brady Singer. You mentioned him in passing a little earlier. Rob wanted to know, Singer has been really good for the last month, including a big uptick in K-rate. He was really bad early in the year, so it's been a huge turnaround. Is there anything

in the pitch mix or otherwise that explains how Brady Singer has been more effective here over the last two months or so all right so we're talking uh since the beginning of july yeah you last 60 days that's a 345 era 112 whip 52ks against 14 walks just five hummers allowed in those 62 and two thirds. I love this. This conversation follows one of his worst starts of the entire season. He went three and two thirds of the weekend against the Cubs,

but nevertheless, he's, he has been much better. I don't know that I believe in him because first of all, on every, every time we sorted the list, he was at the bottom. You know, that's why you kept hearing his name in this episode right right uh he was you know you know in both poor buckets i think for uh chase and in zone contact and then uh when i

switch over to the stuff plus tab i even since july 1st in this good stretch 83 stuff plus on the sinker 84 on the slider 53 on the change up like this is a decent amount of command i think maybe he had a stretch where he's commanding ball well but in terms of you know do i believe or not uh i'm gonna say i heartily do not agree that uh he's a good bet going forward next year or the rest of the season. He's somebody that I just put firmly in the bucket of, I'd almost like, I like Cole Raggins better. I think there's more upside for Cole Raggins to be a front of the rotation type pitcher. Singer, to me, is in that bucket of, he pitches in Kansas City. If he's got the

White Sox and the Guardians at home this week, I'm into it. Yeah, there's some cases in deeper leagues where you'd throw him out there without really worrying about recent form. I think what's tricky is that this recent stretch looked very similar to what he did last year over 153 in the third inning. So it was the best season that I didn't even notice until about September because I had him nowhere. 323 ERA, 114 whip a year ago. You're right in that the skills this year especially, it's a sub-20% K rate for the season, even with the recent improvement.

The walk rate's not as good as it was last year. It's not a case where the swinging strike rate's way up and the K rate's still just lagging behind. It's basically the same swinging strike rate we've always seen from Brady Singer. It's sink or slider that made everyone think there was that level that he could get back to all the time and year over year over year he underperformed even though there were stretches where you could use him i think that's basically what brady singer is right now the one thing i would say in gibson's defense is a lot more pitches i don't remember if he had that many pitches at the beginning of his career, though, or if that's something that's changed with him over time.

He kept adding a pitch to Stave off all the time. Yeah, it was three pitches. It was fastball, slide, or change up at the beginning of his career. Yeah, now he's like, I've got three different cutters. Tinkering and tinkering and tinkering some more. So that's kind of where i'm at with him another player that was part of that email this was from rob louise severino he's been horrible all season is there anything in the underlying numbers that explains the severino collapse it's not it's not

obvious to me uh you know you look at things like uh velo and movement and he's not he's it's pretty obvious he's not all the way back to to where he was by a lot of those uh i'm gonna do you know regular season and i'm gonna talk about uh year to year so i can just look at this forcing velo this year 96 67 forcing velo this year 96.67 that's his best uh since 2018 so but you know it's it's what it's like his third best or fourth best uh forcing velo so that's not quite it the one thing that i did notice and i think about this with james paxton too is that his slider velo uh at 85.3 is the like the second worst of his career and he when he was really at his best Luis Severino had that nasty gyro hard 89 mile an hour slider and if he's throwing at 85 that means that some of those are 84 and 83 right if you think about just the distribution of pitches so we know that around 85 and 86 there's a threshold where you know sliders get a lot better if you can

throw it far harder than that so if he's averaging 85 that means he's throwing you know sliders that are 84 and 83 that don't have a lot of movement because they're kind of gyro-ish kind of like zero zero zoops you know and like if he's doing that then uh and he's throwing him 84 83 i would venture to guess that that's maybe the the main place uh that he's lacking will he get it back i just you know when i talked to james paxton he said you know i don't know why uh my fastball velo is back but my slider velo is not he said i wonder that you know they took that they took a little they have this tendon in your wrist that you don't really use uh and now that when they do tommy johns now they take this like tendon that that you quote unquote don't really use and use that for your new tendon in your arm um and he's

like what if that was like helping me throw the slider faster like what if there is actually uh some use to that thing so uh but i i i think about that with how much i want to trust james paxton and uh why louis severino uh has fallen off so much because breaking ball velo is as important as fastball velo and I think a lot of times we look at the fastball and be like, he's 97, what's the problem here? But he's 85 on the fastball and I think that's probably the biggest source of drop for him. Yeah, I was thinking about in the context of Noah Syndergaard too. Velocity down just everywhere across the board for

Syndergaard ever since he came back from his injuries. It's not that he doesn't throw 97 with his fastball anymore. It's that his slider is slower and his curveball. It's the secondaries. The Velo loss on the secondaries is probably burying him more than only losing the Velo on the fastball would have.

Let's just say he had the same Velo on the fastball would have. If he still, let's just say he had the same Velo on his secondaries and was throwing 92 with his fastball, he would just throw the secondaries more, and that would work. But the secondaries aren't as good at this Velo as they were at the old Velo, so nothing works for him anymore. That said, you know, the stuff

plus story under the hood says 98 stuff plus fastball, 120 Stuff Plus slider, 105 Stuff Plus cutter. These numbers aren't as good as they were before, but he also isn't a guy that has awful, awful command. So, like, I have a place in my heart for Luis Averino. He's out there for free in AL labor right now. There's like a standing offer that somebody can take him off his hands.

I don't know if I have the intestinal fortitude in labor where I have to put him in my lineup to pick him up. But, you know, he obviously has 12 team upside. So if you're in a 12 team and you're out of it and you just have a roster slot that's going to some boring reliever that you're not going to keep you know over the offseason why not just pick up Severino and leave him on your bench or if you want to lose games you're in tank-a-thon like you know throw Severino but I'm not sure that the career is over you know what I mean like I may have some shares of Luis Severino especially if you know what if he signs with the Pirates next year? There seems to be like a highway from New York to Pittsburgh.

I think there literally is. If he signs with the Pirates next year, he has a nice home park. What if he comes in the spring, he's throwing 86, 87 on the slider again? Like, you know, might be into it. I think there is a literal highway between those two places. be into it i think there is a little literal highway between those two places so ways to get from here to there more than just airplanes in this case but it's the ivan nova highway yes severino home against the gnats this week sure why not next week's going to be a two-step at the tigers at the astros if look if you're playing catch-up or ifros if you're playing catch up or even if

you're not currently in the money and bulk is the only way you're going to get there that's the dart throw. That's one of the guys you say who else are they going to throw out there? Unfortunately they're throwing him like 3 and 4 and 2 innings per start so you might not even get that much bulk out of 2 starts.

If he pitches well they'll leave him in because he's a pending free agent and they're just trying to get through the end of the season now. It's survival mode for the Yankees. We are going to go. On our way out the door, you can get a subscription to The Athletic for $2 a month for the first year

at theathletic.com slash ratesandbarrels. You can find us on Twitter at Eno Saris and at Derek Van Ryper. The pod is at ratesates and Barrels. If we set up other accounts for the pod, I will relay them here. That's going to do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We are back with you on Tuesday. Thanks for listening. Thank you.