Daisy Cutter: Andrew M... (05/01)
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As a two-pitch pitcher, Hagadone likely struggles with predictability, especially since the two pitches he throws are so easily distinguished by opposing hitters. With that in mind, Hagadone worked with 
Addressing Hagadone’s breaking ball without hurting his fastball velocity was the goal, but Boddy and Hagadone were actually able to improve the “rise” on the pitcher’s fastball as well. The mechanical overhaul made during their training sessions led to small improvements for Hagadone’s fastball and breaking ball. The next part was incorporating another tool for Hagadone to keep opposing hitters off balance.
So far this season Hagadone has sat at 95 mph with his fastball, 90 mph with his cutter, and 79 mph with the slider. Hitters have had to adjust to multiple velocities with more subtle differences between them, at least compared to previous years, making Hagadone more difficult to figure out.
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May 1, 2015 Pitching BackwardPITCHf/xing and Pitcher Fixing
While we often use the terms “ceiling” and “floor” to describe prospects, the implication is far more certain than the facts: A prospect’s ceiling might be higher than we ever allowed, and his floor might be nearly anything. Take Nick Hagadone: He always had promise, but the floor was set by concerns about his ability to develop a solid third pitch. See it in his player comment the 2010 BP Annual: A key part of the V-Mart trade, Hagadone missed most of the 2008 season with Tommy John surgery. In his 15 Sally League starts across both systems he impressed, showing both the good (a 93-98 mph fastball is unusual power for a lefty, plus he has good sinking movement) and the bad (control issues). A rare talent who has only given up one home run in 79 1/3 minor-league innings, Hagadone's health, lack of command, and the absence of a solid third pitch have some scouts already projecting him as a reliever, but that's one heck of a back-up plan, as we're talking about a guy with Billy Wagner's arsenal and about eight more inches of height to angle it from. Top notch stuff, but uncertainty over whether it would be used in the first inning (ceiling) or the ninth (floor). The reality was different: Five years later, he’s been a replacement-level reliever for the Indians. The challenge facing Hagadone is to recapture that promise. His potential ceiling, after all, might still be higher than we realize. *** Hagadone is a unique pitcher in a lot of ways. After an impressive pro debut as a sandwich-round pick by the Red Sox, he Tommy John surgery before his second pro season. Amid up-and-down performances upon his return, he ultimately found a role as a middle reliever on a young Indians club. There have been strong stretches and poor ones. His most recent 20 innings have been his best. In at least one way, Hagadone is an outlier. His vertical release point is more than seven feet off the ground, with more than 6 percent of his pitches coming from a release point at least 7 feet, 4 inches high, according to Beyond the Box Score’s Justin Perline. You can see his extreme release:
He never figured out that third pitch, at least through the 2014 season, having thrown his four-seam fastball and slider more than 98 percent of the time. His fastball still sits in the mid-90s, averaging more than 95 mph last season. His slider—a pitch he threw 23 percent of the time last season—is on the opposite end of the velocity spectrum, with an average velocity of 81 mph. For much of his career hitters have sat on one of the two pitches, a somewhat easy stance to take given his consistent velocity and movement on those pitches:
*** Driveline Baseball is a pitcher-training facility run by Boddy in the Pacific Northwest. Hagadone went to the facility with hopes of improving his repertoire. So what was the initial assessment on Hagadone’s arsenal? Says Boddy: The whole process involved looking at his Trackman and PITCHf/x data to see how he creates swing and misses. He obviously has some elite stuff, his FB spin rate is crazy high and his velocity is up there. However, his breaking ball was spinning around a gyroscopic axis, which makes sense if you look at his PITCHfx data. He was throwing a bad slider or a gyroball, which has a place in pitching, but not for a reliever when that pitch is 80 mph and his fastball is up to 99 mph. So we had to attempt to fix the spin angle issues. The last line was step one in overhauling Hagadone’s repertoire. The two worked on some mechanical tweaks that allowed Hagadone to get more vertical movement on his breaking ball while maintaining the plus velocity from his fastball. The result is a pitch with ~1.5 inches more vertical movement, with little to no horizontal movement. You can see this change in vertical movement in his PITCHf/x data:
Boddy explains the rationale behind adding a new pitch to Hagadone’s repertoire: We added a pitch between 88-92 mph this year and I was open to it being a two-seam fastball or a cutter. He expressed interest in a cutter and developed a feel for it pretty quick, and it actually helped his fastball, I think. While his velocity is not super high, I think he pitches effectively at 94-97 mph and doesn't need a LOT more, though I expect him to start throwing harder as the season progresses. The idea was to not allow the hitter to have a polarized approach - looking at video and PITCHf/x data, hitters were getting off huge swings on his 97 mph heater. Whether or not they made contact - and often they didn't; he had a good year in 2014 - doesn't matter. Hitters should not be able to get aggressive timed-up swings off premium heaters, especially lefties. So by adding a fastball variant that was still hard (around 90 mph), hitters could not sit on heaters and discard his breaking ball in non-2-strike counts, because Nick cannot throw his breaking ball for reliable strikes. The bolded portion was the impetus for the tweaks Hagadone pursued this summer. Boddy and Hagadone were able to combine video with the PITCHf/x data from his pitches to identify a serious problem: hitters could sit on the fastball. The attempted solution was to incorporate a pitch in the 88-92 mph range that would give the pitcher a more varied velocity profile. It also wouldn’t hurt to incorporate some new movement for hitters to contend with. As Boddy noted, Hagadone gravitated toward the cutter, which fit nicely into the velocity band that they were targeting. So far this season, the cutter has settled in right at 90 mph, giving Hagadone a slightly different look:
Has it worked? As Boddy said, the raw results last season were decent there was still room for improvement. Hagadone’s ERA is slightly better, while his cFIP is slightly worse, but drawing conclusions from 134 pitches is always turmoil. The best evidence that something is working: His whiff rate on four-seamers has jumped from 10 percent last year to 13 percent this year. His slider’s whiff rate has gone from 19 to 29 percent, though this early in the season that’s a bump of two swinging strikes. What might be next? I’ll be watching to see how his pitch usages change over the course of the season. So far in 2015 he’s essentially replaced half of his sliders with cutters, meaning that he’s still throwing four-seamers about 75 percent of the time. It might make sense to replace some of those four-seamers with cutters and sliders, giving him a more balanced profile. Maybe not, though. Relievers have thrived with fastball-heavy approaches before. The jury is going to be out on Hagadone’s new pitch until he’s worked enough innings to give us a solid sample size from which to infer real results, but we now have something to focus on moving forward. The Indians have given him some rope—he has pitched the fourth-most innings out of their bullpen so far this season—so we’ll get a chance to see the effect of Hagadone’s changes. We often hear about pitchers adding new pitches during the offseason, but rarely get a glimpse into the rationale behind it. In this case, we get to see what PITCHf/x as a coaching tool can offer. It’s not just for building heatmaps and comparing the movement on guys’ pitches. It’s a serious tool that can help a pitcher lift his ceiling.
Thanks to Kyle Boddy of Driveline Baseball for his insight and help in understanding the offseason training program for Hagadone.
Jeff Long is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @JeffLongBP
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