May 28, 2016

Raising Aces

Miracle Matz

by Doug Thorburn

We divert our attention this week away from the top-end of the starting pitcher spectrum to some of the lesser-known faces that have been making an impact this week. In our pitching notes for week eight of the season, we take a look at three young players whose fortunes have recently taken additional emphasis, one because the ace-level starters above him are faltering, another due to his recent return to the bump, and one closer whose recent fortunes encourage optimism on what once looked like a failed offseason transaction.

Let's get started on the east coast.

Steven Matz, LHP, NYM

Matz was heavily regarded coming out of spring training, as the young southpaw was expected to step in his place in line behind aces Noah Syndergaard, Matt Harvey and Jacob deGrom in New York. The first start of the 2016 season for Matz was an unquestioned disaster, as he surrendered seven runs against the Marlins without escaping the second inning. In the time since, Harvey has been completely ineffective, deGrom is trying to find his way, Thor has been incredible and Matz has stepped in as the second-best starter in the vaunted Mets rotation.

Game Stats

Date	IP	R	H	HR	BB	K	PC
May 25	8.0	0	4	0	1	7	104
May 20	7.0	2	3	1	0	8	88

Matz has been unstoppable since his forgettable first start, tossing 48.0 innings of 1.13-ERA baseball, pitching at least 6.0 innings in each of his last seven starts and not allowing more than two runs in any one outing. He has 49 strikeouts and just seven walks over that stretch; forget quality starts, these are impeccable starts. The dominance has continued over his last two turns, and though he had an easy task against the Brewers on May 20, his last start came against Bryce Harper and the Nats.

I underestimated Matz coming into the season, under the thinking that his rotation-mates were having undue influence on his perceived value and that a minor-league K rate of merely a strikeout-per-inning would sink to less impressive levels against big league bats. I was willing to over look his sparkling ERA of 2.25 over more than 380 frames in the minors, but in hindsight that was a mistake, because thus far in the majors he is turning the same trick. His mechanics also support the stat-line, as a pitcher whose delivery is a little bit light on power but whose stability is advanced beyond his years.

His fastball is above-average and borderline plus based on it's raw velocity of 94.4 mph, but his left-handedness and impressive extension of release point bump it up such that the fastball grades as easily plus. The fastball has been responsible for the majority of his strikeouts this season, and Matz brings the smoke on more than half of his pitches regardless of count or situation. His command of the fastball is what makes it so effective, while the breaking pitches (a slider and a curve) survive due to a combination of sharp movement and impressive command for a young player. He brings the fastball in high and will bury the breakers, but he has also shown the willingness to drop the slider or the curve in the upper part of the zone, a tendency that he has gotten away with so far but could catch up to him as the league gets the book on the left-hander's approach.

Lance McCullers, RHP, HOU

McCullers missed the first month-and-change of the season as he dealt with shoulder issues, and the tendency for shoulder woes to linger has turned up the pressure of his first few starts. He struggled to get through his first start, surrendering five earned runs in 4.2 innings, but over his last two turns the K count has been rising while the runs count has been falling.

Game Stats

Date	IP	R	H	HR	BB	K	PC
May 26	5.0	1	1	1	6	10	108
May 20	6.0	2	5	0	3	7	92

McCullers has been sitting heavily on a mid-90s fastball and a high-80s breaking ball that earns the “curve” designation at Brooks Baseball, and he has thrown the two pitches a combined 87.3-percent of the time so far in 2016, with the curve representing his most-used pitch with a 46.3-percent frequency. The curve was a 35-percent pitch last season, a value which is still on the high side but doesn't send off the warning flares of a 46-percent rate, and his affinity for the breaks this season could be a small-sample fluke or part of an overall approach, but if it's the latter then it carries the risk of overexposure.

I like double-digit strikeouts as much as the next guy (probably more), but when those whiffs come at the expense of pitch command and pitch-count efficiency then it stops being worth the trouble. McCullers required an astounding 108 pitches just to get 15 outs in his last turn, thanks to six walks on top of his 10 strikeouts as the 23 batters that he faced averaged 4.7 pitches apiece. Hit counts cease to matter when there are so many freebies being given to opposing hitters, and he's quite fortunate that the bases weren't inhabited by any of his walked batters when the lone hit left the field of play.

McCullers was under the strike zone all day long, a trend that becomes apparent when comparing the pitch plot from his last game to one from a year ago:

May 26, 2016 (left); May 23, 2015 (right)

Keeping the ball down is generally a good thing, and as McCullers proved in his last start it's a great way to limit hits, but repeated dirtballs is just cause to let more pitches go by, a factor which contributed to McCullers' high pitch counts on the day. He generally avoided the middle of the strike zone on both days, but in the 2016 start there was literally one pitch that was placed in the middle “5” key of the strike zone keypad, and not a single ball in play was hit off of a pitch near the middle of the zone. His stay-low trend was so pervasive in his last start that McCullers didn't throw a single pitch that finished clearly above the strike zone, even on those offerings that missed the zone inside or outside, and the key to his success will be to slightly shift his pitch plot upward such that it looks more like his plot from the ballgame on May 23, 2015.

Ken Giles, RHP, HOU

We'll stick with the Astros but move to the bullpen for our last pitcher of the day. Houston traded a king's ransom to acquire the services of Giles for the back end of the bullpen, and though the team was saying all the right things when Luke Gregerson was handed the closer job out of spring training, it became apparent that the decision was made at least partly because Giles had lost his mojo.

For the first calendar month of the 2016 season (from April 5 to May 5), Giles carried a horrendous 9.26 ERA with five walks and 17 hits allowed (three of which were home runs) but 16 strikeouts in his first 11.7 innings. Since that time, Giles has turned it around, and in his last 10 games covering 8.7 innings, the right-hander has given up just a single run with 11 strikeouts against three walks and six hits.

Game Stats

Date	IP	R	H	HR	BB	K	PC
May 26	1.0	1	2	0	0	0	20
May 25	1.0	0	0	0	1	3	19
May 24	1.0	0	1	0	0	1	11
May 21	1.0	0	0	0	0	2	8

Giles was throwing hard during the rough times, albeit not quite as hard as had become his MO in Philladelphia. The right-hander averaged less than 98 mph on his fastball in 16 of his first 18 outings on the season, and he bottomed out with an average in the 94.5-to-96.5 mph range for a four-outing stretch around the flip of the calendar, but on May 17 he suddenly spiked. The average velo on his fastball that day was 99.2 mph, and he would eclipse 98 mph on average for six straight outings.

The added pitch-speed wasn't an accident, according to Giles, who insists that his struggles were “mechanical 100 percent. Not confidence.” The explanation offered has revolved around hand placement, along with the rationale that hitters had an easier time seeing the ball prior to his making a mechanical adjustment, but that fails to explain the enhanced radar-gun readings.

It's true that his hand placement is different. In April, Giles was raising the hands along with his leg lift, separating ball from glove just after max lift; in his most recent outings, Giles has eliminated the raising of the hands along with leg lift, instead keeping them at the same height and separating ball from glove just before or right on top of reaching max leg lift. Despite his explanation that the hand placement was helping hitters, I contend that the hand placement was actually a trigger for the timing and sequencing of his delivery.

When the hands went up and he separated ball from glove later in the sequence, it would delay the start of the upper-body portion of the delivery such that the arm would lag behind, struggling to catch up, and he failed to generate ideal torque due to the lapses in mechanical timing and sequencing. His current motion, which involves no vertical movement of the hands and an earlier separation, allows him to get the upper-body portion of the kinetic chain started in sequence with the rest of the body, such that the upper-half is prepared to fire when he hits foot strike rather than lagging behind in the kinetic chain. This improvement to timing would theoretically help velocity by enabling greater hip-shoulder separation due to a well-timed trigger, as well as improvements in pitch command due to a release point that is more consistent and better lined up with his targets.

The mechanical change is a positive for his prognosis as a reliever this season, regardless of whether the mechanism matches his description, and one wonders if Gregerson – who has blown three of his last six save opportunities - is on the hook to get pulled out of the closer role.

Doug Thorburn is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @doug_thorburn
Click here to see Doug's other articles. You can contact Doug by clicking here