Leave-land State: What’s going on at CSU?
April 24, 2015Best skills of the 2015 NFL Draft: Offensive Skill Players
April 24, 2015Somewhat lost in the midst of the Cleveland Indians failure to live up to expectations in the early part of the 2015 season is that Trevor Bauer has been quite good. In fact, he has been perhaps the most dominant pitcher in MLB, and, as such, Trevor has been the ace of a staff that has quite a few ace pitcher candidates.
Corey Kluber has a Fangraphs “society” dedicated to his pitching and is the reigning Cy Young Award winner. Carlos Carrasco had a great ten starts to end the 2014 season, and he has not deterred from that path despite taking a line drive off of his face. Even Danny Salazar was touted as a sleeper Cy Young candidate without such mentions for Bauer. Trevor Bauer is coming off of a promising 2014 season, but it was still a season in which he finished with a slightly below average ERA (4.18 ERA, 90 ERA+) and FIP (4.01). Therefore, despite his potential1 , it is surprising that he has posted the following pitching line in his first three starts:
Of course, the standard caveats apply. Three starts and nineteen innings are an extremely small sample size and the results that Bauer has achieved thus far are likely to evolve as the season progresses. I doubt anyone believes that Bauer will continue to allow less than one hit every two innings over the course of the season. As such, a few outliers could appear to be important components in the statistics and heat maps that we are looking at below. In addition, the heat maps are not going to demonstrate pitch ordering, movement, or indicate pitch framing that may also play a significant role. Still, an academic exercise is a worthwhile venture to see if we can determine what is noise versus what might be actual improvement in his pitching2.
Also, as pitch placement will be vastly different between left-handed batters and right-handed batters, the charts and discussion below cover what Trevor Bauer has done against righties. It further shrinks the sample size, but it provides a cleaner baseline.
The red squares indicate where a pitcher throws most often in and around the strike zone, while the blue squares indicate where a pitcher throws least often in and around the strike zone.
Immediately, it is evident that Trevor Bauer has had a specific plan of attack for RHB in 2015. He has absolutely peppered the outside of the plate with special focus on the lower outside corner. Gone are many of the missed locations or perhaps purposeful pitches up in the zone and towards the inside. Hitting the lower outside corner has been a staple of many great pitchers, but it is not easily obtained. The MLB average pitcher utilizes the entire strike zone other than the upper left square quite regularly.
Remember that lower left corner of the strike zone? Well, that corner is the corner where RHB are least likely to take a swing on average, and the 2014 Trevor Bauer opponents held to that average. However, likely due to his propensity to pepper that corner, hitters are slightly more likely to swing against a 2015 Trevor Bauer pitch in that square. Even more telling though is that RHB against 2015 Bauer are twice as likely to swing at the lower three squares outside the strike zone compared to 2014 Bauer and the MLB average pitcher.
Much has already been made about Trevor Bauer and Corey Kluber’s ability to miss bats as they currently hold the fourth and fifth best contact% in MLB and are the AL league leaders in that category.
The heat map above demonstrates that despite hitters at least being able to get the bat on the ball with regularity above the MLB average rates on pitches middle to the inside, RHB have scarcely been able to make contact on Bauer’s outside pitches.
In particular, the lower left hand square of the strike zone has a league average of 77% contact (and 75% from Bauer in 2014), but 2015 Bauer has been able to hold hitters to a 22% contact rate. Outside pitches out of the strike zone are hit at just under half the time from a league average pitcher, but 2015 Bauer allows less than a quarter of those pitches to find the bat.
The next obvious question is to check to see if Bauer has changed his pitch selection or the velocity on any of his pitches. PitchF/X tracks Trevor Bauer pitches in six categories:
- FA (Four Seam Fastballs)
- FT (Two Seam Fastballs)
- FC (Cutters)
- CH (Change Ups)
- SL (Sliders)
- CU (Curveballs)
As seen in the table above, there are not many changes in velocity or frequency of pitch types. Trevor Bauer is still throwing his four seam and two seam fastballs just over half of the time. He has increased his usage of the cutter and changeup, while reducing usage of his slider and curveball. But, those minor adjustments in his secondary pitches could just be due to the small sample size or perhaps pitches that move better in the colder weather.
Overall, the success that Trevor Bauer has had in 2015 cannot definitively predict that he will continue his success throughout the season. However, it is apparent that the success is due to either a changed or refined approach to the location of his pitches even as the pitch selection has remained relatively static. Therefore, his dominance cannot be attributed to good fortune, but it is specific to the skill that he has demonstrated. Trevor Bauer is hitting the lower outside corner of the strike zone (and outside it) more often, and he is getting hitters to swing more often with less contact on those pitches. Now, it is up to him to prove that he can be consistent with his newly refined skill. If he can, then he could become the fourth Cleveland Indian to win a Cy Young Award in the past 10 years.
- Aside: Chris Antonetti was able to decide against paying Shin-Soo Choo and somehow convinced Arizona to take Didi Gregorius from Cincinnati. The Indians took the money they could have paid Choo and spent it on Brett Myers and Nick Swisher. Neither of those contracts have bore a ton of fruit, but Nick has given some value and we still received a good young pitcher under team control for the forseeable future out of it. Another great trade for the Indians. [↩]
- Major hat-tip to Fangraphs and Baseball Info Solutions for making all of this analysis possible with all of the data they provide so quickly on every MLB player [↩]
9 Comments
Good read! Is “Bode Plots” a pun I’m not getting, though?
Thank you for asking.
Bode Plots are an electrical engineering way of analyzing frequency in comparison with magnitudes and decibels (et cetera). As an electrical engineering major, it may have become a running joke with me 🙂
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Control_Systems/Bode_Plots
I love this quote from Bauer: “Look, I’m not that big. I’m not that strong. I’m not fast. I’m not explosive. I can’t jump. I wasn’t a natural-born athlete. I was made.”
He’s quickly becoming my favorite Indian.
I absolutely love that he gave a big FU to the major league pitching establishment thinking. Like you said he made himself, and I hope the Tribe can inject some of Bauers training regiment into some young arms in the near future.
Completely agree. I love how when he came here all I read was about how he had a bad attitude and was a bad teammate, like he was Milton Bradley v.2.0. In reality, he’s just somebody smart enough to have his own ideas about how to approach the game and brave enough to voice those opinions. That’s so rare in baseball. And the higher ups on the Indians deserve some credit for understanding how to handle a guy like that.
Not only for handling him properly, but also recognizing his situation in Arizona was detrimental towards his development and properly seeing that he was a great buy-low candidate.
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