Today’s MASH Report is being brought to you by Ryan Butcher and Wade Davis. The pair were given a few days off recently to get themselves back together. Butcher was sent to the minor and Davis to the DL. While both may have needed a break, one interesting note exists about them missing time, both pitchers experienced a drop in their fastball spin rate right before the decision was made

These are the first two times I have seen a major league team admit that a pitcher’s spin was used to decide on how they handle a pitcher. It has been known for a while that changes in spin rate can help detect injuries. Eno Sarris talked to FanGraphs friend, Kyle Boddy about this issue.

From that discovery flowed others. “Spin-rate changes are actually one of the best predictors of injury,” pointed out Boddy, a fact that was confirmed as a known within many parts of the baseball community by multiple sources. At Driveline, pitchers have their spin rates monitored constantly for the earliest signs of unhealthy fatigue.

The problem for the general public, we have not had good access to pitch spin data until StatCast began releasing data last year. Here is a detailed look at the two pitchers whose spin rate change cause their team to act and can we make any conclusion from them.

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Note: Some of these notes were written before the games were played on Tuesday, so the stats may be a day old.

Quick Looks: Robert Stephenson

The 23-year-old Stephenson’s star has fallen a little bit since the start of the season. Here is how MLB.com and Baseball America graded him out to start the season.

Baseball American had him graded out quite a bit higher with his curve and change being borderline elite pitches. MLB.com on the other hand graded his fastball higher.

The one aspect both publications could agree on is his lack of control. His inability to find the plate can be seen in his 4.0 BB/9 or greater since he has been promoted to Double-A.

I watched his start on the Aug. 5 versus the Mets and here are my thoughts.

• The fastball was between 93-96 mph. Most of the time it was straight, but did show some cut action. Besides the speed, this pitch is very blah.
• His curve was between 80-83 mph with 12-6 break. At times he could throw it for strikes.
• His change was 84-86 and really inconsistent. Sometimes it was straight as an arrow. Other times it had a nice 12-6 break. Even other times it bounced in front of the plate. This inconsistency can be seen in a 20% Zone% on the season. Hitters will soon find they can just let this pitch pass.
• While I mentioned specifically that his change was going to be inconsistent, he lacked command on all his pitches.

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Joey Wendle and JaCoby Jones: The other callups

Most of the current prospect buzz is on Yoan Moncada with our own Eric Longenhagan covering him in detail. Besides Moncada, a couple light hitting shortstops have gotten the call, the Athletics’ Joey Wendle and the Tigers’ JaCoby Jones. Let me start my examination with Wendle.

Wendle’s call to fame is that he was the main piece the A’s got for trading away Brandon Moss. Let me start with some comps to his 2016 prospect grades given by MLB.com.

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Last week, I examined hitters who had a known injury they were playing through and then determined how their Stat Cast exit velocity changed. Today, I am moving on from back looking at injuries (reactive) to forward-looking (predictive). Any important conclusions drawn this early in the process should be taken with a grain of salt, but I will trudge along on anyway.

One issue I will continue to run into when looking at this data is the lack of data. Having less than two season’s worth of data is frustrating to work with. Five to six years from now, we will likely be laughing at the work that was done with so little information. Just be skeptical of the information provided as I am trying to be at the tip of the spear so I am likely to get cut a few times.

The more I looked at the data, it seemed a large drop of around 5 mph to 6 mph was indicative of a major injury. The one problem I ran into was players like A.J. Pollock who have both speed and power. Charlie Blackmon and Starling Marte as other similar players. They have wider normal ranges in exit velocity, so instead I went with looking at a half of the standard deviation of the player’s exit velocity to help flag injured players. Most of the time this value is around 5 to 7 mph.

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First, I would like to apologize for recently covering quite a few players at or below the fringes for most leagues. After moving over from tracking injuries, it seems like a ton of new players have entered the league I know little about. I will probably keep up looking at fringe guys until the season’s end, especially with roster’s expanding. Once the season ends, I will mainly stop with the fringy guys and will go to the top and start making a 2017 draft list.

The Newest Mets’ Starters: Seth Lugo and Robert Gsellman

All the Mets’ rotation, with the exception of Noah Syndergaard, has gone on the DL this season. Seth Lugo and Robert Gsellman are two of the pitchers called up to be replacement starters and here is my stat only based look at each one.

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Chad Kuhl: Quick Look

The 23-year-old righty has been getting some love because of his improved second half when he has posted a 2.37 ERA with 11.3% K%-BB% and a 50% GB%.

I will start with his 2016 MLB.com grades of:

• Fastball: 60
• Slider: 50
• Changeup: 45
• Control: 50
• Overall: 50

His grades weren’t this high until this year. Most places saw him as a low-level bullpen arm.

Year(publication): Overall grade
2016 (BA): 40
2015 (BA): 45
2015 (MLB): 45

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The following is an experiment. I wanted to see if hitter exit velocity (EV) drops and by how much when a batter players through an injury. I am not sure before starting it where it would head and after a small stab at the data, I seemed to end up with more questions than answers.

The following may sound like a scientific study and in many ways, it is one. I am trying to take a theory and find a solution. Let me start with the theory.

First, injured players perform worse while playing through injury. I have tackled this idea as I looked back at the players’ stats the season before, of, and after the injury.

Talking to several hitters, they say they know when something is bugging them. They just can’t get hit the ball as hard as when they are healthy. Instead of trying to figure out if a player’s slump is from bad luck or injury, we have StatCast’s exit velocity to help us see if they are hitting the ball as hard.

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A.J. Cole Breakdown

The National’s righty made a spot start for the Nationals on August 22 and allowed four runs over seven innings of work. To start getting a profile of Cole, here are his pitching comps using his 2016 MLB.com grade. Additionally, I included his previous grades which I will discuss in a bit.

The pitcher list isn’t that exciting with most pitchers falling into the #4 to #5 starter range.

The big note I took away from the grades, was his declining fastball grade from MLB.com. It was 70 in 2014, 65 in 2015, and 55 this year. Additionally, here are the velocity speeds stated in the Baseball America Handbook for each year.

Season: Fastball Speed Description
2014: “… sits at 94-95 mph and regularly hits 97.”
2015: “… pitched comfortably at 91-93 … and bumped 96.”
2016: “… sits comfortably in the low 90s, pushing as high as 96 mph …”

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Pitch Velocity Effects on Groundballs, Exit Velocity, and Swinging Strikes

Last week, I examined Danny Duffy and several other writers have examined at him also. If you want to read up on various theories on my he is performing great and why that may change, go ahead. Instead, today I am going to concentrate on his fastball velocity changes and how the results change as the velocity changes.

Danny Duffy is starting to get some Cy Young consideration after spending part of the season in the bullpen. One cause for the turnaround is his fastball velocity increasing from 93.8 mph to 95 mph. The average velocity was even higher earlier in the season but it has been steadily dropping.

So what difference does it make if he is throwing 96 mph or 94 mph? Today, I am going to lay the groundwork for finding such an answer.

Simply, I looked at three different factors, exit (or batted ball) velocity (EV), groundball rate (GB%), and swinging-strike rate (SwStr%) and how each compared to a 1 mph velocity block. To help smooth out the results, I looked velocities between whole values like 90 mph to 91 mph and labeled them 90.5 mph. Also, I looked at values between 90.5 mph and 91.5 mph and put them in the 90 mph bin. I know there is overlap, but I hoped the higher number of samples would help smooth at the final results, especially with a limited number of samples at both ends of the data range.

To start off, here are Duffy’s average exit velocities for a given range of fastball velocities.

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In last week’s MASH Report, I ran an up-to-date ranking of the of my pitcher injury finding metric, PAIN. The metric is supposed to find pitchers who are displaying traits of possible injuries. Reader, lostatlimbo, wondered:

“I’m also a little disappointed to see no mention of the % of actual injuries from high PAIN scores vs low to validate the data. Plenty of the pitchers with even negative scores have still been injured this season and naturally anything can happen at any time, but is there a significant statistical difference between the upper tiers and lower?“

Besides some initial testing on that season’s pitchers, I haven’t extensively run a recent test on the data. While information has always passed the eye test, it is time to dig a little more.

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