Noncompetitive Pitches and Jeurys Familia

Talk to any pitcher about command, and you might be surprised how imprecise they feel they can be. “I have command to one part of the zone, low and away,” said Javier Lopez. “Almost everyone has better command to one side of the plate or the other,” said Zack Greinke. Even Corey Kluber, who has great command of his breaking ball, said that he only aims his breaking ball for the beginning of the break, and then is at the whim of the actual break he gets for where the ball ends up. When Ben Lindbergh asked PITCHf/x how far the glove moves from target to ball on the average pitcher, they told him the glove moves 13 inches. When I asked for leaders on 3-0 counts, it was Dallas Keuchel… with a nine inch average.

So command is a general thing. And yet… there is such a thing as the useless pitch, the pitch with so little command that it serves no purpose. Pitches 2.5 feet from the center of the strike zone are balls 97% of the time. They very rarely get swings, and unless the pitch is behind the batter, they can’t serve much of a purpose if they don’t entice the hitter at all. The idea of the noncompetitive pitch was first mentioned by Jessica Mendoza and then statified by August Fagerstrom.

I ran correlations between non-competitive pitch percentage and walk rate (r2 = .085), strikeout-minus-walk rate (no significance), and soft hit rate (no significance), so at best, it’s a casually interesting way to try to quantify that elusive skill we call command. Let’s see what the leaderboards can tell us about this year’s best and worst at avoiding the noncompetitive pitch.

First, the best at not wasting pitches.

Rich Hill! Amazing. He doesn’t look to have great fastball command, but he rarely misses badly, I guess. And for a guy that throws so many curveballs, it’s amazing he doesn’t bury more in the dirt.

The rest of the list features plenty of guys that seem to have good command. Aaron Nola, David Price, and Chris Sale all have stuff and command. Guys like Bartolo Colon, Phil Hughes, and a healthy Matt Cain have command and not a ton else perhaps.

But it is nice to see Matt Cain on a good leaderboard. From watching his starts, I can say that his command is inching forward… and yet he has little confidence in his fastballs. You can tell that in the numbers because he’s gone from throwing a fastball 71% of the time in 2-0 counts for his career to 50% this year. The pop-up rate is back, though, and if there wasn’t a league-wide homer problem, Cain might actually be able to help your team. If you add his pop-ups back into his strikeout rate, you actually get an average pitcher again. Deep leaguers should take note.

This has to be seen as a good sign for young Julio Urias, who has had some walk rate hiccups. And perhaps even for knuckleballer Steven Wright. He did say that commanding the knuckler is possible, and here we have more evidence.

The worst:

The general quality of this portion of the list is not on the same level of the first list. Antonio Bastardo has lost the plate this year. We’ve got a few relievers that aren’t having good years. Tim Lincecum never had good command. Generally, there are more 10% walk rates on this part of the list.

Mike Fiers has the best walk rate here, but walk rate doesn’t tell you everything about command. We have these noncompetitive pitches as evidence, and then also his fastball heat map against righties below. Not only is he missing badly out of the zone, but he’s missing towards the middle of the zone. Perhaps he’s earning that bad home run rate.

That’s probably the story with Sonny Gray and James Shields this year, too. We know from Jeff Sullivan that Gray has lost command of his breaking ball, and we know from the box scores that Shields is struggling with everything. Neither is own able in any format right now.

What do we do with the guys that are having good seasons but are on this list? Maybe Adam Conley doesn’t have great innate command. Maybe DeSclafani also wastes too many pitches. Maybe this will have something to say about their longevity, or their upside — it seems probable, even, given their lack of pedigree, that they are pitching at their best right now.

Jeurys Familia is struggling with his command to an extent… but how much do we worry? He still has great stuff, and hasn’t given up a home run this year. I suppose we’d like him to waste fewer pitches, but given the fact that this stat doesn’t correlate strongly to results beyond walk rate, I wouldn’t jump overboard. He’s not in the same spot as David Robertson, who has more problems. I’d rather own Nate Jones than Addison Reed, in other words.

The noncompetitive pitches are smoke on the horizon. You want to see a little fire before you jump ship.