Reviving the Quadrinity, Relief Pitcher Edition: The Next Anthony Swarzak, Only Better

Once a preseason, it appears, we decide we like a pitcher, don’t trust our own affinities, and neither write about him nor draft him ourselves. In 2016, it was Rick Porcello, who won the Cy Young award. Last year, less catastrophically, it was Anthony Swarzak. For reasons we’ll detail below, we liked Swarzak going into the 2017 season. What, after all, was there not to like about a 31-year-old middle reliever coming off a season in which he’d had an ERA of 5.52 and an even higher FIP, and spent a month on the DL and two months in Triple-A? Even for us, connoisseurs of the preposterous, this was too preposterous, and we paid no attention to Swarzak in Fangraphs or in our myriad drafts and auctions.

You know the sequel. Swarzak was magnificent in 2017, with a 2.33 ERA, a 1.03 WHIP, more than 10 strikeouts per 9 innings, and no earned runs relinquished in 18 of his first 19 appearances. According to Baseball HQ, he earned $12 in 5×5 Rotisserie—the same as Gerrit Cole and Dylan Bundy, and more than Trevor Bauer, Zach Davies, Masahiro Tanaka, and dozens of others.

So it would have been nice to have Swarzak in your lineup, or at least on your bench waiting to be plugged in if, say, one of your regulars had a dirt bike accident. The problem with drafting or rostering guys like Swarzak, though, is that their upside is so limited. They’re not going to get you wins and saves, and they’re not going to earn you anything in the other categories unless their performances are really outstanding. And you know how it is with non-closers—they’ve got to do really well for a long time (Andrew Miller is the exemplar here) to be worth a roster spot ex ante.

We therefore wondered: is there anyone this season who looks, right now, as if he can give you the unexpected profits Swarzak would have given you last year? To find out, we used the same approach we used to unearth Swarzak: the Holy Trinity and the Holy Quadrinity. The Trinity, originally identified by Brett Sayre of Baseball Prospectus, is a statistical paradise that grants admission only to pitchers who get ground balls and strikeouts but don’t give up walks. The Quadrinity is our own contribution to the theological discussion. It consists of guys who get strikeouts but don’t give up walks, and who, when they are hit, are hit softly rather than hard. If you’re interested in pursuing a graduate degree in the subject, start here and then poke around our archive. Swarzak made both lists last year. Who makes them this year?

Some predictable and semi-predictable names, of course: Felipe Rivero, Ken Giles, Ryan Madson, Joe Smith. Luke Gregerson, whom we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, makes both lists. Not only that, but he qualifies as unlucky in 2017 by the metrics we use, as to which see here. We see no reason he won’t thrive as the Cardinals’ closer, as long as they don’t do something silly like signing Greg Holland.

But Gregerson is too mainstream for present purposes. We call your attention to one particular reliever of whom nothing is expected, but who managed to pull off the Trinity/Quadrinity/Unlucky trifecta. That is the Swarzakesque George Kontos. He’s 32, and has been, in Mike Podhorzer’s words, “your everyday vanilla middle reliever” for years, mostly with the Giants, spending some time in the minors most seasons and finally getting waived by the Giants in August and picked up by the Pirates, for whom he was quite effective. Still, his season totals were okay but not heart-stopping: 3.72 ERA, 1.221 WHIP, 9.5 K/9.
There’s nonetheless something in Kontos’s record that suggests a dramatic change in 2017. He threw his fastball less than ever before, and his cutter way more. Presumably as a result, he was able to induce more swings at pitches out of the strike zone than was his wont, and with way better results: an O-Contact rate of 48% and an overall Contact Rate of 66.3%, both in the top—that is, the bottom—20 among MLB relievers. In short, Kontos suddenly started fooling a lot more hitters than ever before.

We don’t have anything anecdotal to back up our statistical inference that Kontos’s cutter is now an advanced weapon. It’s entirely possible that last year’s numbers are a blip of some sort. It’s also quite possible that the analytics departments of other teams are looking at the same numbers we’re looking at and spreading the word: Lay off Kontos’s cutter. Nonetheless, last year’s numbers say what they say, and as a late pick in the reserve round—his ADP is 715, he’s been taken in only 21 of 82 NFBC slow drafts, and we got him in the 50th round of our slow draft—he’s got some appeal.

More appeal, in fact, than even the foregoing would suggest. We concede that even a middle reliever as effective as Swarzak was last season is just caulking when your pitching staff springs a leak, because he’s not going to get saves. But Kontos looks to us like something more than a middle reliever. He already figures to be one of two setup guys for pitiless closer Felipe Rivero. And if, heaven forfend, something untoward happens to Rivero, he’s got (in our opinion) at least as good a shot as the frequently unhittable but infuriatingly inconsistent Michael Feliz of taking over.