Steven Wright Should Float On Ok

On Tuesday night, Steven Wright was roughed up for nine hits and eight earned runs in 4.2 innings against the Tigers. Amazingly, he remains seventh among qualified starters in the AL with a 3.12 ERA, but there seems to be this constant fear that Wright could become a bad pitcher at any moment. Given his lack of track record before this season, I think some apprehension is justifiable. However, my perception is that the greater part of the mistrust of Wright’s performance to date is tied to his being a knuckleballer, which I believe makes people think these sorts of blow-up performances are all but guaranteed when he loses the feel for his most important pitch.

I wanted to test whether knuckleballers were more prone to blow-up starts than other pitchers, so I started by classifying qualified starters based on their most frequently thrown non-fastball pitch type each season. Knuckleballers tend to throw that pitch way more than even their fastballs, but I thought excluding fastballs would do a better job of categorizing other pitchers, who may or may not have differences in the anecdotal “feel for their pitch” from time to time. Next, I tallied up the number of each pitcher’s blow ups, which I defined as starts with at least as many earned runs allowed as innings pitched (so a 9.00 ERA or worse for the start). To illustrate the idea, here are the qualified starters with the highest blow-up percentages this season.

Aaron Nola leads the list with seven blow-ups, and he and about half of the rest of the list are examples of pitchers who have suffered through major slumps at times this season. Perhaps those slumps are related to pitch mechanics, but they could also be tied to injuries, a lack of quality stuff in general, and other reasons.

Matt Shoemaker is the pitcher that I think serves as the best comparison to the general perception of Wright. Shoemaker has also enjoyed a breakout season, but the similarity I mean is rather that Shoemaker does not throw hard and relies on one really effective pitch, his split finger—which he throws 35.2 percent of the time—to produce his gaudy strikeout rate. Shoemaker does have a lot of blow ups this season, but four of his five came in his first six starts this season.

If public perception believes that Shoemaker has “figured it out”, then I feel Wright should have the same benefit of the doubt. Wright has just two blow ups this season, the same number as Max Scherzer, Chris Sale, Jake Arrieta, Johnny Cueto, Aaron Sanchez, Jose Quintana, and several others. Meanwhile, if you combine every qualified starter since 2002 based on their primary non-fastball pitch types, knuckleballers have not been any more susceptible to big outings than any other type of pitcher. In fact, that ratio has been nearly identical for every type of starter.

Wright isn’t an elite fantasy starter. His 7.4 strikeouts and 3.3 walks per nine are good but not great, and his 3.12 ERA is more than a run lower than his 4.43 xFIP thanks to an unsustainably low 6.0 percent home run per flyball ratio and 67.4 percent strand rate. But I don’t see any evidence that Wright’s reliance on a knuckleball makes him more likely to implode down the stretch than other starters with similar statistics and histories. Meanwhile, I have a lot of confidence that Wright will continue to pitch the rest of this season, which is a major question for many younger top-end starters like Aaron Sanchez and starters on teams that could fall out of the race. As such, I think Wright is actually a good trade acquisition target as many of his owners could be anticipating a blow up that I just don’t see coming.