Archive for Sinker

Last year, Justin Steele verged upon pitch-tracking-era history:

Justin Steele is 21 four-seamers away from history*.

Most four-seamers thrown w/out giving up a HR in the pitch tracking era:

Heath Bell: 807 in 2010
Justin Steele: 786 in 2022.

— Alex Fast (@AlexFast8) July 22, 2022

If you don’t know how this ends, my exceptionally dim-witted-but-nevertheless-talented colleague and friend Alex Fast jinxed it in spectacular fashion:

This streak by Steele ended on his first pitch of tonight's game. Schwarber slugs a 90.8 mph four-seam fastball from Steele over the RF wall. https://t.co/1cZyei5EHT

— Meghan Montemurro (@M_Montemurro) July 22, 2022

Nevertheless, the streak remains interesting because Steele is up to his same antics.

Only four pitches have been thrown 500 times this year and allowed just one home run. Here they are, in order of total pitches thrown and accompanied by total plate appearances (PA) completed:

1. Steele’s four-seamer (725 thrown, 199 PA)
2. Kevin Gausman’s splitter (622, 160)
3. Jordan Montgomery’s sinker (584, 170)
4. Hunter Greene’s slider (516, 100)

It’s one thing to accomplish this feat at all; it’s another all together to do so with a fastball (kudos to J-Mont, but a sinker ain’t a four-seamer). Here is the top of the list of only fastballs that have allowed one or fewer home runs, ordered by most thrown. The gulf between first and second from a volume standpoint is astounding:

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It’s easy to dismiss Randy Dobnak, to turn him into a punchline. When 99.99% of baseball fans were introduced to Dobby last fall, they learned two things:

1. When he wasn’t pitching, he worked part-time as a ride-share driver to help pay the bills (an altogether separate indictment of MLB and its broad moral shortcomings), and
2. He has a handlebar mustache.

That’s just enough, but also plenty, to undercut a grown man’s legitimacy. It’s this very illegitimizing, I hypothesize, that has allowed Dobnak to fly under fantasy radars, even as he demonstrates nonzero aptitude on the mound.

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Fantasy owners have been chasing, to no avail, Chris Archer’s 2015 season, during which he recorded a 29% strikeout rate with a 3.23 ERA. After finishing just outside the top-50 overall by National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) average draft position (ADP), Archer averaged the No. 50 pick from 2016 through 2018. Unfortunately, the outcomes annually and in aggregate have been awful…

… even though his peripherals before and after 2015 have been nearly identical. That’s the persistent problem with Archer: he has given us perpetual reason to chase results he may never again achieve.

I’m here to argue Archer’s woes started not in 2016, when his ERA ballooned to 4.02, but in 2015 — yes, his career year. That’s because he stopped throwing his sinker in 2015, opting instead to rely on a pitifully bad four-seam fastball as his primary offering. His 2015 success can be attributed primarily to his slider, which he began to feature much more prominently, but the remaining success was thanks to good luck.

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It’s not as if the Chicago Cubs’ trade for started-turned-reliever-turned-starter Mike Montgomery came cheap. Dan Vogelbach isn’t a top-flight prospect, but with plus power and a solid plate approach at Triple-A Iowa this season, it’s not like he’s a nobody, either.

Then again, neither is Montgomery. A supplemental first-round pick almost 10 years ago, he was a Kansas City Royals top-5 prospect for four straight years and a Baseball America top-40 prospect for three of them. Then 2012 came; he was thrown into the James Shields–Wade Davis–Wil Myers–Jake Odorizzi blockbuster before continuing to generally fail to impress anyone. The Seattle Mariners acquired him in 2015, the year in which he debuted, in exchange for Erasmo Ramirez, and Montgomery delivered 16 suboptimal starts. He’s in Chicago now, providing relief every sixth day to a starting rotation that has generated the best staff WHIP in more than 100 years. Cool. Got that out of the way.

Montgomery is no ordinary sixth starter, though. I beg you to read this automated scouting report generated by Brooks Baseball regarding Montgomery’s pitches and their outcomes in 2016. Extreme number of ground balls. Blazing fast. Extremely high number of swings & misses. The remarks for all five of Montgomery’s pitches are, in a word, glowing.

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I already wrote about Aaron Nola this year. So, too, have Eno Sarris, August Fagerstrom and Jeff Sullivan. He’s been a big deal.

When I wrote about Nola — barely a month ago, at this point — he kind of took the backseat to rotation-mate Vincent Velasquez, who had recently struck out 16 hitters in a dominant complete game. However, since VV’s first two starts, during which he struck out a combined 25 hitters, he hasn’t struck out more than six hitters in a single game and has shown lapses in command.

Meanwhile, Nola has, somewhat quietly, turned in one of the season’s best first six weeks. He ranks third in pitcher WAR (wins above replacement) behind Clayton Kershaw and the underrated Jose Quintana. But WAR is partly a function of playing time, so this might be an unfair comparison for, say, Kyle Hendricks, who has started two fewer games than Nola.

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It’s time for our Depth Chart Discussions to begin. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, bullpen, and rotation) and will begin breaking them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find them gathered here.

Zach Britton’s Sinker… Eh? Eh???

In fact, according to BP’s PITCHf/x Leaderboard, five of eight Baltimore Relievers had above average Sinkers last year: Zach Britton (#1 overall obviously), Darren O’Day (#17), Wesley Wright (#24), Tommy Hunter (#32) and T.J. McFarland (#39). Five of the top 40 (out of 136) relievers who used a classified Sinker over 100 times were Baltimore Orioles.

Available out of the bullpen:

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Any day now, Zach Sanders (@zvsanders) will come out with his end-of-season FAVRz/Fantasy Rankings. Look out for them.

For this post, I will provide three sets of rankings using that same approach (summed up z-scores) for our end-of-season “Bullpen Report: Expected Fantasy Rankings”. The Bullpen Report team should follow up with role reports for each division in the coming weeks as well.

The first set of rankings you will find almost anywhere: on the fantasy sites that you use, via player-raters, etc. It’s the standard 5×5 fantasy value (Wins, ERA, WHIP, SO and Saves). The second grid will be for 6×6 leagues (addition of Holds). The last grid will be for 5×5 and 6×6 leagues, but instead of standard ERA and WHIP, we’ll look at rankings if you were to use expected ERA (via SIERA) and adjusted (adj)WHIP through BABIP differential: I will explain below.

1) 5×5 Rankings (Wins, ERA, WHIP, SO and Saves) – actual 5×5 value in column 4; expected 5×5 value in column 5:

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