The Change: Alex Wood’s Bond Between Stuff & Command

Is there a more perplexing pitcher this year than Alex Wood has been so far? His pitches are all there, in the same quantities, at the same velocities, and with the same shapes… and the results — when it comes to balls and strikes at least — are nowhere to be found. Even my favorite pitch type peripherals are all out of whack.

How does a pitcher with the same stuff fail so miserably?

Check out how little his stuff has actually changed. I mean, these are the same pitches.

Well, okay, the curve has changed a bit. By PITCHf/x. If you look at Brooks Baseball’s cleaned-up values, the curve is about the same. And no mention of changing his grip on the pitch or anything.

So, his pitches look like they are about the same. The results have not been.

He’s getting some more grounders, but it’s not enough to offset or explain the lack of whiffs.

Well, maybe the grounder rate difference is important. Look at his average height on the sinker, and it looks like Wood is throwing the ball lower in the zone.

That holds up with all of his pitches included, too. To the heat maps:

So Alex Wood is throwing all of the same pitches at mostly the same velocities, with mostly the same shape, and somehow throwing a little further down in the zone has robbed him of his ability to get whiffs? We’re not all the way there yet.

I mean, after all, Wood always had this coming. He had a 55% ground-ball rate in the minor leagues, 49% in his rookie year, and then was down to 46% last year. The three pitches he features — the curve, the sinker, and the change — are all great ground-ball pitches. And Wood managed to get these grounders alongside whiffs, in the past. So a focus on grounders isn’t robbing Wood of his strikeouts.

Except maybe in a roundabout way. Take a look at what happened when I asked a few of my favorite Braves fan friends about Wood’s early season. The short version: Ben Duronio and Joe Lucia thought I should take a look at his command.

We showed that the pitches were mostly the same by movement, but not by whiffs, but we didn’t show one aspect of the pitches that had also changed. See how often his pitches have been in the zone last year and this year.

It’s amazing to see concretely how Wood’s command is stealing opportunities for whiffs from him. Last year, 7.8% of Wood’s overall pitches came in a three ball count. This year, that percentage is up to 9.4%. He’s throwing the sinker in 78% of the three-ball counts this year, too. So he’s becoming more predictable, and he’s getting into situations where he can’t go to any of his three pitches at will.

That’s how command can hurt your ability to get whiffs, beyond the ability to actually place the curve and change in the right place to get whiffs. You need to be able to get into the right counts to use your dangerous offspeed pitches. It’s not just about the shape and velocity of the pitch, it’s about the predictability of its use, the location it’s thrown to, and the context of the at-bat.

Wood’s become slightly more predictable because of his focus on the bottom of the zone. He’s throwing too many pitches outside of the zone, and that’s hurting his ability to be unpredictable. The good news is, he’s had blips like this before (see below), his pitches are still all about the same, and his command isn’t Defcon 1 (Aka Allen Webster) bad. He should come out of this.