The Change: Scouts, Stats Split on Tropeano

If you bought FG+ — and you should have, because all those player caps and all that research would help you dominate your leagues this year — you might have sallied over to the player page for Nicholas Tropeano. And if you did that, you probably would have noticed that the player cap and the grades from Kiley McDaniel don’t quite agree.

You can probably just ignore the player cap. Some idiot probably wrote it.

But suppose there’s opportunity there? Suppose that disagreement really means that Tropeano is a guy that should be on your radar?

The dreaded caveat before we get too far into this: Tropeano doesn’t currently have a role with the Angels. He’s behind at least four starters, and really you’d probably want to put Hector Santiago and Andrew Heaney ahead of him, too. Tyler Skaggs returns eventually, making this a crowded house. Tropeano, short of being declared the fifth starter in March, is no mixed league pickup. But deeper leaguers?

Deeper leaguers know that teams use ten starters on average. Deeper leaguers know that anyone from sixth to eighth on a team’s starting rotation depth chart is interesting. Deeper *dynasty* leaguers want to know about young arms that have wide arsenals and a fighter’s chance of relevance in the coming year.

So we return to the opening conceit. Does Tropeano fit this bill?

The point of concern between the stats and the scouts is the changeup. Kiley’s grade have Tropeano’s change as his best pitch, and in his writeup, he was pretty succint about the relative values of the pitches in the former Astro’s arsenal:

Tropeano’s delivery isn’t pretty, but he commands his pitches well and competes, sitting 88-91 with sink that’s hit 94 mph, a fringy to average curveball and a plus changeup. Scouts round up on the their projections due to the swing-and-miss changeup, the deception and feel to pitch along with the bulldog approach of the NYC native.

Okay so here’s the problem. Brooks Baseball says that Tropeano got a 21% whiff rate from his slider and a 14% whiff rate from his changeup. By results last year, you’d want to reverse the plus and minus signs on his different pitches.

Fie, you say, dude threw 77 breakers and 77 changeups, why would you quote his results on those pitches. First, I say, yes that’s not a bad point, but at least we are looking at whiffs, which are the quickest to stabilize on a plate appearance level.

Second, I say — the shape of a pitch must stabilize very quickly. There’s almost no human error introduced at all when you say that a pitch broke this many inches downward and this many inches sideways and went this fast. So we can look at the shape of Tropeano’s 77 changeups, and… the pitch doesn’t look that great.

Check out how Tropeano’s pitch relates to the league average right-handed changeup in those three stats:

It’s a bit of a frisbee change, and it lacks average drop. While it has some nice fade, it has almost exactly the same fade as his sinker. In fact, his change is about the same as his sinker, just eight miles per hour slower. Considering that a ten mph gap is good for whiffs, and drop is also important for a good changeup, we could say that this change is okay. A 14% whiff rate is above-average, so let’s say the pitch is above-average.

That’s not quite plus.

Now, the breaking ball is a bit weird. At 80 mph, it’s a very slow slider. And McDaniel called it a curve. But the movement on it (basically 0/0.5) suggests slider. And PITCHf/x has something separate called a curve that has more drop. Let’s give that pitch an incomplete grade until we can figure out what’s going on there.

If you zoom in, the stats like the breaker more than the change and that seems weird. You could take this as a positive (perhaps the change has more to show, and perhaps the breaker is actually better than scouts thought) or as a negative (the change isn’t as good as the scouts thought, so uh-oh). This probably won’t get solved here for good, at least not without more data.

If you zoom out, though, the stats seem to say the same thing as the scouts, actually. Here’s a pitcher with some interesting traits — good command, some good offspeed pitches, and a little bit of opportunity in a good ball park — that also has some flaws. Sounds like a perfect deep league bench play.