The Change: Secretly Bad Fastballs

In the past, while looking for pitchers with multiple plus secondary pitches, I’ve run into a type of pitcher that can struggle despite having good offspeed weapons: the bad fastball guy. Chase Whitley, John Lamb, David Hale, and Nick Tropeano could all be put into this bucket, even if their stories are not yet done being written.

If your primary weapon isn’t great, you really have to go full Matt Shoemaker and start throwing you secondary pitches more often than your fastball, and even then you’re not guaranteed success. Look at Nathan Eovaldi, who did go the Shoemaker route once he found that splitter that he likes, and yet… he’s just about the same as he’s ever been, more or less.

What the heck? He’s got a really big fastball. But it’s lesser, for a few reasons. Let’s try to get at one of the ways it’s less than it should be today — perceived velocity.

Pitchers are taught to release their pitches out in front for a few reasons. It’s a good thing for timing and health, so it’s a mechanically sound thing to teach. But it also makes the pitch look better. The closer you release the ball to home plate the less time the hitter has to react to the pitch, and the more ‘perceived velocity’ that pitch has.

Over at Statcast, they use a pitchers’ extension to measure a perceived velocity. Basically, they can figure out where the ball was actually released and then extrapolate what that pitch would look like from a normalized release point. Let’s look at a list of the pitchers with the biggest gap between their actual and perceived velocity — here it’s sorted for the guys that get the most out of their extension.

Here’s something to get excited about for Tyler Glasnow: on this list, he’s got the highest base velocity among starters not named Danny Duffy or Noah Syndergaard. So that 94 mph fastball plays up even further. Of course, he has to harness all of his stuff, and nobody would really call his his fastball a secret.

Yusmeiro Petit, with his invisiball, is the patron saint of this analysis. But he’s ‘just’ a reliever, and his usage hasn’t changed in years. Not much fantasy value to be mined from him, or Brian Flynn, or Matt Belisle. But perhaps Zach McAllister is third in command in Cleveland. And maybe Carl Edwards Jr — especially with the injury woes for Pedro Strop and Hector Rondon — is really second in command on Chicago’s North Side. He’s certainly a great pickup for holds right now, with his big fastball that’s even bigger that it first appears.

Maybe there’s still hope for the struggling Shelby Miller or the hurt Michael Wacha, but when it comes to using this analysis to spot an underrated starter, I’d shine the spotlight on Mike Clevinger and Sean Manaea.

The Indian looks a lot better at 94 than 93, especially since he’s gotten plenty of whiffs on his change (15%), slider (16%), and curve (12.5%). Danny Salazar is back this week, but the rest of the rotation has had injury woes, Trevor Bauer is up and down, and Josh Tomlin has been hit hard recently. Pounce if there’s negative news for an existing Indians starter.

Sean Manaea has been better recently, and that has to be at least partially due to changing his changeup grip back to the FOSH he used in college, as he told me. He also admitted to me that his slider needs to be harder, though, so the best news might be that his slurve has been harder in the last four starts than any other four-start stretch before. Now’s a good time to buy him in all but ten-team and shallow twelve-team leagues.

Here are the guys that are worse than the radar gun reading suggests they should be.

It’s tempting to run and get David Phelps with a near-94 average, but there are a few reasons that this pitcher may not be a great every-down back despite good results on his change (27% whiffs), curve (11%) and cutter (10%) this year. For one, that’s 26 changeups, and over the larger sample of his career, the change hasn’t been great (562 thrown, 9.6% whiffs). That puts more pressure on his harder stuff, and he’s a guy that average 89 or 90 out of the rotation. He’s kept some of that velocity game in the last few starts, but even the radar lies in his situation. I’d call him a spot starter, mostly at home.

You have to give lefties a mile per hour credit because they average a mile per hour less than righties, on average. So just pretend that Adam Morgan, Drew Pomeranz and Daniel Norris are righties, in essence, because they give as much back with short strides and poor extension as they gain in being left-handed. That means Pomeranz is still decent, Norris still has some promise, but Morgan less so. It is interesting that this is a thing that separates Pomeranz from Rich Hill, though — Hill has normal extension and Pomeranz is less than what he seems on the fastball.

Check out all the guys with big radar numbers that get hit around more than you’d expect! The list is full of them. Andrew Cashner, Danny Salazar, Yordano Ventura, even Ross Ohlendorf these days. I’m a little surprised to see Sam Dyson and Ken Giles here, but they are so plus on the radar guns, and Dyson has so much sink, that maybe it’ll be okay.

The radar gun seems like a teller of facts. And it is! That’s how fast the ball went. But there’s a little more to it once you realize these are human bodies, and they aren’t all releasing the ball from the same point. Some of them are right on top of you with their exploding fastballs, a la Tyler Glasnow.