The Change: This Year’s Wide Arsenals

In pitching, you have your Matt Cains and you have your A.J. Burnetts — there’s no one way to be a good starting pitcher. Sometimes you have a wide arsenal of representative pitches, sometimes you have one excellent pitch and you find a way to keep throwing it over and over again.

Today, let’s give some love to the Matt Cains and find pitchers with many good pitches. Maybe we’ll find an undervalued guy or two.

First, we’ll use the “above-average” benchmarks set up here, with a low minimum to allow for short-sample pitchers to get into the list. If you’ve thrown your pitch 20 times so far this year, that pitch is eligible for this list. Then, the simple question is, is your pitch over the benchmark? Let’s sum the starters for swinging strikes first.

Here are the starters with the most PITCHf/x branded pitches that are above average for whiffs.

Pitcher Total
Clay Buchholz 5
Ian Kennedy 5
James Shields 5
Jarred Cosart 5
Jon Lester 5
Rubby de la Rosa 5
Scott Kazmir 5
Shaun Marcum 5
Andrew Cashner 4
Carlos Carrasco 4
Chad Bettis 4
Chris Archer 4
Chris Rusin 4
Cole Hamels 4
Corey Kluber 4
David Price 4
Erasmo Ramirez 4
Felix Hernandez 4
Jacob deGrom 4
Jesse Chavez 4
Jimmy Nelson 4
Masahiro Tanaka 4
Mat Latos 4
Matt Harvey 4
Max Scherzer 4
Michael Lorenzen 4
Michael Pineda 4
Steven Matz 4
Trevor Bauer 4

For James Shields, Scott Kazmir, and Jon Lester, this is just a bit of a feather in their cap. Or maybe it’s a little bit more. Listen to James Shields talk about how he’s improved his changeup by throwing his knuckle curve more, and you understand how a wide arsenal can be huge for longevity. So when one of these pitchers loses a tick on a pitch, or doesn’t have that pitch in a specific game, they’ve got four other pitches that do well by whiffs.

Guess it’s time to buy in on Clay Buchholz, says the guy that has known in his brain that the time is already too late, but can blame a broken heart for the pain he’s experienced in missing out on this run. Once it came out that that Buchholz improved his changeup, and once he started putting up elite strikeout minus walk rates, it was obvious that he *should* be a good pickup. I guess I’ve been burned a little too often, and now I’ve been burned again by not jumping in when I should have. Congratulations on getting your 80 good innings from Clay Buchholz, which come around every few years like the World Cup or a Charles Barkley gaffe.

Ian Kennedy and Rubby de la Rosa don’t have problems getting whiffs. You’d think that two pitchers with ten above-average pitches between the two of them could figure out how to avoid giving up homers, especially when one pitches in San Diego and the other has decent velocity. Perhaps command has them tweaked, perhaps they’ve just had bad luck so far, but they are not failing for lack of another pitch, that much we can see here.

Jarred Cosart teaches us to be a little wary of PITCHf/x classifications. Here are the pitches that the system has Cosart throwing regularly: Four-seamer, sinker, change, knuckle curve, curve. Sounds to me like he has three pitches. At least he’s figured out a decent mix for those pitches in terms of individual whiff rates, but his bad command keeps him from being able to throw the breaking pitches for whiffs more often. And his kind of bad command is not going away.

The next group of pitchers has some interesting names.

Chad Bettis rises to the top based on the alphabet. He’s showing a 10% whiff rate this year, and though it’s supporting just an average strikeout rate, that’s much better than he’s done to date in the major leagues. His best secondary offering is a curve, so that explains why his strikeout rate isn’t plus (curves get fewer swings and fewer swings and misses than the other secondary pitches). This is the first time he’s trusting his changeup and getting plus results from it, so it’s nice that this kind of analysis promotes him a bit. That change doesn’t have good velocity gap, but it drops three inches more than average and is getting whiffs at a good rate. Bettis’ fastball is a little slower than usual, but it looks like it has some natural cut on it, and it’s getting great grounders. With that change and an okay slider, maybe Bettis can survive the Coors effect on his curveball. Otherwise, his line seems more sustainable in this analysis than his projections would suggest.

Repeat the paragraph for Chris Rusin, I guess. He has the same bendy change with a bad velo gap, fastball with good movement and iffy velocity, and assortment of decent breaking balls that Bettis boasts. Maybe the team decided movement — and actually throwing a change — were more important than the velocity gap. But, given Rusin hasn’t struck out more than six per nine since 2010 in Double-A, his upside is lower than his teammate’s.

Jesse Chavez, Trevor Bauer, and Erasmo Ramirez may not seem like they have a lot in common, but they might. Yes, Bauer has the best velocity of the group, but he may not (by his own admission) have one elite pitch, and neither do the other two. But they do have a wide arsenal and have done some slight tweaks to find success in the bigs. Maybe the secret comes from Bauer:

The more passable pitches you have, the better you have a chance to sequence those pitches to put the batter off balance.

I wouldn’t have thought this sort of description would apply to a former closer, but maybe Michael Lorenzen deserves a little more love. It’s not just PFx — Brooks has his slider, curve, change, and four-seamer as above-average in whiffs. The reason he doesn’t have more Ks is that the fastball is the least above-average of the crew, despite having good velocity. He’s only thrown 84 changeups, and his version of the pitch has below-average drop, but it has the ten mph gap, and he sorta trusts it. And it’s getting good results. Lorenzen doesn’t get love as a good dynasty pick up, and he shouldn’t be considered a blue-chipper, but he has all the pieces he needs, and he’s generally throwing his change and curve combined as much as his slider, which seems like a decent proxy for viability of each of his pitches. Watch this cat.

Okay, let’s add grounders in. This is a flawed approach — grounders are less valuable than whiffs — but if a pitch is above-average by grounders, it also gets a ‘1’. Below, we’ve added all their above-average whiff pitches to their above-average grounder pitches.

Pitcher Total
Mat Latos 10
Rubby de la Rosa 10
Carlos Carrasco 9
Clay Buchholz 9
Erasmo Ramirez 9
Felix Hernandez 9
Jarred Cosart 9
Jimmy Nelson 9
Jon Lester 9
Scott Kazmir 9
Chad Bettis 8
Cole Hamels 8
Dallas Keuchel 8
Dillon Gee 8
Ian Kennedy 8
James Shields 8
Lance McCullers 8
Matt Andriese 8
Michael Pineda 8
Sonny Gray 8

Many of the same pitchers grace this list, but let’s give some love to Cole Hamels, who has improved his curve to the point where he now has four legit plus pitches. And we forgot to give Jimmy Nelson love for *his* new curveball above, so let’s do that now, and add that he could actually improve on his second half projections, considering he’s not quite the same pitcher he was when those projections were informed. Michael Pineda’s change has improved, so ditto for him. And Sonny Gray added that slider.

But let’s instead use this space to highlight two very different pitchers. One is Lance McCullers, who has three very excellent pitches that have velocity and bite. Maybe his 94 mph fastball is a little straight, but it’s getting the whiffs no matter. He has a 5/-5 curve that is the second-hardest curve in the big leagues among starters, and we know that velocity on curves is good for whiffs. And his changeup has three inches more drop than your average righty change, and six inches more drop than his fastball. It has two inches more fade than you average change, and four inches more fade than his fastball. Yes, he can’t really command that pitch, but it’s a fierce arsenal, and it’s deep enough.

On the other side is Matt Andriese. He doesn’t have above-average velocity on his fastball, but it does have nice rise, meaning it should be a good weapon against same-handed batters. His sinker has average movement, his curve is about average in movement, and his cutter looks decent. No pitch stands out, but every pitch does just enough, and he has great command. He’ll make for a decent AL-Only pick up if he returns to a legitimate rotation spot in Tampa.

And Dillon Gee? He’s free! Some major league team should have claimed him, you’d think.

Like Andriese, Gee doesn’t have one standout pitch. But the mix, and the command, make him viable. Wide arsenals shouldn’t be the first thing you look for, but — especially when it comes to staving off the ravages of aging, since starters age better than relievers and traditionally have more pitches they can throw — having a diverse lineup of pitches is still important.





With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.

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GoOppo
8 years ago

Great article. Loved seeing RDLR and Kennedy there, they always seem like they had great stuff to me at least but Who am I.?

I mean RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE stop talking about the redsox buchholz blah blah