What Has Happened to Carlos Carrasco and Miles Mikolas?

After Monday’s smallish slate of games, there have been a total of 241 games played so far this season. That’s 9.9 percent of the total schedule. By the time Tuesday’s games are done, the status bar will have moved to 10.5 percent. For a very brief moment, we still have the opportunity to say, “we’re not even 10 percent through this season!”. That’s something of a comfort when coping with the angst that comes with having drafted players who underperform early in the season.

Mike Podhorzer has looked into a number of slow starters in separate columns for hitters and pitchers, and a couple of the subjects from the latter column have been particularly concerning to me. Mike pointed out that Carlos Carrasco and Miles Mikolas are both posting a lower SwStr% so far this season, but what had caught my eye about them was where they were ranking on Baseball Savant’s leaderboard for exit velocity on flyballs and line drives (EV FB/LD).

Carrasco, who has hovered around the slightly-elevated mark of 93 mph over the last four seasons, is suddenly “leading” all pitchers with at least 30 batted balls with an average of 100.4 mph. Mikolas was one of three pitchers last season — Noah Syndergaard and Zack Wheeler being the others — to have one of the five lowest average EV FB/LD and one of the five lowest average exit velocities overall (min. 400 batted balls). Through four starts, Mikolas has been utterly normal (92.5 mph average EV FB/LD, 88.8 mph average overall EV) in both regards.

The double whammy of a lower SwStr% and higher exit velocities for both pitchers leaves me with two questions for each: why is this happening and at what point do I need to freak out?

Carlos Carrasco’s Season To Date

Not only is Carrasco getting scorched on flies and liners with the highest exit velocities of any pitcher with at least 30 batted balls, but he has also compiled the highest hard-hit rate, with 58.8 percent of all batted balls exiting at a rate of at least 95 mph. In addition to allowing more hard contact, Carrasco is allowing more contact in general, with his SwStr% plummeting from last season’s 15.3 percent to 10.9 percent — his lowest mark since 2013. He has been throwing his slider more frequently than any other pitch, which you would think would bode well for his whiff rate, but the SwStr% on his slider has actually fallen by more than seven percentage points. Incredibly, Carrasco’s strikeout rate is slightly higher than it was last season, in part because he has increased his called strike rate by nearly two percentage points (from 17.2 to 19.1 percent).

Selected Stats for Carlos Carrasco, 2018-2019
Season Slider SwStr% K% EV FB/LD (mph) ERA
2018 26.2% 29.5% 93.6 3.38
2019 19.0% 30.9% 100.4 12.60
SOURCE: EV data are from Baseball Savant

As is frequently noted in these spaces, swinging strike rate has correlated far more strongly with strikeout rate than called strike rate has, so Carrasco’s sagging slider SwStr% could do damage to his K-rate if it persists. The average velocity on each of his pitches is close to where it was for last season, and his slider is sliding about as much as it did in 2018 (1.5 inches of horizontal movement, as compared to 1.7 inches last year). However, it’s not getting as much downward movement, only dipping 1.2 inches on average in 2019 versus 2.3 inches in 2018.

So far, Carrasco has thrown 58 sliders. That’s a sample that is so small that a rate of 23.2 percent is still within the 95 percent confidence interval. If he were to maintain his current 19.0 percent rate after he had thrown 200 sliders, the upper bound of a reasonable rest-of-season expectation would be just 21.3 percent. To put that in perspective, Carrasco has never finished with a slider SwStr% below 22.5 percent.

Using the Reliability and Confidence Bands Tool created by Jonah Pemstein, we can’t calculate the confidence interval for average EV FB/LD, but we can do it for overall EV. If we assume that Carrasco will maintain his current average EV of 95.5 mph for another 66 batted balls (when he will reach a total of 100), the lower bound of the confidence interval is 90.1 mph. Only two pitchers with at least 300 batted balls had an average EV that high last season. They were Matt Moore and Chris Stratton, and both had ERAs above 5.00 and ISOs above .180.

Carrasco has plenty of time to fix his slider and his issues with hard contact. If he doesn’t, he will probably still miss enough bats to avoid a 5.00-plus ERA. Nonetheless, if his slider SwStr% and average EV is in similar territory by mid-to-late May, a rest-of-season ERA in the mid-4.00s would not be an unreasonable expectation.

Miles Mikolas’ Season To Date

We can see in the table below that Mikolas is more than one-third off his 2018 SwStr% pace. Unlike Carrasco, his strikeout rate is being affected, and his lack of whiffs cannot be tied to just one pitch. He and Carrasco do share one similarity in that both have lost approximately one inch of vertical movement on their sliders. Mikolas’ ability to thwart hard contact, regardless of the ball’s trajectory, has been absent as well.

Selected Stats for Miles Mikolas, 2018-2019
Season SwStr% K% EV FB/LD (mph) Overall EV (mph) ERA
2018 9.6% 18.1% 90.3 85.4 2.83
2019 6.2% 11.8% 92.5 88.8 6.00
SOURCE: EV data are from Baseball Savant

Last year, Mikolas’ average velocity on his slider held steady throughout the season, but so far in 2019, it’s 1.5 mph below the 2018 average of 88.5 mph. Also, his average four-seam fastball velocity has fallen from 94.7 mph to 93.7 mph.

While we should keep an eye on Mikolas’ velocity trends, we should also see if any improvement in velocity translates into more swings-and-misses and softer contact. If, after 900 total pitches, Mikolas still has a 6.2 percent SwStr%, the upper bound of the confidence interval for SwStr% will be just 8.6 percent. Should he maintain an 88.8 mph average EV after 150 batted balls, Mikolas probably won’t have an average EV lower than 87.7 mph for the remainder of the season. In other words, if Mikolas continues his current trends for another month, it’s a good sign that he will be a worse strikeout pitcher than he was in 2018 and merely average at preventing hard contact.

Being elite at the latter skill was a key to Mikolas becoming a must-own fantasy pitcher a year ago. There is still a chance that he can demonstrate that skill in 2019, but time will soon be running out. For now, it’s premature to drop Mikolas in just about any format.





Al Melchior has been writing about Fantasy baseball and sim games since 2000, and his work has appeared at CBSSports.com, BaseballHQ, Ron Shandler's Baseball Forecaster and FanRagSports. He has also participated in Tout Wars' mixed auction league since 2013. You can follow Al on Twitter @almelchiorbb and find more of his work at almelchior.com.

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DBRunsmember
4 years ago

Look at Carrasco’s fastball velocity. He wasn’t throwing it with any conviction in his last start. Hitters have a .529 AVG, .824 SLG, and .295 ISO against his fastball this season.

BradleyZimmernsBizarreHits
4 years ago
Reply to  Al Melchior

Velo is what I’ve been watching and it’s very encouraging to see him go into the seventh inning regularly hitting 93-94 on the fastball.

He will be fine as long as the Kansas City start was just a weather thing

BradleyZimmernsBizarreHits
4 years ago
Reply to  DBRuns

Coming back to this a day later with the power of hindsight but he just killed it and his fastball had an average Velo of 93.8. when he’s playing well, this is where you want him to sit, regularly hitting 93-94 with good command.

Supposedly the game in Kansas city was super cold and I read something about how he was talking about struggling to hold on to the ball. His fastball velocity in that game was basically straight 90. The first start as well, he was averaging just under 92 with average at best location.

Once I saw Velo numbers from KC and heard the weather, I wasn’t worried (as a Cleveland fan and fantasy owner)

his whole repertoire is very much reliant on good command of the fastball hitting 93 miles an hour regularly. It’s what makes his changeup so devastating but he’s had to throw it (and the slider) more for strikes and the changeup isn’t as effective when there’s a 5mph difference