We continue our journey through the first-half performances in the A’s system with a look at the batted-ball statistics of Oakland’s minor league pitchers. As with the batters in Part 3, we’ll be looking at the org’s top ten in batted ball distribution statistics (ground/fly/line drive, pull/up the middle/opposite field), as well as both the top ten and bottom ten performers in homer-to-flyball ratio and batting average on balls in play.
As with the first pitching installment (Part 2), to qualify for these lists, pitchers have to be prospect-eligible and have thrown at least ten innings at a full-season A’s affiliate. There are 59 eligible pitchers. Statistics in this piece are through June 19.
Like Part 3, we’ll start with batted ball types, which themselves will begin with groundball rate.
Groundball Rate
For position players, groundball rate is a fairly neutral statistic: for some hitters (say, Drew Swift), it’s generally a good thing, and for others (say, Pat McColl), it’s not so good. But for pitchers, we generally think of the inducing of grounders as a positive. That’s not to say it doesn’t come with some tradeoffs–groundballs are associated with the sinker, which has the worst swinging strike rate among all pitch types by a good amount, for one–but holding all else constant, a pitcher would probably prefer to keep the ball on the ground. The ten best pitchers in the A’s system at that skill so far in 2022 have been these guys.
We’ll get to the overall trends on this list in a moment, but let’s pause first to admire the dominance of Norge Ruiz in this category. For context, only one MLB pitcher with at least Ruiz’s number of innings (Clay Holmes) has a groundball rate above that of Ruiz. Ruiz’s career looked over after a 2021 season in which he mostly wasn’t healthy, following parts of two seasons in Triple-A in 2018 and 2019 in which he posted an 8.45 ERA. Now 28, Ruiz was an afterthought in the Las Vegas bullpen when the season began, but he showed up on a lot of the overall pitching leaderboards in Part 2 last week, and this is probably the biggest reason why. A three-quarter pitcher who sits in the low 90s, Ruiz gets a weird cut/sink shape on his fastball, but he hasn’t really showed advanced groundball ability at any previous stop; his zone approach favors lower locations by a bit, but not some kind of telling gigantic amount, either. Since we’re talking about a sample of just 51 batted balls with him, it bears watching to see how legitimate this groundball excellence is.
Turning to the rest of the pitchers here…yeah, as you’d expect, there are a lot of sinker guys, most of whom have a history of at least above-average groundball generation. Holman in particular has a real bowling ball of a pitch in the mid-90s; though he works up in the zone more frequently than a lot of sinker-oriented guys, it isn’t surprising to see that opponents have had a lot of trouble lifting his pitches. Yehizon Sanchez throws a hard two-seamer with bigtime movement as well, and he uses the upper part of the zone significantly less than most pitchers. Romero’s approach is fairly similar, sitting 92-95 mph with sink and mostly working the lower two-thirds. Briggs (93-96) and Breault (94-96 T97) throw quite hard as well, and both get good sink on the ball despite employing fairly high arm slots, resulting in their fastballs entering the zone at a particularly sharp angle.
If you’re noticing a trend in the previous paragraph about not only sink, but velocity, that carries over to the rest of the names on the list as well–everybody on here is up to at least 94 mph. So much for the groundball finesse pitcher, right?* Vazquez throws what looks like more of a true four-seamer but doesn’t seem to get great spin, so the pitch doesn’t carry much, but he’s one of the hardest throwers in the system. Kubo has also touched 98 mph and seems to have a bit more ability to push the ball by guys up in the strike zone with late life to the arm side, but he was also up over 50% grounders in Stockton last season and seems to prefer to work down in the zone for now. Conley’s fastball is in the 93-95 range and has some interesting properties. His low three-quarters slot imparts the usual sink to the ball, but his release seems to make everything cut, with both his 88-92 mph cutter and long 78-82 mph slider showing big horizontal action to the glove side. It seems like the low slot and cut-oriented release kind of cancel each other out when it comes to the fastball’s horizontal movement, as the pitch ends up flying in quite true for one with this amount of sink. Since he gets a decent spin rate on it, Conley might be better served trying to upward-plane the fastball by opponents up in the zone. He did more of that in previous seasons and is the only one of these ten pitchers who doesn’t have a particularly groundball-oriented history.
*Matt Milburn, who is more of an 89-91 guy, is 11th on the list, though. He throws a lot of sliders. More finesse guys creep in around the 15-20 range.
The one surprising entrant here (to me) is James Gonzalez, a big lefty whose fastball is a bit more of a carrying four-seamer. However, Gonzalez does throw his sinking changeup quite frequently–he particularly likes to double and triple up on it–and he keeps it down in the zone pretty consistently, so perhaps that’s the driver of the strong performance here. He was in the 48% range last season, so there’s some evidence that he’s at least above average in groundball ability. He throws the changeup from a significantly lower arm slot than the fastball, though, so he’s going to need to work on getting the whole arsenal more consistently released as he develops. If that entails raising the changeup’s arm slot to high-¾ like his other pitches, that would have different consequences for his profile than if he drops the release on his fastball and curve to the changeup’s current medium-low ¾ look.
Flyball Rate
On the flipside of the groundball coin, here are the pitchers in the system who have allowed the highest proportion of fly balls:
Not surprisingly, there is not a single pitcher on this list who I’ve coded as throwing a two-seamer. Everyone except Logue–who has the sort of low-slot upward-plane approach I just discussed might be well-suited to Conley–throws from a high three-quarter slot or higher. There’s also more of a finesse presence here, as Sawyer, Martinez, Howard, Logue, and Nambiar have averaged under 92 mph with their fastballs this season.
Most of the groundball pitchers–all except Romero and maybe Gonzalez–have had nice seasons, and several have exceeded expectations overall this year. The flyball group is more of a mixed bag. You’ve got Zhuang, Beers, and Harris, who might be the three biggest breakout arms in the system this season, but also Cedano, Martinez, and Logue, who have run into serious trouble.
As with the batters, let’s break this down into the outfield fly leaders and infield fly leaders to see if that helps us separate out the performance a bit more. We’ll start with outfield flies:
Look at that. Zhuang led the system in overall flyball rate, but is not even top 10 in outfield flies allowed (he’s 12th). Likewise, Hogan Harris is 27th here despite placing in the top 10 in overall flies. Even Beers fell to eighth. Conversely, some of the system’s weakest performances are more represented here, with only Beers and new entrant Jack Owen qualifying as enjoying strong campaigns. Owen, Szynski, Dunshee, and DeMers are all finesse guys as well. DeMers is particularly frustrating to see on here because he does have a heavy sinker/change combo as well as a slurve with tough plane, yet works up in the zone a lot. I really wonder what an all-low, all-the-time approach would do for DeMers, who does throw a ton of strikes.
The infield fly rate leaderboard is, perhaps unsurprisingly, more correlated with overall success.
It’s been a massive struggle for Adam Oller in his attempts at solving the big leagues this year, but almost half the fly balls he’s allowed in Vegas have stayed on the infield, which is a nice way to avoid being subject to the crazy offensive environment of the Pacific Coast League. His fastball isn’t really the carrying sort, though, and he hasn’t demonstrated this sort of popup acumen before, so there’s likely some small-sample fluke in his performance: as I noted in the last installment of this series, popup rate is going to run into some of those issues.
Still, it makes sense that Harris, Zhuang, Nambiar, and Criswell–all carrying four-seam guys who work up in the zone with solid command–would be pretty good at getting opponents to swing underneath the ball. Cedano is interesting to see here because hitters have tattooed him to a .411 BABIP so far, which would suggest a very low proportion of weak, easily fielded contact like this, but he’s also a carrying fastball guy with some velocity, so it’s nice that there’s at least one statistical benefit of that approach that’s manifesting. Beers has been very tough to hit overall, but he’s an offspeed-heavy pitcher without as much of a high-heat approach, though perhaps batters sit on his slider (which he will move up and down more than most pitchers do) and thus end up underneath the fastball. Howard is a pitch-mixer who can be tough to square up given his giant 6’9” frame and resultant extension. Ginn and Sawyer are small-sample guys. Ginn actually has an extreme groundball history, but Sawyer is more of a flyball pitcher; nevertheless, he had just a 7.22% popup rate last season.
A couple final notes here: first, other than the small-sample Ginn, the first guy on the list who throws a two-seamer is actually the groundball-heavy Yehizon Sanchez (8.33%, good for 17th). Second, we do see a different in average BABIP between the top ten groundball pitchers (.321), outfield fly pitchers (.311), and infield fly pitchers (.301), which generally tracks with what we know about the probability of each of those batted ball types going for hits. Thus, the relative lack of success of the outfield fly-allowers is (overall) not due to additional bad luck with BABIP, but likely more related to home run issues (along with possible lacks of command and/or strikeout stuff, in certain cases).
Line Drive Rate
As much as we’ve seen the outfield fly guys struggle relative to the other two lists so far, the hit type that is most associated with good hitting (and thus, poor pitching) is the line drive. However, line drive rate is also a notoriously noisy statistic, so as we look at the pitchers who have allowed the most liners, we’ll have to be careful how we attribute what’s going on here.
There are a couple of overall trends to point out here. First, as we might expect, the average BABIP of these ten pitchers is quite high: .362, to be exact. Second, in Part 3, I noted that the top six line-drive hitters in the system were all Las Vegas Aviators, a trend dramatic enough to make one wonder if there’s some official-scorer bias toward line drives in their home park or at least their league. But it’s just Holmes and Brown here among the Aviators, and the only other Las Vegas pitcher in the top 20 is Miguel Romero. As I discussed in Part 2, there are some clear location-based reasons why Holmes and Romero have been hit hard.
Because line drives are so correlated with batting average allowed–a statistic we looked at in Part 2–I’ve talked through the challenges several of these guys have faced already. Still, the most bizarre thing about this list is that it begins with possibly the three hardest-throwing pitchers in the Oakland system. Cusick’s lack of a third pitch has to factor into his issues somewhat, though he’s been hit around even the first time through the order; we’ll talk about some interesting other stuff with him a bit later. Charles has been up to 99 mph but has had a couple of stretches this year where he’s really struggled to find the plate, leading to a lot of fastball counts. He doesn’t have any history of these sorts of liner/BABIP issues, though, so perhaps some positive regression is coming. That’s doubly true for Acton, who has dominated this season in spite of this number; though his line-drive rate in his excellent 2021 was up around 23%, there’s not much reason to think it should be any higher than that. Now that he’s in Las Vegas, it will be interesting to track his exit velocities.
The rest of the list is more varied. The similarly-named Grant Holman and Grant Holmes are also hard throwers: Holman’s sinker really doesn’t get lifted, does it? His flyball rate for the season is a microscopic 13.11%. Ty Damron is a 27-year-old finesse starter who got off to a miserable start this year repeating Midland, but seems to have figured out a remedy over the last few weeks, where he’s abandoned the full windup and pitched from a stretch-only motion that hides the ball a lot better. Before the change, his windup/stretch splits were dramatic, so his season performance has slowly started to drift toward equalizing. Berrios could use such a change: his BABIP actually isn’t outrageous at .328, but his groundball rate is very low (34.1%) for a guy who pitches off a two-seam/slider/change mix, and hitters seem to get a similarly long look at the ball against him as they did against Damron from the windup. At 91-92 mph, he doesn’t really have the juice to make up for that if his location isn’t exceptional. A similar issue applies to Whittlesey, who has solid command but has struggled to get his pitches to have consistent life.
Cohen and Brown are guys who have underwhelmed this year after getting off to hugely promising starts in Midland in 2021. Cohen picked up three or four ticks to his fastball in the pandemic off-year, was skipped over High-A, and pitched to a 3.00 ERA/3.29 FIP in Midland, mostly as a starter, before going down with an arm issue in June. This year, his performance has regressed a bit despite his repeating the level as a reliever, but his velocity has regressed a lot, basically back down to where it was in 2019, albeit with some in-season fluctuations. The fastball still gets on hitters quickly, Cohen’s slider and curve remain promising, and there’s undoubtedly some statistical noise at play here, but he’s now a low-90s reliever with below-average command a year after being the most interesting breakout starter in the system. Brown, now 30, is a converted outfielder who thrived as Midland’s closer early in 2021 before scuffling some with his command in Vegas. He has a nice fastball-slider combination from the left side, and there’s actually some evidence that this line-drive rate is not really reflective of the quality of contact he’s allowed, as his BABIP is down at .260 (in the PCL!) and his average exit velocity against is just 87.5 mph, about a mile per hour better than Adrian Martinez and Norge Ruiz, to pick two more successful Aviator hurlers. Still, Brown’s 14% career Triple-A walk rate and struggles to consistently miss bats in the PCL are concerns he needs to solve very soon to get a big league look.
Pull Rate
Now, we’ll move onto the horizontal distribution of hits. I have to say, I don’t think I’ve ever really thought much about this with respect to pitchers in all my time thinking about baseball. Is there any difference in value between allowing lots of pulled balls (Alek Manoah does, and that’s working pretty well for him) and opposite-field ones (Carlos Rodon leads MLB in this category right now)? Or are up the middle hits the worst (Kyle Wright leads this one, hmm)? And what even causes a pitcher to persistently allow a lot of contact to one part of the field? I’d start out by thinking that allowing pull hits is a combination of throwing fairly soft (or easy to time in some other way) and working inside on batters frequently. Here are the Oakland organizational leaders in highest percentage of pulled batted balls allowed:
For one brief moment, you see Skylar Szynski and his 12.66 ERA at the top, and you think aha! pulled batted balls are bad and caused by throwing slow. But the next two names on the list immediately challenge that distinction. Though the rest of the list remains finesse-heavy, it definitely ends up fairly mixed overall in terms of both stuff and 2022 success.
Let’s talk about the harder throwers first. I suspect Briggs’ pull rate is fairly fluky–we’re talking about just 50 batted balls, and he was down at 41.7% last season. He can revert to more of a one-pitch fastball approach at times, especially against righties, which might make him easier to time, but he tends to focus on working the outer part of the plate. Cedano presents the ball pretty early and might be easy to time despite his fastball occasionally climbing into the mid 90s. Criswell is definitely not easy to time, but that seems to manifest mostly in batters’ inabilities to hit his stuff back up the middle, which they do only 15% of the time, lowest in the organization. His changeup has such speed separation from his fastball (in the 13 mph range on average) that batters can certainly get out in front of it–a good reminder of how pulls can sometimes be a good sign for a pitcher.
Like Criswell, the soft-tossers also can get players pulling the ball by design at times. Szynski, Lardner, and Cohn don’t even touch 90 mph, but the best pitch for all three is the changeup. Still, batters don’t have that much trouble getting the bat around on their other pitches, either.
DeMers, Danielak, and Ruiz all have sinking fastballs without overwhelming velocity. It makes some sense that DeMers and Danielak, in particular, might be more prone to allowing pulled contact, because the running action on their fastballs makes them good candidates to bust in on righties.* Ruiz’s cutting fastball would seem to defy that idea though; his zone profile against same-side hitters is quite balanced, though the cutting action does enable him to work inside to lefties. I’d be inclined to write Cohen off as a fluke if he hadn’t been at 50% last year despite throwing harder back then. He doesn’t hesitate to pitch inside, but even at his current velocity, the abrupt nature of his delivery would seem to make him tough to time.
*Man, I wish we had platoon splits (other than the PCL Statcast stuff) on this stuff; would be really interesting to see what that would look like.
Up-The-Middle Rate
We next progress to the pitchers who have allowed the highest proportion of balls back up the middle.
This is the most volatile of the three batted ball location statistics, so I’m just going to skip over the 11-inning samples of Sawyer, Plunkett, and Tomioka. Whether you include them or not, there are some interesting trends here. The most interesting thing to me is that all of these pitchers except Martinez are four-seam fastball guys who allow an above-average number of fly balls. Since that gives their attack more of a vertical dimension, it opens up more possibilities for working the middle area of the plate. If I look at the bottom ten in this statistic, I do see a pretty high concentration of sinker/groundball pitchers, few of which place in even the organizational top 20.
There’s also a large number of fastball-dominant pitchers on the list. Lardner and Martinez are changeup-heavy guys (who both give up a lot of pulled contact too, so batters really don’t go to the opposite field much against them), but basically everyone else uses their fastballs pretty frequently, and even Lardner and Martinez don’t really throw a low proportion of fastballs–they instead keep their breaking stuff on a tight third-pitch-to-same-side-batters-only sort of leash. So perhaps there’s something to the notion that fastball-heavy pitchers get squared up and taken up the middle more frequently than offspeed-oriented guys.
Opposite Field Rate
Next, we turn to the final type of batted ball location, those hit to the opposite field. Here are the pitchers who allow the highest frequency of opposite-field contact in the A’s system.
In Part 3, I found that the top ten batters in the system in opposite-field rate had significantly lower batting averages on balls in play then the top ten in balls hit to the other locations. Here, however, this sample of opposite-field pitching leaders tells an opposite story: they allowed an average BABIP of .342, compared to .332 for the up-the-middle leaders and .317 for the pull leaders. They do have a substantially lower HR/FB%, though, just under 10% to the 14-15% range of the other two groups.
I kind of expected this list to consist largely of the hardest throwers in the system. We do have Cusick, and Oller, Romero, and Cota can all dial it up to 95 or so, but joining them is the finesse lefty brigade of Koenig, Owen, Nambiar, and Logue. All four lefties have a fairly balanced location approach to righthanders but work heavily away from their fellow southpaws. Koenig changes speeds on his fastball pretty significantly, which might have something to do with this effect, and Owen and Nambiar really try to work the edges of the strike zone and avoid the middle, resulting in moderate pull rates but very few balls hit back through the box. Infante is righthanded, but he’s also an east-west command artist; with just 59 batted balls against him and a pull-heavy history, it seems likely he’s bound for some regression here. Granado throws a bit harder and, like Owen and Nambiar, tries to live three inches off the corners (albeit with a sinker), but that hasn’t managed to either yield ground balls (39.8%) or limit hits (.395 BABIP), perhaps because he’s tended to fall behind in counts and gets very fastball-dominant when he does.
Speaking of BABIP woes, I find it really interesting that Cusick’s velocity has prevented hitters from pulling the ball–he has the lowest pull rate in the system by nearly seven percent–and yet he’s allowed liner after liner and hit after hit. By the same token, Logue has allowed a homer every three innings despite keeping a strong percentage of contact against him the other way.
Home Runs Per Fly Ball
All of the individual rates we’ve looked at so far are subject to heavy regression to the mean, but we’ll now move to the final two metrics, those known in particular for involving a bit of skill but a heavy luck component: HR/FB% and BABIP. For each, I’ll look at both the top ten and bottom ten performers in the system. First, the pitchers whose fly balls have resulted in home runs the least:
One of the ways that you can tell that this statistic is more luck driven than even some of the more volatile ones we’ve looked at so far (line drive rate, infield fly rate, up the middle rate): the top eight players are all guys who have all received less than a typical minor league starter’s workload. That’s six relievers, one starter who has split his time between the minors and majors (Oller) and one starter who has had two IL stints and been stretched out very slowly since his most recent activation (Harris). Finally, you get to Cushing and Koenig, who are both finesse types. Cushing allowed very few homers per fly ball in 2021 as well, even though he doesn’t have the sort of arsenal that would make one think he can pull that off; Vegas will be a huge test. Koenig wasn’t especially great at homer prevention in Midland in 2021, but you can at least point to the extreme opposite-field nature of contact against him in Vegas (yet to manifest in MLB, where his velocity has ticked down). The rest of the guys are a hodgepodge and I don’t have much to say about them beyond noting the strong popup tendencies of Oller, Harris, and Nambiar. I guess Vazquez’s velocity is kind of intriguing to see here too, and he allowed only one homer in 38 innings last year, so maybe there’s something to that. I’d like to see him get a look in Lansing’s bullpen soon–he’s 24 and has to get moving.
Here are the guys who have struggled the most to keep the ball in the park on the occasions it goes airborne:
Looks about right: four Aviators, two Ports, only one Lugnut (who places tenth), and only two guys who have had a full starter’s workload (Adrian Martinez and Milburn). I mentioned earlier how Brown’s high line-drive rate was kind of deceiving, as he had allowed a fairly low quality of contact against him overall, but that hasn’t kept him from this dubious distinction; thanks, Vegas! I think we’ve mostly been over the woes some of these pitchers have faced: Logue, Milburn, and especially Szynski, Cohn, and Daniel Martinez don’t have much velocity and really have to locate. All of the relievers on the list have had some sort of command challenges this year.
Batting Average on Balls in Play
Finally, we get to BABIP. Here are the pitchers who have most limited hits on balls in play:
Further reflective of randomness: only tenth-place Criswell has a normal starter’s workload of innings. Notably, Brown is the only Aviator–we’ve dissected his quality of contact already–and there aren’t any full-season Ports (Baram has thrown a few innings there after getting demoted from Lansing). Harris, Briggs, Brown, Kubo, and Criswell show nasty stuff, but there’s Daniel Martinez and his 9.70 ERA–burned as noted above by the home run ball. These pitchers have allowed more popups and fewer liners than most, but both of those are volatile in the first place, particularly in these small samples. If we were to extend things out further to capture more starters, we’d eventually find Parker Dunshee (.273; 12th), Jared Koenig (.276; 13th), and Blake Beers (.293; 16th) before crossing the .300 mark with Chen Zhong-Ao Zhuang (.301, 18th). Koenig’s opposite-field rate might support this sort of mark, and he was at .276 in Midland last year, and Beers and Zhuang have flyball tendencies and quality stuff and command, so I can see how they’d join Criswell high on a list like this. Dunshee, an 88-91 mph finesse guy with an ERA over 7, is more puzzling, but he has limited hitters to an average exit velocity of 86.7 mph and is flyball-oriented, so there’s some underlying coherence there as well. He has a pretty solid history of low BABIPs, too.
And on the more troubling (or unlucky…yeah, probably unlucky) side:
Yeah, just one full-time starter here: Ty Damron, whose issues hiding the ball from the windup I’ve discussed already. Again, there’s not a ton of point in really dissecting the rest of the guys here beyond marking these as trends to watch. Cusick, in particular, will be really interesting to track in several batted ball regards once he’s healthy again. Vazquez, Acton, and Charles have bigtime stuff; we’ve already seen the elevated line drive rates of the latter two, but Vazquez is down at 17.71% on that statistic, so I don’t see any obvious reason to think this is a long-term problem for him. Vazquez and Acton in particular have had strong seasons despite this bad luck, so they could really be dominant forces if it turns around in the second half. If I look further down the list to catch a few starters, the next group of them is David Leal (.369; 13th), Luke Anderson (.368; 14th), Kyle Virbitsky (.355; 15th), and Colin Peluse (.350; 18th). Leal’s rate is driven by a .430 mark since his promotion to Midland; he’s adopted a very changeup-heavy approach that has led to hitters pulling the ball a lot more than they had previously. Anderson and Virbitsky are likely victims of the inconsistent Stockton defense more than anything, though Anderson’s command troubles have put him in a lot of tough, predictable counts as well. Peluse’s fastball-heavy approach hasn’t worked as well at 92-94 mph as it did at 93-95 T96 last year; he’s been tagged for a 26% line-drive rate.
In Parts 5 and 6 later this week, we’ll turn to looking at plate discipline statistics.
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