We’ve reached the final installment of this series! This time, I’m looking through the plate discipline-related metrics of the A’s pitching prospects: the same stats I examined on the hitters in Part 5. See Part 2 and Part 4 for discussions of the pitchers’ basic stats and batted ball stats, respectively. As in all previous installments, I’ll be looking at the top and bottom ten players in the system in each of the relevant statistics. In this case, I’m considering all pitchers in the system with at least 15 innings of full-season pitching who remain prospect-eligible. There are 62 such pitchers.
Stats are current through July 26. Let’s begin.
Walk Rate
We’ll start with the pitchers with the lowest and best walk rates in the system.
There’s a more diverse mix of styles here than you might expect. When we think about pitchers with low walk rates, especially in the minor leagues, we often picture them as guys with pinpoint command but a lack of huge, bat-missing stuff. If you had such stuff, you could entice pitchers to chase out of the zone with a lot of frequency, but a byproduct of such an approach is a non-elite walk rate.
Of course, Leal is perhaps the living embodiment of the crafty lefty, sitting 81-82 mph, and Wiles and Cushing are classic finesse righty starters with ultra-clean deliveries who sit about 90 but move the ball around to all four quadrants of the zone, but they are the only three guys who fit in a conventional finesse bucket. I guess Peluse is trending toward that area as well, with his velocity falling down to around 92 mph after sitting 93-95 last season, so his strike-throwing has become his primary statistical positive. He also has a simple delivery and throws a lot of fastballs (as does Cushing, and Wiles if you count his cutter). Coker and DeMers don’t throw hard either, especially not for righty relievers, but both are low-slot deception guys who throw wiffleballs up there with all kinds of movement, yet both have long histories of pounding the strike zone.
The other four pitchers, though, are relatively power-oriented arms who nevertheless have managed to keep from issuing free passes. Breault is the one reliever of the four, Oakland’s 20th-round selection from last year’s draft. He’s up to 97 mph with two-seam action and pounds the zone with a relatively simple delivery. Holman, Zhuang, and Virbitsky are all guys who top out in the mid-90s, so their pairing of power stuff with this level of strike-throwing has been a very positive development. It’s the first full season for all three. It’s been impressive to see Zhuang quickly adapt to US professional ball after signing out of Taiwan in the offseason. Holman and Virbitsky were both 2021 draftees, and both are huge guys who were solid but inconsistent with their command in college. Holman came out pounding the zone with his hard sinker in Lansing, and Virbitsky has clearly made getting ahead of hitters a priority all season in Stockton, earning a recent promotion to Lansing himself.
Here are the pitchers who have issued walks most frequently in 2022.
This list is more in line with what you’d expect stylistically: it’s a lot of hard-throwing relievers, with Anderson being the lone starter sneaking in in 10th place (He is immediately followed by three more in places 11-13). Wandisson Charles is the hardest thrower in the system–he hit 100 mph the other day in Frisco–but he oscillates between stretches where he throws a solid number of strikes and weeks where he can’t find the plate at all. Highberger touches 99 mph, Kubo 98, Pimentel and Romero 97, Brown 96, and Baram 95, but none of them show enough mechanical consistency. A problem for several in this group–and it applies to the softer-tossing Szynski as well–is struggling to get over the front side, leaving the arm lagging behind the body and causing fastballs to tail up and armside. Pimentel and Martinez–the other soft-tosser here–both have inconsistent strides to the plate that affect their release timing in more sporadic ways. Charles and Kubo are higher-effort guys with very rotational approaches to pitching that lead to outing-to-outing command inconsistencies: when they have a feel for releasing the ball square with the plate, they’re unhittable, and when they don’t, they throw balls 60% of the time. Anderson’s got big stuff too, touching 96 out of the rotation with two good breaking balls, but he’s got the longest arm action of everyone in the system and struggles to corral it. There’s some of the same boom-or-bust command inconsistency with him too: he’s had several starts where he gets things in sync and dominates, but also has had too many 6+ walk outings.
The good news is that all of these pitchers do flash the ability to throw consistent strikes–even Szynski, who’s pitched better in recent weeks. Many of them are separated from much better walk numbers by just a bit of mechanical consistency. As I’ll discuss a bit later, it’s not that uncommon for pitchers to find that consistency with a minor adjustment here or there.
Strikeout Rate
Strikeout rate is often treated as the biggest indicator of a pitcher’s ability to dominate opponents, and understandably so. But excellence in this area can be due to a wider array of factors than walk avoidance. Let’s see who tops the A’s organizational list.
There’s definitely a mix of styles here, with everything from Garrett Acton’s electric high-velocity mix to Jack Owen’s extreme finesse approach to pitching. Small sample (57 batters faced) or not, it’s hard to not marvel at Charles Hall’s dominance. The small righthander has the best curveball in the system, sitting around 80 mph with huge, tight vertical action, and though he doesn’t throw incredibly hard, the cut and carry on his fastball make it play very well at the top of the strike zone. His mid-80s slider has taken a step forward and given him another swing-and-miss offering. Likewise, Hogan Harris’ renaissance season shows up on yet another statistic here, much as it was at or near the top of many metrics in previous installments. Harris has been up to 97 mph with big carry as well, and hitters have struggled to figure out how to time his upper-70s change and low-70s curve.
You might notice that a common trait between Hall and Harris is their fastballs have a lot of carry, which is often associated with bat-missing ability. Acton (96-98 mph) and especially Cohen (91-94) share that trait as well, but there’s actually quite a diverse mix of fastball approaches on the list, even as most of the non-Acton/Owen guys fall into a fairly similar velocity area. Virbitsky has a fairly straight four-seamer with some carry, but it doesn’t play as well in the zone because his height and high release point give the pitch more of a downward angle. Still, he reliably gets it in for early-count strikes–recall his appearance on the walk rate leaders–and then has three useful offspeed offerings that can put batters away. Walkinshaw, Ginn, and Martinez all throw two-seamers, though even then, they’re fairly different pitches. Walkinshaw seems to have some Josh Hader-esque seam-shifted wake going on with his, enabling it to play well up in the zone while running in on righthanded batters. His slider and especially his changeup have also proved very tough to hit. Martinez has more of an east-west approach with his running fastball which sets up his real bat-missing offerings, especially his plus changeup. Walkinshaw and Martinez are also two of the system’s best pitch tunnelers. Ginn’s fastball is more of a true sinker: his strikeout rate is pretty small-sample and he doesn’t have as much of a bat-missing track record. Finally, Dheygler Gimenez has been a huge surprise in Stockton with his ability to strike batters out, a talent he rarely exhibited at the complexes. He’s a lower-slot righty who sits 92-94 with some running action, kind of similar to Martinez except the fastball appears to be a four-seamer. Because he’s a lower-slot guy with a high spin rate (apparently ~2400 RPM), the fastball enters the zone at more of an upward angle and has managed to sneak over bats. He’s also got a big curve that freezes Low-A hitters for lots of called strikes and a developing changeup that has also some generated some empty swings.
As for Owen, he sits just 86-88 mph with a very straight four-seam fastball and has two fairly nondescript offspeed pitches in his breaking ball and changeup, but he has elite command and spots the fastball on the corners at will. No pitcher in the system takes better advantage of wide-zone minor league umpires than Owen, who also seems to have added the ability to manipulate his breaking ball this season, with it coming in as an 11-5 curve at times and as a long sweeper at others with no meaningful difference in velocity. He’s hung in after being moved from the Stockton bullpen to the Lansing rotation, still generating a 22% K% in the latter assignment.
Who’s on the wrong side of the system’s strikeout leaderboard?
Yeah, it’s been a rough year for Romero, Szynski, and Martinez, who find themselves on the downside of both the walk and strikeout lists. Romero throws fairly hard, but his fastball’s sinking shape doesn’t elude many bats, and his inability to get ahead of hitters consistently has hamstrung his hard slider’s effectiveness as well. Szynski is still regaining his feel to pitch after missing 2017-2020 due to two elbow surgeries and the pandemic off-year. His upper-80s velocity doesn’t give him much margin for error, so he’s had a lot of the same sort of troubles when he doesn’t get strike one. Martinez has a lot of the same trouble, with three solid offspeed pitches (cutter, curve, and change) but a very straight ~90 mph fastball that he hasn’t located consistently; however, just yesterday, I noticed a promising mechanical change from him, where he was getting downhill to the plate much more effectively, and it resulted in maybe his best inning all season.
We usually think of relievers as being more likely to rack up strikeouts than starters, since hitters don’t generally see them multiple times in a game and they get to throw at something closer to peak efficiency, yet there are only two starters on here. Both are strike-throwers: we saw Peluse on the walk leader list, and Milburn has a career walk rate of just 4.57%, though it’s a career worst (8.23%) this year. We’ll see Peluse more later, but his fastball-dominant approach to pitching just isn’t as imposing when he’s throwing 92-93 mph as it was when he sat around 94 last season. Milburn has added a cutter recently that seems to be helping diversify his vanilla pitch mix a bit, but he’s never garnered big strikeout totals in his several years in Midland, sitting 89-91 mph, working heavily off his average slider, and pounding the corners.
The remaining relievers also have a mix of pitching styles. DeMers and Cohn are both two-seam guys who don’t throw very hard but are around the strike zone. After huge struggles in Midland earlier this season, Whittlesey’s velocity has ticked back up to last season’s 91-94 range since his demotion to Lansing, but though he’s got solid command, none of his pitches move enough to really emerge as swing-and-miss options on a consistent basis. Tomioka’s got four solid pitches, but his feel for finishing hitters off has lagged behind his raw ability to command the baseball, perhaps a product of his lack of pro experience (he barely pitched in college in Japan and then pitched semi-professionally through through age 23 before being signed by the A’s after an open tryout). Grant Holmes has the best stuff on this list, sitting 93-96 and snapping off a good hard curve in the mid 80s. The curve is able to garner swings and misses, and Holmes has easily the highest swinging strike rate of these ten pitchers. He had a 21.1% strikeout rate in Las Vegas last year, so maybe there’s some bad luck in his statline.
As we did with the batters in Part 5, having looked at walk and strikeout rates first, we’ll now turn to K/BB ratio and K%+BB% to get a sense of who the most- and least-dominant commanders of the strike zone have been and which pitchers end up being most and least generative of balls in play.
Strikeout to Walk Ratio
We start with the system’s most dominant K/BB ratios.
I’ve talked a lot before about how the starting pitching depth runs ahead of the relief depth in the system, and you can really see that here, with seven of the eight top K/BB pitchers being starters despite it being the harder role to dominate in. But it’s a reliever who leads the list, as Coker has put together a dominant season after returning from a three-year bout with labrum woes. He’s 26 and still in A-ball, and he’s not anyone’s idea of a power arm, but pounding the zone has always been a strength of the sidewinder’s, and it’s impressive to see his feel for pitching return so immediately. The other relievers who show up here–Hall and Acton–are doing so mostly on the back of their strikeout dominance, though it’s impressive that the max-effort Acton has cut his walk rate to just 5% since his midseason promotion to Las Vegas.
One trend that shows up in this list is how many of these dominant pitchers are new to the system. Holman, Virbitsky, and Beers were 2021 draftees, Owen was a 2021 NDFA, and Zhuang was signed as an international free agent in November. None are out of A-ball yet, and it’s easier to dominate the zone there, but these guys represent a promising influx of unheralded pitching talent–none were drafted in the top 5 rounds, and Zhuang wasn’t signed with much fanfare–into the system. Heck, Wiles is new too, though he’s in his eleventh year in pro ball, so his signing in minor league free agency is definitely a different sort of acquisition. He had a K/BB of better than 4 with Texas’ AAA affiliate last season, so this sort of effectiveness–particularly at walk avoidance–isn’t new to him.
Beers is the only pitcher to appear on this list without ranking in the organizational top ten in walk rate (16th) or strikeout rate (12th). The 24-year-old righty has also seen his K/BB drop from 7.29 in Stockton to just 2.3 after his promotion to Lansing. Still, given that Beers and his wicked slider only were only able to amass a 58/40 K/BB in four seasons at the University of Michigan, it’s hard to deny his significant progress since the A’s made him their 19th-round selection last season.
There’s not much to say about the other side of the K/BB ratio list, seeing as it’s essentially just the pitchers with the highest walk rates minus Luke Anderson plus Shohei Tomioka.
In that sense, it reflects how walk struggles can lead to strikeout rate struggles. Guys like Charles, Kubo, and Brown have bigtime strikeout stuff out of the bullpen, but they haven’t gotten ahead of hitters consistently enough to leverage it.
Walk + Strikeout Rate
Which A’s system pitchers allow balls to be put in play with the least frequency?
There are Hall and Harris again. Hall has, incredibly, not allowed a single hit in Midland since he was promoted well over a month ago, and batters are still slugging just .175 off Harris: it wasn’t until his eleventh start that the lefty allowed an extra-base hit. Both have somewhat elevated walk rates, a tradeoff that results partly from batters’ huge struggles hitting them at all. We’ve got a mix of moderate-strikeout guys with walk issues (Pimentel, Kubo, Highberger, Anderson) and the other dominant strikeout pitchers. Here we do see a bigger presence of relievers.
Most of the names on the other side of the list won’t be surprising either, given the previous entries.
One thing that bears mention here is how much you see velocity show up as a hidden factor on these lists. Everyone except Hall (94) on the first list has touched at least 96 mph, whereas here, the only two guys who get up to 96 are Holmes and Sanchez. Then you’ve got Peluse and Whittlesey, who both scrape 94 on occasion, and everyone else tops at 92 or below. At the same time, of course, everyone except Holmes and Sanchez is a proven strike-thrower. Sanchez, like Holmes, has a swinging strike rate that runs ahead of his modest strikeout ability, so we may see his bat-missing ability tick up in time, though his fastball’s sinking shape prevents it from being much of a K generator on its own.
Pitches Per Plate Appearance
Now, we leave the domain of walks and strikeouts and turn our attention to more granular stuff. We’ll start with pitches per plate appearance. With hitters, we tend to think that seeing more pitches is better, all else equal, but with pitchers, is the inverse true? We hear about pitch efficiency a lot, and it’s obviously valuable to get outs quickly, but strikeouts are the surest outs a pitcher can get, and they often take more pitches to achieve, so…well, let’s see which pitchers throw the most pitches per opponent in the A’s system.
Hmm. So, for what it’s worth, among the sample of 62 pitchers here, P/PA had a far stronger correlation with walk rate (r-squared = .31) than with strikeout rate (r-squared = .14). That doesn’t mean that working deep into counts prevents a pitcher from being successful, because look who’s at the very top of this list. There are Acton and Hall again, too, and Cohen, Judkins, and Kubo have put together solid seasons of their own. Mixed in with them are the more erratic campaigns of Pimentel, Charles, Cedano, and Martinez. Cedano is a weird name to see here, since his K+BB% is just under 29%, easily the lowest of this group.
It’s worth emphasizing that the pitchers on this list are almost all hard-throwing guys with somewhat high-fastball-oriented approaches. None of these guys throw sinkers, and most of them have bat-missing characteristics to their fastballs. Since the fastball is the pitch that tends to be put in play the most, the fact that everyone on here except perhaps Cedano and Martinez can generate empty swings with their fastballs regularly does a lot to extend plate appearances in situations where other pitchers would see a higher likelihood of in-play contact. There’s also a preponderance of quality breaking (Hall, Acton, Cohen, Charles) and offspeed (Harris, Acton, Martinez) stuff here, incentivizing these pitchers to try to get hitters to expand the zone.
So, alright, these guys aren’t always all that efficient, but several of them have been effective. How about those whose battles with batters end the quickest?
Yeah, this certainly isn’t a death sentence either. Coker has been great, Holman has been very effective, and Zhuang and Leal have had solid seasons. Cushing got hit around a ton in Vegas–few don’t–but he’s been very efficient and effective in Midland. Myers has had a workable season in Stockton, too.
But though the effectiveness of this group isn’t all that dissimilar from their less-efficient counterparts, the stuff profiles of these pitchers sure is. All of these guys (except the wacky Leal, who throws a four-seamer with extreme run) throw sinkers, and there are only three guys who could be classified in the “power arm” category: Holman, Vazquez, and Zhuang (Maybe Berrios now too after his recent move to the bullpen, but that is still a very small portion of his overall season performance). These guys mostly don’t boast bigtime offspeed stuff, either: the only real plus non-fastball is Zhuang’s terrific changeup (honorable mention to Cohn’s and Leal’s changeups and Coker’s, Berrios’, and Cushing’s sliders). So this is a fairly fastball-heavy group of guys whose fastballs lack bat-missing shape, but who do pound the zone.
Zhuang is really the one guy who doesn’t seem to fit in any of these boxes, since he’s a carrying four-seam guy up to 96 mph (he also has a sinker, but it doesn’t get as much usage) with the plus change, and he’s achieved a solid strikeout rate. It speaks to his pitch efficiency that he’s dispatched hitters so quickly and effectively. It’s also interesting that Vazquez shows up on here despite a walk rate north of 11% and one of the harder fastballs in the system, but he gets very fastball-heavy at times and racks up grounders when he’s throwing strikes, which seems to counteract the intermittent wildness as far as this statistic is concerned.
Now we’ll move into the final portion of plate discipline-related statistics: those operating on a pitch-by-pitch level. We’ll start with strike rate, then move on to swinging strike rate, before breaking the latter statistic down into its component parts: swing rate and contact rate.
Strike Rate
Well, strikes are good for pitchers. Here are the A’s farmhands who get them most frequently:
Of course Leal leads the list. He hasn’t slowed down in this regard since his promotion to Midland, either. We see a lot of the familiar walk-avoiding names pop up here again, with Coker, Holman, and Zhuang getting prominent spots and Virbitsky sneaking onto the back end. Walkinshaw’s excellence manifests here as well.
Throwing a lot of strikes isn’t a guarantor of dominance, though. Leal’s been hit around some since getting to Midland, Peluse has been hit around all season, and Estes, Breault, and Myers are having somewhat middling campaigns. Estes’ statistics are interesting: in my charting–which includes about ¾ of his outings–his mid-90s running fastball has gone for a strike over 70% of the time and missed bats at an elite rate, but his slider and changeup have lagged behind not only in strike rate (usual) but also swinging strike rate (unusual). My charting on Breault is less complete since Stockton’s home games don’t have video feeds, but it tells a similar story. The fastball reliance of both pitchers could explain why their batter-to-batter results trail behind their pitch-to-pitch ones. Myers works very quickly and pounds the zone with a diverse mix of pitches, headlined by a solid slider/change combo, but his 89-92 mph fastball is very hittable.
The flipside of the list is less ambiguous though.
These are all relievers–it’s not until thirteenth-place Luke Anderson that we get to a starter–and we’ve got to cross 58% before we get to someone with an ERA under 5.00. It’s worth noting that some of these guys are turning the corner a little bit–I mentioned Martinez’s recent adjustment earlier, Baram is up at 63.4% since his demotion from Lansing to Stockton, and Granado is at 59.9% since he moved his arm slot up from near-sidearm to its more natural low-¾ slot around the beginning of July. Walks have understandably been an issue for everyone on this list except for (to some extent) Cohen.
Swinging Strike Rate
Swinging strike rate is right up there with strikeout rate and K/BB ratio in terms of oft-cited shorthands of pitching dominance. And, yeah, none of these guys are having bad seasons:
It’s worth noting that the majority of these seasons are taking place in the low minors, where it’s a lot easier to rack up strikeouts without having huge, dominating stuff, but that does make the seasons of Ginn, Acton, and especially Hall all the more impressive. Among the lower-minors guys, Coker’s excellence shows up here again, as do Walkinshaw’s, Holman’s and Zhuang’s. Breault’s ability to appear on this list despite throwing his fastball so much is a testament to the quality of that pitch, even though he still has work to do to round out his game. Conversely, Mac Lardner’s ability to generate swinging strikes at this rate is downright incredible given his velocity. He sits 84-85 mph, but he throws straight over the top with good carry on the fastball and turns over a diving changeup that hitters have a very hard time identifying.
How cool is Dheygler Gimenez coming out of nowhere? He struck out just five of the 36 batters he faced in the ACL to start the season (not included in this sample), but has been a bat-missing dynamo ever since heading to Stockton. Since he’s got a quality three-pitch arsenal as described earlier, he’s quickly become a sleeper arm to watch in the system, as have several of the other names. Again, the preponderance of A-ball guys on here is somewhat of a function of the comparative ease of pitching at those levels, but it’s also reflective of the infusion of new arm talent into the system.
Here are the pitchers who have missed bats the least frequently.
With some of the previous stats like strike rate, the lessons the top 10 and bottom 10 lists gave seemed to be “being bad at this is deadly, but being good at it doesn’t guarantee success.” Here is seems the reverse is true: everyone on the top 10 is pitching competently or better, but a few of these guys, notably Wiles and Plunkett, are pitching fairly well too. Plunkett, a converted catcher who the Dodgers released earlier this year, has seemed to find a new strike-throwing gear in Midland. He’s been up to 95 mph and tosses in a kitchen-sink array of four different offspeed offerings, but though he’s put up a 20.2% strikeout rate, those pitches apparently aren’t causing many whiffs. Wiles is on a recent run of impeccable command–he has just three walks in his last 43 innings–and he’s a throw-every-pitch-in-the-book guy as well.
This is definitely not a hard-throwing group of guys overall. In addition to Plunkett, there’s Romero again–we’ve been over his struggles–and Tomioka and Granado have topped out at 94, but that’s about it. Tomioka is starting to get into a groove after missing the first two months of the season and looking rusty upon his return, so hopefully he’ll move off this list by season’s end. Granado, Infante, and DeMers work off two-seam east-west approaches to pitching that rely heavily on their command, and none of their offspeed pitches are real bat-missers. It’s disappointing to see Logue on this list after he was at 12.1% with Toronto’s AAA affiliate just last season, but his velocity is down a tick from what was reported at the time of his acquisition, and his changeup, supposedly his best pitch upon his acquisition, has only mustered a 7.9% whiff rate while being used the least used of his four offerings.
Swing Rate
Swinging strike rate is one thing, but we can learn more about how batters react to the arsenals of different pitchers by seeing who elicits the most and fewest swings, and how frequently those swings make contact.
With hitters, we tend to be skeptical of hitters who swing a lot unless they have exceptional hitting ability, since all else equal, not swinging is usually the more valuable decision. I don’t think we consider this in the context of pitching as frequently, and perhaps for good reason–we’re dealing with a fairly small range here (just about every pitcher who can throw strikes is going to be between 35% and 60% or so), and there are a whole bunch of factors that can drive that number up or down. Is eliciting more swings indicative of better pitching, or just that the hurler in question throws more hittable pitches? Let’s take a look.
As with the batter swing data, huge thanks to Down on the Farm for providing me with these swing numbers.
Yeah, so…being on this list definitely doesn’t mean you’re pitching poorly. As we’ve seen, Coker, Holman, and Walkinshaw have been excellent, and several of the other guys are at least acquitting themselves okay. But there are some guys who have struggled, too–Peluse, Berrios, and Holmes stand out in this regard.
What jumps out to me, especially in looking at the very top of the list, is fastball dominance. Estes, Peluse, and Breault all throw a lot of fastballs and have fairly zone-oriented approaches, so hitters feel comfortable taking a lot of swings against them. This is probably a big reason why Estes’ and Breault’s overall season performances have been middling in spite of pretty impressive swinging strike rates and good control numbers–hitters take a lot of cuts expecting fastball, and even though they still have some trouble, that guess is often right and can lead to fairly significant power on contact. Holman is also very fastball-dominant, but because his is a hard sinker, powerful contact against him is mostly just going to be singles back through the box.
Moving down the list, we start to see a preponderance of pitchers who aren’t quite as reliant on the heater, but still throw at least an average number of fastballs and lack much velocity. Berrios sat 91-92 as a starter: he’s picked up more velocity out of the bullpen now, but again, that’s just like 1/15 of his season innings. Coker tops out around 90, Myers isn’t imposing, and we all know about Leal’s velocity. Walkinshaw and Holmes are the only two guys on here who are neither super fastball-reliant nor soft-tossers. Holmes leaves a lot of pitches middle-middle, though, as discussed in earlier installments of this series. Walkinshaw is around the zone with all three of his pitches and has done a great job getting ahead of hitters. In his case, getting hitters to swing this frequently looks like an indicator of his pitching savvy: he’s toying with the Midwest League as a 26-year-old.
How about the pitchers who elicit the fewest swings?
Hmm…this looks a lot like the laggards in the walk and strike percentages, doesn’t it? Except…there’s Dheygler Gimenez in there somehow, and J.T. Ginn on the back end, too. Ginn is particularly mystifying since he’s a fairly fastball-dominant guy with the sinker and tends to throw a lot of strikes, so maybe that’s a small-sample thing? Gimenez could have some small sample stuff too, but he really seems to have a knack for getting batters to give up on his curveball. It’s worth noting that Hogan Harris and his system-high 4.25 P/PA are in twelfth place on this list, for another example of success despite prompting patience.
Contact Rate
Finally, let’s see which pitchers in the system have proven hardest to hit when batters do decide to swing.
Oh man, Charles Hall. For the record, no MLB pitcher with more than 10 innings this season is particularly close to this number–Edwin Diaz is lowest, at 53.3%. And then whoa, seriously, what a revelation Gimenez has been: batters have been judicious with their swings against him, yet those swings come up empty with incredible frequency. Ginn’s missed way more bats than expected, and now that he’s on the comeback trail from his injury woes, it’ll be fascinating to see how he progresses. And hey, look, Ryan Cusick shows up on a positive leaderboard! This is a wild one to see him on, too, since earlier in the series we saw how much damage batters were doing on contact against him. It’s nice to see Pimentel excelling in this area as well, considering his struggles in the command department. Otherwise, we’ve got the usual suspects like Harris and Acton, along with another opportunity to marvel at how good Lardner’s changeup is. Seriously, it’s incredibly impressive to post this kind of number as a High-A starter sitting 84 and without even an average breaking ball.
Let’s see who’s on the other side.
Recall how frequently batters swing against Peluse, then see this, and it’s easy to understand why his performance has taken such a step backward this year. He just really couldn’t afford to have his velocity back up on him. Here’s hoping it ticks back up at some point, perhaps with a move to the bullpen. Tomioka and Plunkett are the other four-seam quasi-power guys on here; batters swing at their stuff a lot less frequently, but seemingly judiciously so. Everyone else on here falls into more of the soft-tossing area, most of them being sinker guys. Note again that Wiles has made this work, by virtue of extreme strike-throwing, though this number is certainly a note of caution for those who think that he’d be able to transition that performance to the big league level. The same goes for Leal, who I think will likely be better served with a move to the bullpen.
Thanks for reading the series! Perhaps I'll do some sort of analogous check-in in the offseason.
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