If you’ve read Moneyball, you might recall that one of the first glimpses the book gives of the early-2000’s Athletics’ revolutionary approach to the evaluation of amateur players is the story of one David Beck. Beck, notes Michael Lewis, was discovered by then-assistant general manager Paul DePodesta because he was teammates with a potential first-rounder,* yet actually had better statistics than his more-heralded teammate.** Yet he was essentially completely unnoticed by the scouting community, apparently because the big lefty was a “soft-tosser.”
*Lewis doesn’t name the player, but we can safely assume it’s Chris Smith.
**A lot of stuff in the book has come under scrutiny over the years, and rightly so (the treatment of Beck is particularly problematic, as I’ll get to later), but I looked it up, and this is actually true. Beck’s 2001 senior season still stands in the Cumberland University record books as the school record in batting average against (.167) and strikeouts (136). Beck also edged out Smith in ERA, 2.11 to 2.13.
In a story that may or may not involve some dramatic exaggeration, the scouting department eventually signs Beck (out of the Frontier League, which interestingly isn’t mentioned) without even seeing him, in an effort to appease DePodesta, only to find out he has a bizarre pitching motion where his hand flops all over the place.* Despite only sitting around 84 mph, Beck immediately went out and shut opponents down in the Arizona League, striking out 32 batters and allowing just two runs in 18 innings, being named a postseason All-Star. His immediate success is painted as emblematic of Oakland’s creativity in finding non-traditional performers.
*I’ve never really been comfortable with Lewis’ description of Beck’s delivery, which is very over-the-top in how bizarre he claims it is. I’m not sure he ever was working off a visual account anyway, just stories that scouts or front office people told him, and it’s easy for such things to get exaggerated to the point of being apocryphal. Regardless, it probably is safe to say that Beck’s delivery was weird and had some deception, and that was likely a key part of how he was so successful in college despite throwing pretty slow.
Eighteen years after signing David Beck, the A’s made a nearly-as-unheralded acquisition of a big lefty named David, spending their 38th-round selection in the draft–the last time said round would even exist–on David Leal from Louisiana Tech. Like Beck, Leal was sent to the Rookie-level A’s in the Arizona League as a reliever and proceeded to put up a completely dominant statline. In 37⅔ innings, he struck out 50 batters (36.2%), walked just three (2.2%), and held opponents to just six earned runs (1.43 ERA) and no homers.
Also like Beck, David Leal throws about 84 mph. And he doesn’t even have a trick delivery; there are no weird floppy wrists, nor is there the wacky submarine slot of another Moneyball soft-tossing fixture, Chad Bradford. Yet, despite being maybe the most extreme soft-tosser currently out there, Leal has put up gaudy statistics his entire professional career. How does he do it, and can it possibly keep working?
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First, I want to give some context for just how unique of a pitcher Leal is. I’ve watched most of the games he’s pitched in full-season ball, including several where the broadcast was hooked into an accurate radar gun, and 84 mph might actually be generous–there are a lot of games where he sits in the 82-84 mph range. He did have one last year where he was throwing a bit harder, sitting 83-86 and touching 89 (!!!) once, but he’s clearly below 85 mph on average.
If you exclude sidearmers and submariners, that just isn’t a velocity band you really see in professional baseball much at all. In the nearly 200 full-season games I attended in the minor leagues from 2012 to 2015, I can recall only one pitcher who sat below 85, former White Sox farmhand Jeff McKenzie, who was 82-84 touching 85 in a 2014 outing I saw. There were a few more in Rookie ball, like former Royals lefties Christian Flecha and Ian Tompkins and Blue Jays lefty Miguel Burgos, and the full-season list admittedly does grow a bit when you add in sidearmers like Trent Blank and Joe Burns, but still: out of the hundreds of pitchers I saw, the only full-season “conventional” pitcher throwing under 85 was McKenzie.
Velocity, at least in MLB itself,* has risen about 1 mph since my days of in-person looks, making Leal even more of a unicorn than that comparison would suggest. Further, McKenzie (like the other pitchers mentioned in the above paragraph) was not a very successful professional pitcher; he lasted just half a year in full-season ball.
*I’d strongly suspect a similar gain has been made in the minors.
But Leal has bucked that trend of mediocrity, although he’s obviously never been treated like an organizational priority. Despite his Rookie ball dominance in 2019, he was only assigned to Low-A Stockton after minor league play resumed in 2021, already 24 years old. He posted a 29/1 K/BB in 26 ⅔ innings there as a tandem starter and was then given a midseason promotion to High-A Lansing, where he spent the rest of the year–interrupted by injury–striking out 49 and walking just seven batters in 42 ⅔ innings. Two of those walks were intentional. Still, he’s started 2022 back in Lansing, where he again has dominated the strike zone (11/1 K/BB). All told, that’s a 141/11 K/UIBB ratio in 120 ⅔ professional innings.
By any reasonable measure, Leal’s pro career is already a success. You can’t expect more from a 38th-round pick, let alone one who throws so slow, than being a very effective High-A pitcher. I’m not sure what led to the A’s drafting Leal in the first place, but they probably just wanted somebody who could eat up relief innings at the Rookie level by pounding the zone. Everything that’s come after that has been gravy.
After all, that’s where Leal’s path diverged from that of David Beck. What Michael Lewis neglected to mention in Moneyball was that at the time of his 2001 Rookie ball dominance, Beck was already 23 ½ years old. The following year, Beck pitched well in short-season Vancouver at age 24, but unlike Leal, he floundered in a brief full-season stint, walking seven batters and allowing ten earned runs in 6 ⅔ innings. That was it for his pro career.* Lewis’ lionization of Beck as some sort of vanguard of mysteriously-effective soft-tossers stands as one of Moneyball’s most retrospectively presumptuous passages.**
*In fairness, injuries reportedly played a part.
**I get that this isn’t really the point of Lewis’ Beck anecdote–it’s a convenient and illustrative entree into the world of the analytics revolution. Still, it really doesn’t age well, and in retrospect probably could’ve been a little less prematurely congratulatory (easy to say in hindsight, of course). That said, Beck fulfilled exactly the expectations I outlined of Leal in the previous paragraph. Just being an effective short-season guy is a fairly positive outcome for a NDFA.
So how does Leal succeed where all of these other pitchers have failed? The fact that he throws a lot of strikes is obvious, and I’ll double back to that later, but let’s think through the more confusing part of his statistical output first: the strikeouts. Sure, it’s A-ball, but how does a guy whose fastball wouldn’t get pulled over for speeding on a Utah highway miss so many bats?
Let’s start with Leal’s delivery. A lot of control artists, like Leal’s 2021 Lansing teammate and current Stockton Port Jack Owen, have very simple, clean deliveries that are easy to repeat. Leal doesn’t quite fit that mold. He utilizes a fairly high legkick, which combines with a slight hip turn to hide the ball well. He quickly gets out of the legkick into a more conventional position as his stride begins, though he opens up his hips later than most, with his stride direction taking him very slightly toward first base. The arm action itself is fairly conventional, with a slight stab in the back being the only real notable feature. Leal gets solid extension to the plate because of his size, though his stride isn’t especially long, and he uses a low three-quarters arm slot. Out of the stretch, he simplifies significantly, eliminating the high legkick and some of the extra hip rotation. Overall, it’s fair to say his motion is more deceptive than most–60-grade deception, you could call it, if we were to grade such things.*
*This is using the “60 is a standard deviation above average” idea, which would put Leal somewhere between the 70th and 90th percentile in deceptiveness. Calling Leal something like the eighth-most deceptive guy among Oakland’s 60ish pitchers currently at full-season affiliates sounds about right to me. Garrett Acton would be at least a 70.
So Leal’s mechanics are an asset, especially since he can obviously repeat them well enough to avoid walks to such a fantastic extent. Still, they hardly serve to explain how he’s able to generate so many strikeouts, especially given that he’s obviously putting the ball around the strike zone to at least some extent, right? Maybe the delivery makes the fastball play up to look like it’s 86 or 87 mph, but it can only be so much more than that. So let’s look at his arsenal of pitches.
Now, you might have picked up on my note that Leal uses a low three-quarters arm slot and thought Ahh! So maybe part of this is that he’s got some sort of bigtime sinker. Nope. Despite the low slot, Leal isn’t a sinker guy, and he’s not a groundball pitcher at all (career 36.3% groundball rate, which drops to 33.9% if you exclude Rookie ball). The low slot also rules out Josh Collmenter-style vertical wizardry, so okay, the fastball is just bad, right? It must be that he’s got some sort of offspeed thing(s) that he just throws constantly, like Ryne Harper with his curve, or Cesar Valdez with his changeup, or Ryan Yarbrough with his cutter. Those guys all sit like 85-87, and they made it to MLB, so that’s the path.
Uhh…David Leal has thrown 143 pitches this season. By my tracking, 87 (61%) have been fastballs.
I’ll get back to how the heck that can work in a minute, but I’ve talked about the fastball a lot–let’s move to the secondary stuff. Despite the lack of velocity, Leal actually made the Honorable Mention section of the FanGraphs A’s prospect list* over the offseason. To quote the blurb: “Go check out Leal’s numbers. He’s doing that while sitting 84! He has one hell of a changeup.”
*Irrespective of my nitpicking below, the list is extremely well-researched, very thoughtful, and a must-read. As are all FG prospect lists.
The changeup, eh? So, this is sort of right and sort of wrong. To be sure, if you were looking for one element of Leal’s stuff that you could actually praise, it would absolutely be his changeup. The pitch arrives in the mid-70s with good sink and fade (exaggerated a bit because it’s so slow; you don’t get to see many 74 mph changeups in professional baseball), and he sells it with good arm speed. I’d put a 50 grade on it, though I’ll admit that there’s a bit of an error bar on that because it’s hard to know how to treat such a slow changeup. It’s a solid pitch, but it’s not like he’s Alex Claudio out there.*
*Or is he? Hold on to that thought!
In this case, though, I’m actually less interested in my own evaluation of the pitch than Leal’s, because despite the fact that the changeup is his only pitch that even cracks a 40 on the scouting scale,* he doesn’t throw it all that much. He’s thrown 26 (18%) by my count so far this season, and that’s up from where he was last year, where he would often throw only two or three per outing and use it merely as a little wrinkle on his final time through the order. I’d guess it was more in the 10-12% range at that point; we’ll see if its uptick in usage in 2022 holds over a larger sample.
*From a “raw stuff” standpoint. Obviously, his stuff is playing up.
His other pitch, or pitches, is a very slow sweeping breaking ball that I’ve seen come in anywhere from 65 to 73 mph, and often on the slower end of that range. Now, I’ve typically treated this as just one pitch, but Lansing’s great play-by-play man Jesse Goldberg-Strassler mentioned on a broadcast in mid-2021 that Leal was “working on a slider.” That comment aside, I never really saw any distinction in the shape or sharpness of the pitch all of 2021, but I did note for the first time a clear slider in Leal’s start on April 19th (and it was a good one actually, a two-strike front-door freezer to Corey Rosier). So, maybe he’s starting to get some differentiation. Regardless, for now (especially given that this year is a very small sample), let’s think of the breaking stuff as one pitch, a very slow three-quarters sweeper that makes up the other 21% of Leal’s offerings this year (and, just guessing from memory, 25-30% last season). Every now and again, he’ll throw one in that has good shape, but the thing is so slow, and it doesn’t have some sort of otherworldly amount of movement that would allow it to be any sort of swing-and-miss offering. That said, I’m sure there is a disorienting aspect to the pitch being so unlike most of what even A-ball hitters typically go up against, and it does give Leal more velocity separation to play with than most guys with mid-80s heat.
So the changeup is solid, but the fastball and breaking ball make up over 80% of Leal’s pitch selection, and they exist in a velocity band that hasn’t been seen by MLB in a decade. No non-sidearmer has thrown a fastball averaging below 85 mph and a curve averaging below 70 mph for a season since Jamie Moyer and Livan Hernandez in 2012. Even then, those guys’ curves were fourth pitches; there hasn’t really been an MLB analog to Leal’s stuff since R.J. Swindle in 2009,* a pitcher who also put up ridiculous minor league numbers despite an absurd lack of velocity.
*Swindle’s stuff is still somewhat dissimilar from Leal’s–nobody since Swindle has had the audacity to regularly throw a 54 mph curve, and he relied on a 72-mph slider a lot. A weighted average of the two breakers would actually be in the upper 60s like Leal, though, the fastball shape is kind of similar, and the arm slot’s not far off.
But let’s go back to the fastball, because there’s obviously something about it that’s working. We’ve established that it’s very slow and doesn’t have the sink typical of pitchers with a low arm slot, but it does have two interesting attributes. The first is that because he’s throwing a fastball from a low arm slot without much sink, he can place the pitch around the letters and benefit from upward plane. Second, the pitch gets strong armside run, allowing Leal to get Greg Maddux-esque comeback strikes to his glove side, run the ball off of barrels to his arm side, and dance across the plate at an unusual horizontal angle. I know it’s a bizarre descriptor to use about an 83-mph four-seam fastball, but between Leal’s imposing physicality and the forceful armside sweep* of the pitch, it feels weirdly violent as it arrives into the catcher’s mitt.
*”Sweep” about a fastball’s armside action: also a weird word choice! Yet, again, it’s the one that strikes me as most appropriate.
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So that’s what David Leal does on the mound (see this for a brief instance of what it actually looks like). From a stuff perspective, his strengths are deception, the run and approach angle of his fastball, the feel for and movement of his changeup, and his ability to change speeds. None of those quite feel compelling enough to overlook his lack of velocity and declare him a real prospect. But the performance he’s been able to muster is so hard to ignore, and it’s so out of step with the lefty’s raw stuff that it kind of demands real consideration. Our options seem to be to reflexively dismiss Leal because no MLB players since Swindle (who himself was limited to a couple of short, unsuccessful MLB stints*) have looked like him, or to anoint him as a sort of generational finesse unicorn. Leal just seems to present extremes, and our choices thus seem to be which extreme to grab onto as salient. But both of these options seem to me to be overly simplistic conclusions without thinking through things more robustly.
*If we are absolutely insistent on finding a sustained MLB career at something like this skillset, I suspect (late-career, anyway) Chris Hammond is probably our man, for what it’s worth. So we have to go back 15+ years.
I should pause here to note that, as this piece stretches into single-spaced page six of Google Docs, that as fascinating as Leal is, you can probably guess where my analysis of him is going. The truth is always somewhere in between, and if you squint hard enough, then…or whatever it is. If Leal ever pitches for the A’s or any other MLB team, it’ll almost certainly be as a change-of-pace lefty out of the bullpen–maybe he’ll sit 85-87 there!–a role in which it would be a huge upset to see him ever have a 1+ WAR season. I’m not writing about him at such length simply to repetitively fawn over his uniqueness, nor to try to sneak him into some sort of Top 20 A’s Prospects discussion. I’d stop about here if either of those were the goal. But what I want to do is try to get beyond the options presented in the above paragraph–the reflexive dismissal on the stuff, or the reflexive genuflection to the statline–to think about what additional tools we might have to evaluate a player like this, one who presents weird extremes and doesn’t have good historical comparables.
In particular, I’d like to focus on two questions:
Does Leal’s uniqueness count for anything, in a positive sense?
How might we evaluate Leal’s command in a better way than just “he hasn’t walked anybody as an older pitcher in the low minors?”
The first is more of a philosophical question; the second is more of a data question.* There is thus perhaps more depth to explore in the second, but I want to at least take a few moments on the first.
*The first question can also be measured by data in theory, but it would require either access to all minor league Trackman stuff or over a hundred hours of careful work and research, so I’ll have to content myself with a philosophical exploration of it for now.
David Leal is a finesse pitcher, and we generally view finesse pitching prospects with suspicion. There are many, many examples of guys dominating A-ball or even the upper minors with vanilla repertoires, only to eventually run into a roadblock where the strikeouts plummet and the walks and hard contact skyrocket. Every now and again, one of those guys turns into Dallas Keuchel or Kyle Hendricks or Tommy Milone, or goes to the bullpen and becomes Yusmeiro Petit or Wade LeBlanc, but for each one of those, there are a whole bunch of Matt Milburns and Evan Manarinos. When you have a fairly generic finesse pitching prospect, then, it’s easy to do the mental math: the pitcher is one of many dozen who is currently finding success in the minors due to advanced pitchability, but only a single-digit number of those guys are useful MLB pitchers at any given time, usually because they turn out to have 70-grade command (obviously tying into the second question, here), elite groundball ability a la Keuchel, or develop bigtime offspeed stuff. It’s a daunting ratio to overcome.
But Leal isn’t a generic finesse pitcher. Batters at any full-season level face plenty of Matt Milburns and Parker Dunshees and Jack Cushings. They have plenty of context for what it’s like to go up against a pitcher with a clean delivery who spots an 89-91 mph fastball, two distinct playable breaking balls, and a solid changeup well.* When successful, these pitchers are sometimes referred to as “comfortable 0-for-4” guys–batters feel like they see the ball well and feel confident in the box, but before they know it, they’re 0-for-4. Guys like Greg Maddux and Mark Buehrle historically got this sort of distinction.
*Or whatever generic arsenal it is. Cushing is 90-93 with one breaking ball, but you get the point.
But batters might go an entire season, even in A-ball, without seeing another pitcher like Leal, so part of the challenge of facing him is figuring out how to handle such a unique look. As such, batters usually look profoundly uncomfortable against him. When his fastball tails out over the middle of the plate, it still often ends up jamming batters because of the deception and late movement. Guys get helplessly out in front of the breaking ball. Leal is usually ahead in the count, so he quickly gets opponents into protect mode, where they can look foolish. You would think such a soft-tosser would induce a lot of pull contact, but balls in play against Leal have only gone to the pull side about 38% of the time in 2021-22, a couple ticks below average.
In this sense, Leal does remind me of Alex Claudio. Claudio is a pitcher who I saw a ton of back in my live-look days, mostly in then-Low-A Hickory. I saw his full-season debut in 2013, where he allowed 3 hits in 1 ⅔ innings, throwing an 83-86 mph sinker alongside what I originally thought was an upper-60s curveball. Nothing to see here, I thought. Wacky low-minors sidearm reliever, whatever. The second time I saw him, though, I realized that the upper-60s thing was actually a changeup with ridiculous movement, where he somehow managed to repeat his arm speed despite over a 15 mph difference from the sinker. The third time I saw him, he struck out six of the nine batters he faced, all of them looking helpless and uncomfortable against a pitch they had no context for. As that kind of performance started to become the norm, I found myself believing in Claudio’s MLB potential despite the mid-80s fastball and heavy reliance on a sub-70 mph pitch. The movement played a significant part in my coming to that conclusion, but equally if not more important was how foolish he made opponents look and how unique his arsenal was.
Nobody really had expectations for Claudio, a former 27th-round pick, in 2013, just as nobody really expects anything from Leal now. Guys like this inherently walk a tightrope, and small changes can easily rob them of their effectiveness. But because of their lack of profile, what really matters for pitchers like this (in a prospect sense) is the right-tail outcomes. There is a huge difference between having, say, a 6% chance of 2 career WAR or more and having a 14% chance of attaining that level of performance.
I do tend to think* that the uniqueness of a pitcher like this helps move that right-tail window a bit. The right tail of outcomes of any finesse pitcher is usually going to be conditional on the attainment of unusual progress or superlatives.** Either the pitcher picks up enough velocity later on to leave the finesse bucket (a la Liam Hendriks or Bailey Ober), or something else on his scouting report–an offspeed pitch, or command–ends up grading out 65 or higher and becomes a carrying skill and mitigating force. Occasionally, a Mike Fiers type is able to throw deception into the mix as an additional equalizer. But what isn’t usually on the table as a viable right-tail outcome is “the stuff just somehow plays.” The uniqueness of the look a pitcher like Leal provides,*** and the resulting lack of context batters have for facing him, makes such a possibility seem more realistic. Compared to someone like the aforementioned Jack Owen, who the A’s signed as an undrafted free agent last year and who has gotten off a stellar start of his own in pro ball (34/8 K/BB in 27 IP), Leal’s weirdness may well be an advantage. Guys don’t seem anywhere near as uncomfortable against Owen, who dots his upper-80s fastball on the corners and complements it with a long, sweeping slider and a playable changeup. I have a much harder time seeing his arsenal work in the big leagues as-is than I do with Leal, even though it actually might grade out a touch better on a scouting report.
*As noted earlier, this is something that would need a lot more investigation to actually prove. I absolutely could be wrong.
**An important exception here is when the fastball is fairly slow but has an elite spin rate, which makes it more viable. When I say “finesse prospects” in this section, I’m talking about pitchers who would have a poorly-graded fastball on a scouting report, not solely a lack of velocity. Obviously I’m not sure what Leal’s spin rate is, but it would have to be just about unprecedented to make his fastball grade out as even a 40.
***Josh Collmenter is probably another useful example of uniqueness as a plus.
Leal’s uniqueness still won’t be enough unless his excellent walk rates continue to hold all the way up the ladder, which brings me to the second question I asked earlier. We know that Leal very rarely issues free passes to low-minors opponents, but we also know that those numbers are of pretty limited predictive utility. Guys like Chris Archer and Craig Kimbrel were wildly erratic at times as minor league pitchers and ended up being solid strike-throwers at the MLB level, and conversely there are plenty of Braxton Garrett/Ryan Borucki types who limit walks very well in the minors but struggle to do so in the bigs. Plenty of pitchers also hit significant control hurdles when they reach the upper minors and their more discerning collection of batters. How do we discern which strike-throwers will continue their walk-limiting excellence as they climb the ladder?
The old adage is that we have to differentiate pitchers who have “control” from those who have “command.” In this sense, “control” means “throwing strikes,” while “command” means “throwing quality strikes.” Pitchers who have control but not command run into trouble, we’re told, because as they move up and face more talented hitters, those non-quality strikes get hit harder and harder. This negative feedback, in turn, prompts such pitchers to nibble more on the edges of the zone, which, since they don’t have great command, ultimately leads to more walks.
Conceptually, this is more or less on point. Strike-throwing and mistake avoidance have a push-pull relationship with one another, and we thus ought to carefully think through how they will interact for a given pitcher as he faces more talented opposition. Pitchers like Kimbrel can miss in the middle of the zone against even elite hitters and live to tell the tale more often than not, whereas pitchers like Borucki cannot.
Still, I’ve long taken issue with this “control vs. command” idea in a few more technical senses, which I discussed at some length nine years ago. For one, the way the word “control” is used here, referring to being vaguely around the strike zone but specifically not in precise control of the pitch, is confusing.* But secondly, there’s the question of how such a thing can even be a skill. How can a pitcher consistently be around the strike zone without really having solid command of his pitches?
*Etymologically speaking, I imagine “control” was around first and was used to mean “throwing a lot of strikes,” but then eventually people felt the need for a second, more precise word, and so “command” came about. Still, the idea of using two synonyms to mean what end up being two radically different concepts is linguistically quite problematic.
The answer is that this “control” idea is capturing something almost entirely divorced from “controlling the ball’s location” at all. If you throw a lot of strikes but don’t have a great feel for locating your pitches, you must be trying to throw a lot of strikes. “Control” thus represents a zone-heavy plan,* and command is actually hitting the spots you intended, regardless of the plan.
*Obviously, the pitcher has to have some measure of command, even with a zone-heavy plan, to be seen as having good “control” and limiting walks, but from there the plan is hugely influential.
This is why you never see a scouting report that grades “control” and “command” separately. Command is an actual skill that translates, whereas how much the pitcher wants to pound the strike zone versus nibble or bury pitches is something that can fluctuate dramatically on a batter-to-batter, game-to-game, and certainly a level-to-level or year-to-year basis.
Still, as frustrating as the control-versus-command terminology may be in its equating of two quite separate notions, it does highlight how minor league walk rates can be plan-based illusions, not necessarily indicators of pitching precision. So how do we actually capture “command” without “control” butting in?
If the difference between “command” and “control” manifests in non-quality strikes, then I guess we need to think about the quality of a strike. What is a non-quality strike? It’s perhaps not a great definition, but the first thing that probably comes to mind is “a middle-middle pitch.” With some caveats, that’s a reasonable place to start, and will mostly be what I content myself with for this piece.
So perhaps one way to reverse-engineer what a pitcher like Leal would need to do to succeed in the majors one day is to look at the standard set by MLB’s elite strike-throwers at avoiding the middle of the zone. There were 31 pitchers in 2021 who walked 5% of opponents or less while throwing 20% innings. Below is a table of how frequently their pitches ended up in a middle-middle location, per PitchInfo:
First off: next time you hear an announcer say a starting pitcher made “only one or two mistakes all night,” remember this chart. Anyone who’s looked at a few zone plots knows that even the best pitchers throw stuff down the heart of the plate all the time. Of these 31 pitchers, only deGrom and Stammen found the heart of the zone on less than a ninth of their in-zone pitches. The greatest pitcher of the last 15 years, Clayton Kershaw, has thrown more middle-middle pitches over his career (7.71%) than to any other area of the zone (next-most is middle-gloveside, at 6.85%).
Of course, the pitchers in the above table have wildly varying levels of applicability to any notion of “finesse pitching.” I’m not sure there’s a single less relevant data point in MLB history with regards to projecting David Leal’s chances of getting to the big leagues than Jacob deGrom’s 2021. Out of curiosity, I did run a quick regression on this admittedly tiny sample of pitchers to see if their velocity was related to their middle-middle avoidance, and the regression line did orient toward hard throwers being less avoidant, but not meaningfully so (r-squared = .022).
How does David Leal grade out on this criterion? Actually, pretty well so far in 2022.* Of the 143 pitches he’s thrown, I’ve coded just eight as middle-middle, or 5.59%. His zone percentage, per my coding, is 55.24% (79 of 143), right in line with the average of the above sample, but if he’s actually this good at keeping the ball out of that area, that would bode well for his ability to keep getting outs.**
* Worth emphasizing: Until I got to this sentence in writing this, I didn’t look up in my charts how well Leal had done on this metric. By no means were the statistical tests in this section set up to make him look good.
**Standard caveats about me being a human coder, working off broadcast angles, rather than a precise system like PitchInfo, apply. Small sample caveats also render this an extremely incomplete answer to the question of whether Leal actually avoids this part of the zone well. As the season progresses, I’ll check back. Mostly here I was just interested in establishing what a reasonable point of comparison was.
The final element of the control-command thing that has always been kind of frustrating to me is that it’s never been clear to me whether “quality strikes” refers to “well-located pitches in the strike zone,” as the above analysis kind of treats it, or “well-located pitches that result in strikes.” That was the other key thing that changes in the upper minors in the conventional narrative: better hitters stop chasing junk. When Leal runs his 67 mph curveball down and away in the dirt to a lefty on a 1-2 pitch and the hitter flails at it, was that a quality strike?
It’s easy to chase one’s tail to try to answer that question, especially where development/projection is concerned. On one hand, the result is great: it’s hard to garner a more positive result than inducing a swing on a pitch in a very hard-to-hit (let alone barrel) location. On the other hand, getting a #8 hitter in A-ball to chase such a pitch is exactly the sort of thing that doesn’t translate when you’re staring down Mike Trout. But then, it makes no sense to impose a Trout sort of standard when that’s not who the pitcher was facing. Whether this represents a good pitch is also highly dependent on the pitcher’s stuff (ability to elicit O-Swing, in particular), sequencing/situation, and whether the pitch was supposed to be located there.
It’s by no means a perfect tool to go about attacking the complexity inherent to the situation, but for now I’ll content myself with the idea of “waste rate:” how frequently the pitcher throws a pitch way out of the strike zone (say, 9+ inches or so, visually), where the chances of eliciting a swing from a capable hitter decreases significantly. Just as middle-middle pitches are typically the worst kind of in-zone offerings, these are the least competitive out-of-zone pitches. David Leal has thrown 13 “waste pitches,” per my coding; indeed, twelve were balls and the thirteenth hit a batter. That gives him a “waste rate” of 9.09%. Combine that with the eight middle-middle offerings, and Leal has only thrown 14.7% of his pitches in locations that are particularly troublesome.
Admittedly, this “waste” idea is hard to standardize. In 2009, Dan Turkenkopf looked at the idea of waste pitches and defined the “waste zone” as more extreme than I do here (14-16 inches away from the zone); he found that 3.5% of all MLB pitches at the time fell into the “waste” category. Turkenkopf came to the conclusion that, as Leal has with his 13 wayward efforts, pitchers generally get poor results when they venture far out of the zone. Carmen Ciardiello defined waste pitches as “0-2 pitches out of the strike zone” in a piece last year, and naturally that definition yielded a more positive spin on the waste notion. I’m using something in between the two here.
For a sense of Leal’s excellence in putting the ball in good locations both in and out of the zone, let’s compare him to his teammates in Lansing this year (sample of rest of team of 1,463 pitches, roughly 75% complete).
| Leal | Rest of Team |
Middle-Middle% | 5.59% | 10.05% |
Rest of Zone% | 49.65% | 42.52% |
Close Non-Zone% | 35.66% | 33.63% |
Waste% | 9.09% | 13.81% |
M-M+Waste% | 14.69% | 23.86% |
The strength of the Lansing pitching staff probably lies most strongly in their command, so it’s striking to see how strongly the big lefty outpaces his teammates here. We can see that (at least thus far this season) Leal doesn’t pitch in the zone all that much more than his teammates–55.2% to 52.6%–but he avoids mistakes both in and out of the zone at a far superior rate. I’m not sure how quickly these statistics stabilize, but if this is his legitimate level of mistake avoidance, he is anything but a “control-over-command” pitcher.
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I still don’t really know what to think of Leal’s future. Climbing aboard the bandwagon on a pitcher like this risks making the mistake Michael Lewis made when writing about David Beck all those years ago: Look at this performance, he must be good. Sure, I’ve provided what I hope is a satisfactory explanation for how Leal has put this kind of performance together, and it’s quite impressive, but we’re still kind of working backward from the A-ball performance of a 24-year-old. If Leal gets promoted to Midland in May and proceeds to allow six homers and eight walks in his first eighteen innings, the notion that he’s some sort of exception to the rule will look silly very quickly. And that’s a distinct possibility–as it is, we’re talking about a guy with a career 1.3 HR/9 and 4.12 ERA in 83 full-season innings, despite the zone-controlling excellence.*
*A couple of notes of positivity on this, lest these numbers seem damning. First, Leal has played in some pretty hitter-friendly environments. Second, he’s allowed only one unearned run. Finally, a lot of this is distorted by a rough first few High-A starts. Since July 18 of last year, he has a 2.14 ERA and has allowed only two homers in 33 ⅔ innings, all in High-A. One of those two homers was an inside-the-park job where the CF got hurt diving for the ball. Still, he’s an extreme flyball guy throwing 83 mph, so homers are gonna come with the territory at higher levels, I’m sure.
The fact that such a flameout is easy to envision nevertheless does not remove Leal’s intrigue. The uniqueness of his approach to pitching opens up more possibilities for success than we might often associate with extreme finesse guys, and my extremely-small-sample analysis* of his command reflects very positively. If we’re really talking 70-grade command here, that will go a long way. Given how promising the command numbers are, they dovetails nicely with the uniqueness to widen the proportion of outcomes that might yield MLB success for Leal, which I honestly wasn’t really anticipating when I started working through this analysis.
*I didn’t want to let my eye-test of Leal’s command over the 50 or so innings I’ve watched him throw, dating back to last year and even his High-A spot start in 2019, really mix with the statistical results of the previous section, which is restricted to this year only, but I will say that visually, he’s appeared to have strong mistake avoidance all along. I’d still guess he regresses upward in both middle-middle and waste rate, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he stabilized around 6.25% and 10.5%, somewhere in there.
I hope something in that set of outcomes comes to fruition, not only as an A’s fan, but also because baseball could always use more unique pitchers. In a world where Domingo Tapia and his 98 mph heat got DFA’d yesterday, there is something amazing about a lefthander who can jam opposing righties with an 83 mph fastball up and middle-away. A pitcher who throws that slow, and yet whose fastball gets by guys up in the zone with sudden violence. A pitcher who throws a bloopy, rolling breaking ball in the upper 60s as his primary offspeed pitch, but manages to get opponents to flail at it. That doesn’t seem like a pitcher who should be able to exist, yet Leal does. It doesn’t seem like a pitcher who can keep existing, but maybe he can. It sure would be fun.
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