The Simple Way MLB Teams Make Pitchers BETTER

Usage: Optimization vs Team Philosophy When pitchers change teams, like at the trade deadline, one of my favorite things to do is look at what the organization that acquired the pitcher changed. Now, this can get complex when you dive into pitch shape changes and mechanics changes, but in a given season when the acquiring team probably still needs that pitcher to get outs every fifth day, there may not be the risk tolerance for these kind of more sweeping changes. Usage changes, however, are the low hanging fruit and we see them all the time. When pitchers switch teams. I'm going to bucket usage changes into two categories #1 is pure optimization #2 has to do with team philosophy. Now, I know the pitchers we're going to talk about today have small samples sometimes in their new organizations, but I still think it allows us to learn something about how teams try to make pitchers better. Yusei Kikuchi's Struggles Let's start in the first bucket optimization. The Blue Jays traded you say Kikuchi to the Astros for a package that many considered pretty lofty. Kikuchi was having a not so great season, but that's if he were looking at earned run average. Other ERA indicators that try to isolate more pitcher skill suggested he was having the best season of his career. FIP, which is focusing on strikeouts, walks and homers. Ex FIP, which is focusing on those three things, but applying a league average home run rate and Sierra, which adjusts for the kinds of balls and play that you allows the pitcher all thought he was performing very well. The Astros could have acquired Kikuchi and said, hey, do exactly what you're doing, you're going to get better. The numbers say so, but that's not what happened. Two Simple Usage Tweaks Take a look at Kikuchi's pitch level performance to righties from May to July just before he was traded, and let's see if you can predict what the Astros were going to tweak. He throws 4 pitches, the slider he uses more in two strike situations. And that's also where the forcing usage comes down to more 40% as opposed to the 50% we see right here. If we go off swing miss, we don't see much. He has a good amount of bat missing stuff, which is reflected in his strikeout rate. But let's go over to contact quality and compare that back to his usage. Which of these pitches in a vacuum would you expect to be thrown less if the acquiring organization is trying to make the pitcher better? The four seam and the curveball, right? Those two pitches have the worst contact quality, and coincidentally they're the pitches he uses the most. Flash forward to his two starts with the Astros and we're looking pretty good with our prediction here. In Kikuchi's first outing, he was under 40% fastball usage for just the second time this season. He threw a season high number of sliders. His change of usage jumped up in that curveball he was throwing 20% of the time. The Astros basically said stop throwing it. He threw just two of them in his first start, both in OO counts, which I think is more to take advantage of hitters being passive on curveballs a league wide when they're thrown as the first pitch of an AT bat. Kikuchi went five innings with 11 strikeouts against the Rays in his first start with the Astros. Not the best start of the season, but more swing and miss than pretty much any start that he's had this year. And everything held in his second start with the Astros as well against the Rangers. Less fastball, minimal curveball, and a lot of sliders. Blue Jays Caught Sleeping So the natural question to ask is why didn't the Blue Jays make these changes with Kikuchi? Let's start with the curveball. Kikuchi's was really good to start the season. From April to May. He was throwing it 32% of the time and it was good from a result standpoint. He posted A325 ERA in his first eleven starts. Why change anything? So when he hit a rut in that June to July window, I could see the thinking that his curveball was going to bounce back. It was just a command thing. As you can see here, the pitch was in zone more in June and July than it was in April and May. Maybe that just corrects back and the pitch is good again. And I'll give the Blue Jays some credit because they were tapering down the usage of his curveball as the season progressed, which you could see in this chart. They cut the usage of the pitch in half over the course of a few months. The Astros just seem to have put the final dagger in the pitch. Why the Blue Jays didn't push down Kikuchi's fastball usage is a more interesting question. Fangraf's Stuff Plus has it as a 117, which is a plus fastball. Better than 85% of the fastballs in MLB, so I could see holding the usage of this pitch pretty strong, especially when he doesn't really have anything else. He strikes consistently. On the other hand, there's not a lot of fastballs from left-handed pitchers thrown 50% to right-handed daters, even those that grayed out pretty well. And on a very broad results basis, there isn't a massive gap in performance between 4 seam cutters and sliders from lefty pitchers to righty hitters. The Jays had some things working in their favor in terms of keeping Kikuchi's four seam above 50%. The Astros just said Nah. I think we prefer the pitch. We're pretty sure it's going to perform better. We don't really care about the fastball. Regardless of these league wide results you're talking about, we're going to hammer the slider. Optimization is what we bucketed these Kikuchi changes into because it's exactly what the Astros did. They optimize him for more swing and miss and better results, pulling down the fastball, pushing up the slider and everything else, throwing out the curveball. As to why the Blue Jays didn't get to that optimization first is a really good question and that's where I want to bring in something very random. Vince Vaughn in a recent episode of Hot Ones. He's an actor and he had some thoughts about the movie industry. I swear this relates to pitch usage. Vince Vaughn on Pitch Usage?! The people in charge don't want to get fired more so than they're looking to do something great. So they want to kind of follow a set of rules that somehow like it's set in stone that don't really translate. I'll link to Vaughn S full thoughts in the video details. What he's essentially getting at is that media executives are more interested in self preservation than accepting some creative risk to potentially do something great. I think this applies to pitching and usage in general. And I'm not saying that the Blue Jay coaches are in self preservation mode. I just think there's this general idea that permeates some organizations where you just want to stack really small gains over a long period of time when in individual instances you're not totally willing to accept more risk to potentially have that pitcher make a substantial leap. So in the case of Kikuchi, the Blue Jays perhaps were looking at the ERA predictors and going he will get better. We don't really need to make any drastic changes. We could just taper down the curveball over time Where when run to these forks in the road where a pitcher gets traded or is pitching so bad that changes need to come immediately. Think of a guy like Hunter Brown on the Astros. Those are the points at which it seems like pitchers and organizations are more willing to accept risk. So that's why we see these optimization accelerations almost when guys go to new organizations. Now that's our first bucket optimization. There's another bucket here that has to do with team philosophy. So let's look at 2 examples. Team Philosophy Influences Usage The race traded Aaron Savali to the Brewers about a month before the deadline, so we have some decent sample to work with here. For his usage change. I want to focus on left-handed hitters in particular. Savali was a sinker, curveball, cutter pitcher to lefties. He wasn't missing a lot of bats, he was giving up some slug. He had a mid force fit versus that handedness. Not really that amazing. If you were showing me his usage and damage, the same exercise we did for use Kacuchi, I think I would say less sinker and more sweeper, even though you'd be betting on a small sample of that sweeper's success. What actually happened was the Brewers traded cutter for more sinker usage, pushing that pitch above 25% where it was previously below 15%, and they also doubled his sweeper usage. Now this is bold because these two pitches, sinkers and sweepers, are not platoon neutral pitches. They generally don't perform as well from right-handed pitchers to left-handed hitters, but the Brewers do not care about that almost at all. Brewers Oddities They're a top five organization in terms of sweeper usage from right-handed pitchers to lefty hitters, where the Rays are bottom five team in this exact category. And the Brewers are also a top four team in terms of sinker usage from righty pitchers to lefty hitters. This oppo handed sinker has been the Brewers MO for the last three seasons. In the case of Savale, the Brewers thought they could optimize him by aligning who he is as a pitcher with something they already do a lot internally. The problem is that Savali hasn't been really good. He has A5, four ERA and a 569 FIPS since being acquired. He's not improved versus lefties. With this new approach, I don't really know what to make of him. He seems to have some oscillation of performance on a yearly basis and this year surely has been a down year. The Brewers gave it their all and aligned him with their org philosophy. We'll see if it eventually turns around, but right now it's not really working. Red Sox Hate Fastballs The next example I'll touch on quickly is a classic one that you may have already seen coming. The Red Sox hate forcing fastballs, and fastballs generally they're tracking right now to have the lowest combined 4 SIM and sinker usage for a team in one season since the beginning of time. We know their organizational philosophy, it's one of the most obvious ones in baseball, so I wonder who they applied it to. Oh James Paxton, the guy who has a career 60% four SIM usage rate with his best seasons coming when he was throwing 4 SIM 65% of the time. In Paxtons first two starts with the Red Sox they cut his forcing usage from 54% down to 32% and even crazier they jacked up his sinker usage from about 4% with the Dodgers to 22%. Both of his fastballs aren't really that good stuff plus thinks they're basically the same pitch in terms of quality because the shapes aren't that different due to his over the top slot inability to create drop, the singer just moves a little bit more arm side and doesn't really have much deviation from the four scene. Both of these pitches with the Dodgers had pretty bad results. This is as aligned with an organizational philosophy in terms of a usage change that we're ever going to find. It doesn't really line up with the data things publicly. Perhaps the Red Sox have something internally that they just want more sinkers than four seam. The only thing I could think of is that they want Paxton pitching to two locations at the top of the zone as opposed to 1, the sinker inside the four seam. Away with the Dodgers, it seemed like the four seam was just generally up, but that's all I really have. Why Our Usage Buckets Matter So that's what I have on usage changes, two buckets, optimization and team philosophy. Obviously some overlap between the two of them, but I hope this video helped you understand how I believe they're slightly distinct. Team philosophy stuffs fun. I feel like in my last couple of videos I've been getting into that a lot because I find it so fascinating. I also think it's somewhat differentiated from what other people do on YouTube here from a baseball standpoint, so I hope you enjoy it as well. Used to changes are great. I track them all the time in my sub stack. Especially when you guys change teams, it gives us kind of a peek behind the curtain as to what maybe one organization saw from the performance of a pitcher in a prior organization. It's also really fun when they go from really smart organization to really smart organization, like the Rays to the Brewers for example, or even Jack Flaherty, Tigers to Dodgers. I'm still keeping an eye on what he's changed. Or even a guy like Zach Afflan, again, Rays to Orioles. All these teams are pretty smart, but looking at the same pictures they probably have a lot of the same numbers, but sometimes the philosophy side of things is really what differentiates what they do with an arm. I'll link to my sub stack in the video details. Check that out. Top 40 pitching prospects. Aman just dropped a lot of data in there just beyond the AAA stuff that is public, which I think if you're a baseball nerd like me, you'll enjoy. As always, thank you for watching.