THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Do ace relievers collapse faster than other pitchers?

Joe on the stuggles of Soria:

It’s just not quite. The easy part is explaining why Soria is struggling.

1. Hitters are no longer swinging and missing Joakim Soria’s pitches. Throughout Soria’s career he would get swinging strikes 11 or 12 percent of the time. This year, they are swinging and missing less than 7 percent of the time. This is in part because ...

2. Hitters are no longer swinging at pitches Soria throws out of the strike zone. He could count on them doing that about 30% of the time in the past. Now, it’s less than 20%. In truth, batters are just swinging at fewer Soria pitches, strikes or balls. This is in part because ...

3. His command just seems off. He’s throwing the lowest percentage of strikes of his career. It used to be that when Soria was pitching, you might as well come out swinging because he was going to throw strikes. Now, he struggles with the strike zone sometimes. He gets behind hitters. The mushball fastball he threw to Torii Hunter was on a 2-0 count.

4. He has lost his ability to put hitters away. It used to be when Soria had two strikes on a hitter, the battle was over. Hitters hit .116 against Joakim Soria with two strikes coming into this season. Their OPS was .340. It made sense. Soria—with a fastball he could put anywhere, a slider he could put anywhere, a change-up that looked just like his fastball coming out of his hand and that dizzying slow curve—was all but impossible to beat with two strikes. This year, with two strikes batters are hitting .350 and slugging .600. Obviously that’s in a very small number of at-bats but something drastic has changed.

So all that’s easy. It’s easy to see he’s pitching differently than he did. But WHY is he pitching differently?
...
Is this simply what happens to closers? That is the theory of one baseball man I talked with on Monday. The list of closers who were great for short bursts of time is daunting. Mark Davis won a Cy Young in 1989, he was all but unpitchable one year later. Bobby Thigpen saved 57 games in 1990, he was was minus-1 Wins Above Replacement for the rest of his career. Bryan Harvey ... Chad Cordero ... J.J. Putz ... Robb Nen ... Michael Jackson ... Derrick Turnbow ... Jeff Russell ... B.J. Ryan ... you can name two dozen others ... they had dominant seasons as closers, some of them had multiple dominant seasons, but then it ended, maybe because of injury, maybe because the league figured them out, or maybe because closers, like running backs and boy bands, live thrilling but short lives.

Another baseball executive kept asking me through the years why the Royals would not make Soria into a starter. I had written about that topic a few times, and he was adamant that the Royals were making a huge mistake keeping Soria in the closer’s role. He had three reasons. His first reason was that the Royals, being a lousy team, did not need a closer. Made sense. His second reason was that Soria was worth SO MUCH MORE as a starter than as a closer, and it’s the job of lousy teams to maximize their assets. Also made sense. But three, he believed that—sooner rather than later—Soria would become ineffective as a closer because that’s what happens to all but the a handful of them. And when that happened, he said, the Royals would be stuck with the least valuable commodity on earth: A worn out closer.