Point Blank – June 6, 2017
It’s getting near midnight for Matt Cain (and many of you will already guess what the jukebox button is for that)…Ian Kennedy’s Monday was even worse than the box scores show…
Today brings us an opportunity to go inside the numbers into some pitching categories that have a lot of merit, but don’t get a lot of mainstream attention, and unless you do some deep digging, do not show up from the daily box scores. These numbers also tell us that the time remaining for Matt Cain in a Major League starting rotation may be limited.
I’ll be keeping the Allman’s tribute going through the end of the NBA playoffs, so the jukebox connection today is an easy one – with the clock coming close to midnight for Cain, let’s go to Gregg Allman with "Midnight Rider" live from 2015, and some lyrics that likely meant even more to him as the various twists of life played out -
Item: Matt Cain, and when SWS% and O-Swing% can come front and center
In the Monday edition part of the focus on the decline of Ian Kennedy came from some subtle categories that can tell us a lot. And Kennedy’s slide continued, a bad outing that was even worse than some of the measurements will show (I’ll get back to him in a moment). Now it is time to focus in on Cain, because it is not just a tale of a pitcher in decline, but also of someone walking a tight rope in terms of being able to hang around at all.
Cain’s 3-4/4.53 bottom line does not look awful, and given that he has had a respectable career, a 3.60 over more than 2,000 innings, he is being priced rather fairly in the marketplace. He and the Giants have drawn money this morning, Pinnacle from -139 down to -122 so far. But in discussing Cain in a recent thread I noted that the splits were becoming ever so important – he is a fly-ball guy that still has some margin of error in home games, where a pitcher can get away with balls being hit hard that will still find outfielders gloves, but some of that same contact will go for extra base hits, and indeed home runs, on the road.
The 2017 split is clear on that front, so much so that we don’t have to look far beyond the most basic measure –
W/L ERA
Home 3-2 1.56
Away 0-2 8.28
I bring that up first because that is the quick glance that many bettors will take, and so the oddsmakers know it is something they have to incorporate. There isn’t anything fluky about it -
AVG OBP SLG
Home .256 .303 .348
Away .311 .405 .524
But it isn’t just this season. While injuries have limited Cain’s time on the mound over the past three campaigns, here are the splits in terms of ERA and HR/9, which is where his major issue is at this stage -
2015-17 H A
ERA 4.36 6.67
HR/9 1.1 1.9
Now to get down to what we can call the brass tacks. As noted with Kennedy yesterday, declining K% and BB% is a natural affliction as someone loses their stuff. Cain is there, his K% being at a career worst level, and BB% his worst since 2008. It is the path to those outcomes that is worth searching out more deeply.
When a pitcher loses his oomph, not only do hitters swing and miss less often, they are also afforded the opportunity to swing less often, getting more time to recognize whether a pitch is in the strike zone or not. Cain’s average fastball is tracking at 89.4 this season, a full 3.1 below his career high. Now for some perspective. Let’s look at three key categories attached to this general notion, and show where Cain compares to his career rate, and also rates among the 107 pitchers that have worked at least 50 innings this season -
K% SWS% O-Swing%
Career 19.8 8.8 27.4
2017 14.8 (96) 5.1 (106) 23.2 (103)
Needless to say, his current stuff is not good. The only pitcher getting fewer swinging strikes is Bartolo Colon, and at 2-7/7.78 you can see how that is playing out for him. Cain is the only pitcher in the Majors to rate in the bottom 11 of each of these categories.
Here is the particular problem with SWS% - he is now bordering on church league softball. Let’s compare that 5.1 to the pitcher with the worst mark from the previous five seasons –
2016 Colon 5.5
2015 Buehrle 5.2
2014 Colon 5.6
2013 Guthrie 5.1
2012 Alvarez 5.1
If not for the current Colon, Cain would be threatening to be at the very bottom of those charts covering the last 5+ campaigns. It means that his margin for error is dangerously thin.
O-Swing% (how often opposing hitters swing at pitches outside of the strike zone) is a little trickier to work with because it is one of those statistics that calls for some judgment, and while I go through many of those categories each day, I don’t bring them into play in these spaces as often since they are not an “official” statistic, and the tracking cannot fully be trusted. But of all judgment elements out there in the stat world, whether or not a pitch was in the strike zone has the proper camera angles for these numbers to have a reasonable level of accuracy.
Yet here’s a subtlety about O-Swing% that can actually help a guy like Cain – while batters get plenty of time from his release of the ball to read where it is in regard to the strike zone, and will lay off of pitches clearly missing the mark, Cain may be a little more likely than most to induce swings at borderline pitches. Batters don’t want to take a walk vs. fast-balls coming in at less than 90 mph, they want to get a swing, so there will be some nights in which Cain can still be effective, working around the corners to get over-eager hitters to generate some routine fly balls. The problem is that he has to rely on that far too much these days.
I will be looking for ways to get in play against Cain in just about every remaining road start that he has, and the markets have obliged by reducing the out-lay morning. Given the recent stuff from Chase Anderson, there is a fit to get #956 Milwaukee (7:40 Eastern) into play, the value point being -130 or less.
I was impressed by what I saw from Anderson at New York on Thursday, in what set up as a vulnerable setting for him. He had just come off of a flirtation with a no-hitter vs. Arizona, the Diamondbacks not breaking through until the 8th inning, which pushed him to a career-high 114 pitches. But instead of a hangover Anderson’s stuff was just about as good vs. the Mets, who managed only three hits and one walk over seven innings. That is a two-game count of 18 Ks, four hits and four walks allowed over 14 scoreless innings, and while Anderson is not good enough to maintain that for an extended period, it does mean a high level of confidence, which also connects to the 2.12 he has dealt from this mound so far this season.
Item: On the Psychology of Pitching, and Adam Wainwright
Adam Wainwright is a great case study right now, not only having put together the historic run of having three rbis vs. only one run allowed over his last four starts, but also that notion of how pitchers with diminishing physical tools can still think their way through games. Like Cain, Wainwright’s average fast-ball is down more than 3.0 mph from his career best, but because he has also been a control/ground ball guy (career 2.3 BB/9 and 48.3 GB%), he has far more tools to reach back for, even as his 36th birthday approaches. So put this in your files -
"I'm really trying to listen to hitters. What are their swings telling me? I'm changing speeds with just about everything I have. Feel is very important, but I'm always looking up at the speeds just to try to keep the hitter off-balance."
Wainwright has 1,830 regular-season innings under his belt, and has truly learned the craft (while also bringing an integrity when he steps into the batter's box as well). It raises a question in an era in which so many young arms are out there throwing with so much velocity – how many of them are truly learning to pitch?
About Last Night - Ian Kennedy was even worse than the numbers show…
Kennedy has now fallen to last among all pitchers in O-Swing%, all the way to 20.6, and that helps to explain his 0-6/5.33 bottom line. Yet what indeed registers as another dismal outing on Monday night was even worse than that, and is another example of how digging more deeply enables one to come up with better power ratings.
You will notice from the basic box score that Kennedy faced 22 batters, with six of them getting hits, including four doubles and a home run and three drawing walks. That is ugly enough, a slash line of .316/.409/.684. But then you notice that he is credited with recording 15 outs despite only retiring 13 batters, and this is an instance in which a pitcher gets improperly rewarded by the sport.
The Astros ran into two outs in the second inning - Norichika Aoki got thrown out trying to turn a single into a double, and George Springer was caught stealing. While the pitcher should get some credit for a caught stealing, but minimal because it was only made possible by him allowing a batter to reach base, when a runner is thrown out on the base-paths on a play that started with a hit, that is an undeserved break for him on the run prevention charts.
It takes time to process through these components, for now having to sort the play-by-play until there becomes some sort of official tracking that can be attached. But as is the case in just about any endeavor, those that are willing to take the extra steps are going to end up finding advantages, and in an arena as competitive as the betting marketplace, that diligence indeed matters.
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