Spring training numbers don’t matter, is the popular belief. These players are not Really try, and most of the time teams don’t consistently line up with top league talent.
But that can’t be entirely true.
For one thing, major league teams make decisions based on spring training – there are literally battles going on at almost every club. Most of the time it’s for one of the last spots on the list, but that means teams are actually looking at a set of numbers to make decisions.
Then there is actually evidence that these numbers matter, that spring numbers are (easily!) predictors of regular season performances. They’re a month’s worth of games, after all. It’s probably a signal, as Dan Rosenheck of The Economist once noted. Others have found that process stats that stabilize quickly carry some signal – things like strikeout rate and groundball rate can quickly tell us about the changes a player can experience from season to season.
One way to extract as much signal from the noise as possible is to focus on process statistics like these. We’ve got one for pitchers here: Stuff+ only looks at the physical properties of a pitch and stabilizes very quickly. For example, with four-seam fastballs, after only 18 fastballs thrown, we get more signal than noise.
There are still mitigating circumstances. Starting pitchers pitching for three innings are not the same as starting pitchers pitching for six innings, that’s true.
But we do know that the translation from helper to starting pitcher was on the order of five points from Stuff+. So if we just focus on starting pitchers who threw a decent range of pitches in front of the machines this spring and increased their Stuff+ by more than five points, we should be able to find some real change under the hood . Let’s rank the top movers and highlight a few that stand out.
player
spring stuff+
22 stuff+
differential
pitches
appearances
127
101
26
50
2
116
96
20
87
3
124
106
18
138
3
127
110
17
150
3
99
83
16
71
2
103
89
14
52
1
113
99
14
83
2
128
115
13
73
2
114
102
12
128
3
118
107
11
111
2
117
106
11
85
2
110
99
11
78
2
98
87
11
135
4
97
87
10
55
1
108
98
10
55
2
113
103
10
166
4
112
102
10
71
2
117
108
9
69
2
93
84
9
135
3
91
82
9
76
2
Number one is fun, but there might be a few pitchers ahead of him in line for this Tampa rotation. Still, it’s great for Taj Bradley’s long-term value to see his Stuff+ lineup match scouting reports from the smaller leagues. Connor Gray has made some progress but looks like a deep piece in New York, especially if we have to deduct a few points from Stuff+ once he pitches up to 80 per performance. We could say the same for Matthew Liberatore, who is likely to be needed in St. Louis. But once we subtract the relief penalty, he falls below the 97 Stuff+ average for starters.
Ryan Feltner might have better stuff once he gets off the high ground, but the reality remains he needs to get back in, at least for now , opening day starter, got some love here a while ago, as did Kyle Bradish here. Things are looking good for these picks.
Here are the other launchers that caught my eye the most. Feel free to peruse the Spring Stuff+ numbers (and the per court numbers) along with the WBC numbers in the Google Doc here.
Already a Stuff+ favourite, Rasmussen has even surpassed where he was last year. Much of it has been working on refining its two sliders. Well, OK, one of them is a cutter on the sheet, but it’s really what’s called a “gyro” slider, a high-power, low-motion slider.
“There’s only one slider on the PitchCom,” Rasmussen told me last week. “So we call it a cutter. It’s my old slider and we took some depth off it so I could throw it harder.”
It also doesn’t look like a tailor.
This powerslider gives Rasmussen another pitch to throw for a hip strike, just like he did here. An incredible 65 percent of the cutters he threw this spring were strikes, either by foul, swing or call. Where the sweeper has larger platoon splits and is sometimes harder to pen, this pitch is just power and command. A bit like a cutter?
Stuff+ is important, but efficiency is also important for a starter in the Rays, who averaged just over 80 pitches per start last year.
“If you know you’ve got a pretty tough cap, you better throw it over the plate,” he laughed.
Rasmussen has peaked at about 90 pitches per start in August and early September, and if he really nails that three-ball approach, he may still be valuable in all formats despite his lack of depth of play. He still won 11 games last season and made 18 decisions despite his short length.
“I don’t know why it didn’t do better,” an analyst once told me about Pivetta. “Our employees love him.”
Well, so does this one. And it used to be about his four-seam fastball – his other pitches last year were rated average or worse by Stuff+ – this spring his breaking balls are looking positive by that stat.
His curve is all about Velo. He’s throwing it harder at four mph this spring, and even if that slacks off a tick or two, that’ll be a lot harder than his 77-mph curveball last year. That extra zipper took some movement (about a three or four inch drop), but Stuff+ likes the change.
On the slider side, he simply added a drop to the pitch. Three inch drop. It now looks like this:
He hasn’t mastered the field surprisingly well – thrown six strikes out of 14, with one allowed – and that’s been part of the problem in the past. But maybe this is easier to command than his curveball. Less movement is generally at least easier to command.
The Red Sox need Pivetta, and his stuff seems to be taking a step forward this spring. Could he finally put an ERA under four and lower home run rate by improving that side of the ledger? His locations remain sub-par, and maybe they’re not getting any better, so this is the best path for him to take.
We already loved Luis Ortiz for his Stuff+, and now he’s taking it to new heights. He already has the awesome fastball and power curve slider thing, but this spring even his Stuff+ morph is rated above average. And his slider has gone from good (119 stuff+ last year) to elite (142 stuff+ this spring), adding another inch and a half of drop from his fastball (since his fastball also added a small carry). We have to check.
88 mph and off the table. Mean.
But can he force someone out of the rotation? He threw 45 pitches last time out with the Pirates and held serve with other stretched starters. But now he’s in the WBC, where he’s pitched another 23 pitches and has the third-highest Stuff+ in the tournament, but that won’t help his bulk. Roansy Contreras’ stuff is a bit run down but he needs to get a legitimate shot when there’s no injury. Rich Hill is still out here throwing curveballs. Vince Velasquez is up three innings and should get the first shot at fifth seed. Johan Oviedo’s average material and location package continued, and he threw 41 pitches on his last time out.
There are either one or two people between Ortiz and a rotation point in Pittsburgh. Stay alert.
Beau Briske, Tigers
Owner of the second-highest spring training speed jump to date, Beau Briske also has the fewest pitches per appearance in this sample. So maybe take his jump in Fastball Stuff+ — from 96 Stuff+ last year to 121 this spring — with a grain of salt. He might lose more than five points if the Tigers push his pitches per appearance.
Or maybe, despite looking for starting pitchers here, we’ve found a sleeper in the Tigers’ pen. On his last outing, Brieske threw 10 fastballs and had a Stuff+ over 140. He’s improved alternately with Changeup and Slider, but overall they both look like real guns too.
The Tigers will need someone to step up behind Alex Lange in the bullpen and they could have their beau.
It’s not the fastball with Baumann this spring (last year’s fastball was his best throw from Stuff+). Only the sparsely thrown changeup was above average from Stuff+, and that in such a small sample (on such a tricky pitch) that it’s probably more revealing to say that the changeup was a got whiff. So in a way, Baumann was a one-pitch guy on a team that was getting crowded in the rotation.
Well, the Orioles picked up two more starters in the offseason and Grayson Rodriguez looks ready, but Baumann’s arsenal has taken a leap forward, with both his Slider (118 Stuff+) and Curve (112 Stuff+) ratings now are above average.
The slider also has two inches more drop and two inches more horizontal movement. It passes the eye test at a fixed 90 mph and movement in two planes:
A slightly tighter turn (+1 mph) may get back where it was, but a little more drive on the fastball and more movement on the slider has turned Baumann into a true three-pitch pitcher. And all of these numbers have held up, even though Baumann has driven his pitches to over 50 per appearance.
Where will he end up fitting? FanGraphs doesn’t even have him in the club’s top 10 starters OR relievers right now, so he has some ground to gain. But Tyler Wells has lost some stuff this spring, and if the team decides to take a look at Baumann while Rodriguez is sent down, it wouldn’t be an impossible outcome. Or Baumann is what Keegan Akin was last year, a multi-inning bridge down the middle. However, it looks like he’s upped his game and should get some sort of role.
(Top Photo by Pivetta: Winslow Townson/Getty Images)