Rick Porcello (His Story, Etc.)
Apr 16, 2018 0:23:32 GMT -5
sarasoxer, jimed14, and 2 more like this
Post by ericmvan on Apr 16, 2018 0:23:32 GMT -5
No thread for him in the last year, and I'm guessing he'll deserve one.
I have a huge amount of data to back up the following, which I may or may not post later. But here's the basic story without numbers.
Porcello had a breakout season with the Tigers in 2014 entirely because of a potent sinker (2-seamer) / changeup combo.
SINKER / CHANGEUP THEORY (Optional!)
Now, I've known for a long while that the changeup spins just like a two-seamer but slower, while its spin axis is noticeably different from a 4-seamer. If you think of a changeup as a pitch that's dressing in disguise to sneak into the catcher's mitt, the specific costume it's wearing is not fastball but 2-seam fastball.
I felt that had to be some relationship between throwing the two pitches. My guess was that guys who threw the 2-seamer more than the 4-seamer had more effective changeups (this turns out not to be true!). This suspicion was reinforced when I saw Jalen Beeks throw what was at the time the best game of his life, for Salem in Wilmington, while watching from the the second or third row. Those A+ hitters couldn't tell the two pitches apart, to a point approaching comedy ... it's funny how watching less skilled hitters can teach you how the game works.
So I just did a study that shows that 2-seamer effectiveness and changeup effectiveness are correlated. Each pitch can make the other better. (I don't believe this is true for any other pair of pitches, but I'll have to check.) Relative frequency of the two fastball types has no influence I can find.
This makes a good deal of sense. I think the whole effect is driven by guys like Porcello (and Beeks in high-A) whose two pitches really are hard to tell apart. It doesn't matter whether you throw the sinker a lot or a little relative to the change and the 4-seamer. The effectiveness is not based on expectation of what's coming, but on how well you read the ball coming out of the hand.
Note that if you're facing a pitcher who throws just 4-seamers and a change, and if you're not guessing (as is true for many hitters when they're behind in the count), your brain can still mistake the change for a 2-seamer. The conscience knowledge that he doesn't have a 2-seamer is going to have a hard time overriding the "muscle memory" that has to react instantly to the spin of the ball. But if you're guessing fastball or changeup, your brain will know very quickly whether that guess was correct. OTOH, a guy facing Porcello who is guessing sinker or chengeup who gets the opposite can get fooled completely.
STORY RESUMES: 2015
Now, it so happens that in 2014 Porcello threw more 4-seamers and fewer 2-seamers than ever before (although the latter still were the majority). There was no reason to think this had anything to do with his success; the 4-seamer was still a below-average pitch for him.
So, in 2015 ... the Sox had Porcello become predominantly a 4-seam pitcher, and they cut his use of the change by 42%. And this wasn't because it was getting hit hard; he had a great change in his first two starts.
Really. They had the guy dramatically reduce the usage of his two bread-and-butter pitches. WTFFFFFFF?
The four-seamer was actually really effective, but the sinker became subpar, and he lost the feel for the changeup and it got destroyed. (Every pitch has a correlation between how often it's thrown and how effective it is, because guys throw their more effective pitches more often, but it also works the other way; the more you throw a pitch, the better you command it and the better your feel for it, with fewer hangers as a result. The changeup is far and away the pitch with the highest variance of results and the strongest correlation between how often you throw it and how good it is.)
After two months they had him go back to throwing the sinker predominantly, but it didn't recover, and they kept his changeup rate low and it continued to get pounded.
After he came off the DL, he went back to his 2014 approach in full, and he had the best changeup of his life. I spent all winter arguing that this was the real Porcello, and that between 2014 and the last two months of 2015 he was a #2 starter.
2016
I was wrong. In 2016 his slider, which had always been supbar, suddenly became great. He had the 23rd best among the 144 starters with 80+ IP. And the slider is the best pitch in baseball, with all the upside of the change but much less downside. That made him a CY sort of guy. But he seemed not to realize just how good it was; he threw it 12.5% of the time, essentially unchanged from when it was subpar.
He also had the same success with the 4-seamer that he had in early 2015. So that experiment wasn't completely a disaster, as he added the up-in-the-zone swing-and-miss heater to his arsenal. So whoever had the insight that he could do that was on to something important. Why they thought he should just do that ... hmmm.
2017
His changeup is really bad from the outset, and he ends up throwing it at the 2015 frequency. I'm guessing he couldn't find the feel for it in ST and never got confidence in it. All his pitches were subpar except the slider, which he amped up to 16.8%, and that made him mediocre.
2018
Is 2016 except that now he's throwing the slider 22.3% of the time. I don't see any reason why he can't be better this year than he was two years ago.
Here's some data: Sinker and Changeup Effectiveness in runs per 100 pitches, starting in 2011.
I have a huge amount of data to back up the following, which I may or may not post later. But here's the basic story without numbers.
Porcello had a breakout season with the Tigers in 2014 entirely because of a potent sinker (2-seamer) / changeup combo.
SINKER / CHANGEUP THEORY (Optional!)
Now, I've known for a long while that the changeup spins just like a two-seamer but slower, while its spin axis is noticeably different from a 4-seamer. If you think of a changeup as a pitch that's dressing in disguise to sneak into the catcher's mitt, the specific costume it's wearing is not fastball but 2-seam fastball.
I felt that had to be some relationship between throwing the two pitches. My guess was that guys who threw the 2-seamer more than the 4-seamer had more effective changeups (this turns out not to be true!). This suspicion was reinforced when I saw Jalen Beeks throw what was at the time the best game of his life, for Salem in Wilmington, while watching from the the second or third row. Those A+ hitters couldn't tell the two pitches apart, to a point approaching comedy ... it's funny how watching less skilled hitters can teach you how the game works.
So I just did a study that shows that 2-seamer effectiveness and changeup effectiveness are correlated. Each pitch can make the other better. (I don't believe this is true for any other pair of pitches, but I'll have to check.) Relative frequency of the two fastball types has no influence I can find.
This makes a good deal of sense. I think the whole effect is driven by guys like Porcello (and Beeks in high-A) whose two pitches really are hard to tell apart. It doesn't matter whether you throw the sinker a lot or a little relative to the change and the 4-seamer. The effectiveness is not based on expectation of what's coming, but on how well you read the ball coming out of the hand.
Note that if you're facing a pitcher who throws just 4-seamers and a change, and if you're not guessing (as is true for many hitters when they're behind in the count), your brain can still mistake the change for a 2-seamer. The conscience knowledge that he doesn't have a 2-seamer is going to have a hard time overriding the "muscle memory" that has to react instantly to the spin of the ball. But if you're guessing fastball or changeup, your brain will know very quickly whether that guess was correct. OTOH, a guy facing Porcello who is guessing sinker or chengeup who gets the opposite can get fooled completely.
STORY RESUMES: 2015
Now, it so happens that in 2014 Porcello threw more 4-seamers and fewer 2-seamers than ever before (although the latter still were the majority). There was no reason to think this had anything to do with his success; the 4-seamer was still a below-average pitch for him.
So, in 2015 ... the Sox had Porcello become predominantly a 4-seam pitcher, and they cut his use of the change by 42%. And this wasn't because it was getting hit hard; he had a great change in his first two starts.
Really. They had the guy dramatically reduce the usage of his two bread-and-butter pitches. WTFFFFFFF?
The four-seamer was actually really effective, but the sinker became subpar, and he lost the feel for the changeup and it got destroyed. (Every pitch has a correlation between how often it's thrown and how effective it is, because guys throw their more effective pitches more often, but it also works the other way; the more you throw a pitch, the better you command it and the better your feel for it, with fewer hangers as a result. The changeup is far and away the pitch with the highest variance of results and the strongest correlation between how often you throw it and how good it is.)
After two months they had him go back to throwing the sinker predominantly, but it didn't recover, and they kept his changeup rate low and it continued to get pounded.
After he came off the DL, he went back to his 2014 approach in full, and he had the best changeup of his life. I spent all winter arguing that this was the real Porcello, and that between 2014 and the last two months of 2015 he was a #2 starter.
2016
I was wrong. In 2016 his slider, which had always been supbar, suddenly became great. He had the 23rd best among the 144 starters with 80+ IP. And the slider is the best pitch in baseball, with all the upside of the change but much less downside. That made him a CY sort of guy. But he seemed not to realize just how good it was; he threw it 12.5% of the time, essentially unchanged from when it was subpar.
He also had the same success with the 4-seamer that he had in early 2015. So that experiment wasn't completely a disaster, as he added the up-in-the-zone swing-and-miss heater to his arsenal. So whoever had the insight that he could do that was on to something important. Why they thought he should just do that ... hmmm.
2017
His changeup is really bad from the outset, and he ends up throwing it at the 2015 frequency. I'm guessing he couldn't find the feel for it in ST and never got confidence in it. All his pitches were subpar except the slider, which he amped up to 16.8%, and that made him mediocre.
2018
Is 2016 except that now he's throwing the slider 22.3% of the time. I don't see any reason why he can't be better this year than he was two years ago.
Here's some data: Sinker and Changeup Effectiveness in runs per 100 pitches, starting in 2011.
Year SI CH
2011 -0.42 -0.75
2012 -0.11 0.00
2013 0.70 0.60
2014 1.05 0.99
2015A -0.35 -6.17
2015B -1.13 -5.18
2015C 0.93 1.37
2016 0.35 2.53
2017 -0.89 -1.94
2018 0.94 6.11
