Changing speeds critical for Blackburn

Back on June 18th, Nick Blackburn followed a decent seven-inning 3-2 loss to the Atlanta Braves with an absolute throttling by a potent Philadelphia Phillies lineup – one that chased him out of the game in the middle of the second inning. Before most fans had found their seats, Blackburn had been tagged for eight earned runs on six hits including two rocket home runs from Ryan Howard and Chase Utley. After the game, the diagnosis from the Twins pitching coach was that Blackburn failed to adequately change speeds.


As you can see from his pitch speed chart below from that outing, it wasn’t until his 21st pitch of the evening that Blackburn spun his first curveball over. By that time, it was already 3-0 Phillies.

Blackburn vs Phillies - June 18th, 2010

Rick Anderson’s resolution was fairly simplistic. Mixing in different pitches would keep Blackburn from developing a familiar pattern. Even at Anderson’s behest and three out of four starts in which Blackburn failed to enter the fifth inning, he still didn’t incorporate the desired changes.

This kicked off a string of consecutive starts in which the right-hander went 1-3 with a snowman-shaped 8.57 ERA while allowing another seven home runs in 21 innings of work. The unifying link between his fiasco in Philadelphia and the ensuing losses was the inability to vary his velocity. With the exception of his victory over the Tigers on June 29th, Blackburn clung to his sinker with a kung fu death-grip.

In his last start prior to the All-Star Break on July 10th, Blackburn tangled with the Tigers at Comerica. Like his start against Detroit at Target Field the prior week, he opened the game with a decent mix of pitches and variations in velocity. Only, instead of maintaining this pace, after being roughed up for three runs however, this game plan was discarded in favor of the fastball, throwing it 43 out of his last 47 pitches. Following four more runs, including a three-run jack by Johnny Damon, Blackburn was chased from the game in the fifth inning without ever recording an out.

Blackburn at Tigers - July 10th, 2010

In this particular start, it appeared that Blackburn attempted to adhere to the game plan of changing speeds but simply got sloppy once the game started to slip away further exacerbating the situation.

With his spot in the rotation in severe jeopardy and the frustration escalating with every start, manager Ron Gardenhire and Rick Anderson met with Blackburn regarding his struggles. Before Sunday’s game against the White Sox, there was yet another summit among the three. The message expounded on the righty, as conveyed by Bert Blyleven during Sunday’s broadcast, was the value of changing speeds.

Why is this so important?

The idea is simple. If you miss your spots as Blackburn has done so routinely recently, the damage may be minimized by messing with the hitters’ timing. If you are missing spots and throwing at the same speed constantly, professional hitters will hammer those pitches. While location remains supremely important, if there is a deviation in velocity or break, this may incite hitters to commit too early to a pitch they would otherwise drive, turning it over on the ground. When Blackburn was tearing through opponents in May, he rarely showed the same reliance on his fastball in succession. This was a chief reason behind his ability to achieve success with a substandard amount of strikeouts.
Reviewing the pitch speed chart from Sunday’s come-from-behind victory over the White Sox, we see that Blackburn made sufficient strides in improving his deception:

Blackburn vs White Sox - July 18th, 2010

Throughout the first four innings, Blackburn reconnected with what made him successful in May: alternating 92-mph fastballs with 79-mph changeups and back again. Only once did he throw three fastballs in a row in that time and, with the exception of Alexi Ramirez’s groundball double down the third base line, Blackburn did not allow any extra base hits or particularly hard hit balls.

Nevertheless, in the fifth inning, Blackburn once again reverted to his fastball. Instead of mixing in his curve and changeup, he fed the White Sox lineup fastballs on 13 of the 17 pitches – at one point tossing 12 straight to Ramon Castro, Gordon Beckham and Juan Pierre. After that, the White Sox jumped on top of his stuff and stamped his ticket to an early shower.

Again, when he has embraced variety, Blackburn has performed very well (as evident by his month of May and his first four innings on Sunday). On the other hand, when he is lulled into relying on his fastball, he gets whipped. A starting pitcher cannot have sustained success by continuously throwing one pitch at one speed. Blackburn has been given nine starts to recognize that fact in addition to a tutorial from his pitching coach back in early June. Naturally this development has exhausted both the coaching staff and the front office. Even with the signs of progress in his most recent outing, with Brian Duensing waiting in the wings and the trade deadline approaching, Blackburn’s days in the rotation are most likely numbered.

If or when he does get another start, here’s one tip: change speeds.

Often.

Bank on a better second-half for Liriano

The Twins starting pitching staff sputtered into the All-Star Break abused and confused in the month of July. The initial start by Kevin Slowey on the other side of the Midsummer Classic did little to reassure the team that things were going to turn around quickly either. In yet another abbreviated start, Slowey allowed five earned runs on nine hits in just three innings. This performance aided in increasing the starting staff’s ERA to a ghastly 6.71 for the month – the second-worst in baseball, ahead of only the Toronto Blue Jays – while sinking the team to a 3-8 record over the past 11 games and distancing themselves from view of the division-pacing White Sox.

 

Now, once again, the Twins turn to Francisco Liriano to see if the southpaw can stop the bleeding.

 

In the TwinsCentric Trade Deadline Primer, I stated that “Liriano might be one of the AL’s better starters in the first-half.” While some might disagree with that assessment, especially after his most recent start, the facts show that Liriano clearly possesses ace-like qualities:

 

• He has the third-highest strikeouts per nine innings in the American League (9.81) behind only Toronto’s Brandon Morrow (9.99) and Los Angeles’s Jared Weaver (10.19).
• His groundball rate (50.9%) is the 12^th best in the American League.
• His 0.17 home runs per nine innings is the lowest average in baseball. In fact, Liriano’s two home runs allowed are the fewest among pitchers that have thrown 100 innings to date.
• His 12% swinging strike rate is the also the best in baseball, putting him ahead of such reputable arms like Tim Lincecum, Josh Johnson, Jared Weaver and Clayton Kershaw. This is the indications of some seriously filthy stuff. 

Because of his high volume of strikeouts, ability to keep the ball in the ballpark and regularly inducing ground balls, Liriano’s turned in the best performance by an American League pitcher when using the xFIP statistic (2.97). Nevertheless, in spite of this high-caliber performance, the lefty has been shackled to 6-7 record and higher ERA (3.87) than xFIP would expect.

 

If he’s so dominating, why is he the owner of a losing record and a steadily rising ERA?

 

There are two factors impeding him from achieving those superior numbers. The first of which is that amount of balls skirting past defenders. Liriano’s carrying around the league’s most top-heavy batting average on balls in play (.361). Depending on your religious beliefs, this is a strong indicator that either his defense is not supporting him or the baseball gods are directing more balls into vacant real estate. As a groundball-oriented pitcher, Liriano should have a significantly lower BABIP than the one he currently owns.

What we see from his splits below, regardless of the method they are directed into play, Liriano’s averages are much higher than the norm:

 

BABIP	Liriano 2010	League Average
Line Drive	.786	.722
Ground Ball	.245	.225
Fly Ball	.244	.142
Overall	.361	.294

 

Instead of finding leather, the dinks, doinks, gorks and quails have nestled into areas of the field not patrolled by the Twins defense. Per usual, these numbers have a tendency to regress back towards the average. The back-half of the schedule should correct some of the defense’s (or baseball gods’) malfeasances, particularly with a healthy J.J. Hardy rounding out the infield.

 

The second factor, equally responsible for his misfortunes in the record department, is his lack of offensive support. The Twins have scored two runs or less in six of his 17 starts. Presently, Liriano’s 3.8 runs per game qualifies as the 10^th-lowest amount of help in the AL. For a team that typically scores 4.6 runs per game, the Twins should provide Liriano with extra runs in the second-half of the year that they failed to supply in the first-half.

 

Despite the perception of him wilting under big-game pressure, Liriano retains many of the traits of a rotational ace. His stuff this year has proven to be overwhelming as he’s dispatching opponents at a torrid pace while avoiding hard contact. With improvements in these two areas, coupled with his continued dominance at the plate, Liriano should easily outperform his first-half numbers.

Joe Mauer's pull power?

For the second day in a row, Star Tribune columnist Jim Souhan has taken aim at Minnesota’s All-Star catcher, this time taking an opportunity to highlight what he believes are the reasons behind Joe Mauer’s decline in productivity. Souhan indicates several factors contributing to this drop-off, noting “the ballpark effect”, “the scouting effect”, “the position effect” and “the contract effect”.

Although some of the scribe’s offerings have some merit (for example, teams have shifted the shortstop almost on top of second base when Mauer is batting to cut down the hits up the middle and this plays a role in his batting average), others are more speculative (the contract effect is less likely to do with the “pressures of a contract” but rather the team that signed him did so when he was overachieving and thus likely to have a regression the following season). Still, there is one declaration that Souhan made that caught my attention which fell under “the scouting effect”:

“When Mauer was at his best last season, he was capable of pulling the ball with power; he has not shown an ability to do so this season.”

At best, this statement is shoddy reporting and at worst it is patently false. Either way, it was lazy.

While Mauer demonstrated a decent ability to hit the ball to all fields well, he did not necessarily pull the ball with power. Everybody who has reviewed his numbers last year would agree that Mauer’s power was generated when driving the ball to left field, not pulling the ball. In fact, just eight of his 59 extra base hits (14%) were pulled into right field.

According to Baseball-Reference.com’s split breakdown, Mauer’s power numbers were well above the league average when driving the ball to the opposite field but well beneath the norm when yanking the ball to the right:

Slugging Percentage	Pulled	Opposite
Mauer 2009	.553	.912
Mauer 2010	.500	.558
League LHB	.766	.473

Obviously his power was most prevalent when going away and has suffered the most from ’09 to ‘10. After all, 16 of his 28 home runs were opposite field shots helping to bolster that slugging percentage. Additionally, Mauer’s power results when pulling the ball this year are almost as good as his previous season, if not better. While his slugging percentage is down to an even .500, he’s knocked seven of his 29 extra base hits to right (25%). So suggesting that he is not pulling the ball for power this year is misleading.

What’s more is that by the virtue of the manner in which he was putting the ball into play, Mauer has demonstrated little that he has a tendency to hit the ball for much power when pulling in the first place.

For his career, Mauer’s hit a groundball to the right side 70% of the time when making contact in play. During the season in which he was supposedly “pulling the ball with power”, the Twins catcher bounced the ball 77.6% of the time in that direction. Last year, left-handed batters as a whole hit the ball on the ground 59% of the time. It’s hard to accumulate desirable power numbers when the ball is kicking up dirt. Nevertheless, as you can see, there is little evidence separating what he did last year in his MVP year when turning on a pitch from this year:

Batted Balls - Pulled	Line Drive%	Groundball%	Fly ball%
2009	14.5%	77.6%	7.9%
2010	16.2%	76.5%	7.4%
Career	15.9%	76.5%	7.6%

Without question, the fan base, front office and coaching staff are all seeking answers to the team’s most well-paid hitter’s offensive doldrums; however, those numbers didn’t drop-off because he has stopped hitting the ball for power when pulling it as the popular columnist noted. Ironically, if Mauer would like to beat the defensive maneuvering that has quieted his riot thus far in 2010, hitting for power to right field could led to alterations in the opposing team’s approach and thereby opening up the middle of the infield for him more often.

Then again, simply continuing to hit the ball hard all over the field will undoubtedly lead to more hits. 

Available: The 2010 TwinsCentric Trade Deadline Primer

As it stands, in addition to the current division leaders, twelve teams are within five games of first-place creating a market in which 16 teams could potentially be buyers in the next two weeks as the non-waiver trade deadline rapidly approaches. In the next fortnight, there will be a deluge of rumors, hypothetical scenarios and actual trades that inundate all mediums. To be sure, it is a dizzying time of year to be a baseball fan.

For example, last Friday the day began with Cliff Lee in a Seattle Mariners uniform but ended with him relocating to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Somewhere in the middle of all that, there was a point in which the baseball world was convinced the Yankees would land the southpaw in exchange for catching prospect Jesus Montero. Some of baseball’s most prominent reporters all but confirmed this transaction.

But before you could finish your Jimmy John’s sandwich, that all changed.

Suddenly, the Mariners were no longer interested in the catching prospect and were broadcasted to be discussing terms with yet another team. Undoubtedly, every fan following this action unfold quickly did a mental inventory of their team’s farm system and tried to determine if there was enough prospect in stock to land the coveted ace. Twins fans held their collective breaths hoping that Wilson Ramos’s slump did not deter the Mariners from wanted the best trading chip in the organization. Was he enough? Who could have better chips on the table? Ultimately, the Rangers won the auction, landing Lee with a cache of prospects that included the switch-hitter first baseman Justin Smoak, and have changed the dynamic of the franchises both presently and in the future.

So unless you are nerdy enough to have Jimmy John’s delivered so you don’t have to miss a tweet as the transaction was constructed, you probably don’t have the time to dig through all 32 teams and figure you their needs, their commodities and their ability to absorb a budget. With that in mind, we at TwinsCentric enlisted some of the internet’s best writers to help condense all of this into an easily digestible and accessible 160-page PDF document: The 2010 Trade Deadline Primer.  

These intelligent writers and wonks have provided us with an exclusive firsthand account of their respective team’s needs, trading chips and their specific targets. In additional to the individual teams, we’ve isolated all the potential trade targets league-wide and provided a cliff’s notes scouting report and analysis on the player. Likewise, we also have done the same with baseball’s top prospects as these are often the unknown pawns that wind up emerging as frontline contributors in no time. As names are bandied around on Twitter or MLBTradeRumors.com, you can quickly review these sections to see what the experts think about his ability.    

Naturally, we did not farm out the writing for the hometown team. We’ve got all the information you want on the Minnesota Twins including a team summary by the always level-headed Nick Nelson, prospects covered by the minor league maven Seth Stohs, and a sharply-penned essay on the team’s future payroll (absolutely vital in shaping the available trade targets) by the entertaining and educational John Bonnes. Finally, I’ve contributed the team’s report card grades along with a first-half write-up on the roster’s individuals, attempting to explain their performances and what we may expect in the back-half of the year. Between the four of us and the stable of writers, we spoon feed you all the background you need to know to help you formulate a well-informed opinion on all trades, rumored or otherwise.

Lastly, ESPN.com’s Rob Neyer, whose resume includes working with Bill James, STATS, Inc as well as authoring numerous books on his own, lends his writing chops to the Primer in the foreword. His contribution to the publication added flavor from a professional individual that shares the same passion for the game and the intricacies of team-building that is enjoyed by the rest of us that do this more or less for free.

So as the activity intensifies in the coming weeks, be a proactive fan: Purchase the 2010 Trade Deadline Primer.

Trading Kevin Slowey?

In the midst of speculations involving Seattle’s Cliff Lee, one major league source has cited the Mariners’ interest in Kevin Slowey as a key piece of a potential deal. As the Mariners compile their due diligence, hoping to leverage the trade deadline’s best trading chip for the highest possible return, those that are in the “Acquire Cliff Lee Now” camp should hope that Seattle’s scouts were not paying attention to the Twins starter the past several weeks: In his last five starts, Slowey has been tagged for 35 hits in 24.2 innings of work leading to 24 runs scored.

While Lee would improve a rotation that is down on its luck at the moment, the long-term sustainability of the organization has to be considered when measuring any trade. Slowey is still young, affordable and has compiled an impressive minor league track record that would suggest this is a hiccup. Then again, with the recent surgically repaired wrist less than a year ago, Slowey may be experiencing difficulties adjusting to what he described in the spring as a new sensation and wondered aloud if he would “ever feel the same like I did before.”

The obvious reality is that his stuff just isn’t quite there in 2010. While he is still master of the strike zone’s domain - throwing strikes regularly and working ahead of hitters - the opposition is raking line drives and deep fly balls all over league. As a point of order, Slowey has always been near the bottom of the league in inducing worm-burners, but this season his groundball rate has sunk to a new low of 27% - the lowest in baseball by a wide margin.

The added elevation off of opponents' bats correlates with the loss of movement in his breaking pitches. Although his fastball remains a very effective pitch in his repertoire, his secondary pitches, the curveball and slider, has not had the same results from prior seasons:

Slowey’s Curve/Sliders	Pct Thrown	Chase%	Miss%	Groundball%
2010	14%	16%	11%	28%
2009	21%	30%	19%	41%
2008	23%	36%	25%	40%

(via MyInsideEdge.com)

Essentially, hitters have strayed after fewer out-of-zone pitches and missed less frequently. In short, he’s not fooling anybody with the breaking action.

Reviewing his pitch f/x virtualization charts - which are the average path that a pitcher’s pitches take from the release point to the catcher’s mitt, as shown from a bird’s-eye view – reveals that his arsenal is not producing the same movement as it had in the past. Give additional attention to the green diamond, his slider:

Slowey - 2008

 

             

Slowey - 2009

            

      

Slowey - 2010

   

As you can derive from those graphs, on average, Slowey’s non-fastball offerings are flat and catching far too much of the strike zone. As a result, hitters have been able to cause damage by posting a 1.095 OPS on his curve/slider (versus a .609 league-average OPS on those types of pitches). Losing confidence in a pitch (or pitches) for a control-orient pitcher can have nasty consequences. As Jesse Lund at TwinkieTown.com pointed out, Slowey basically eliminated throwing any semblance of a breaking pitch in his most recent start in Toronto, throwing 87 fastballs out of 98 pitches. This pitch selection led to two home runs and nine hits in 6.1 innings in Canada.

The real question then is if this is a temporary setback or if it is indeed the reprecussions of his wrist surgery that may have long-lasting effects. Basically, would trading Slowey now be a "sell-low" maneuver for the Twins, allowing the Mariners benefit from his continuing production when he fully recovers, or would it be an unloading of a commodity that is slightly damaged and may never live up to expectation? The answer to that is the difference between a bad trade and a good one.