Long Weekend Up (Part I): Two big wins, and pitching performances, to start a big series!
Going deep on both Yusei Kikuchi's Thursday performance, and José Berríos on Friday. Plus Russell Martin, flag-drawing, Blue Jays Happy Hour, and more!
The Jays got off to a great start in their five-game long weekend series against the Rays on Thursday night and Friday afternoon. And since five games is way too many to cover in a single Weekend Up! piece, especially with a whole lot needing to be said about the performances of Yusei Kikuchi and José Berríos, I’m breaking this weekend’s posts in to two parts.
So let’s say some things! Here’s Weekend Up! — part one…
Up: Thursday: Jays 4 - Rays 1
One way Baseball Savant looks at pitch location that goes beyond just balls and strikes is by classifying pitches by four "attack regions" — "heart," "shadow," "chase," and "waste."
The names are fairly self-explanatory, but I think it's worth taking a look at the specifics anyway.
As you can see, the "chase" region begins about five inches off either side of the plate and four inches above or below the zone. The "waste" region begins about 10.5 inches off either side of the plate, and about 12 inches above or below the zone.
As the name implies, a "waste" pitch of any kind is a fully non-competitive one. Almost none of those induce a batter to swing. For a pitch like Kevin Gausman's splitter the "chase" region isn't a bad place to be. When it comes to fastballs, however, unless you’re trying to elevate the heater in order to induce swing-and-miss you’re probably not intentionally going anywhere near either region. As such, fastballs classified as “chase” or “waste” are a fairly good indicator of an unintentionally non-competitive pitch, especially when we’re talking about a guy like Thursday’s Blue Jays starter, Yusei Kikuchi, who tends to not live at the top of the zone.
Of the 38 pitchers to have thrown 500 four-seamers so far this season, Kikuchi has the fourth-highest rate of ones that ended up in the chase or waste regions (28.3%). And the three pitchers above him, Michael Kopech, Cristian Javier, and Chris Flexen, all have a penchant for the high fastball.
Kikuchi’s worst performance in this regard came last weekend in Milwaukee, when 46.9% of his four-seamers failed to find either the edge or the heart of the zone. His next worst? 43.6% on April 29th, an outing against the Astros that saw him last just 2 2/3 innings, allowing four runs on four hits and three walks. Moving down the list we have a 43.5% one on June 8th, which was the start in Kansas City where he couldn't even get out of the first inning. Those are three of his four worst starts of the season by Game Score. Next on the list is the June 19th start against the Yankees (35.9%) — a game in which he laboured through four innings, allowing just three hits and two walks, but hitting two batters, uncorking a wild pitch, giving up two home runs, and needing Alejandro Kirk's arm to bail him out twice — once on a back pick to get a brooding Josh Donaldson to end the first, then throwing out Aaron Hicks' attempted steal attempt to end the second.
Why do I bring any of this up? Because a funny thing happens when you keep going down this list, and when Kikuchi gets this number down to even just the 30% range: he can make it work.
The next two games listed were his second start of the year — a one-run, three-hit, three-walk performance over five innings at Fenway Park — and Thursday night against the Rays.
It’s also worth noting that, among plenty of other pitchers to have been successful doing so, Alek Manoah in 2021 was throwing pitches to these areas at just about the same rate (27.8%). And Kikuchi himself was significantly better at finding the zone or the edges with his fastball in 2019, producing a 22.1% rate.
All of this is a long way of saying that Kikuchi can regularly be better than we’ve seen over the last month at getting his fastball to where it needs to be, and that he doesn’t even need to be all that much better to be effective. And all of that is a long way of saying “don’t freak out when you see his zone chart from Thursday night!”
Here it is:
Kikuchi got swings on two of the fastballs that hugged the bottom of the zone but were just outside of it, but only one swing on any of the ones that ringed the zone further out than that. Several of those elevated changeups are probably not where he wanted them, either. But there's good in this chart, I think. He was in the zone a lot, generally stayed off the heart of the plate, and — most notable of all — he brought back the cutter for the first time since April.
Kikuchi has rare velocity from the left-hand side, which is one of a number of things that have invited comparisons to Robbie Ray. There is at least one major difference between the two, which is that Ray seems to have better command, or at least more of a willingness to trust his stuff.
Ray only threw 49.2% of his fastballs in the zone in 2020, which was only a little bit down from his 2019 season (52.7%). That number jumped up to 60% last season, and anybody who watched his starts on a regular basis will know that this wasn't happening because he was especially fine with his location. He seemed more to be pumping pitches into the zone and letting the chips fall where they may. His stuff was good enough to make that work, and my sense of the Jays' Kikuchi experiment has always been that it was an attempt to recreate that with a guy who is also left-handed, throws similarly hard, with similar movement. That they tried to combine his slider and cutter into a tighter slider that more resembled Ray's speaks to that, I think.
Unfortunately, so far it seems to have been a much more difficult thing to get Kikuchi to trust — or to control — his fastball. The pitch he really seems to trust, as we can see in the above zone chart, is that original cutter. He was filling up the zone with it, as he did last year (58.4% of pitches in the zone) and the year before (57.2%).
The problem with this situation is that the cutter was his worst pitch last year by several metrics. Only 19.1% of his cutters in 2021 generated swing-and-miss, and while that number is up to 28.4% here in 2022 (obviously in limited use), the hard hit rate on the pitch is up to 66.7% from 51% last season.
On Thursday night that hard hit rate held up. Rays batters put four of Kikuchi's cutters in play: only one of them had an expected batting average below .530, and all of them came off the bat at 96.4 mph or higher.
If the cutter is coming back, the Jays and Kikuchi are going to have to find a way to improve that, but there were some very good qualities to the pitch on Thursday as well. Rays hitters swung at it 12 times, and whiffed on five of those swings (42%). He also got four called strikes on it — though two of those were 3-0 pitches, which speaks to his comfort throwing it in the zone — plus five off of the fastball, presumably because of hitters' difficulty distinguishing one from the other out of his hand.
There are still definitelty things that need to be worked on out of this start, in other words. His line of four hits and eight strikeouts over six innings of work certainly sparkles, but it's a bit flattering. The outstanding defence provided by Matt Chapman at third saved Kikuchi's bacon, particularly in the sixth inning, when Chapman started an incredibly tough double play for the first two outs of the frame, then spectagularly threw out Randy Arozarena from the far side of the bag to end the threat.
But the start was very much something to build on — especially the fact that Kikuchi only walked one batter. Considering the run he'd been on previously, I'd consider that a major success.
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Up: Friday: Jays 9 - Rays 2
The Blue Jays began their Canada Day romp over the Rays with an outstanding tribute to their greatest ever Canadian player, Russell Martin.
Things only got better from there — save for the weird military propaganda video that followed — with the club taking advantage of a rare Kevin Kiermaier misplay…
…to break the game open with five doubles, plus a single and a walk, in a five-run bat-around third inning.
That was all the offence they'd need, though they'd get three more in the sixth and put an exclamation on the performance with a Lourdes Gurriel Jr. blast in the seventh.
This was the case, of course, because, like Kikuchi the day before, Jays starter José Berríos took a major step in the right direction — probably an even more important one than Kikuchi's, frankly, because of how much more vital he is to the Jays' success, and how much more out of character his recent awful run has been.
Also like Kikuchi, part of the key for Berríos — who allowed just four hard hit balls over five innings of work — comfort seemed to be the key. In this case, a move back toward third base on the rubber.
Looking through the data throughout Berríos’s career shows that he’s tinkered with his position on the rubber quite a bit, but never had he been so close to first base as he was over the last six weeks or so. That adjustment was clearly made to help him get out of the funk he’s been in for much of the season so far, and obviously it didn’t really work.
Berríos didn’t exactly have a line to write home about in this one, lasting just five innings and giving up two runs on eight hits with just three strikeouts, but given the hard hit rate, and simply what we were able to see with our eyes, I think it’s fair to says that he was BABIP’d a little bit — something Dan Shulman even brought up on the Sportsnet telecast.
As we can see from his strike zone plots, he was locating the changeup exceptionally well to left-handed batters, routinely throwing the slider to their back foot, and kept the fastball off the plate. Against right-handers it was primarily sinkers and curveballs, the former of which has tremendous arm-side run, while the latter tends to sweep across the plate into the opposite batter's box.
This approach didn’t generate a ton of swing-and-miss — just eight whiffs on 42 swings — but it was Berríos's best job of limiting hard contact this season by far, with his rate coming in at 20% as compared to a 45.6% rate on the year. And seeing as how that 45.6% rate is the highest of his career so far — and, frankly, the culmination of a rather worrying trend...
...you have to have absolutely loved what you saw in this one if you're the Blue Jays.
Hey, and Sergio Romo debuted and looked... kind of OK?!? Hard to complain about that, either. A great game for a great crowd.
Other notes
• As I type this the Jays and Rays are about to get underway in game three of this set — the first of two games in a Saturday doubleheader. They’ll be in tough for the next few hours, unfortunately, as the Rays send Shane McClanahan to the hill. As we can see in the following chart of his earned run trend this year via Props.cash — player prop research made easy! — his only two games of more than 3 ER allowed came in his first four starts. Lately he's been a bit more... uh... stingy. Gulp.
• I couldn't squeeze this into the section on Kikuchi, but I need to relay this quote that he provided, via interpter Kevin Ando and a tweet from SI's Mitch Bannon, about how the team has rallied around him during his struggles this year.
"I want to give a shout out to my teammates. You know, there was a rough stretch there but they always seem to have my back. Going out to dinner with some of the guys, and even on the plane, they were trying to cheer me up, bringing me drinks or whatever it was on the plane to try to cheer me up. And so it dowes make it that much more special to be able to bounce back finally."
You love to see it!
• Call me a mark, but I am absolutely always going to click on a video of athletes attempting to draw things.
• Lastly, Nick and I recorded a live version of Blue Jays Happy Hour after Thursday’s game, talking about Kikuchi’s gem, our confidence in each member of the bullpen, Ross Stripling, pitching development, Teoscar Hernández, and more!
Thanks to everyone who joined us live to ask Qs, give us a call, or just listen in. For those that missed it, you’ll be able to find the show your podcast app of choice — like Apple, Spotify, or Google. (NOTE: If you had us on your podcast app before we made the move to Callin, you'll need to subscribe again using these links — essentially like it's a brand new show.)
Be sure to get Callin and follow Blue Jays Happy Hour so that you can join us next time. We’ll be back again on Thursday!
Next up:
Saturday (game one), 12:07 PM ET: Jays vs. Rays (Kevin Gausman vs. Shane McClanahan), TV: Sportsnet, Radio: Sportsnet 590
Saturday (game two), 6:07 PM ET: Jays vs. Rays (Thomas Hatch vs. Drew Rasmussen), TV: Sportsnet, Radio: Sportsnet 590
Sunday, 1:37 PM ET: Jays vs. Rays (Ross Stripling vs. Shane Baz), TV: Sportsnet, Radio: Sportsnet 590
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And I just woke up to look at the horror double-header scores. Wow this really shows our lack of starting depth. Let's hope big time that Gausman is okay, but if one of our starters goes down for the year...big trouble! The fact that Hatch was left in there so long to soak up innings is a sad state of affairs. I also wonder in hindsight if he should've been paired up against McLanahan. Double headers are hard to sweep anyway and perhaps we just should've gone for the easier option.
Great piece Andrew. Loved the deep dive. I got the sense that Pete kind of gave up and told Kikuchi to do whatever he feels comfortable with.