Pitch mix isn’t the only key for Bowden Francis
Part one of a series of Statcast Post-Mortems on some of the Jays' most important and confounding players.
The Blue Jays’ 2024 season has been over for months in spirit, but soon even the zombified version of the schedule will mercifully come to an end. This means it’s time for some reflection. And though we’ve all been asking ourselves “what happened?” since before the All-Star break, it sometimes takes until the end of the season—often longer—for certain things to come into view.
I mean, sure. Some things have been obvious for a while. We didn’t necessarily know that the Jays would end up having the worst-performing bullpen by fWAR since at least 2018 (and in the bottom-10 by RA9-WAR in the 2020s), yet we could certainly tell that it was a problem. But some of issue show up in more subtle ways, and can be better observed with more data. Apologies to Buck Martinez’s brain worm, but having more information is better in just about any situation.
As it turns out, the baseball world got a bunch more information on Thursday. Baseball Savant has released a number of new Statcast-powered toys, explained in a thread from Mike Petriello. Information on IVB (induced vertical break, which we’ll get into in a minute) has been made more visible, data on pitchers’ arm angles is now available in a number of places, and both are among some changes to the available options for graphs on player pages—which also now include options to track bat speed and swing length data from year-to-year, month-to-month, or game-to-game, and against different pitch groups and types, and in different counts.
Taking all of this into consideration, it seems like a good time to poke around the new numbers, plus some old ones, and see what they might be telling us about some of the Jays’ most important players. Particularly ones about to finish up some especially confounding seasons—in both the good and the bad way.
So here’s part one of a multi-part series doing exactly that…
I’ve written about Bowden Francis a few times lately, and each time I’ve pointed out that it’s not really his splitter that’s been the key to his practically miraculous transformation over these last two months, despite it getting much of the attention early on. Really, though, that’s an oversimplification. The splitter is new this season, and he’s thrown it more often to left-handed batters during his superb August and September run than he did previously.
It has been a really important pitch for him overall. Just not quite as much against right-handers, which I think has been the more crucial split for him.
He grabbed attention when he started to throw the splitter to righties in quite significant numbers in August. But, really, that number is inflated by a couple of mid-month starts—one against the Cubs and another against the Angels—which now look pretty clearly like outliers.
What we can better see now is that it wasn't just about the splitter, it was about refining and expanding his arsenal—which now also includes a sinker, and has seen the curve come back. And, more to the point was that it was about refining and expanding his arsenal to better go with what was already a pretty special fastball—and then locating that fastball much better than before.
That Francis has a good fastball is nothing new. Way back in March, NBC's Eric Samulski wrote about pitchers with surprisingly good fastballs, creating a leaderboard that included Eno Sarris' Pitching+, Pitcher List's Pitch Level Value, and Statcast's Run Value, and noting pitchers that were above average according to at least two. Francis graded out very well.
“Last season,” Samulski writes, “Francis’ fastball averaged 94.4 mph with 6.8 feet of extension, and an average of 17 inches of iVB, which is elite.”
Now that he’s moved to the rotation the velo has dipped a bit—down to 92.6 mph since he rejoined the rotation in late July—which puts even more of a focus on that elite IVB.
So what is it?
As opposed to simply measuring how much pitches break from release until they cross the plate, Savant explains that IVB removes the effect of gravity and compares the break on each pitch “to other pitches of the same pitch type, within +/- 2 MPH and +/- 0.5 feet of extension/release.” A slower pitch will be affected more by gravity by the time it reaches the plate than a faster one, and that’s important to consider. For example, loopy curveball at 74 mph will have a lot of break, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a better pitch than a tighter but faster curve. By attempting to remove gravity from the equation we can see how much movement is “created by a pitcher’s ability to spin and manipulate the ball.”
For fastballs it’s a measure of “rise”—though this actually just means it sinks less—and with IVB now available on Savant’s leaderboards, we can more clearly see that Francis does indeed have an outstanding fastball in this regard relative to the rest of the league. He ranks 57th of 415 pitchers by IVB when it comes to his four-seamer. That puts him in the 86th percentile. Among Blue Jays, only Chad Green (47th) ranks higher. (Trevor Richards ranks sixth).
Maybe most important of all, he’s become even better than that when it comes to locating the pitch.
Francis threw his fastball in the zone 57% of the time last season, which is just about where he was at back in April of this year. But as the season has progressed that rate has grown to surprisingly huge extent.
The line in the graph above may not appear to move a ton, but the amount that it does is very, very meaningful. Among 181 pitchers to throw at least 100 four-seamers in the month of April, Francis’s rate of finding the zone with 55.5% of them ranked just 114th.
Now?
Among 147 pitchers with at least 400 four-seamers thrown this season, Francis ranks 12th at 61.5%. (Kevin Gausman ranks first).
And if we look back to just the start of August? Among pitchers with at least 250 four-seamers thrown, he is tied with Gausman and Pablo López at 63.0%, trailing only Justin Steele.
When everybody wanted to talk about the splitter and Francis attributed his newfound success to trusting his shit and letting it eat, it seemed a rather glib assessment from a genuinely interesting dude. But turns out it was actually a pretty bang on assessment.
And, if I do say so myself, when I wrote that what we were seeing was “Bassitt-ification, with a hint of Gausmania,” I guess that was pretty true, too.
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"Induced movement" looks like an interesting metric. Hadn't heard of it before, but had thought one could compare pitches with a theoretical "cueball" pitch (ie an idealized sphere that responds to gravity and drag, but with no spin effects, just a simple calculation) released at the same point, same speed, and same trajectory, and compare where they cross the plate. I _think_ that statcast could do that with the information they have fairly simply, but maybe the relative metric is more useful, or just easier to calculate.