Collette Calls: 9-1-1, We Have an Emergency

I believe we all recognize we are headed toward some uncharted waters on the pitching front this summer. We have the league mandate to change their black ops habits of enhancing their grip, and many pitchers surpassing their 2020 workloads, simultaneously hitting the sport in the coming days. Tyler Glasnow and Shane Bieber are already down for the count in one form or another, and Jacob deGrom is breaking down regularly. I'm not arguing that enforcing a long-ignored rule is bad for baseball, but I strenuously oppose doing so in the middle of the season with two weeks notice. Baseball has a long track record of barking about things but doing very little biting, but in this instance, they're gnashing their teeth into the arms that help create their product, and we're stuck with whatever that outcome looks like this summer.

Rant aside, we have seen some rather amazing pitching over the past 30 days. Consider the following bodies of work:

• Jacob deGrom: 0.33 ERA, 51% Strikeout rate, & holding hitters to a .100 average
• Kevin Gausman: 0.64 ERA, 37% strikeout rate, & holding hitters to a .134 average
• Zack Wheeler: 1.27 ERA, 38% strikeout rate, & holding hitters to a .170 average
• Brandon Woodruff: 1.34 ERA, 29% strikeout rate, & holding hitters to a .161 average
• Those four plus eight other pitchers (Carlos Rodon, Corbin Burnes, Robbie Ray, Tarik Skubal, Lucas Giolito, Tyler Glasnow, Clayton Kershaw, Freddy Peralta, Tyler Mahle) each have strikeout rate of at least 30%

Then we flip the leaderboard and we find Eduardo Rodriguez with some of the most perplexing numbers. Rodriguez has never been a model of consistency, but his numbers of late are truly a boom or bust situation compared to his career rates:

Rodriguez is getting more strikeouts and has a better overall strikeout minus walk percentage (my favorite quick and easy pitching metric), yet he has nothing to show for it but horrific ratios along with an 0-3 record over his last six starts.

Drafting Rodriguez came along with the inherent risks of him missing the entirety of the 2020 season as arguably the most notable COVID-19 case in baseball given how hard the virus hit him. The intrigue has always been there with Rodriguez, especially after he went 19-6 in 2019. The excitement continued when he opened the 2021 season going 5-1 over his first seven starts, albeit with a 4.15 ERA. Using the same figures as above, here is how those first seven starts compare with his most recent six:

Through the first seven games, there was obvious issues at hand even as Rodriguez piled up the early wins. The 4.15 ERA was an easy starting point, but the 1.41 WHIP and .327 BABIP pointed to some potential volatility moving forward if something did not change. Let's see what has changed.

Velocity

The black line indicates 30 days back from when I write this. Velocity has not been the issue outside of a dip in his changeup. There has not been any noticeable absence of velocity in his pitches during 2021.

Spin Rate

Things are rather interesting here. Pitchers got the official word they had roughly two weeks to clean up their game before the suspensions would kick in should the pitcher be caught adding substances to a baseball. The spin rates on most of Rodriguez's pitches have held up, but his changeup has behaved like a completely different pitch:

Things did dip down in his 3rd-5th start, but went back up for another four before diving again. That said, there has been no noticeable decline in the pitch's effectiveness, as it still holds up well and he has not changed his utilization of the pitch. 

Command

This is a very telling trend for Rodriguez:

As the season has worn on, he is throwing fewer pitches in the strike zone. The data tells us that Rodriguez leans on his four-seam fastball when he is behind in the count:

Rodriguez throws the pitch 36 percent of the time in any count, and it has been his most problematic pitch regarding actual to expected outcomes. The xBA on his fastball is .235, yet the league is hitting .328 off the pitch. The xSLG off that four-seamer is .425 against an actual .642 slugging percentage. There is an additional 113-point gap between his actual and expected wOBA. When a pitcher's primary weapon has this much of a split between the actual and expected outcomes, that will be an issue. The changeup, as it evolves, has had its own issues as it too is underperforming its expected outcomes. Only Rodriguez's slider, which is the least used of his five-pitch repertoire, is outperforming its expected statistics.

I look at a pitcher who is falling behind in counts on an increasing basis and is overusing his fastball in his efforts to not lose the batter. That is leading to an alarming drop in his whiff rate, which lived in the 60th percentile from 2017 to 2019 but is in only the 35th percentile this season. Perhaps the year off caused him to lose his feel for his pitches and he is still searching for things. The early Boston schedule was mostly forgiving for him as he faced Baltimore (2x), Minnesota, Toronto, Seattle, Texas, and Oakland. The schedule has taken a turn for the worse over the past 30 days as he has faced Toronto again, Philadelphia, Houston (2x), the Yankees, and Atlanta. The Houston lineup makes the most contact in baseball and that lineup punishes pitchers who struggle with their command, and they hung 12 earned runs and 18 baserunners on Rodriguez in 9.1 innings of work.

Removing Houston from the equation helps the numbers look a bit better, but the problem remains that good lineups are going to be an issue for Rodriguez in his current form. Rodriguez's next few starts will come at Tampa Bay, at home vs. the Yankees, on the road in Oakland, and at home against Philadelphia just before the All-Star Break. Needless to say, the road does not get any easier for him through the break and Boston plays the Yankees, Rays, and Jays for the rest of July coming out of the break. 

Simply put, if you are considering buying low on Rodriguez, he might not be done on his journey down the rankings given the strength of schedule coming up for him.