Coming off a complete game shutout where Henderson Alvarez mowed through the competition efficiently it may seem like a strange time to tell people to worry, conversely, I think its perfect.
Since mid-2011, Jays fans kept hearing about how Alvarez was big league ready in AA and hitting 100 MPH with his darting fastball. Since arriving, he has pitched 63.2 innings, posting a 3.53 ERA and striking out 40 while letting only 12 runners reach via hit by pitch or walk. His peripheral numbers supported his fine play as well as he posted a 4.00 FIP and a BABIP of .283, indicating only a slight future regression. His strikeout rates were as expected, fairly low (5.7 K/9) but this played up due to a low walk rate. Using his hard and heavy two-seam fastball he got opponents to hit the ball on the ground 54.6% of the time. He had a high HR/FB rate of 17.8%, but it was expected to regress as it was double league average of 8.1%.
Fast forward to this season and Alvarez is still getting batters to put it on the ground at a 56.7% rate and his ERA is fantastic at 2.83, but that is where the good signs end. His FIP has ballooned to 5.12 due to his absolutely brutal 2.6 K/9 and his walk rate has jumped from 1.13 BB/9 to 2.18. Since 1980 only 14 times has a pitcher posted a lower strikeout rate then Alvarez, the most recent being Nate Cornejo in 2003 and before that it hadn’t been done since 1989.
His BABIP is an insanely low at just .201 and unless you listen to Pat Tabler, you know that it is a bad sign of things to come, as BABIP tends to regress to around .300. Only 17 times since 1950 has a pitcher sustained a BABIP under .220, and the last time it was done it was Tom Browning in 1988. In 23 seasons no qualified pitcher has had a BABIP under .220. Alvarez has also seen no drop in his HR/FB rate as its still double league average at 16.2%.
Digging deeper into the numbers we see his career 5.4% swing and miss rate, which since 2002 ranks 858th out of 879 pitchers to throw at least 100 innings which is incredibly alarming. Lets look at it this way: in his career Alvarez has induced 87 swings and misses on 1550 pitches. In 780 pitches since 2007, Brandon Morrow has 63 whiffs with his changeup alone.
Alvarez’s four-seam fastball, that apparently touched 100 MPH in AA, hasn’t touched higher then 96.1 MPH at the big league level and has averaged 94.49 MPH. He has also given up six home runs of the four-seamer. His more commonly used two seam fastball (used 45% of the time) averages 93.6 MPH and generates a 61% ground ball rate; five of the 14 home runs he‘s allowed in his career have come off that pitch. As we can see, 79% of the home runs he’s given up in his career have come off his fastball, which is his best pitch. He uses it 70% of the time.
His slider hasn’t faired much better despite being a seldom-used pitch. He’s given up two home runs on 169 pitches and has only managed to fool hitters into swinging and missing 13 times. His need for an out pitch is even more evident when you see that he has allowed five home runs while having two strikes on a batter.
With all that said, Alvarez has a nasty two-seam fastball that generates a ton of groundballs and he has shown an ability to throw strikes consistently. However, unless he finds a way to strike out more batters, and force batters to not sit on his fastball, the odds are against him having a long and successful career. He has only thrown 100 big league innings and should be given more time to work out his issues, but as of this moment, Blue Jays fans should be very, very afraid of, not if, but when regression hits.
Ever heard of Greg Maddux, Tim Hudson or Jimmy Key. Try doing your homework before writing like an idiot. Alverez is awesome and is a groundball machine. Lots of pitchers succeed with that. He could be a really good number two if not a number one.
Are you seriously comparing Maddux, Hudson and Key to a 22-year-old with an up-and-down minor-league track record?
First of all, all those pitchers had significantly higher K-rates than Alvarez does this year (admittedly, a small sample size, but still not encouraging) and they had/have SIGNIFICANTLY better stuff. Just go look at the pitch F/X data for the movement on Hudson’s pitches compared to Alvarez’s.
But what you are missing is that Hudson has a career K/9 of 6.12, and whiff% of 9.1%. Alvarez has yet to approach Hudson’s level of ground ball success either. As for the other two Maddux had a career K/9 of 6.06 and his K/BB was well over 3. Greg Maddux also had a whiff rate of 7.8%.
As for your comment about ground balls, ground balls are great and all, but keeping not allowing hard hit balls is another. Alvarez’s bbFIP is worse then his FIP actually. Good groundball pitchers like Hudson and Lowe routinely would out perform their FIP, and their bbFIP would be nearly directly in line with their results, because they were effective groundball pitchers. Even Jimmy Key struck out 5.34/9 IP. Talk to prospect evaluators, Alvarez has a ceiling of maybe a #3 starter and could end up in the bullpen due to only having 2 pitches worth a damn.
I wonder how much of an effect the Jays’ (and other teams’) aggressive defensive shifts would have on a pitcher’s ERA vs. FIP numbers in the long run. Obviously the sample size is too small to draw any conclusions right now, but it seems logical to expect that pitchers will be able to more consistently out-perform their FIP if the defence behind them is consistently being rearranged to maximize their chances of making outs on balls in play.
In that sense, maybe pitchers like Alvarez will be more valuable in this new defensive environment. I’d be very interested to take a look at the end of the year and compare the BABIPs of pitching staffs for teams that use aggressive shifts (Jays, Rays) vs. the rest of the league. It seems logical to expect a difference, but I’m excited to see how it plays out in real life.
Definitely agree about defense playing a role in outperforming FIP for Pitchers. The Braves and Cardinals are a great example of this. They have always developed very good fielding teams and are 2 of the three best teams when it comes to out performing FIP since 1994.
Here is the top teams for 2011-2012 (Under Farrell) http://tinypic.com/r/eahxdw/6 Rays are #1 by a VERY large margin
Groundball pitchers can routinely generate lower than average BABIP numbers, but I agree, .201 is a little unsustainable. Nice work.
I think we tend to overrate a lot of Jays pitchers based on our own fandom. Alvarez might turn out to be a decent pitcher, but the Cy Young predictions are a little much.
Travis and I are actually putting together a comprehensive study on BAOGB (BA on ground balls) and high GB rates.
.201 is a little unsustainable, watching some of those grounders are scorched. It wouldn’t surprise me to see him settle around .270-.285. But even then, Its his strikeout and walk rates that are going to be the problem for him. I’m not sure his HR/FB rate is going to come down because I don’t actually feel his command in the zone is that great really.
http://www.fangraphs.com/heatmap.aspx?playerid=5669&position=P&pitch=FA
If you check out his Two seam fastball, fastball and slider, he really leaves the ball right in the middle of the plate. I expect to keep seeing high HR rates until he is able to command the fastball down.
Interesting analysis. But for me personally here is the burning question – a question that no one is asking which is despite him throwing hard he can barely strike anyone out with his fastball. Its 96-97 he should be able to rear back and blow it by people yet he can’t. I think the heat maps give a partial answer to this question but I’d be interested to get your answer. I live south of the border so I have rarely seen him pitch.
Heat maps show a lot of it, and the thing is, while his two seamer has movement, its not outstanding movement and as Travis shows in his piece for getting blanked http://blogs.thescore.com/mlb/2012/05/05/url-weaver-the-henderson-alvarez-edition/ His movement on it just doesn’t compare to someone like david price. It stays on the hitting plane and the movement he does get causes batters to catch a little less then the ideal amount of the ball and groundout.
Well that makes sense, because when I watch his highlights it appears that a lot of his ground balls do get hit pretty hard, so he is not exactly inducing weak contact nor is he breaking bats. And I have read this before about him having control but not command necessarily.
But the thing is and this is what excites a lot of people about him in spite of the ridiculously low K rate is the list of 22 year old pitchers who have compiled a ERA + of 133 is a very short and impressive list. So I have a really hard time figuring out where exactly his future lies.