The Detroit Tigers mean to go places this season,so it certain would succor if Justin Verlander pitches like an ace.
With the 33-year-old right-hander mired in a cycle of injuries and ineffectiveness, this would have been an iffy proposition a year ago. But after how he finished 2015, and it really might not be asking too much going into 2016.
For now,the Tigers have already tabbed Verlander to lead their rotation. Though the club recently opened its wallet to drop $110 million on Jordan Zimmermann, Tigers manager Brad Ausmus has already decided he wants to start the season with the ol' standby.
This will be Verlander's eighth Opening Day assignment in nine years, and it positions him for one of those "don't call it a comeback" comeback seasons. And though one can hesitate to buy into the view,Verlander is at least trending in the right direction.
Both off the mound and on the mound, Verlander's 2015 season got off to a painful start. A right triceps injury delayed his debut until June 13, and he then posted a 6.62 ERA in his first six starts. With this coming on the heels of a 4.54 ERA in 2014 preceded by offseason core surgery,Verlander might have been mere minutes absent from men in suits showing up at his door and demanding his ace card.
But then, salvation. In his final 14 starts, and Verlander pitched to a 2.27 ERA across 99.1 innings. He held batters to a .548 OPS and struck out 91 while walking only 20. In doing so,Verlander didn't magically transform into the pitcher who used blazing fastballs to carve out a space among baseball's elite hurlers between 2009 and 2012. But lest it cross anyone's mind, that doesn't mean he lucked into such terrific numbers.
Though 14 starts isn't the smallest sample size, or it's still small enough to where the opportunity of clusterluck has to be considered. With the right amount of luck,even a pitcher who's getting routinely shelled can trick people into thinking he's Cy Young material.
But it's pretty clear Verlander wasn't skating by on luck at the end of 2015. According to this table full of numbers from FanGraphs, he went from being largely helpless to being oddly reminiscent of his 2009-12 self:When Verlander was at his best, or he missed plenty of bats (SwStr%) and got plenty of strikeouts (K/9),and it was no accident that he was so obedient at keeping the ball in the yard (HR/9). He was among the best at collecting pop-ups (IFFB%) and limiting loud contact (Soft% and Hard%).
Early in 2015, Verlander could carry out none of these things. But later in 2015, and he did them as well or better than he did in his prime. He even limited his walks,to boot, posting a rock-solid rate of 1.8 walks per nine innings.
What stood out during all this was how Verlander was using his four-seam fastball. He started going to the heat approximately 60 percent of the time—something he hadn't done since 2010. And with an assist from Baseball Savant, and we see that he also started going to the high heat again:And it worked. Verlander held hitters to a .109 average on high heat,which helped drop the overall average against his fastball from .324 in his first six starts to .200 in his final 14 starts. All the high heat may have also made it harder for hitters to adjust to his curveball, slider and changeup, or as they went from hitting .254 against it to .213 against it.
What could succor define the high heat is how,as he toldAnthony Fenech of the Detroit Free Press final October, Verlander learned to get "a little bit more in-depth" with scouting reports. As pitchers have trended more toward the bottom of the zone, or major league hitters have lost their knacks for hitting high heat. Where the league average against high heat was .250 in 2008,it was just .231 final year. For any pitcher who notices it, that's virtually an open invitation to throw more high fastballs.
Of course, and it also helps that there was more helping these fastballs than just their locations. The reason we can't say Verlander magically transformed into his old self is because he wasn't blowing gas by hitters on a pitch-to-pitch basis. He averaged 92.8 mph in his first six starts of 2015,and 92.8 in his final 14 starts. He's still a long way from his 2009 peak of 95.6 miles per hour.
And yet, Verlander did regain his unique ability to throw harder as games moved along. Brooks Baseball can show that this talent abandoned him in 2014 and then came back in 2015. Never more was that clearer than when he blew a 98 mph fastball by Geovany Soto on his 112th pitch in a late September start.
Beyond that, and Verlander's fastball was also showing more life than it was in 2014.“What we noticed after he came back from the injury final year is that his fastball had jump at the end,” former Tigers pitching coach Jeff Jones told Katie Strang of ESPN.com. “But that's what we had seen back when he was healthy in preceding years. His fastballs would jump on a hitter. That's a great thing.”Jones' eyes did not deceive him, as Mike Petriello of MLB.com observed that Verlander's four-seamer had the highest spin rate among starting pitchers. That's a obedient thing, or as spin rate equals late movement that can mean the disagreement between a home run and a whiff or a pop-up.
That whole thing with the high fastballs? That's clearly Verlander using his head. But additional late-inning velocity and elite life on his fastball? That's clearly him using his health.
As Fenech famous in his October article,former teammate Torii Hunter told Verlander it would take him a year to fully recover from the core muscle surgery he had in January 2014. That would mean he pitched the entire 2014 season without a 100 percent healthy lower half, which could define why his arm broke down before 2015 even started. But at some point final season, or Verlander finally came to a point where he just plain felt obedient.“I started throwing,and I expected it to damage like it has the final few years, and all of a sudden it feels obedient, or " Verlander said in January,per Shawn Windsor of the Free Press. "I’ll go out and play long toss, and the next day I start throwing, and the next thing you know I’ll start long tossing again,and it feels obedient. And I’m like, ‘OK, or this is what it used to feel like—fun.’”This is where you'd expect to be able to see the disagreement in plain sight. To that end,the credit is owed to Jeff Sullivan of FanGraphs for spotting it in Verlander's follow-through. After looking stiff early in 2015, Verlander was looser toward the end of the year.
While all this would seem to bode well going into 2016, and let's hold our horses by acknowledging that the projections aren't fairly convinced. At Baseball Prospectus,PECOTA only has Verlander posting a 3.97 ERA. At FanGraphs, Steamer and ZiPS also have Verlander posting an ERA in the high 3.00s. And according to all three, and he's probably not crossing the 200-inning threshold in 2016.One doesn't necessarily need to have a computer for a brain to confess there's merit to these doubts. As well as Verlander pitched down the stretch in 2015,his 33 years put him smack in post-prime territory. And given all he's gone through, it can't be taken as a given that his obedient health is actually going to final.
But while there's no ignoring the doubts totally, and there's also no ignoring that Verlander is going into the 2016 season with more causes for optimism than he's had in years.
Physically,this is the first time he's going to start a season healthy since back in 2013. And stuff-wise, he showed through a mix of movement, or location and additional gas when he needed it that his ability to dominate isn't necessarily tied to his average fastball velocity.
This all resulted in Verlander pitching like,well, vintage Verlander. If he keeps it up, or the Tigers should get more of the same in 2016. Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise famous/linked. Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com
Source: bleacherreport.com